Louisa Moats, Ed.D. - Teaching Teachers to Teach Reading

Index: Personal Background Congressional Testimony & 'Reading First' Knowledge Gulf  Inertial Resistance Tragedy of Reading Failure  Lack of Adequate Teacher Preparation  All But Fating  Reading is Rocket Science  Science vs. Whole Language Theory  How Do We Help People Understand the Code  Children of the Code Overview  Basic vs. Proficiency  Reading Aversions  Instructional Confusion  Adult Centric Thinking About the Code  Helping Teachers Understand the Code  Code Negligence  How Do We Create an On-Ramp  Buffering a Complex System  Spelling Reform Attempts - Roosevelt in 1906  Institutional Inertia  Spelling vs. Reading  It All Comes Down to a Code

Dr. Louisa Cook Moats, Ed.D., is the Director of Professional Development and Research Initiatives with Sopris West Educational Services. Dr. Moats specializes in the implementation of schoolwide interventions for improving literacy. She directed the NICHD Early Reading Interventions Project in Washington, DC and as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar, worked on the California Reading Initiative. She is the author of many books and articles including:  Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers, Parenting a Struggling Reader, and LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling). Additional bio info The following conversation with Dr. Louisa Moats is a compilation of two phone interviews conducted in October and November of 2003.  We found Dr. Moats to be a teacher of teachers who is dedicated to improving children's lives by improving their literacy.  Her work in neuro-psychology and large scale reading projects has provided her a unique perspective on the social-educational inertia that constrains how teachers and parents think about the challenges involved in learning to read. In response to the many requests for Dr. Moats we decided to share the transcripts of our first phone conversations and append them with the transcript of our video interview, taped in June of 2004, as soon it becomes available.

The following transcript has not been edited for journal or magazine publication (see 'Interview Notes' for more details). Bold is used to emphasize our [Children of the Code] sense of the importance of what is being said and does not necessarily reflect gestures or tones of emphasis that occurred during the interview.

Part 1: October 30, 2003

David Boulton:  It’s a pleasure to speak with you. Let's start with some background on you. Tell me why you do this work?

Personal Background:

Dr. Louisa Moats:  What brought me into the whole field of reading was actually that I started out as a neuro-psychology technician in one of the first neuro-psych labs to be established in Boston in 1966. I graduated from college and my first introduction of learning disabilities was the clients that came to the neurology clinic. I became very interested in brain behavior relationships, particularly with regard to language processes. Then I figured that testing people was not nearly as interesting as trying to treat or teach them, so I got into the first group of federally funded learning disabilities teachers on a full scholarship.

I went to get my license as an LD teacher and in the process of getting that certification I kept thinking, ‘I’m not learning anything of value here.’ I came out of Peabody College with a Master’s degree in learning disabilities and went to work as a teacher and found myself completely befuddled, although I didn’t know enough to know what was missing or what was wrong with what I’d been taught or what I was doing. I just had this terrible feeling that I wasn’t really helping these kids. I was told to fix their learning disabilities, but not to teach them to read.

Then I went on teaching in several different kinds of settings in public and private schools. After about eight years of that and a brief career as a professional musician, I came back to Boston to work in the neuro-psych lab as the educational specialist and was told by the director that I needed to get a doctorate in order to keep my job because the hospital required it. I kind of bumbled into a doctoral program in reading at Harvard where Jean Chall was the departmental professor. It wasn’t a knowledgeable decision on my part to get a doctorate in reading; I just thought it was the next best thing to getting a doctorate in learning disabilities so I might as well sign on.

In the process of doing that, I realized how much I’d been missing in knowing basic disciplines, knowing about linguistics and reading psychology and cognitive psychology. I finally got a very good grounding in those things and very good training in language. I went on after that to be in private practice as a consultant and diagnostician and I got licensed as a psychologist and tested many people when I was living in Vermont. That’s when I got to know Reid Lyon. He was in Vermont at the same time I was and we did a lot of work together for eight or ten years before he went to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He did a lot to educate me about research and evidence and drew me into the research community.

I had started writing a lot and going to NICHD symposia. I was teaching graduate courses to teachers the whole time and then it began to dawn on me through all these experiences that the teachers I was working with, by and large, just had no idea at all about the things I knew about at that point. Their training wasn’t equipping them to help the kids. Most of the clients I had in my clinical practice simply hadn’t been taught well and Reid really got me to understand that what we were facing was a crisis of understanding and implementing what we knew from research.

