David Boulton: Is there an educational mission that trumps, that is more important than stewarding the health of our children’s learning?

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: No, when put that way. Nothing is more important as an educational mission than paying attention to the overall nature of the learning experience for children and what they get out of the education system as they encounter it from pre-K all the way though post secondary education. We understand well that there are particular skills that have to be required as a function of that educational experience. But there are also a set of dispositions and attitudes and approaches that come out of a good educational experience as well. Ultimately, it is those dispositions, attitudes and approaches that drive learning down the road and that prepare adults for the changes that will occur over their life times and what they’re expected to know and what they’re expected to be able to do.

The sense that ‘There’s a new task here, I can learn something about how to do it from reading about it. I can challenge, I can be challenged by this, I can acquire new information and it’s worthwhile to do that’ is I think a legitimate and important product of an educational experience. We need to pay attention to that as well as the particular skills that are derived from the day to day teaching interactions that are part of the curriculum.

David Boulton: There’s no question that we can say we need to be able to read.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes.

David Boulton: We need to be able to manipulate math.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes.

David Boulton: We’ll come to the differences between those two different code processes in our next segment. But it is very difficult to predict at this time what today’s kindergartener needs to ‘know’ fifteen to twenty years from now. What it seems that we can say is that how well they’re able to learn in situations we can not predict is actually beyond certain basic skills, and the ability to interface with the world so as to pull what they need to learn as they’re needing to learn it, is what is most important. That, any other things that we impose on them are to impress our values, not necessarily to develop our children for their future.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes, but as attractive as what you just articulated is, there’s a danger, however, in designing an educational system where the goals are articulated as non-specific and learning to learn and dispositions to learning. It is not quite clear how you get from here to there. It may well be that if our education system focuses on the basic skills and abilities that our culture has defined as important, cultural information to be transmitted by schools and does a good job at that, that perhaps not by design, but as a necessary consequence, children may pick up not only the dispositions, but the approaches to learning that will serve them well when new tasks arise that could not have been predicted in the first place, and therefore, could not have been designed in the system.

David Boulton: It certainly cannot be done in a vacuum. We’ve got to have something that is the exercise environment and it might as well be what we think is most important.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Sure.

David Boulton: No question. But the quality of their participation is more relevant to the future of their ability to learn than a particular content they’re exercising with at the moment.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Perhaps, though I would argue that there are certain basic skills and certainly reading is one, math is another...

David Boulton: Yes, beyond that, the other side of reading and math and basic skills...

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Sure. Engagement is a very powerful variable and when it’s absent...

David Boulton: Then we’re teaching the children that being dull and not participative is…

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Well, and probably when we have situations in which students seem to be learning well, seem to be doing well in measures of outcome, but are obviously not engaged. You can look at them in the classroom, you can ask them and find out they are not engaged in the process. In most of those cases I would assume and hypothesize and guess that there is something wrong with the assessment. It is very difficult over a long term period, considering the school year a long term period, to get children to learn what they really need to learn if they are not engaged. So, it may be that the assessment system focuses on the wrong thing or skills at such a low level that you could show progress in the absence of engagement. But if you are measuring legitimately the authentic outcomes of the learning experience as it’s designed it is probably difficult to get good performance absent engagement.

David Boulton: There’s a difference between the depth of the general transfer of learning and the temporary associative remembrance of what it is that we may be assessing. Thank you for that track off into learning in general. That’s actually our greatest interest. The reason that we’re on reading is that it seems to be the fulcrum at the center of freeing learning in a way. ‘Stewarding the health of children’s learning as if how well they’re participating is the guiding light in which to exercise the content that we think is important and relevant and the skills they’re learning’, that’s the place that we come from in the work we are doing.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes. 

Why is Reading so Difficult?

David Boulton: So, let’s go back to why is reading so difficult? We’ve been doing this for hundreds of years.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Reading is difficult for several reasons. One is that it’s a code and the code is not transparent. The relationship between letters and sounds is not necessarily natural and in the English language the code is made extraordinarily difficult by exceptions and rules and rules that are exceptions to rules. And so even when you’ve learned the code, you can end up not knowing how to pronounce something, not knowing how to sound something. So to begin with, we’ve got a difficult code.

