Read Like a Champion (with Doug Lemov)

Jul 28 2025

Many students graduate high school today without having read a book cover to cover. Many students struggle to learn to read at all. How did this happen? Listen as educator and author Doug Lemov talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the failed fads in reading education, the mistaken emphasis on vocabulary as a skill, and the importance of background knowledge for thinking and reading comprehension. Lemov and Roberts also discuss their love of difficult-to-read authors, the power of reading in groups, the value of keeping a reading journal, and how even basketball can be more enjoyable when we have the right terminology.

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Time	Podcast Episode Highlights
0:37	Intro. [Recording date: July 8, 2025.] Russ Roberts: Today is July 8th, 2025, and my guest is author and educational entrepreneur, Doug Lemov, the Chief Knowledge Officer of Teach Like a Champion, an organization that does professional development for teachers and writes curricula for them. This is Doug's third appearance on the program. He was last here in November of 2016 talking about reading. We're going to talk about reading again today, specifically based on his new book, co-authored with Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway, the Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading. Doug, welcome back to EconTalk. Doug Lemov: Good to see you, Russ. Thanks for having me.
1:16	Russ Roberts: This is a handbook for teachers, but it also has deep lessons for anyone who reads, for parents of children who are readers. And I want to start off with how you start off in the book, with what went wrong with reading in America--the teaching of reading in America--in recent years, and the reporting of Emily Hanford, an investigative journalist who did a podcast on this topic, and we will link to that. What did she uncover? Doug Lemov: Yeah. It's tragic what she uncovered. I've described her work as the most important piece of educational journalism in the 21st century. What she discovered is that early reading programs in American schools--so this is when students learn to read--the most popular programs have been based more on ideology than on science; and we have learned a lot about the science of how people learn to read, and they really ignored science that was out there. It was available to them. And, for a variety of reasons that we can get into, the most popular early reading programs, instead of teaching students systematic synthetic phonics--how to decode words, what sounds mean--went with a more whole language approach. They often socialized students to guess at words--made sense or what the picture said. And the result is that many students, millions of students sadly, did not learn to read. Emily's podcast described this in excruciating detail. It was something like the fifth most downloaded podcast in the United States in 2023, and one of the results was something like 20 states passed legislation that early reading programs had to be founded in science. And so, it really created an incredible amount of change. But, unfortunately, it really came 20 years too late. This is research that we did know for 20 years before the required change happened. Russ Roberts: You just said many programs were based on whole language. What does that mean? Doug Lemov: Yeah. So, there were two arguments about how you learn to read. One was, frankly, much more compelling if I'm a teacher, which is: If I introduce students to words and books and ask them to read, they will learn to read relatively naturally if I encourage them and foster them and expose them to a lot of print. That's the whole language approach. And, the alternative to it is something called phonics, or systematic synthetic phonics, which argues that the way to teach students to read is to teach them--deliberately--letter sounds, combinations of letter sounds, how they work, have them practice them. It's a lot of flashcards. But, it means that when they come across a word that they don't know, they can sound it out. And, the science is overwhelmingly--many students will learn to read naturally, but many students won't. It doesn't have to do much with their intelligence; it's just some kids crack the code on their own through exposure, but some kids don't. And so, the idea behind synthetic phonics is that we intentionally teach the code of letter-sound correspondence. One of the problems with it is that it can be repetitive. It requires a lot of flashcards and repetition-- Russ Roberts: Drilling-- Doug Lemov: and that does not always jibe with what teachers imagine themselves doing when they take the job. Strangely, I think actually students love phonics activities when they're done well, but it wasn't what adults imagined. And so, teachers were, perhaps for that reason, receptive to arguments that phonics was either unnecessary or painful or miserable, and it really lost the day. And, a more whole language-type approach dominated for 20 years. And the result is that millions of kids did not learn to read, or learned to read suboptimally, or finally learned to learn to read way too late and associated reading with unpleasantness. The costs, as Emily Hanford described, were dizzying. Not just for families and for kids, but also for teachers who spent their professional lives teaching the single most important thing that we do in schools wrong. And, that's a painful thing to reckon with.
6:17	Russ Roberts: I want to talk about another example of--I consider these things educational fads, fads that run through educational departments in graduate schools of education. There are many, many reasons for why fads take root. Some are simple--that it's fun to have a new thing, and maybe it's a better thing, and so we grab it and try it. Sometimes it's ideological: it might align with some other theory of society or human beings that people hold. But, sometimes there's just some romance about it that we hope is true that isn't. And I want to quote Dylan William. You quote him saying, quote: The big mistake we have made in the United States is to assume that if we want students to be able to think, then our curriculum should give our students lots of practice thinking. This is a mistake because what our students need is more to think with. And, that idea--that if you want to be able to think, you should practice thinking--and later we'll talk about if you want to get good at vocabulary, you should practice acquiring vocabulary. That's a very reasonable idea, and it speaks, as you point out in the book, to a utopian ideal that we want to believe about education. So talk about that--that romance--and why is it wrong? It seems like what could be wrong with that? If you want to learn how to do something, you practice it. Doug Lemov: Mark Seidenberg has this really powerful quote that I cite in the book also. He says, "Reading is a complex skill that intuition cannot easily penetrate." Sorry, one more quote and then I'll be done. Daniel Willingham said: "We've learned more about the cognitive science about how people learn in the last 25 years than we did in the previous 2500 combined." That: we have been a profession that is enforced by lack of science to fall back on logic, and intuition, and compelling arguments, and ideology; and so that's our habit. What seems compelling, what seems like it makes sense, is how things should work. I read an exchange that happened on the Internet. Someone was talking about teaching reading, and a professor of education, emeritus, opined that teaching reading explicitly is silly. If you look at how students learn to speak, they learn to speak naturally. Everyone learns to speak. This is how reading happens also. That is a very logical argument, but it's profoundly unscientific. Because, we've been speaking for 250,000 years, and so our brains have evolved to speak. And there are parts of your brain--Broca's area, Wernicke's area--that are designed for language acquisition. And so, a baby left to its own devices will begin to mimic and copy its parents. Barring cognitive or perceptive problems, a baby will learn to speak on its own. But, we've been reading for 5,000 years, and for most of that time, very few of us actually have been reading. So, our brains have not had time to evolve for reading. There is no 'reading' part of the brain; there's no Broca's area for reading. And so, when we read, we are rewiring parts of our brains that were designed evolutionarily for other things and putting them in service of reading. So, it's what Dylan William calls biologically secondary, as opposed to biologically primary--things we can learn through intuition. It requires deliberate instruction. It requires methodology. And so, I can see why someone would make the mistake. It's logical to say, oh, well reading and language acquisition would happen the same way. But, actually, we now know that they don't happen the same way. That, reading involves complex cognitive processes that don't yield themselves to the mere observation--the mere observation of intelligent people--and that we have to respect the science and understand the science. And just to go back briefly, our book, interestingly, is not about phonics. It's about trying to extrapolate the lesson. The lesson is that we spent 20 years miseducating young people that had to learn to read in the early elementary years because we ignored the science when it was available to us. If you look at the data right now on how we learn to read in grades three through 12, the data is also terrible. A great school can close the gap between kids who grow up in poverty and kids who grow up in privilege in math in two to three years. Those same schools often never close the gap in reading. The same lesson--that there's a science of reading that can tell us how to teach reading in grades three to 12--also applies. We have also been slow to respond to it, to recognize it, to see it, and it often causes us to question our intuitions and the way that we've done things for a long time. And, that is a big ask, and people are resistant to it, and so the change has been tragically slow, and the price has been high. Russ Roberts: Yeah. This book is not about how to learn how to sound out words and then be able to pronounce them correctly. This book is--what I love about it is that it's about how to think about reading when you're teaching people how to understand and assimilate and absorb a text, a written text. And, that is a special art. I don't know how scientific it is, but I think there are things we know from studies about it, and we also know a little bit from our own experience, which is understandably somewhat dangerous, but-- Doug Lemov: Experience is not irrelevant. It needs to be combined with an understanding of cognitive science.