That was where we were in 1986 and then it took another ten years to even mobilize the National Reading Panel. The two of us were on a speaking circuit for a long time, sometimes together and sometimes going different places. Then Reid got me into working on a California Reading Initiative for a year. I’ve always taken these assignments from him. He said, “You have to go to California, they’re starting this new reading initiative, they need you out there Louisa.”

In California I learned a lot about what it takes at the policy level to change anything in education and teacher education. I was working with the leaders of the California Reading Initiative and got to know Marion Joseph. I was working with the people who got all of the Packard money to start the coach training. I did that for a year and we really had a big impact and I learned a lot about state politics.

Then came the opportunity,  to go to Washington to direct a five year study of reading instruction and reading development in inner city schools. The project was funded by the University of Texas and headed by Barbara Foorman. I got the job of running the D.C. site of that study. Barbara was in Houston with Jack Fletcher  and Dave Francis and we worked on this as a team. I’m still writing up data from that study. It was tremendously informative and it was extremely difficult work because the schools had so many problems and were so dysfunctional.

Nevertheless, in the course of the four years that we stuck it out in D.C. we were able to bring these kids to the average range through intensive professional development for the teachers and equipping them with comprehensive reading programs. We put coaches in the classrooms and had within our project a very consistent, research based approach. In the better functioning schools the kids were above average.

I came out of that experience knowing that the district was totally disinterested in anything we were doing; there was no follow through, there was no support from the district to carry on any of the work we did. All the schools are back where they were. Two years later I got a call from the Assistant Superintendent saying, “We need your help here.” At that point I just thought to myself, no, I’m not going to do that unless something structural changes in leadership because it’s impossible to get information and practices into the classroom without the kind of coordinated effort that has gone on in Los Angeles and a few other districts that we can sight as being the kind of sites for implementation that have made a difference.

Congressional Testimony and The Design of 'Reading First': 

Dr. Louisa Moats:  When I was in Washington I testified to Congress three times. I had several visits from the President in our classrooms and I had lots of photo opportunity sessions with policy makers who wanted to appear as if they were doing something about this problem. They also wanted to know more about what was going on in the schools that were successful.

I was one of the people in the formulation of the Reading First Initiative. My thing there has been the professional development blueprint. Now I am working primarily on professional development. I am writing a lot of materials and conducting institutes, myself and with a team of people for mainly states that want to include my approach in the Reading First Initiative or in a statewide Reading Initiative. I am still seeing how all of this unfolds.

Knowledge Gulf:

Dr. Louisa Moats:  Everyday I’m in a school and working with teachers I continue to be astounded by the gulf of knowledge, the gulf between our knowledge base in the scientific community and the practices that go on in teacher training.

I participated in the WETA Reading Rockets and that was really good. We just need so much more public awareness and mobilization of public interest and understanding.

David Boulton:  That’s what we hope to help happen here. I appreciate your story, it’s very helpful. A number of people that have wound up in this space together seem to have gone through a similar route, sometimes career progression, like getting the doctorate, and sometimes through a process of jumping across disciplines.

Inertial Resistance:

David Boulton:  I get the sense that you’ve gone from the micro-time processing dynamics on the inside of the brain involved in doing this, to understanding the instructional paradigm inertia and the social educational challenge.

Dr. Louisa Moats:  Yes.

David Boulton:  That really is what is retarding our progress. There’s a knowledge gulf, but that sounds passive. There’s almost an actual active inertia resistance on the part of the entrenched systems.

Dr. Louisa Moats: Yes.

David Boulton:  We need to get underneath the polarities that underlie this resistance.

Dr. Louisa Moats: Yes. I agree.

David Boulton:  I think your passion is pretty implicit in all of this, but I would like to give you a chance to speak to that for a moment. I appreciate the story of how you’ve moved through this learning journey that has allowed you to develop an intelligence and knowledge in so many related domains, but what drives you?

Tragedy of Reading Failure:

Dr. Louisa Moats:  What drives me? It is the whole realization of the difference between what is and what could be for kid’s lives and seeing first hand, at every level of society, every age group, how reading difficulty effects people for life. Then on the other end of things, seeing at every level what is not happening that could happen to prepare teachers to address the needs of so many individuals who could benefit from informed instruction and who don’t get it because our whole educational system from start to finish is simply not set up to ensure that people do learn to read.

My subtext here is that they learn competence in their own language, which is an even broader issue. As I work in high poverty schools and with second language kids, I find it more and more difficult to talk only about reading when for me reading is so inextricably associated with oral language use, comprehension, and with writing.