A second problem is that our brains are really not really set up to deal with this code. It is not language. We have evolved a neural system to deal with the processing of language over the course of the evolution of the human species. Writing is a late invention and our brains deal with difficulty with the issue of processing all of this information quickly, assembling it so that one can understand what one reads. We know there are children with reading disabilities for whom the wiring is not there particularly in terms of processing sounds quickly and it generates difficulty for reading.

Third problem is instructional confusion. So, we have a difficult code, we have a neural system that for some children is not optimal for dealing with this code, and then we throw them an instructional system, a teaching system; teachers who don’t understand what the code really is or how it needs to be conveyed. And so the teacher is suggesting you should do this when in fact the child should be doing that.

You can sample first or second grade classrooms around the country and you will still find, despite what we know about the process of reading and have learned over the past twenty years, you will still find that teachers for a first grader who is struggling to sound out a word who will discourage the child from doing that, and encourage the child to look at the pictures in the book and guess what that word means. Good readers don’t guess, good readers sound out almost every word on the page. So, the teacher is saying you solve the task this way when in fact the task has to be solved in an entirely different way. That can not help but confuse children. So, non-optimal instruction, and in some cases simply misleading instruction, is a significant part of the problem.

David Boulton: I am just amazed at the lack of general appreciation, aside from the significance of this, one, and two, the total lack of understanding of what the nature of this challenge is to the human brain and trying to move through it into fluency.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Well, there remains a very clear and present problem. Getting people who are involved in the teaching of reading and generating state, local and national policies with respect to reading to pay attention to what the evidence says. Education in all its forms is not a field that has paid much attention to evidence.

So, you will find somebody looking at a piece of medical research and they might quarrel with how those findings can be generalized. ‘Oh well, the research says hormone replacement therapy doesn’t in general work. Well, I had some success with it, I’ll talk to my physician about it.’ But in reading that’s frequently not the case. You’ll expose people to research and they’ll say, ‘Yes, I see it, but I believe….’  The ‘I believe’ is taken as being equivalent on the scale with the evidence. Again, going back to our first conversation, one of the things that it’s my job to change. 

The Role of Science:

David Boulton: As we were talking about a little while ago, in terms of the challenges of reading - we talked about the code, we talked about the instructional problems, we previously talked about the different consequences and difficulties. We were just going into pedagogy. How is it that we teach children to read in some more optimally effective way and what is the role of cognitive science, emotional science, code science and neuroscience in helping us understand how to unfold this radically unnatural confusion to the human brain so it can grow through it into fluency?

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Well, the role of the underlying basic sciences in helping us solve the challenge of reading success for all children is substantial and fundamental. What we’ve learned from the NICHD research investment over the last twenty years has been fundamental to policy changes in terms of reading instruction in this country. The No Child Left Behind Act and Reading First have incorporated in them, to an unusual degree, scientific findings in terms of what is required of grantees who receive federal money and then spend it for reading instruction.

So, the contribution of current and historical cognitive neuroscience and the next generation of that science is going to be extremely important. At the same time, I believe we know enough now to do a dramatically better job in educating our children in reading and related skills and abilities. We know enough now to do a substantially better job at that. There are engineering tasks at hand that have to be attended to, and if we attend to those tasks the overall level of reading performance is going to soar.

There are going to continue to be substantial numbers of children who will not read optimally, who don’t respond as well as one would hope to these newly engineered delivery mechanisms. I think it’s the next generation of cognitive neuroscience that is going to allow us to identify early on who these children are and the special sort of help they may need to get through the process of learning to read.

But for somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty-five to ninety percent of children in America, this is not a figure grounded in specific statistical studies – it is a guestimate on my part, for the vast majority of children who are reading less well than they could, the problem facing us is to take the knowledge we currently have and see that it is engineered into teaching materials, curriculum, teacher training and professional development in such a way that we can benefit from all that knowledge in terms of what we actually deliver on the ground in classrooms to kids.

Reading is Code Processing:

David Boulton: Let’s talk about that science for a moment. Between the time that our eyes scan a letter and this code driven thought tracks through our mind, whether we virtually hear it or we actually speak it, a series of processing layers are involved in assembling and projecting this stream we call reading. When we break that down, all of this has to happen, this conversion of letters into this stream, faster than we can possibly think about it. If we’re thinking about it, we’re stuttered up.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes.