12:17	Russ Roberts: But, a profound example that you hit on quite repeatedly in the book is the importance of background knowledge. Why is it important? What do you mean by background knowledge being crucial for reading fluency, which is a very different level than just being able to read? Doug Lemov: Yeah. I think one of the fundamental beliefs of the American teaching of reading is that reading is made up of a set of transformable skills. For example, making an inference from a text. And so, the way that American schools typically approach this is we would practice making inferences, and we might talk about what an inference is. And, Russ, when you're making an inference--in inferences, you're filling in the blanks between what the author said and what the author meant. And so, we might have a little chat that we'd say we practice making--we'd talk about the seven steps to make an inference, and we'd talk about making an inference. It's a beautiful idea to imagine that if we taught someone to make an inference or to determine the main idea of a passage, that they would be able to take that skill and apply it to any text that they read for the rest of their lives. Let's just close our eyes for a minute and imagine how beautiful that would be, if I could teach you to make any inference from any text that you ever read. The problem is that making inferences is domain-specific, based on your background knowledge. I have an example. First of all, the key study on this is really fascinating. It's Recht and Leslie's baseball study. So, they have a passage that they give students to read about baseball. By the way, this is great fun to do with audiences in England, because if you give them a very simple passage about baseball, like 'Roberts was on second, Lemov bunted him, laid down the sacrifice for the first out in the inning.' Or, let's say I'm the pitcher and 'Lemov walked the number nine hitter on four pitches, and Roberts, the manager, signals to the bullpen without even walking to the mound.' That's a better example, right? That's a story that, if you have background knowledge about baseball, you know that you should never walk the number nine hitter and that signaling to the bullpen without walking out to the mound is a gesture of disrespect and frustration to the pitcher. You show that passage to someone in England who knows nothing about baseball, and they're like, 'What? There's tension between Roberts and Lemov? There's disrespect?' They have no idea, because the background knowledge causes you to make an inference. I get--like, a simpler example of this is: every text causes you to have to disambiguate the text, and you disambiguate based on your background knowledge. So, in the book, I offer this sentence: 'The wooden box was heavy. She put her bear down. It was going to be hard to carry.' Tell me about that story. Who is the main character? What's happening in that story? Russ Roberts: So, that's a little girl, and she's got to pick up a wooden box. It might not be a big box, because she's probably a little girl, and we know she's a little girl because she's carrying a bear. And, it's probably not a grizzly; it's a stuffed animal. It's hard. This whole idea of putting something down to pick something up--for you and me, it'd be easy. We just grab the box. But, she's small, her hands are small. So, we got a whole visual story from those two sentences. Doug Lemov: You created a story, invested it with meaning, made inferences about it based on your background knowledge--that she could not have been carrying a real bear, because weights and sizes of things is impossible-- Russ Roberts: And, she would die. Doug Lemov: Yeah. If it's a toy bear, we have to be talking about a child. Like, that is actually a big inference about this story. Who is she? She is a child. The bear is a toy bear. Even--the third sentence is: 'It was going to be hard to carry'--the pronoun, 'it' could actually refer to the bear or the box. But, you knew intuitively that it had to be the box, because the box is heavy and the bear is easy. The bear would not be heavy. So, you disambiguated that text based on your background knowledge. It's a very simplistic example of background knowledge. The baseball example is a much more complex example of background knowledge. But essentially, what the science tells us is that our order thinking is domain specific. We make inferences. We think deeply about things that we know a lot about. 'Quick, Russ, make an inference about particle physics.' Or, 'What is your insight about whether Napoleon should have attacked on the second morning of the Battle of Waterloo? Go.' Right? You can't--well, you might actually know. Russ Roberts: I wrote an incredible study of the Battle of the Waterloo when I was eight years old. For a long time, I had that study. You know, what's really funny about that? Just as an aside, because I remember writing that paper. I remember my handwriting for that paper, and I remember taking it to my dad, who knew history very well, and assuming he would be able to read what I had written and tell me, 'Oh, Grand Marshal Ney, he wasn't on the sunken road of Ohain,' or whatever it was called. To me, it was just a bunch of facts that--my background knowledge was mediocre. But my dad, of course, would know why the Battle of Waterloo was lost, because he's a grownup and he reads history. I didn't understand at the age of eight--I might've been 10--I didn't understand then that history is ambiguous and difficult. So, go ahead. Sorry. Doug Lemov: No. I asked the wrong guy the Waterloo question, obviously. Russ Roberts: I still understand it. The sunken road was key. Doug Lemov: Did you have any papers you wrote as a 10-year-old on particle physics to really blow up my arguments? Russ Roberts: No. You're good. Doug Lemov: You actually demonstrated quite a few things. So, first of all, like: The inference happens because you have the background knowledge. And, there's a curse of knowledge, which is: when you know something about the Battle of Waterloo, it's very hard to glimpse and understand the things that someone doesn't understand--never mind why they don't understand them. And so, one of the things we argue is that it's a tremendous waste of time to spend time practicing making inferences. We make inferences when we have background knowledge. If we want students to learn more from text, we should provide them with rich, and useful, and interesting background knowledge while they're reading the book. I made a horrible mistake as a parent when my son was in seventh grade. I gave him Animal Farm to read, and I didn't give him a lot of background knowledge, and I didn't tell him anything about the Russian Revolution and about how this is an allegory for this. So, he read the book diligently--he's a pretty good reader--and he was, like, 'This is a really great story about talking animals on a farm.' And, this happens all the time. For some reason, I think this is a funny story: I have an aunt who likes to write letters of complaint to product manufacturers. She had a bowl of Campbell's chicken soup, which she wrote a letter of complaint. And she said, 'If there was ever a chicken in this soup, it walked through with its boots on.' And actually, I think that that was a really good analogy from students' experience: That, books that we read, especially historical fiction, they walk through with their boots on. We're assuming that they're, like, learning about--if it's Number the Stars--classic canonical fifth or sixth grade text set in Denmark during World War II during the Nazi occupation--and we assume that kids are learning about--they don't have enough background knowledge to understand what rationing is and why there's rationing, and why people would be constrained from telling the truth, and why activities are clandestine, and what the risks are to Jewish citizens. Right? They're walking through with their boots on because they don't have the background knowledge. And, if we want them to think more deeply about the text, and want them to make more inferences about the text, and want them to remember more about the text, the thing to do is to give them knowledge, often through short nonfiction articles. Let's read an article about rationing and talk about why there was no butter and no sugar and why there's rationing. Let's understand some things. The other thing about this is it levels the playing field. Because, so often there's some students in the classroom who do know a little bit about the occupation in World War II and Nazi Germany, and so they can engage the text. But half the class doesn't know those things. And so, suddenly, we're asking them to make inferences about things that they don't have background knowledge. They're not able to play, and they very quickly learn that reading is not for me, because I can't participate in the conversations about the book.
21:10	Russ Roberts: The other powerful insight--and I ji just call it opportunity costs--the other powerful insight is that--I'm thinking about my example of Grand Marshal Ney. Now, when you hear 'Grand Marshal Ney'--first of all, Ney is not a normal modern, say, American name. You might think, 'Ney, does that mean negative ['nay']? Does that mean a horse ['neigh']?' And, you don't know what a Grand Marshal is. And, I think that's the correct name for the French Army. I'm not a hundred percent sure. But, if I ask the students, 'What do you think a Grand Marshal is?' Well, they might think it has something to do with a parade--a marshal for a parade. They might think it's a sheriff in the West. They might think it's Grand Master: might have something to do with chess. And, you point out in the book that as you're trying to guess--as students are--they're at sea. They're desperately trying to grab onto this. The idea that by trying they will get better at it is false. That's Number One. But, the second deep insight is that--this is the opportunity cost--that it takes a lot of time. And it has little benefit. But, by taking up a lot of time, you've lost the opportunity to do other things. And the idea of having a brief excerpt or a passage about, say, rationing or what World War II was like in occupied countries is unbelievably powerful. Because, not only does it shorten the amount of time spent guessing, which has little benefit, it might apply to other readings and other examples that are going to come later. Doug Lemov: I'm building your background knowledge. Both reading and nonfiction builds my background knowledge. But it also causes me to learn more from the fiction. And, maybe reading the fiction causes me to be more interested in the nonfiction and more engaged in it. And so, I'm building student knowledge as we go. And you also--I just want to draw a line under something that you said that's really profound and important, which is: Guessing is not critical thinking. And, a lot of people mistake it. And the place where we see this most is in the teaching of vocabulary. You gave the example of Grand Marshal, where you could argue that this is a vocabulary word, like 'marshal.' What does it mean? Vocabulary is the single most important form of background knowledge that we have. You almost can't conceive of an idea unless you have a word for it. And often, the way that teachers are socialized to teach vocabulary is to have students--well, they would call it critical thinking--guess. So, 'The boys' hands were tired and raw. When exhilarated, they reached the top of the mountain.' Or, 'The boys' legs were tired, their hands were raw. When exhilarated, they reached the top of the mountain.' In a typical American vocabulary lesson, we would then guess what the word 'exhilarated' meant there. And, I might ask, say, 'Does anyone know the word 'exhilarated' from their experience?' Maybe half the class knows a little bit about it, half the class knows nothing. Or I might say: 'From the context clue in the sentence, what can the context clues tell you about the word 'exhilarated'?' If I asked you to come up with a synonym for what 'exhilarated' means, and you didn't know what 'exhilarated' meant, what would you guess? Russ Roberts: Well, you might be exhausted because it sounds like it. You might get confused and make that error. Doug Lemov: Yeah. And, interestingly, the context clues are misdirective. They actually tell us the wrong definition of 'exhilarated,' often. Sometimes they're directive, but actually, when the word is most important in the sentence, the context clues are least likely to be useful. In this case, the whole sentence pivots around the idea that you would expect them to be exhausted. They're tired and raw and worn out, but they're exhilarated because something's changed--because they've reached the top. And so, this idea of inferring word meaning from context clues is flawed. But, what teachers think that they're doing is--they think they're teaching critical thinking. They think that the guessing here--students guessing at the word 'exhilarated'--is critical thinking, when it's not. And, a much better strategy would be to say something like, 'Exhilarated means excited and made alive by a challenging experience. Why might they feel exhilarated when they reach the top of the cliff? Go. Turn and talk to your partner for 15 seconds. Go.' 