This morning I am analyzing writing samples from our D.C. study and seeing the evidence in front of me that these kids whom we taught to read well enough so they score in the average range are never going to make it in life because they can’t write a grammatical sentence with a past tense ending on it. They’ve gotten through fourth grade without anybody teaching them in any kind of systematic way how to handle simple syntax, complex syntax, and standard word usage. They simply aren’t going to make it because I know that they’ve gone too long without anybody doing anything.

If you take these kids at the fifth grade level and give them sporadic, incidental feedback about errors, it’s not going to prepare them for what they’ll face in life. These kids will not make it into higher education; they’re not going to make it into jobs that require writing, even if they can read at a basic level. It’s a tragedy. It’s a tragedy and it’s a treatable one.

Lack of Adequate Teacher Preparation: 

Dr. Louisa Moats:  On the rare days when I lose my passion about this, I lose the conviction that anyone will ever be able to do anything about it because I see so little effective movement in the selection of teachers. I see so few people willing to stand up and say you can’t have a non-verbal teacher teaching reading to first graders. There are so few people who are willing to set standards and to talk about what a teacher should really know and to hold any teacher candidates to some kind of a standard. There are so many excuses and so many forces aligned against the adequate preparation and nurturance of teachers.

On some days I just feel overwhelmed and as if nothing is really going to move here and by the time I die I’m not going to see... it’s hopeless.  I just throw up my hands and think forget public education, just be a supporter of charter schools or something else because it’s just… Those days are rare. I would say I have about two days a month like that.

David Boulton:  I recently interviewed a leader of a reading organization and was flabbergasted at the suggestion that the problem really wasn’t about children learning their way through the code, that children should be relying on other kinds of guessing strategies. My jaw dropped.

Dr. Louisa Moats:  Yes, but yet I find that still, the way things are now, that is the most commonly held belief.

David Boulton:  That’s what we’ve got to get at. Why is it that people hold this belief? What is it that underpins this belief? What you’re saying and what I’m hearing everywhere that I go is that we’ve got this crisis - and we can come back and talk about writing; no question they’re related and they’re both artificial code processing skills -  but they’re distinct in terms of the processing complexity and in terms of speed. With reading, the virtual assembly of the projected reading stream has to happen much faster than in writing, so they’re distinctly different, though related.

All But Fating:

David Boulton:  However, relative to reading, everybody seems to agree that most of our children are to some degree having difficulty with it. It’s all but fating their lives.

Dr. Louisa Moats:  Right.

David Boulton:  According to Reid Lyon and James Wendorf, ninety-five percent of the children that are struggling with reading are instructional casualties.

Dr. Louisa Moats:  Yes.

David Boulton:  It’s a consequence of an unnatural, overwhelming ambiguity forced upon the child while nobody is giving them a stairway through it before they shame-out to the process. The shame itself then impedes their cognitive ability to process it, as well as diminishes their self-esteem in general with all of its transferred effects. 

So we have this massive problem that when we cut it down has to do with the social-educational paradigm-inertia.

Dr. Louisa Moats:  And why is that the case? You’re extremely articulate about it. I’ve tried to reflect on this a lot.

Reading is Rocket Science:

Dr. Louisa Moats:  There’s this monograph, I don’t know if you’ve seen it called, ‘Teaching Reading is Rocket Science.’

David Boulton:  Why do you call it rocket science?

Dr. Louisa Moats:  We are never going to get anywhere if our approach is teachers ought to be able to do this simple thing called teaching reading. I think the rocket science of all this has to do with the requirement of a good teacher to understand what is involved in kids learning the alphabetic code and that requires meta-linguistic awareness that speech sounds are different from letters and that speech sound processing is a requirement and underpinning for learning the code. I find that that’s kind of counter intuitive. People don’t get that. They don’t think about it, they don’t know what we’re talking about.

One of the most common findings in my studies of teacher knowledge and teacher proficiencies is that even experienced teachers of reading really do not know speech sounds. If I ask them a simple thing like how many speech sounds are in the word ‘no’ and I spell it k-n-o-w, they’ll tell me there’s four speech sounds in the word because they don’t know how to separate their own knowledge of orthography from a specific awareness of speech sounds. Because we’re wired up to process phonology at an automatic level and extract the meaning from speech, there’s no requirement for the average person to be meta-linguistically aware at the phonological level.

David Boulton:  Phonemic awareness, as it’s normally discussed, is an artifact of the code processing required here, not a consequence of the natural, oral language processing human beings have.