David Boulton: It has to happen faster than we can think about. So our brains have to learn in a way that there is no evolutionary precedent for; the brain never had to do anything like this before. It has to take these code elements, which are inherently ambiguous, and hold onto them and work out the ambiguity sufficient to create this stream faster than we can think about and fast enough to simulate oral speech as we hear it and say it so that it is comprehendible to us. Later we transcend that, but in the beginning stages we have to go through that.

When we look at that in terms of where the timing bogs are, like Tallal’s circuit work, we bring in some of the different dimensions. It certainly seems that what we have is a disambiguation processing overhead timing problem.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Sure. 

Unnatural Disambiguation:

David Boulton: Which what we’re saying then, if we step back, most of our children are having their lives all but fated socially, academically, economically, because their brains can’t process the ambiguity out of this man-made, invented code fast enough to simulate this natural speech circuitry and they’re feeling like there’s something wrong with them because they can’t.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes, that’s a very significant problem. The problem is not only disambiguating the letter-sound relationships, they are very much contextualized, but there’s significant overhead associated with disambiguating the meaning of the words. That process involves assembling and holding in memory not only information that came from outside of the written text, but information in the prior sentences and paragraphs that have been read. You find these two problems coming together and creating special difficulty for kids.

If I said to you Bill Gates bought the New York Times this morning, that would generate, I expect, a very different response than if I told you I bought the New York Times this morning. The only reason that those two sentences have a fundamentally different interpretation for you is that you know Bill Gates is the richest man in the world and could have bought the New York Times Institution, whereas, I’m a federal civil servant and may have been able to afford the paper at the news stand.

Children who don’t have the underlying knowledge of vocabulary or cultural background have to not only make sense of the code, but also make sense of the words. Their lack of certainty about what the words mean gets in the way of their sense of assurance that the code has been cracked. So, these two problems support each other and together contribute to the child’s sense that something is wrong here.

So, you need not only the code breaking exercises and all the practice that involves becoming fluent with that, but the experience with oral language and understanding what words mean in the conversations one has with other educated people and parents and teachers to be able to collect the knowledge of words and their meaning and understanding of the way the world works to disambiguate those aspects of the printed text as well.

David Boulton: Yes, and as we were speaking before, frequently I can’t know a word’s meaning until I can virtually pronounce it or actually pronounce it, and I can’t virtually or actually pronounce it until I’ve read a word or two down the road.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: That’s right.

David Boulton: This is a stretch into buffer processing that’s never happened before.

An Astounding Neurological Achievement:

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: It’s an astounding neurological achievement to be able to process all of that information, to simultaneously consider multiple sources of information, both code related, phonological and semantic, and to keep all that in memory and produce something that’s understandable to oneself or somebody else. 

Extraordinarily Difficult:

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst:  One of the experiences that can bring home what we’re talking about here is to look at a child who’s struggling with reading. Try to read a passage in a book. Reading that for a fluent reader would involve sixty or seventy words a minute. I have video tapes back from my prior life as a researcher where we have first graders who are taking seven or eight minutes to get through a short, age appropriate paragraph. By the time they get to end of that paragraph, struggling to sound out the words, with parents help, I can’t remember what the child said ten minutes ago, much less the child who is struggling with all the consequences of reading failure.

It’s like any skill, once you’ve acquired it it seems easy, it seems natural. I think parents, teachers and children don’t appreciate how extraordinarily difficult this is. And how if the bar of expectations for what you’re supposed to be doing is way in advance of what you are actually able to do, then the emotional consequences, the frustration feeds into the process. So, you have an explosive mixture of delays in the development of phonologically related skills, delays in the development of semantic knowledge and background knowledge and a contrast between what everybody knows you’re supposed to be able to do and what you are actually able to do. That interferes with the process, as well as a performance problem that often leaves children showing that they’re able to do less than they’re actually able to do because the frustration and emotions, the demands of the task interfere with the child expressing what she’s actually able to do if she relaxed and wasn’t concerned about performance.

The Downward Spiral of Shame:

David Boulton: In one part of the series we call it the ‘Downward Spiral of Shame.'

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes.