'What's a time when you might feel exhilarated, but not because of physical effort, but for some other reason? 15 seconds. Go.' 'What's a time in your life when you felt exhilarated recently, and why was it so important to you? 15 seconds. Go.' I'm starting with the definitions, the first thing I do. I start with the background knowledge, and then I ask you to apply it in different situations, in different settings. That really is critical thinking. First the knowledge, then the critical thinking. If I try and do the critical thinking to arrive at the knowledge, what I have is guessing. And, the other thing about it is that if I give the knowledge first, everyone in the room can play. Everyone has a definition of 'exhilarated,' and now they're trying to use it in different settings and thinking about it and encoding it in their long-term memory. If I ask you to try and guess what the word 'exhilarated'--half the kids in the room are like, 'I've never heard that word. I don't know what it means. And, no thank you on vocabulary.' Russ Roberts: And, as you point out, often the whole point of that unusual word is to grab the reader and make them appreciate that even though their hands were raw and they're really tired, they're actually happy--not depressed, say, or whatever other state you might guess at.
26:38	Russ Roberts: But the other part that I loved--and this is as someone struggling to learn a foreign language now in Israel--you'd think that when you hear it and you go, 'Exhilarated, that's a good word. I'm going to try really hard to remember it.' 'Exhilarated' means really happy after a challenge or really happy and feeling exultantly alive. And, I think about it, think about it, think about it. And, it turns out the next day when you see 'exhilarated,' you've got to look it up in the Hebrew-English dictionary again, and you think, 'Why can't I remember anything?' And, the answer is because that technique is not the way we remember things, other than short term. Doug Lemov: We need lots and lots of retrieval practice. We forget almost everything that we learn in life. This is just a basic thing. One of the most established concepts in cognitive science is that learning is defined as a change in long-term memory. And, if I want to make a change in long-term memory, I have to bring things back into conscious thinking--back into working memory--after a period of forgetting. So, the next lesson has to start with, like, 'Okay, Russ, what's the word for 'exhilarated' again? Let's just review that.' Have to do that three or four times to encode in long-term memory so you can find it. Russ Roberts: But even that--repeating the definition--is not nearly as powerful as you asking me to come up with an example from my life when I was exhilarated. That's so deep. It shouldn't be, but it is. Doug Lemov: There are two reasons why I would say that is true. One is, the cognitive scientist Héctor Ruiz Martin describes encoding--which is learning something, going from understanding it to building it into our long-term memory--as thinking hard about the meaning of the learning object and connecting it to other things in your long-term memory. So, what interested you about that is, like, 'Okay, a time in my life when I've been exhilarated.' Then I'm both retrieving 'exhilarated,' but then connecting it to an experience that was important to me. And then, when I asked you to think of 'Why might the boys be exhilarated here?' you have to explain it based on the context of the sentence. And, then, 'What's a time when you might be exhilarated that didn't involve physical activity?' 'Oh, I was exhilarated when I got a high grade in a test in school.' That's causing you to engage different applications, different shades of meaning. The research on vocabulary is that students who have the best vocabulary and have the best reading comprehension don't just know more words. They know words more deeply. The depth of word knowledge and breadth of word knowledge are different things, and we have to teach both. And so, this sort of model of vocabulary that we propose--which is, instead of wasting your time trying to guess the definition, and the definition is the end point of vocabulary study: The definition is the starting point. And then, we can do lots of examples, what we call active practice, which can be playful and fun and funny. But it causes me to think about the word in different ways, in different contexts, in different settings, so I get depth of word meaning, and I get lots and lots and lots of retrieval. Where, if we have a good conversation about this word, I could probably cause you to use the word 'exhilarated' 20 times in the space of a couple of minutes, and then you own it. But you own it deeply. Like, you understand it from a reading perspective. Russ Roberts: Well, and the other-- Doug Lemov: I think--yeah. Russ Roberts: The part I love about it is: Well, 'exhilarated' just means happy. So, it's just a fancy word for 'happy.' Now, in fact, it's not. I would say 'exhilarated' means it's something that makes your heart sing. Which is an interesting phrase in and of itself because your heart doesn't sing. But, lousy vocabulary and mediocre acquisition of reading and vocabulary is, 'Oh, I have a synonym for that. Happy.' The depth that you're talking about is starting to think about the nuance of why a great writer might say 'exhilarated' rather than 'happy' or 'satisfied,' because it's more than just happy, and it's more than just satisfied. Doug Lemov: From a reading comprehension perspective, if two words overlap in meaning--so the second-most common way that vocabulary is taught in American schools is the synonym model. Right? 'Imitate' means 'mimic.' And those words--maybe they overlap 80% in their meaning, 'imitate' and 'mimic.' But if I say, 'Doug imitated Russ's speaking style' versus 'Doug mimicked Russ's speaking style,' the differences between those two words--one of them could be respectful and appreciative, and one of them is mocking. Right? It's the differences between those two words that would create the meaning in a text if we read that in a text. Right? If I teach a word as a synonym, the risk is that we miss the 20% of the words that are different that create the real nuance and that create the understanding when reading text. And so, I think this is why the research on word depth--that depth of word knowledge is important, as is breadth of word knowledge. I think the point here is that the way we teach vocabulary underestimates its importance, treats it mostly as a skill rather than a critical form of background knowledge, and results in students whose reading isn't what it could be. Russ Roberts: And, just to add another footnote about translation--learning a new language--it's very common: You go to Google Translate and you say, 'What does this Hebrew word mean in English?' And of course, it gives you one word usually. If you work at it, you can get twelve. But, in general, it gives you a word, so you think, 'Well, now I understand it.' And, you do at a certain level, but it's why it's hard to be an immigrant, because there's a nuance of the native speaker that you will never acquire unless you're extremely gifted or come at a young age. And, when we're talking--you and I in this conversation--you're translating what I'm saying into your language in your head, and I'm hoping that you're getting my nuance. I think we're pretty good at it, but it's why miscommunication takes place even when we speak the same language. And, reading is an attempt to understand a thoughtful person's nuance and to grasp it. And it's an art. Doug Lemov: For sure. When you were telling that story, I was thinking of--my parents had a friend who was from Italy who had immigrated, married an American woman, moved to the United States, and he said the hardest part was--his English was good, but he said it was so hard to be funny in English. Because he knew the words mostly, but he couldn't choose exactly the right word with a little sense of irony to drop in there. And so, it was almost like, his whole personality changed as a result. Russ Roberts: Yeah. It's a cliché that humor is hard to translate, but you know that's true when you think about the difference between a great comedian and an okay comedian, or a great punchline and a non-punchline. You can take the greatest punchline to a joke, and if you use a different wording--which means the same thing, come on. But it doesn't--you don't get the same humor.
34:02	Russ Roberts: Let's shift gears. I want to talk about whole books. You emphasize reading for young people--but I would add for adults mostly, too--that we should read whole books in a group--in a classroom--for students. In the case of students. And, I would say for adults, there's something powerful about a book club where a group of adults read a book together. Why? Why whole books, and why in a group? Doug Lemov: Yeah. And, this is profoundly important. You wouldn't think this would be an important argument unless you had spent a lot of time in schools and you had seen how rarely students read books anymore and how often they read passages, and excerpts, and short pieces. But, several things happen when we read books that make them the optimal form of learning communication. One is that the medium is the message, and a book is a long-form process of understanding an idea with complexity and depth. In comparison, say, to a tweet, which suggests that the world can be understood in 128 characters, implemented simply and easily via a hot take. I just finished reading Ian McEwan's book, Atonement. The first 60 pages of it--someone recommended it to me. I didn't really like it. It started slowly. And then, over time, I started to understand the whole context and milieu of the argument that it was making, and what had happened, and why the characters did what they did. And I started to understand some version of truth that was deeper than I would have been able to understand if I hadn't gone through that process. I think that one of the interesting things about a book is that the protagonist never believes at the end what they did at the beginning. Their thinking changes, and a book takes you through the process of