Dr. Louisa Moats:  Yes. It’s artifactual knowledge that has to be acquired and reflected upon in order for a teacher to be able to teach intentionally and to read the behavior of the kids to make decisions about whether they are getting it or not, to forge that pathway even if you put a very good program in their hands.

David Boulton:  When you describe it as knowledge, doesn’t that in a way somewhat sidetrack us? We’re talking about developing faster than conscious processing reflexes. We’re talking about active processes that we can describe with a map-like overlay of knowledge. However, it isn’t effectively just knowledge of this that will actually translate into processing it this way.

Dr. Louisa Moats:  Knowledge is the first step and then there’s a whole repertoire of behaviors involved in teaching that are actually very easy to mess up. I say to the teachers, ‘You know this looks simple, but the minute you get up here to role play what I’m talking about…’ Just a simple thing like segmenting speech sounds and using L-tone and boxes to do that - I hardly know any teachers that know how to do that. There’s so many ways to mess it up that comes from a misunderstanding of the objective and of the activity and the place of the activity in the developmental sequence of learning that the child has to be guided through.

So there is a knowledge base for teachers, first of all, that is the beginning point for them. The knowledge of the structure of their own language, knowledge of what we’re talking about when we talk about phonemes and phonology and orthography, knowledge of how the writing system is structured so it doesn’t seem like a mysterious mess to them. They communicate to kids the confidence that the spelling of any word can be explained, and that there is a path through all of this. Then there’s this whole repertoire of skills in delivering the instruction and giving corrective feedback that requires an awful lot of coaching and modeling and supervised practice for people to really become effective at it. The more involved the kids are, the more challenging it becomes.

What I’ve found is if I can just get to first base with the average teacher out there, I’m not going to get to a highly sophisticated level, but if I put a good program in their hands they will get better results than they were getting before if I can just get them to do some basic things that are fairly rudimentary. They are not experts, but they can get somewhere that they weren’t getting before. Then it takes, for the ones who really get good at this, several years or more. That is what I mean by the rocket science.

Science vs. Whole Language Theory:

David Boulton:  Good, that’s helpful. Let’s back up to a high level summary of this. Again, we’re saying that most teachers don’t understand the code and how the brain learns to process this code into this simulated or articulated speech stream, and that in the absence of understanding that, and you could argue to some degree in some shame avoidance about that, there’s this clinging to an almost religious like explanation to this.

Dr. Louisa Moats:  Yes, and wrong-headed explanations that seem to have some face validity in some other principles of learning and teaching that are important, like literature is valuable and enriching background knowledge.

David Boulton:  Yes and being meaning centric and recognizing that cognition doesn’t do anything without affect and that the affect of interest is really the channel that good learning happens in.

Dr. Louisa Moats:  Yes. Then I think we could characterize it from some of those other theories that have intuitive appeal. If you don’t understand language processing and code acquisition then you’re going to be easy prey for people who come along with whole language theories because they seem to make intuitive sense and you won’t really know why they don’t make sense.

How Do We Help People Understand the Code:

David Boulton:  Right. So the question is how do we create a new reference ground for how teachers and parents think about this reading process and must we go through the complexity of ‘rocket science’ before they can have this new ground that can dispel all of these intuitively convenient models?

Dr. Louisa Moats:  I think there is a threshold of understanding that you would want to achieve with a program like this. If people get beyond that threshold of understanding… It’s the point in my workshop where somebody sits on the edge of their chair and says, ‘The light bulbs are going off! The light bulbs are going off!’ Then I know that they are going to pursue their own learning in the right direction because once people get this fundamental insight into what we’re talking about, then they don’t go back.

David Boulton:  Yes, they don’t need to be pushed, they need to be resourced as they pull their way into it.

Dr. Louisa Moats:  They do. So what makes the light bulbs go off? I think it’s a combination of things. My strategies are first of all to give them experiences with phonological processing that are apparently simple tasks that they mess up and that are ambiguous if they don’t know how to think about the phonological system. In a workshop my strategy is this: we start counting speech sounds and in a room of forty people I’ll get a bunch of different answers to a simple question. Then I’ll show I can do that ten times in a row. Next I say, ‘Wait a minute, I’m asking you how many speech sounds are in a one syllable word and I’ve done this ten times and I have not gotten the same answer from everyone in the room once. What’s going on here?’ So we start with that.