David Boulton: The moment that somebody starts to feel uncomfortable, there’s this split in the processing bandwidth necessary to do the task. The more that they can’t do the task the more that they feel uncomfortable and the more they feel uncomfortable the less they can do the task and down and down and down.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Sure. At the code level, the task is one that requires practice, there’s no short cut for it, and so another consequence of this is that children who are struggling don’t read; they’ll read when they’re required to read, when someone’s looking over their shoulder, but they will not read for pleasure. There end up being vast differences in the exposure to the written language that are a function of underlying skills. The underlying skill effects motivation and the motivation effects reading for pleasure. Reading for pleasure is a source of the information that prepares you to deal with the next level of reading. So, it is a cycle of failure or success that feeds on itself.

David Boulton: We have the ‘Downward Spiral of Shame’ and the ‘Matthew Effect.'

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Exactly so. And reading is actually unusual in that respect. Statistically we tend to find in other areas of development something called regression to the mean. That means that children who score the lowest on whatever assessment is being given tend to score higher next time. Likewise, at the upper end you find some regression towards average performance among those children who scored extraordinarily well. So, you get kind of an ad mixture over time. With reading it’s very different, the paths are diverging. That’s why it’s so important from an education perspective to identify the problems early and a preventive approach rather than the approach that depends on the occurrence of failure and the attempt to remediate that failure.

David Boulton: Too late.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Well, it’s not too late, but it’s extraordinarily difficult. It’s certainly expensive.

David Boulton: It’s too late in the sense that we’ve passed the point of optimal intervention.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: That’s right.

David Boulton: Not that it’s too late in a dooming sense.

Reducing the Shame:

David Boulton:  One of the main missions of this series is to help parents and teachers reframe the lenses they’re looking through as they observe a child learning to read. As we talk with parents and teachers it’s amazing how few of them recognize that this is an artificial, unnatural, technological interface issue. Most think it’s a natural thing to do and there must be something wrong with the child. Even most of our researchers call it deficits as if we’re talking about some inadequacy in the nature of the child, which is boggling. How can we ever get past this shame-inducing context unless we reframe this so that we see that most children do struggle and we treat them as if  "It’s okay if you struggle. This is not a natural thing, no animal has ever done it, and very few humans have ever done it."

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Well, the shame has to be shifted. The context of the shame can not be the child’s performance. It is those of us who are responsible for teaching children to read who should be ashamed if we fail to succeed at that task. There are some small number of children, who because of biological problems, either specific to the underlying circuitry for reading or general in terms of retardation and otherwise, who are going to have difficulty in learning to read. But that’s a very small proportion of the overall population. Reading failure for nearly every child is not the child’s failure; it’s the failure of policy makers, the failure of schools, the failure of teachers, the failure of parents. We need to reconceptualize what it means to learn to read and who’s responsible for its success if we’re going to deal with the problem.  

Unfolding via Sync vs Systematic Instruction:

David Boulton: One of the things that we’re finding traction with, that I’d like to share with you just to get your response about, is that rather than having some model mediate your sense of working with the child – I’m supposed to do phonics, whole language or integrate these different systems (which by the way, as I’m sure you are aware, are all compensations for the mess in this code) we encourage people to get a first-person experience of the correspondence between the articulation stutters in the developing reader and the ambiguity they’re processing; to get to sync with them there so that you have a ground reference for working them through these different layers of ambiguity, rather than throwing some system that you’re imposing upon them.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Well, maybe. On the other hand, if implied by your comment is that every child will receive an individualized instructional package delivered by…

David Boulton: We’re talking about parents for example, that can actually deal with this.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Well, it could be, but then for parents to deliver such an experience requires the parent to well understand what needs to be transmitted and to have a level of skill and understanding that probably is unrealistic. If we shift back to the classroom, the model of the gifted and well trained teacher who can individualize instruction for every child, including reading instruction, may be unrealistic. It’s arguable, and certainly in my position, that well designed instructional materials, by well designed I mean taking into account what we know about the code and how difficult it is, how to make it simpler and more transparent in particular stages in learning to read, well designed instructional materials, teachers who know how to support children as they are exposed to those instructional materials and periodic assessments so we know when children are falling behind. Standard packages of materials as preventive strategies may be sufficient to move us substantially ahead in terms of solving this problem. It will not get us the whole way, but it’s going to get us, I think, a long way there. One of the principle problems here is instructional confusion. If we can reduce that confusion we’re going to generate more successes in learning to read. 

David Boulton: From your vantage of trying to find the fulcrum to lift the population and needing to do it through statistically probable approaches, there’s no question we have to do that.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes.