deep understanding and change; and it is beneficial. So, that was a profound part of my reading this book. But, the struggle of, like, 'I'm not sure I like this': that I had to discipline myself to read 60 pages until I got into the book, and then to have found in the end that I'm so grateful that I've read it because it changed the way that I thought. Learning that over and over again--the discipline of thinking, the way that thinking responds to sustained inquiry--is a really important lesson, especially in an era when the message to young people, to all of us, is that I can pretty much understand this deeply complex issue in the span of a tweet. That's one reason why-- Russ Roberts: I can just get ChatGPT [Generative Pre-trained Transformer] to summarize it for me, and then I know what's in the book. Doug Lemov: Sure. I think--a couple of other reasons why books are profoundly important. First of all, there's a lot of research that stories are cognitively privileged--that we remember things best when we experience them in a story. I think there are evolutionary reasons for this. Right? Like, if you think about an early human, it is necessary to our survival to know how to hunt and know how to create a fire. But, unlike every other animal, we don't learn how to do this through instincts. Right? We have to be taught it and explained it by other humans. And, the way that we, for most of our history, communicated this is we sat around campfires. We sat around in groups, and we told the story of the hunt to each other, or we told the story of, like, how we built a fire--and it was incredibly hard to do--like, how we overcame that. And so, the people who listened to those stories--before there was writing--this is how we communicated our culture, who we were, but also how to survive--cumulative capital. We're the only species on the planet that can communicate complex ideas that are multi-step, are greater than you can hold in working memory at any given time. So, there's a double-selection advantage conferred evolutionarily on the people who listen to stories. Like: One, you learned how to hunt as a group and how to start a fire. But also, by listening to the stories together, like, we're bonded and we're connected, and there's this, like, group formation. I think one of the least understood parts of our evolutionary story is that we only survived in groups. That a human by him- or herself on the savanna with a big brain and an opposable thumb is toast, and is going to be in some fitter creature's belly by midday, because you can't smell your enemies from a mile away and you don't have night vision. And even compared to one of those really cute chimpanzees--you don't have claws and you don't have fangs. You don't have a chance in a fight against that animal. Only when we formed groups and learned that we could rely on each other--interestingly, throwing rocks was one of the critical points of inflection in human prehistory. We're the only species on the planet that can attack or defend from a distance by throwing projectiles. And so, if we can all rely on each other completely to stand and throw rocks, we can drive away a lion. Or hunt a lion. And so, group formation--we survive in groups. And the people who were unable to form groups, or assure their membership in the group, or meet the norms of the groups--they were exiled and they perished. And we are the heirs to the group-formers. So, stories are cognitively privileged to us because they confer a double advantage on us: We learn things through stories, and we are bonded in the experience of, like, listening to stories together. So we have evolved to, like, prize stories and give special importance to stories, and remember the things that we learn from stories for a variety of reasons. So, a story--especially a story that we're emotionally and psychologically committed to--is learning-optimal. And a book captures that. And, a book models the sort of persistence that is needed to master complex ideas. And, it suggests that ideas are complex and not simple and require a sustained study to truly understand the world. And lastly, books contain cultural capital, which is profoundly important ideas that reflect the accumulated wisdom of society. Almost everything that's most important to society has been written and captured in books. And, if I know those books and I have access to them, then I can connect to people about--if you refer to Shakespeare or to 1984, if I don't know anything about George Orwell and 1984, I can't even have a conversation with you about those things. And maybe if I could just say one more thing--about particularly reading books that are older than 50 years old. So, one of the most important forms of diversity that I think is available to us is to hear the voices of the past in their own words as they thought it. And to understand that we have a very presentist way of believing, thinking about human consciousness. And to understand the most important form of diversity--in other words, the way people thought about things 100, 200 years ago--that they felt much more connected to place, that they had a strong sense of duty, that they went off and fought and died in wars, that they were much connected to death and dying, that their family members died with shocking regularity. That yes, they made clearer and, by our perspective, less defensible judgments about race and culture. Understanding all those things about the way that people thought in the past helps us to understand ourselves in the present. If we don't understand those things and we haven't heard the voices in the past, we have a very simplistic view of our own context and milieu today. And, I think you see this all the time with young people having these very presentist, simplistic views of human nature and human history.
42:14	Russ Roberts: That was lovely. I just want to add one thing. It's a common theme for listeners of the program--but I want to say it again because it's so important. Summaries are not--we don't read fiction--we don't even read nonfiction--for the facts. At one point on this program a few years ago, we were talking about something of Homer, either the Iliad or the Odyssey, and someone said, 'I don't need to read it. I read the Classic Comic.' And, there is no Classic Comic for Atonement by Ian McEwan. If there were, you would not be changed by that. Knowing what happens in the book is not why it's a good book. It's not why it's powerful. And, sharing the intellectual journey of a great author--in nonfiction, for example--is more than just: Well, here's a bunch of facts you're going to enjoy knowing. It's: Here's my story--even though it's nonfiction--here's my story of how these facts go together and why they matter. And, you do that a hundred times with great minds, and you become wiser. And, that cannot be summarized. It can't be put in a tweet. It can't be put in an AI [artificial intelligence] summary. It can't be put into a Classic Comic, and it can't be put in a movie--although a movie is a different thing, and it can be very powerful. The transformative effect of a great book is the struggle and the simulation that you make, as you write about in your book, of putting yourself in the shoes of the different characters and feeling how they change. And, that only comes through a sustained and long reading; and that takes work. It's not so popular these days, and your defense of it is very eloquent. I like to think the pendulum will swing back. I may be wrong. I didn't say I'd be right. I said, I'd like to think. I hope I'm right. But, reading-- Doug Lemov: Can I say one tiny thing about that because I agree with you so strongly? You mentioned that the book is for educators, but it's also for parents, and it's for policymakers, hopefully. And, I think that a lot of parents would probably not realize just how few and far between books are in schools, and how much they've been cast out or driven out of the student experience. There was a viral story on social media about a student at Columbia University who her professor asked her to read several books, and she went to him and was surprised and felt like it was unfair because she'd never had to read a book cover to cover in high school and getting into Columbia University. I don't know if you saw this article. This is not an anomaly. Student attention has been changed by the advent of the smartphone and social media. One thing we know about our attention--our ability to sustain states of concentration and focus--is that it's malleable. And that if you spend a significant part of your life--five to six hours a day, if you're the average American teenager--in a state where there's constant novel stimulation, you come to require--you don't even need your cell phone anymore to require that state. The state is wired within you. And so, students read less and less outside of school. And it's harder and harder to get them to sustain the states of concentration in school. And so, I think a lot of schools have given up on requiring students to do things that are hard and challenging that they no longer have the cognitive wherewithal to do. But ironically, the greatest gift that they can give young people is to cause them to read those books. And to actually--we argue in the book--to rebuild their attentional capacity. If the cell phone has taught us that attention is malleable, we should get all the screens out of our classrooms, and we should give kids books, and we should ask them to read for five minutes straight, and then eight minutes straight, and then 10 minutes straight. Ideally, this would be like reading aloud together, so there's a social factor to it. And then, 12 minutes together. We wire how we fire. We read the way we read the way we practice reading. We will read the way we practice reading. I tell the story of a teenager who was required to read for 45 minutes a day. It might or may not be my son, when he was a teenager, lying on his back on the couch, reading the same book that I read 30 years beforehand. But, when he reads it--every five seconds, Bzzz: 'Dude, over at Byron's. You coming over soon?' 'Dude, what's the math homework?' 'Dude, that girl in your math class, when are you going to ask her out?'. His experience with the book is fractured. He doesn't sustain the state of attention. He's not as connected to the book because it's constantly--and he's not in the place where the book is. It's not just that students read less, it's that they read differently--and fractured and disconnectedly. And we can accept that; or schools can say, 'We need to rebuild. We can participate in rebuilding your attentional state. And, this is one of the greatest gifts we can give you: to cause you to read for 10 minutes unbroken. And, that capacity will serve you for the rest of your life.' And, this is one of the arguments that we make in the book--that changes in attention and changes in reading habits are one of the least acknowledged factors in literacy instruction. Students simply do not read. For many of the students in our schools, the books that we assign in school will be the only books that they read, woefully[?], in their youth. Sorry. It's sadly, sadly true. The book is in a death struggle against the cell phone. And unless we bring it to life in our classrooms, and unless we make it social--we read together, and I feel connected to people where I'm reading a book together--it's going to lose. [More to come, 48:23]