Then I do a simulation of a learning to read exercise where I use novel symbols for phonemes and ask them to go through the process of learning the association of sounds to these symbols and then the process of blending them together. They experience speech-sound confusion and difficulty remembering sound-symbol links. When they have to be applying those associations in decoding they start to mess up and experience being disfluent. They experience word confusions from words that look similar and at slow processing speed. Then I kind of bait them into telling me that I’m going too fast, I put too much in the lesson at once, I’m not giving them enough practice and please don’t give them anything new until they have these eight speech sounds under their belt.

I put them right in the shoes of the learners and then we talk about what the role of context is in all of this - how much did that help. They come up with the basic principles of reading acquisition from the learner’s perspective and I don’t have to tell them everything, it comes out of the group. Then I show films of eye movement studies so they understand the physiology of scanning text.

Another thing I do is talk about the history of the invention of the alphabet in relation to how long humans have had oral language, how long it took them to invent written language systems and the alphabetic systems as the latest developing skill. We talk about how it’s logical in looking at the data on writing systems that we’re just not wired up to do this very easily.

I point out all the statistics on how hard it is for people to learn it. Then I teach them explicitly about the speech sounds and the symbols that we use to spell them and for most people it’s a total ‘aha.’ I’ve never had anyone tell me it’s irrelevant. I’ve had thousands of people tell me they should have learned this in their licensing process. I have people telling me for the first time that they understand, that the code system makes some sense. They never knew how to explain these things to their kids. Some of it is just giving people information that also helps them see what we’re talking about.

The last thing I do, I have twelve days of models on this, but the last sort of entry level experience is to put in front of them the writings of kids that have spellings that are explainable through phonological analysis, rather than through some kind of visual orthographic analysis. Through this experience they see that what I’m talking about is directly relevant to an explanation of kid’s behavior.

David Boulton:  Yes, and that the kid’s behavior is quite natural and we’re asking them to do something unnatural in relation to that.

Dr. Louisa Moats:  Yes.

Children of the Code Overview:

David Boulton:  Excellent. We track very well.

The first part of the series is really to put the code in perspective. We’re going to go from the beginning of the alphabet and the different theories of its origin, to its spread around the world, its effect on the planet,  its ‘operating system’ like enablement of the Greek and the Roman civilizations. The evolution of Ietters, the Greek vowels, the Roman introduction of punctuation, the spread of the Latin written system by the Romans and its collision with languages that had more sounds than it could represent, particularly of course, English.

Dr. Louisa Moats:  Right.

David Boulton:  We will explore how it is that the letter-sound relationships evolved from the days of Plato, who said, ‘Once we knew the letters of the alphabet we could read,’ and on up through the phonetic correspondence erosion that we call the First Millennium Bug, where while nobody’s minding the store, this strange pairing system started to evolve in order to compensate for the fact that reading could no longer cue speech in the way it could when the code better matched the spoken languages of the Greek and Romans.

We intend to focus a lot on the added unnatural challenge to the brain of buffering (holding in working memory while processing) this ambiguous code and working it out in time for it to move at the speed of speech.

We talked about the unnaturalness a bit; I really appreciate what you said about the rocket science. I also believe it is critical that parents and teachers begin to understand where this code came from and what a relatively recent, in evolutionary terms, invention it is. And, like you mentioned, that it has no neurologically adapted wiring to run it; it’s all dependant on external learning. Few realize that by virtue of a series of accidents over the past thousand years, with no one ever concerning themselves with how easy this was to read for young children, (until very recently anyway), this thing has developed its own social-inertia.

Basic vs. Proficiency:

David Boulton:  Let’s discuss basic and proficiency. There’s a lot of conversation out there about which of these are important to understand to use as a benchmark in talking about the dimensions of the reading problem. There are also different interpretations of what is the actual definition of these two descriptions. Do you have anything you can say about the distinction between basic and proficiency and what they mean to you?

Dr. Louisa Moats:  Tell me the distinction again.

David Boulton:  Between being basically able to read and being proficient in reading. Right now, in the 2002 NAEP report, they’re saying eighty-eight percent of African American fourth grade children are below proficient and the average overall is sixty-four percent below proficient. What does that mean?

Dr. Louisa Moats:  I think virtually it means that they avoid reading as adults and simply do not look to text as a source of information. I don’t make this public a lot, but one of the astonishing phenomenon that I encountered when I was conducting research in the Washington D.C. school system was that the adults I was working with, who often were products of that school system, who may themselves have never gotten beyond a fourth grade level but got through school somehow, they never read memos, they never sent memos, they never used the internet. The only way we ever got anything done was if I personally went around and talked to people face to face and reminded them of when we had meetings.

Reading Aversions:

David Boulton:  They were reading adverse.