David Boulton: Putting that aside, clearly, compared to being in sync with the flow of confusion the child is actually experiencing and meeting them in that confusion so as to help them through it, everything else is a statistical approximation.

Software:

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: That would be the ideal pedagogical approach, instruction materials finely tuned to an individual child and that child’s progress through the task to be solved. My own view is that software is eventually going to get us there for reading. And other areas of instruction where at least for some children you need the acutely fine tuned personalized instruction that you’re talking about and it will be possible to design software approaches that can deal with spoken language and that can do some on- line, very rapid diagnosis of where the child’s failure is and that can serve up instructional materials that are related to what that child is confused about.

David Boulton: Once we break through to voice recognition of the child’s untrained voice and assuming the child has enough time of access to a computer during the developmental stages of reading… It will be a long time before the world learns to read on anything but paper.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: I think that’s true. So, I didn’t give you a time table. But I’m suggesting that in terms of a practical solution in providing a much more individualized instructional package for children faced with the realities of the teacher workforce, class size, the competing demands of the classroom, that the practical route to getting to what you suggested as the ideal outcome is a route that I think is going to have to be paved in part by software and technology. It’s not that teachers can’t do it or that parents can’t do it, but practically, training teachers and parents to do that, having them have the time to do it with individual children is a high hurdle.

David Boulton: I want to have more conversation on this, but before, as we close is there an important question that we haven’t asked that you think, we didn’t cover and is really critical?

International Scope:

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: One thing we haven’t touched on and it’s a problem, if you’re talking about reading in the United States of America it’s not important to touch on, but if you’re talking about reading in the rest of the world it is. And that’s the question of access to instruction for reading and motivation to obtain access. There’s a billion people in the world living below any reasonable definition of the poverty level, large numbers of children are not learning to read simply because they don’t have the opportunity to be exposed to even poor reading instruction. Even when those opportunities exist there are many oral societies in which it is not at all clear to the adults in that society what is to be gained from reading. So, as we’re thinking in a world context, instead of the context of industrialized advanced nations, we also need to pay attention to access and motivation for literacy both in terms for children as well as adults.

David Boulton: We did speak with Dr. Jones Kyazze, the UNESCO representative to the United Nations, responsible for the literacy decade.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes, that’s very much a UNESCO perspective.

David Boulton: Right, and that is our concern. In China right now about 100 million adults are struggling to learn to read English. It’s a national government mandate that the children will learn to read English. It’s becoming like that all over the world because English is the second language of the planet. And yet, English is so hard to learn to read.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes. Someone told me this week, I can’t attest to the accuracy of the assertion, but that more students in China took the SAT in English than in America, which is some indication.

David Boulton: And they’re not even introducing English until fourth or fifth grade and they’re not trying to build an oral fluency with which to stretch with reading. They’re teaching reading as a basis for pronunciation. If you talk to the average adult who is going through this process, reading out loud in English is considered the worst red facing experience a Chinese adult can go through.

ESL:

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: As a connected issue here that we haven’t discussed and that’s the challenges for reading literacy for children who are learning to read in English, but for whom English is not their native language or the language of their homes. We don’t have nearly enough research that would inform best practice in terms of how to go about dealing with the issues these children face. Because the Hispanic/Latino portion of the population in America is growing so dramatically, this is a very important practical issue to address.

David Boulton: Right, and for them reading of course is different because reading in Spanish is nearly phonetic. They can go right from the oral language to reading with an entirely different overhead of knowledge than we can.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes. One of the examples I’ve used when I’m giving presentations on reading, with respect to the connection between semantic knowledge and phonological knowledge, is that I took a high school Spanish class. If you gave me today’s newspaper from Mexico City I could read it aloud fluently and if you understood Spanish you might understand what I’m reading, but I would not have a clue. But I could pronounce it.

David Boulton: That’s the problem in China, the English code does not lend itself to helping you learn to pronounce which is the basis for hooking into the oral language so you can understand it.

I’m delighted with this interview. In closing, I’d like to share with you our material on the Children of the Code project. 

Close:

David Boulton:  As I said, we really want to wake people up to the nature of this challenge…

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes.

David Boulton:  And understand how powerful and influential it is – our children are all but fated by this.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes. You’re quite right. We also didn’t talk about writing which is the other…

David Boulton: Yes, and we didn’t go into math. But in both of those processes, though being code processes, we have time to volitionally tune in.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes.