Time

Podcast Episode Highlights

0:37

Intro. [Recording date: July 8, 2025.]

Russ Roberts: Today is July 8th, 2025, and my guest is author and educational entrepreneur, Doug Lemov, the Chief Knowledge Officer of Teach Like a Champion, an organization that does professional development for teachers and writes curricula for them. This is Doug's third appearance on the program. He was last here in November of 2016 talking about reading.

We're going to talk about reading again today, specifically based on his new book, co-authored with Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway, the Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading. Doug, welcome back to EconTalk.

Doug Lemov: Good to see you, Russ. Thanks for having me.

1:16

Russ Roberts: This is a handbook for teachers, but it also has deep lessons for anyone who reads, for parents of children who are readers. And I want to start off with how you start off in the book, with what went wrong with reading in America--the teaching of reading in America--in recent years, and the reporting of Emily Hanford, an investigative journalist who did a podcast on this topic, and we will link to that. What did she uncover?

Doug Lemov: Yeah. It's tragic what she uncovered. I've described her work as the most important piece of educational journalism in the 21st century. What she discovered is that early reading programs in American schools--so this is when students learn to read--the most popular programs have been based more on ideology than on science; and we have learned a lot about the science of how people learn to read, and they really ignored science that was out there. It was available to them.

And, for a variety of reasons that we can get into, the most popular early reading programs, instead of teaching students systematic synthetic phonics--how to decode words, what sounds mean--went with a more whole language approach. They often socialized students to guess at words--made sense or what the picture said. And the result is that many students, millions of students sadly, did not learn to read.

Emily's podcast described this in excruciating detail. It was something like the fifth most downloaded podcast in the United States in 2023, and one of the results was something like 20 states passed legislation that early reading programs had to be founded in science.

And so, it really created an incredible amount of change. But, unfortunately, it really came 20 years too late. This is research that we did know for 20 years before the required change happened.

Russ Roberts: You just said many programs were based on whole language. What does that mean?

Doug Lemov: Yeah. So, there were two arguments about how you learn to read. One was, frankly, much more compelling if I'm a teacher, which is: If I introduce students to words and books and ask them to read, they will learn to read relatively naturally if I encourage them and foster them and expose them to a lot of print. That's the whole language approach.

And, the alternative to it is something called phonics, or systematic synthetic phonics, which argues that the way to teach students to read is to teach them--deliberately--letter sounds, combinations of letter sounds, how they work, have them practice them. It's a lot of flashcards. But, it means that when they come across a word that they don't know, they can sound it out.

And, the science is overwhelmingly--many students will learn to read naturally, but many students won't. It doesn't have to do much with their intelligence; it's just some kids crack the code on their own through exposure, but some kids don't. And so, the idea behind synthetic phonics is that we intentionally teach the code of letter-sound correspondence.

One of the problems with it is that it can be repetitive. It requires a lot of flashcards and repetition--

Russ Roberts: Drilling--

Doug Lemov: and that does not always jibe with what teachers imagine themselves doing when they take the job.

Strangely, I think actually students love phonics activities when they're done well, but it wasn't what adults imagined. And so, teachers were, perhaps for that reason, receptive to arguments that phonics was either unnecessary or painful or miserable, and it really lost the day. And, a more whole language-type approach dominated for 20 years.

And the result is that millions of kids did not learn to read, or learned to read suboptimally, or finally learned to learn to read way too late and associated reading with unpleasantness. The costs, as Emily Hanford described, were dizzying. Not just for families and for kids, but also for teachers who spent their professional lives teaching the single most important thing that we do in schools wrong. And, that's a painful thing to reckon with.

6:17

Russ Roberts: I want to talk about another example of--I consider these things educational fads, fads that run through educational departments in graduate schools of education. There are many, many reasons for why fads take root. Some are simple--that it's fun to have a new thing, and maybe it's a better thing, and so we grab it and try it. Sometimes it's ideological: it might align with some other theory of society or human beings that people hold.

But, sometimes there's just some romance about it that we hope is true that isn't.

And I want to quote Dylan William. You quote him saying, quote:

The big mistake we have made in the United States is to assume that if we want students to be able to think, then our curriculum should give our students lots of practice thinking. This is a mistake because what our students need is more to think with.

And, that idea--that if you want to be able to think, you should practice thinking--and later we'll talk about if you want to get good at vocabulary, you should practice acquiring vocabulary. That's a very reasonable idea, and it speaks, as you point out in the book, to a utopian ideal that we want to believe about education. So talk about that--that romance--and why is it wrong? It seems like what could be wrong with that? If you want to learn how to do something, you practice it.

Doug Lemov: Mark Seidenberg has this really powerful quote that I cite in the book also. He says, "Reading is a complex skill that intuition cannot easily penetrate." Sorry, one more quote and then I'll be done. Daniel Willingham said: "We've learned more about the cognitive science about how people learn in the last 25 years than we did in the previous 2500 combined."

That: we have been a profession that is enforced by lack of science to fall back on logic, and intuition, and compelling arguments, and ideology; and so that's our habit. What seems compelling, what seems like it makes sense, is how things should work.

I read an exchange that happened on the Internet. Someone was talking about teaching reading, and a professor of education, emeritus, opined that teaching reading explicitly is silly. If you look at how students learn to speak, they learn to speak naturally. Everyone learns to speak. This is how reading happens also.

That is a very logical argument, but it's profoundly unscientific. Because, we've been speaking for 250,000 years, and so our brains have evolved to speak. And there are parts of your brain--Broca's area, Wernicke's area--that are designed for language acquisition. And so, a baby left to its own devices will begin to mimic and copy its parents. Barring cognitive or perceptive problems, a baby will learn to speak on its own.

But, we've been reading for 5,000 years, and for most of that time, very few of us actually have been reading. So, our brains have not had time to evolve for reading. There is no 'reading' part of the brain; there's no Broca's area for reading. And so, when we read, we are rewiring parts of our brains that were designed evolutionarily for other things and putting them in service of reading. So, it's what Dylan William calls biologically secondary, as opposed to biologically primary--things we can learn through intuition. It requires deliberate instruction. It requires methodology.

And so, I can see why someone would make the mistake. It's logical to say, oh, well reading and language acquisition would happen the same way. But, actually, we now know that they don't happen the same way. That, reading involves complex cognitive processes that don't yield themselves to the mere observation--the mere observation of intelligent people--and that we have to respect the science and understand the science.

And just to go back briefly, our book, interestingly, is not about phonics. It's about trying to extrapolate the lesson. The lesson is that we spent 20 years miseducating young people that had to learn to read in the early elementary years because we ignored the science when it was available to us.

If you look at the data right now on how we learn to read in grades three through 12, the data is also terrible. A great school can close the gap between kids who grow up in poverty and kids who grow up in privilege in math in two to three years. Those same schools often never close the gap in reading.

The same lesson--that there's a science of reading that can tell us how to teach reading in grades three to 12--also applies. We have also been slow to respond to it, to recognize it, to see it, and it often causes us to question our intuitions and the way that we've done things for a long time. And, that is a big ask, and people are resistant to it, and so the change has been tragically slow, and the price has been high.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. This book is not about how to learn how to sound out words and then be able to pronounce them correctly. This book is--what I love about it is that it's about how to think about reading when you're teaching people how to understand and assimilate and absorb a text, a written text. And, that is a special art. I don't know how scientific it is, but I think there are things we know from studies about it, and we also know a little bit from our own experience, which is understandably somewhat dangerous, but--

Doug Lemov: Experience is not irrelevant. It needs to be combined with an understanding of cognitive science.

12:17

Russ Roberts: But, a profound example that you hit on quite repeatedly in the book is the importance of background knowledge. Why is it important? What do you mean by background knowledge being crucial for reading fluency, which is a very different level than just being able to read?

Doug Lemov: Yeah. I think one of the fundamental beliefs of the American teaching of reading is that reading is made up of a set of transformable skills. For example, making an inference from a text. And so, the way that American schools typically approach this is we would practice making inferences, and we might talk about what an inference is. And, Russ, when you're making an inference--in inferences, you're filling in the blanks between what the author said and what the author meant.

And so, we might have a little chat that we'd say we practice making--we'd talk about the seven steps to make an inference, and we'd talk about making an inference.

It's a beautiful idea to imagine that if we taught someone to make an inference or to determine the main idea of a passage, that they would be able to take that skill and apply it to any text that they read for the rest of their lives. Let's just close our eyes for a minute and imagine how beautiful that would be, if I could teach you to make any inference from any text that you ever read.

The problem is that making inferences is domain-specific, based on your background knowledge.

I have an example. First of all, the key study on this is really fascinating. It's Recht and Leslie's baseball study. So, they have a passage that they give students to read about baseball. By the way, this is great fun to do with audiences in England, because if you give them a very simple passage about baseball, like 'Roberts was on second, Lemov bunted him, laid down the sacrifice for the first out in the inning.' Or, let's say I'm the pitcher and 'Lemov walked the number nine hitter on four pitches, and Roberts, the manager, signals to the bullpen without even walking to the mound.' That's a better example, right? That's a story that, if you have background knowledge about baseball, you know that you should never walk the number nine hitter and that signaling to the bullpen without walking out to the mound is a gesture of disrespect and frustration to the pitcher.

You show that passage to someone in England who knows nothing about baseball, and they're like, 'What? There's tension between Roberts and Lemov? There's disrespect?' They have no idea, because the background knowledge causes you to make an inference.

I get--like, a simpler example of this is: every text causes you to have to disambiguate the text, and you disambiguate based on your background knowledge. So, in the book, I offer this sentence: 'The wooden box was heavy. She put her bear down. It was going to be hard to carry.' Tell me about that story. Who is the main character? What's happening in that story?

Russ Roberts: So, that's a little girl, and she's got to pick up a wooden box. It might not be a big box, because she's probably a little girl, and we know she's a little girl because she's carrying a bear. And, it's probably not a grizzly; it's a stuffed animal. It's hard. This whole idea of putting something down to pick something up--for you and me, it'd be easy. We just grab the box. But, she's small, her hands are small. So, we got a whole visual story from those two sentences.

Doug Lemov: You created a story, invested it with meaning, made inferences about it based on your background knowledge--that she could not have been carrying a real bear, because weights and sizes of things is impossible--

Russ Roberts: And, she would die.

Doug Lemov: Yeah. If it's a toy bear, we have to be talking about a child. Like, that is actually a big inference about this story. Who is she? She is a child. The bear is a toy bear.

Even--the third sentence is: 'It was going to be hard to carry'--the pronoun, 'it' could actually refer to the bear or the box. But, you knew intuitively that it had to be the box, because the box is heavy and the bear is easy. The bear would not be heavy. So, you disambiguated that text based on your background knowledge. It's a very simplistic example of background knowledge.

The baseball example is a much more complex example of background knowledge. But essentially, what the science tells us is that our order thinking is domain specific. We make inferences. We think deeply about things that we know a lot about. 'Quick, Russ, make an inference about particle physics.' Or, 'What is your insight about whether Napoleon should have attacked on the second morning of the Battle of Waterloo? Go.' Right? You can't--well, you might actually know.

Russ Roberts: I wrote an incredible study of the Battle of the Waterloo when I was eight years old. For a long time, I had that study.

You know, what's really funny about that? Just as an aside, because I remember writing that paper. I remember my handwriting for that paper, and I remember taking it to my dad, who knew history very well, and assuming he would be able to read what I had written and tell me, 'Oh, Grand Marshal Ney, he wasn't on the sunken road of Ohain,' or whatever it was called. To me, it was just a bunch of facts that--my background knowledge was mediocre. But my dad, of course, would know why the Battle of Waterloo was lost, because he's a grownup and he reads history. I didn't understand at the age of eight--I might've been 10--I didn't understand then that history is ambiguous and difficult. So, go ahead. Sorry.

Doug Lemov: No. I asked the wrong guy the Waterloo question, obviously.

Russ Roberts: I still understand it. The sunken road was key.

Doug Lemov: Did you have any papers you wrote as a 10-year-old on particle physics to really blow up my arguments?

Russ Roberts: No. You're good.

Doug Lemov: You actually demonstrated quite a few things. So, first of all, like: The inference happens because you have the background knowledge.

And, there's a curse of knowledge, which is: when you know something about the Battle of Waterloo, it's very hard to glimpse and understand the things that someone doesn't understand--never mind why they don't understand them. And so, one of the things we argue is that it's a tremendous waste of time to spend time practicing making inferences. We make inferences when we have background knowledge. If we want students to learn more from text, we should provide them with rich, and useful, and interesting background knowledge while they're reading the book.

I made a horrible mistake as a parent when my son was in seventh grade. I gave him Animal Farm to read, and I didn't give him a lot of background knowledge, and I didn't tell him anything about the Russian Revolution and about how this is an allegory for this. So, he read the book diligently--he's a pretty good reader--and he was, like, 'This is a really great story about talking animals on a farm.'

And, this happens all the time. For some reason, I think this is a funny story: I have an aunt who likes to write letters of complaint to product manufacturers. She had a bowl of Campbell's chicken soup, which she wrote a letter of complaint. And she said, 'If there was ever a chicken in this soup, it walked through with its boots on.'

And actually, I think that that was a really good analogy from students' experience: That, books that we read, especially historical fiction, they walk through with their boots on. We're assuming that they're, like, learning about--if it's Number the Stars--classic canonical fifth or sixth grade text set in Denmark during World War II during the Nazi occupation--and we assume that kids are learning about--they don't have enough background knowledge to understand what rationing is and why there's rationing, and why people would be constrained from telling the truth, and why activities are clandestine, and what the risks are to Jewish citizens. Right? They're walking through with their boots on because they don't have the background knowledge.

And, if we want them to think more deeply about the text, and want them to make more inferences about the text, and want them to remember more about the text, the thing to do is to give them knowledge, often through short nonfiction articles. Let's read an article about rationing and talk about why there was no butter and no sugar and why there's rationing. Let's understand some things.

The other thing about this is it levels the playing field. Because, so often there's some students in the classroom who do know a little bit about the occupation in World War II and Nazi Germany, and so they can engage the text. But half the class doesn't know those things. And so, suddenly, we're asking them to make inferences about things that they don't have background knowledge. They're not able to play, and they very quickly learn that reading is not for me, because I can't participate in the conversations about the book.

21:10

Russ Roberts: The other powerful insight--and I ji just call it opportunity costs--the other powerful insight is that--I'm thinking about my example of Grand Marshal Ney.

Now, when you hear 'Grand Marshal Ney'--first of all, Ney is not a normal modern, say, American name. You might think, 'Ney, does that mean negative ['nay']? Does that mean a horse ['neigh']?' And, you don't know what a Grand Marshal is. And, I think that's the correct name for the French Army. I'm not a hundred percent sure. But, if I ask the students, 'What do you think a Grand Marshal is?' Well, they might think it has something to do with a parade--a marshal for a parade. They might think it's a sheriff in the West. They might think it's Grand Master: might have something to do with chess.

And, you point out in the book that as you're trying to guess--as students are--they're at sea. They're desperately trying to grab onto this. The idea that by trying they will get better at it is false. That's Number One.

But, the second deep insight is that--this is the opportunity cost--that it takes a lot of time. And it has little benefit. But, by taking up a lot of time, you've lost the opportunity to do other things.

And the idea of having a brief excerpt or a passage about, say, rationing or what World War II was like in occupied countries is unbelievably powerful. Because, not only does it shorten the amount of time spent guessing, which has little benefit, it might apply to other readings and other examples that are going to come later.

Doug Lemov: I'm building your background knowledge. Both reading and nonfiction builds my background knowledge. But it also causes me to learn more from the fiction. And, maybe reading the fiction causes me to be more interested in the nonfiction and more engaged in it. And so, I'm building student knowledge as we go.

And you also--I just want to draw a line under something that you said that's really profound and important, which is: Guessing is not critical thinking. And, a lot of people mistake it.

And the place where we see this most is in the teaching of vocabulary. You gave the example of Grand Marshal, where you could argue that this is a vocabulary word, like 'marshal.' What does it mean?

Vocabulary is the single most important form of background knowledge that we have. You almost can't conceive of an idea unless you have a word for it.

And often, the way that teachers are socialized to teach vocabulary is to have students--well, they would call it critical thinking--guess.

So, 'The boys' hands were tired and raw. When exhilarated, they reached the top of the mountain.' Or, 'The boys' legs were tired, their hands were raw. When exhilarated, they reached the top of the mountain.'

In a typical American vocabulary lesson, we would then guess what the word 'exhilarated' meant there. And, I might ask, say, 'Does anyone know the word 'exhilarated' from their experience?' Maybe half the class knows a little bit about it, half the class knows nothing. Or I might say: 'From the context clue in the sentence, what can the context clues tell you about the word 'exhilarated'?' If I asked you to come up with a synonym for what 'exhilarated' means, and you didn't know what 'exhilarated' meant, what would you guess?

Russ Roberts: Well, you might be exhausted because it sounds like it. You might get confused and make that error.

Doug Lemov: Yeah. And, interestingly, the context clues are misdirective. They actually tell us the wrong definition of 'exhilarated,' often. Sometimes they're directive, but actually, when the word is most important in the sentence, the context clues are least likely to be useful.