David Boulton: But in the reading process, we don’t have time for that.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Quite so.

David Boulton: It’s got to happen at an entirely different frequency.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Sure. Absolutely.

David Boulton:  The Children of the Code is an attempt to get people together into understanding the importance of focusing on this challenge in a new way.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes.

David Boulton: And how unnaturally radical it is, so as to dispel and shift this pervasive atmosphere that is allowing the child to feel like there is something wrong with them… because that must change.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes.

David Boulton: I got into this because despite being so interested in what I call learning to learn from the inside-out and stewarding the health of our children’s learning (being this most profound  and practical intersection) I began to see that we have got a code problem. I’ve charted Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, Melville Dewey, the mistake of Theodore Roosevelt that allowed the press to smear Carnegie’s investment and that kept everybody away from thinking about the code for a century since.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Uh-huh.

David Boulton: It’s an amazing story. We’ve been so adverse to thinking about the code because all attempts to do anything about it have been considered folly – ‘Are you kidding that we’re going to change the Library of Congress because kids can’t read easily?'

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Right.

David Boulton: It’s been considered absurd.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes.

David Boulton:  I am interested in saying: Look, these children are suffering. Their lives are being fated because of a technological accident…

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes.

David Boulton: That happened a thousand years ago between two different kind of language systems…

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Right. (laughing)

David Boulton: Nobody’s been minding the store!

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Right.

David Boulton: People that have come together to try to fix it have had this stink put on them because it meant going up against the inertia of the established inventory of writing systems, but that’s a hell of a thing to do to our kids!

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes, I agree with you!

David Boulton: Okay.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Good. Pleasure talking with you.

David Boulton: Pleasure talking with you.  