In this case, the whole sentence pivots around the idea that you would expect them to be exhausted. They're tired and raw and worn out, but they're exhilarated because something's changed--because they've reached the top. And so, this idea of inferring word meaning from context clues is flawed.

But, what teachers think that they're doing is--they think they're teaching critical thinking. They think that the guessing here--students guessing at the word 'exhilarated'--is critical thinking, when it's not.

And, a much better strategy would be to say something like, 'Exhilarated means excited and made alive by a challenging experience. Why might they feel exhilarated when they reach the top of the cliff? Go. Turn and talk to your partner for 15 seconds. Go.' 'What's a time when you might feel exhilarated, but not because of physical effort, but for some other reason? 15 seconds. Go.' 'What's a time in your life when you felt exhilarated recently, and why was it so important to you? 15 seconds. Go.'

I'm starting with the definitions, the first thing I do. I start with the background knowledge, and then I ask you to apply it in different situations, in different settings. That really is critical thinking. First the knowledge, then the critical thinking. If I try and do the critical thinking to arrive at the knowledge, what I have is guessing.

And, the other thing about it is that if I give the knowledge first, everyone in the room can play. Everyone has a definition of 'exhilarated,' and now they're trying to use it in different settings and thinking about it and encoding it in their long-term memory.

If I ask you to try and guess what the word 'exhilarated'--half the kids in the room are like, 'I've never heard that word. I don't know what it means. And, no thank you on vocabulary.'

Russ Roberts: And, as you point out, often the whole point of that unusual word is to grab the reader and make them appreciate that even though their hands were raw and they're really tired, they're actually happy--not depressed, say, or whatever other state you might guess at.

26:38

Russ Roberts: But the other part that I loved--and this is as someone struggling to learn a foreign language now in Israel--you'd think that when you hear it and you go, 'Exhilarated, that's a good word. I'm going to try really hard to remember it.' 'Exhilarated' means really happy after a challenge or really happy and feeling exultantly alive. And, I think about it, think about it, think about it.

And, it turns out the next day when you see 'exhilarated,' you've got to look it up in the Hebrew-English dictionary again, and you think, 'Why can't I remember anything?'

And, the answer is because that technique is not the way we remember things, other than short term.

Doug Lemov: We need lots and lots of retrieval practice. We forget almost everything that we learn in life. This is just a basic thing.

One of the most established concepts in cognitive science is that learning is defined as a change in long-term memory. And, if I want to make a change in long-term memory, I have to bring things back into conscious thinking--back into working memory--after a period of forgetting.

So, the next lesson has to start with, like, 'Okay, Russ, what's the word for 'exhilarated' again? Let's just review that.' Have to do that three or four times to encode in long-term memory so you can find it.

Russ Roberts: But even that--repeating the definition--is not nearly as powerful as you asking me to come up with an example from my life when I was exhilarated.

That's so deep. It shouldn't be, but it is.

Doug Lemov: There are two reasons why I would say that is true. One is, the cognitive scientist Héctor Ruiz Martin describes encoding--which is learning something, going from understanding it to building it into our long-term memory--as thinking hard about the meaning of the learning object and connecting it to other things in your long-term memory.

So, what interested you about that is, like, 'Okay, a time in my life when I've been exhilarated.' Then I'm both retrieving 'exhilarated,' but then connecting it to an experience that was important to me.

And then, when I asked you to think of 'Why might the boys be exhilarated here?' you have to explain it based on the context of the sentence. And, then, 'What's a time when you might be exhilarated that didn't involve physical activity?' 'Oh, I was exhilarated when I got a high grade in a test in school.'

That's causing you to engage different applications, different shades of meaning.

The research on vocabulary is that students who have the best vocabulary and have the best reading comprehension don't just know more words. They know words more deeply. The depth of word knowledge and breadth of word knowledge are different things, and we have to teach both.

And so, this sort of model of vocabulary that we propose--which is, instead of wasting your time trying to guess the definition, and the definition is the end point of vocabulary study: The definition is the starting point.

And then, we can do lots of examples, what we call active practice, which can be playful and fun and funny. But it causes me to think about the word in different ways, in different contexts, in different settings, so I get depth of word meaning, and I get lots and lots and lots of retrieval. Where, if we have a good conversation about this word, I could probably cause you to use the word 'exhilarated' 20 times in the space of a couple of minutes, and then you own it. But you own it deeply. Like, you understand it from a reading perspective.

Russ Roberts: Well, and the other--

Doug Lemov: I think--yeah.

Russ Roberts: The part I love about it is: Well, 'exhilarated' just means happy. So, it's just a fancy word for 'happy.' Now, in fact, it's not. I would say 'exhilarated' means it's something that makes your heart sing. Which is an interesting phrase in and of itself because your heart doesn't sing.

But, lousy vocabulary and mediocre acquisition of reading and vocabulary is, 'Oh, I have a synonym for that. Happy.' The depth that you're talking about is starting to think about the nuance of why a great writer might say 'exhilarated' rather than 'happy' or 'satisfied,' because it's more than just happy, and it's more than just satisfied.

Doug Lemov: From a reading comprehension perspective, if two words overlap in meaning--so the second-most common way that vocabulary is taught in American schools is the synonym model. Right? 'Imitate' means 'mimic.'

And those words--maybe they overlap 80% in their meaning, 'imitate' and 'mimic.'

But if I say, 'Doug imitated Russ's speaking style' versus 'Doug mimicked Russ's speaking style,' the differences between those two words--one of them could be respectful and appreciative, and one of them is mocking. Right? It's the differences between those two words that would create the meaning in a text if we read that in a text. Right?

If I teach a word as a synonym, the risk is that we miss the 20% of the words that are different that create the real nuance and that create the understanding when reading text. And so, I think this is why the research on word depth--that depth of word knowledge is important, as is breadth of word knowledge.

I think the point here is that the way we teach vocabulary underestimates its importance, treats it mostly as a skill rather than a critical form of background knowledge, and results in students whose reading isn't what it could be.

Russ Roberts: And, just to add another footnote about translation--learning a new language--it's very common: You go to Google Translate and you say, 'What does this Hebrew word mean in English?' And of course, it gives you one word usually. If you work at it, you can get twelve. But, in general, it gives you a word, so you think, 'Well, now I understand it.' And, you do at a certain level, but it's why it's hard to be an immigrant, because there's a nuance of the native speaker that you will never acquire unless you're extremely gifted or come at a young age.

And, when we're talking--you and I in this conversation--you're translating what I'm saying into your language in your head, and I'm hoping that you're getting my nuance. I think we're pretty good at it, but it's why miscommunication takes place even when we speak the same language. And, reading is an attempt to understand a thoughtful person's nuance and to grasp it. And it's an art.

Doug Lemov: For sure. When you were telling that story, I was thinking of--my parents had a friend who was from Italy who had immigrated, married an American woman, moved to the United States, and he said the hardest part was--his English was good, but he said it was so hard to be funny in English. Because he knew the words mostly, but he couldn't choose exactly the right word with a little sense of irony to drop in there. And so, it was almost like, his whole personality changed as a result.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. It's a cliché that humor is hard to translate, but you know that's true when you think about the difference between a great comedian and an okay comedian, or a great punchline and a non-punchline. You can take the greatest punchline to a joke, and if you use a different wording--which means the same thing, come on. But it doesn't--you don't get the same humor.

34:02

Russ Roberts: Let's shift gears. I want to talk about whole books. You emphasize reading for young people--but I would add for adults mostly, too--that we should read whole books in a group--in a classroom--for students. In the case of students. And, I would say for adults, there's something powerful about a book club where a group of adults read a book together. Why? Why whole books, and why in a group?

Doug Lemov: Yeah. And, this is profoundly important. You wouldn't think this would be an important argument unless you had spent a lot of time in schools and you had seen how rarely students read books anymore and how often they read passages, and excerpts, and short pieces.

But, several things happen when we read books that make them the optimal form of learning communication. One is that the medium is the message, and a book is a long-form process of understanding an idea with complexity and depth. In comparison, say, to a tweet, which suggests that the world can be understood in 128 characters, implemented simply and easily via a hot take.

I just finished reading Ian McEwan's book, Atonement. The first 60 pages of it--someone recommended it to me. I didn't really like it. It started slowly. And then, over time, I started to understand the whole context and milieu of the argument that it was making, and what had happened, and why the characters did what they did. And I started to understand some version of truth that was deeper than I would have been able to understand if I hadn't gone through that process.

I think that one of the interesting things about a book is that the protagonist never believes at the end what they did at the beginning. Their thinking changes, and a book takes you through the process of deep understanding and change; and it is beneficial.

So, that was a profound part of my reading this book. But, the struggle of, like, 'I'm not sure I like this': that I had to discipline myself to read 60 pages until I got into the book, and then to have found in the end that I'm so grateful that I've read it because it changed the way that I thought. Learning that over and over again--the discipline of thinking, the way that thinking responds to sustained inquiry--is a really important lesson, especially in an era when the message to young people, to all of us, is that I can pretty much understand this deeply complex issue in the span of a tweet. That's one reason why--

Russ Roberts: I can just get ChatGPT [Generative Pre-trained Transformer] to summarize it for me, and then I know what's in the book.

Doug Lemov: Sure. I think--a couple of other reasons why books are profoundly important. First of all, there's a lot of research that stories are cognitively privileged--that we remember things best when we experience them in a story.

I think there are evolutionary reasons for this. Right? Like, if you think about an early human, it is necessary to our survival to know how to hunt and know how to create a fire. But, unlike every other animal, we don't learn how to do this through instincts. Right? We have to be taught it and explained it by other humans.

And, the way that we, for most of our history, communicated this is we sat around campfires. We sat around in groups, and we told the story of the hunt to each other, or we told the story of, like, how we built a fire--and it was incredibly hard to do--like, how we overcame that.

And so, the people who listened to those stories--before there was writing--this is how we communicated our culture, who we were, but also how to survive--cumulative capital. We're the only species on the planet that can communicate complex ideas that are multi-step, are greater than you can hold in working memory at any given time.

So, there's a double-selection advantage conferred evolutionarily on the people who listen to stories. Like: One, you learned how to hunt as a group and how to start a fire. But also, by listening to the stories together, like, we're bonded and we're connected, and there's this, like, group formation.

I think one of the least understood parts of our evolutionary story is that we only survived in groups. That a human by him- or herself on the savanna with a big brain and an opposable thumb is toast, and is going to be in some fitter creature's belly by midday, because you can't smell your enemies from a mile away and you don't have night vision. And even compared to one of those really cute chimpanzees--you don't have claws and you don't have fangs. You don't have a chance in a fight against that animal.

Only when we formed groups and learned that we could rely on each other--interestingly, throwing rocks was one of the critical points of inflection in human prehistory. We're the only species on the planet that can attack or defend from a distance by throwing projectiles.

And so, if we can all rely on each other completely to stand and throw rocks, we can drive away a lion. Or hunt a lion.

And so, group formation--we survive in groups. And the people who were unable to form groups, or assure their membership in the group, or meet the norms of the groups--they were exiled and they perished. And we are the heirs to the group-formers.

So, stories are cognitively privileged to us because they confer a double advantage on us: We learn things through stories, and we are bonded in the experience of, like, listening to stories together.

So we have evolved to, like, prize stories and give special importance to stories, and remember the things that we learn from stories for a variety of reasons.

So, a story--especially a story that we're emotionally and psychologically committed to--is learning-optimal.

And a book captures that. And, a book models the sort of persistence that is needed to master complex ideas. And, it suggests that ideas are complex and not simple and require a sustained study to truly understand the world.

And lastly, books contain cultural capital, which is profoundly important ideas that reflect the accumulated wisdom of society. Almost everything that's most important to society has been written and captured in books. And, if I know those books and I have access to them, then I can connect to people about--if you refer to Shakespeare or to 1984, if I don't know anything about George Orwell and 1984, I can't even have a conversation with you about those things.

And maybe if I could just say one more thing--about particularly reading books that are older than 50 years old. So, one of the most important forms of diversity that I think is available to us is to hear the voices of the past in their own words as they thought it. And to understand that we have a very presentist way of believing, thinking about human consciousness. And to understand the most important form of diversity--in other words, the way people thought about things 100, 200 years ago--that they felt much more connected to place, that they had a strong sense of duty, that they went off and fought and died in wars, that they were much connected to death and dying, that their family members died with shocking regularity. That yes, they made clearer and, by our perspective, less defensible judgments about race and culture.

Understanding all those things about the way that people thought in the past helps us to understand ourselves in the present.

If we don't understand those things and we haven't heard the voices in the past, we have a very simplistic view of our own context and milieu today. And, I think you see this all the time with young people having these very presentist, simplistic views of human nature and human history.

42:14

Russ Roberts: That was lovely. I just want to add one thing. It's a common theme for listeners of the program--but I want to say it again because it's so important. Summaries are not--we don't read fiction--we don't even read nonfiction--for the facts. At one point on this program a few years ago, we were talking about something of Homer, either the Iliad or the Odyssey, and someone said, 'I don't need to read it. I read the Classic Comic.'

And, there is no Classic Comic for Atonement by Ian McEwan. If there were, you would not be changed by that. Knowing what happens in the book is not why it's a good book. It's not why it's powerful.

And, sharing the intellectual journey of a great author--in nonfiction, for example--is more than just: Well, here's a bunch of facts you're going to enjoy knowing. It's: Here's my story--even though it's nonfiction--here's my story of how these facts go together and why they matter.

And, you do that a hundred times with great minds, and you become wiser. And, that cannot be summarized. It can't be put in a tweet. It can't be put in an AI [artificial intelligence] summary. It can't be put into a Classic Comic, and it can't be put in a movie--although a movie is a different thing, and it can be very powerful.

The transformative effect of a great book is the struggle and the simulation that you make, as you write about in your book, of putting yourself in the shoes of the different characters and feeling how they change. And, that only comes through a sustained and long reading; and that takes work. It's not so popular these days, and your defense of it is very eloquent. I like to think the pendulum will swing back. I may be wrong. I didn't say I'd be right. I said, I'd like to think. I hope I'm right. But, reading--

Doug Lemov: Can I say one tiny thing about that because I agree with you so strongly?

You mentioned that the book is for educators, but it's also for parents, and it's for policymakers, hopefully. And, I think that a lot of parents would probably not realize just how few and far between books are in schools, and how much they've been cast out or driven out of the student experience.

There was a viral story on social media about a student at Columbia University who her professor asked her to read several books, and she went to him and was surprised and felt like it was unfair because she'd never had to read a book cover to cover in high school and getting into Columbia University.

I don't know if you saw this article. This is not an anomaly. Student attention has been changed by the advent of the smartphone and social media. One thing we know about our attention--our ability to sustain states of concentration and focus--is that it's malleable. And that if you spend a significant part of your life--five to six hours a day, if you're the average American teenager--in a state where there's constant novel stimulation, you come to require--you don't even need your cell phone anymore to require that state. The state is wired within you.

And so, students read less and less outside of school. And it's harder and harder to get them to sustain the states of concentration in school. And so, I think a lot of schools have given up on requiring students to do things that are hard and challenging that they no longer have the cognitive wherewithal to do.

But ironically, the greatest gift that they can give young people is to cause them to read those books. And to actually--we argue in the book--to rebuild their attentional capacity. If the cell phone has taught us that attention is malleable, we should get all the screens out of our classrooms, and we should give kids books, and we should ask them to read for five minutes straight, and then eight minutes straight, and then 10 minutes straight. Ideally, this would be like reading aloud together, so there's a social factor to it. And then, 12 minutes together.

We wire how we fire. We read the way we read the way we practice reading. We will read the way we practice reading.

I tell the story of a teenager who was required to read for 45 minutes a day. It might or may not be my son, when he was a teenager, lying on his back on the couch, reading the same book that I read 30 years beforehand.

But, when he reads it--every five seconds, Bzzz: 'Dude, over at Byron's. You coming over soon?' 'Dude, what's the math homework?' 'Dude, that girl in your math class, when are you going to ask her out?'. His experience with the book is fractured. He doesn't sustain the state of attention. He's not as connected to the book because it's constantly--and he's not in the place where the book is.

It's not just that students read less, it's that they read differently--and fractured and disconnectedly.

And we can accept that; or schools can say, 'We need to rebuild. We can participate in rebuilding your attentional state. And, this is one of the greatest gifts we can give you: to cause you to read for 10 minutes unbroken. And, that capacity will serve you for the rest of your life.'

And, this is one of the arguments that we make in the book--that changes in attention and changes in reading habits are one of the least acknowledged factors in literacy instruction.

Students simply do not read. For many of the students in our schools, the books that we assign in school will be the only books that they read, woefully[?], in their youth. Sorry. It's sadly, sadly true. The book is in a death struggle against the cell phone. And unless we bring it to life in our classrooms, and unless we make it social--we read together, and I feel connected to people where I'm reading a book together--it's going to lose. [More to come, 48:23]

Read Like a Champion (with Doug Lemov)

How Better Feedback Can Revolutionize Education (with Daisy Christodoulou)

Adam Mastroianni on the Brain, the Ears, and How We Learn

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Read Like a Champion (with Doug Lemov)

How Better Feedback Can Revolutionize Education (with Daisy Christodoulou)

Adam Mastroianni on the Brain, the Ears, and How We Learn

LEAVE A COMMENT

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