Share this:   Tweet        The Children of the Code is a Social Education Project and a Public Television Series intended to catalyze and resource a social-educational transformation in how we think about and, ultimately, teach reading. The Children of the Code is an entertaining educational journey into the challenges our children's brains face when learning to read. The series weaves together archeology, history, linguistics, developmental neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, information theory, reading theory, learning theory, and the personal and social dimensions of illiteracy.    Let's Stop Reading Shame! Millions of kids grow up ashamed of their minds because they blame themselves for not being good enough at reading. It's a crime they feel this way and we want your help to stop it. We are raising money to give our DVD sets to the teachers and literacy volunteers that need it the most but can afford it the least. Help us raise funds that will spread the word about and help stop reading shame!  Donate now!                       For more information about Children of the Code events please click here or call: 502-290-2526 Please sign up to receive notices when we post new articles, videos, and updates. Sent by Google's FeedBurner. Easily unsubscribe at any time. Never any spam.   Note about interviews: Participation in the preceding Children of the Code interview does not constitute or imply an endorsement of the Children of the Code project or documentary by the interviewee. Conversely, including an interview does not constitute or imply an endorsement of the views, organizations, books or products of the interviewee, other than as explicitly stated, by the Children of the Code Project and documentary.   There is no substitute for your first-person learning. Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst  Director, Institute of Education Sciences, Assistant Secretary of Education, U.S. Department of Education Dr. Jack Shonkoff Chair, The National Scientific Council on the Developing Child; Co-Editor: From Neurons to Neighborhoods Siegfried Engelmann Professor of Instructional Research, University of Oregon; Creator of Direct Instruction   Dr. Edward Kame'enui Commissioner for Special Education Research, U.S. Department of Education; Director, IDEA, University  of Oregon Dr. G. Reid Lyon  Past Director, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Dr. Keith Stanovich  Canadian Chair of Cognitive Science, University of Toronto Dr. Mel Levine Co-Chair and Co-Founder, All Kinds of Minds; Author: A Mind at a Time, The Myth of Laziness & Ready or Not Here Life Comes Dr. Alex Granzin  School District Psychologist, Past President, Oregon School Psychologists Association  Dr. James J. Heckman Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences 2000; Lead Author: The Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children Dr. Timothy Shanahan President (2006) International Reading Association, Chair National Early Literacy Panel, Member National Reading Panel Nancy Hennessy  President, 2003-2005, International Dyslexia Association Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams Senior Scientist, Soliloquy Learning, Author: Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print Dr. Michael Merzenich Chair of Otolaryngology, Integrative Neurosciences, UCSF;  Member National Academy of Sciences Dr. Maryanne Wolf Director, Center for Reading & Language Research; Professor of Child Development, Tufts University Dr. Todd Risley  Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Alaska, Co-author: Meaningful Differences Dr. Sally Shaywitz  Neuroscientist, Department of Pediatrics, Yale University, Author: Overcoming Dyslexia Dr. Louisa Moats  Director, Professional Development and Research Initiatives, Sopris West Educational Services Dr. Zvia Breznitz Professor, Neuropsychology of Reading & Dyslexia, University of Haifa, Israel  Rick Lavoie Learning Disabilities Specialist, Creator: How Difficult Can This Be?: The F.A.T. City Workshop & Last One Picked, First One Picked On Dr.Charles Perfetti Professor, Psychology & Linguistics; Senior Scientist and Associate Director, Learning R&D Center, U. of Pittsburgh, PA Arthur J. Rolnick Senior V.P. & Dir. of Research,  Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis;  Co- Author: The Economics of Early Childhood Development   Dr. Richard Venezky  Professor, Educational Studies, Computer and  Information Sciences, and Linguistics, University of Delaware Dr. Keith Rayner  Distinguished  Professor, University of Massachusetts, Author: Eye Movements in Reading and Information Processing Dr. Paula Tallal  Professor of Neuroscience, Co-Director of the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers University Dr.John Searle  Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language, University of California-Berkeley, Author: Mind, A Brief Introduction Dr.Mark T. Greenberg Director, Prevention Research Center, Penn State Dept. of Human Development & Family Studies; CASEL Leadership Team Dr. Terrence Deacon  Professor of Biological Anthropology and Linguistics at University of California- Berkeley Chris Doherty  Ex-Program Director, National Reading First Program, U.S. Department of Education Dr. Erik Hanushek Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University Dr. Marketa Caravolas Director, Bangor Dyslexia Unit, Bangor University, Author: International Report on Literacy Research Dr. Christof Koch Professor of Computation and Neural Systems,  Caltech - Author: The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach Dr. Guy Deutscher Professor of Languages and Cultures of Ancient Mesopotamia, Holland; Author: Unfolding Language Robert Wedgeworth  President, ProLiteracy, World's Largest Literacy Organization Dr. Peter Leone  Director, National Center on Education, Disability and Juvenile Justice Dr. Thomas Cable  Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin, Co-author: A History of the English Language Dr. David Abram Cultural Ecologist and Philosopher; Author: The Spell of the Sensuous Pat Lindamood and Nanci Bell  Principal Scientists, Founders, Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes Dr. Anne Cunningham  Director, Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education, Graduate School of Education at University of California-Berkeley Dr. Donald L. Nathanson  Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Jefferson Medical College, Director of the Silvan S. Tomkins Institute  Dr.Johanna Drucker  Chair of Media Studies, University of Virginia, Author: The Alphabetic Labyrinth John H. Fisher  Medievalist, Leading authority on the development of the written English language, Author: The Emergence of Standard English Dr. Malcolm Richardson   Chair, Dept. of English, Louisiana State University; Research: The Textual Awakening of the English Middle Classes   James Wendorf  Executive Director, National Center for Learning Disabilities Leonard Shlain Physician; Best-Selling Author: The Alphabet vs. The Goddess Robert Sweet  Co-Founder, National Right to Read Foundation FULL LIST OF OVER 100 COMPLETED INTERVIEWS HELP US: If you appreciate this interview and the work of the Children of the Code project please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us. Your comments and feedback not only help us learn to better serve you, they help us get the support we need to continue the project.  Click here to read what others are saying about the Children of the Code Project. SIGN UP HERE to receive general updates about our project or news of future interview releases  CONSIDER HELPING OUR WORK BY CLICKING HERE THANK YOU! Copyright statement:  Copyright (c) 2014, Learning Stewards, A 501(c)(3) Non-Profit Organization, All Rights Reserved. Permission to use, copy, and distribute these materials for not-for-profit educational purposes, without fee and without a signed licensing agreement, is hereby granted, provided that "Children of the Code - www.childrenofthecode.org"  (with a functioning hyperlink when online) be cited as the source and appear in all excerpts, copies, and distributions.  Thank you. (back to top)