Sucheta Kamath: Welcome back to Full PreFrontal exposing the mysteries of executive function. I'm your host Sucheta Kamath. And I have been having these conversations, time and time about executive function, its impact on life, personal achievement, personal success. And we as humans are, you know, going through life and one of the biggest sources of novelty or new perspectives and information is reading and gaining perspective on the world through the lens of somebody else. And I'm a voracious reader, I was talking to another guest yesterday. And, you know, I was like blown away by the data that just got published in December Gene, I'm wondering if you heard that, which is 50% of Americans read less than one book a year. And if you read more than 10 books a year, then you are 99% which is what I am. And we have a returning guest who has this incredible, you know, scope of practice a wealth of knowledge, and he's going to talk about his second expertise today about literacy. And as I think about the topic of literacy, you know, I'm a speech and language pathologist, that the bane of my existence is comprehension, process, oral language, written language, understanding of language and nonverbal communication and then producing or communicating through oral communication and written communication. So, I have had the blessings of understanding the backdrop. And the last way I would like to talk tie the topic today is my own journey as a multilingual speaker and I think those who listen to this regularly have heard this. So I grew up in India and a particular state called Maharashtra, where my mother tongue is Marathi. And my parents were very proud to put their children in Marathi medium, so you could be medium of instruction could be English. So from kindergarten itself, you learn in English, which is what my husband did, versus you learn entire your educational journey is through your mother tongue. And I was fortunate enough to do that, what was so interesting, I was a voracious reader, I belong to a very small community outside Bombay, and there was a public library and it had 200 books. And I was done by sixth grade, I was done with those books. So I was starving for information. And I was at an early on exposed to a lot of literature and poetry and a lot of thought, thought leaders, more like a philosophers than never scientific reading, by the way. So by the time I finished 10th grade, the way Indian education works, we merged our English medium cohort and Marathi medium cohort merged. And we became a 40 students instead of, you know, our maybe 60 students instead of 30-30. And I, who was the top, a really great student completely plummeted in my academics, I could not keep up with the language of science being taught in English. And I was devastated because I didn't think I was a bad student, or I had any academic struggles. And suddenly, I found myself. And one of the gaps that I noticed now that I look back is lack of knowledge. I just did not have any exposure to the linguistics, or the content or the scientific lingo, other than what I had read, which was all philosophy and never science, and all the scientific concepts suddenly were introduced in English. And so as I think about our students and their learning, I often channel my own 11th grader who was in a very pitiful state. And so Gene, my guest today is going to help me understand how to not feel sorry for myself and and maybe he can use me as his, you know, example that yes, once knowledge is expanded, and if you channel your attention, your motivation, you too can become very well versed and I have returned to reading, you know, two books a week and I read more than 50 books a year. So with that said, it's a great honor and privilege and joy to have my guest, Gene Kerns again back on the podcast. He is, as I mentioned in the last podcast, but he's a third generation educator with teaching experience from elementary through university level He also has switched hats. So being directly in front of the students, he has now been in front of the those who teach students and those who design programs for students. from an administrative perspective. He has a he currently serves as the Vice President and Chief Academic Officer of Renaissance Learning. And he has more than 20 years of experience in leading professional development. He speaks nationally, we have been co presenters at many conferences. I really hope I do some fun things with him. But my greatest joy today is to talk about a specific book that he has co written with his colleagues, which is called Literacy Reframed. So, by the way, that itself should jog our attention because it's like literacy framed versus reframed, why we're going to ask him about that. But also, I think, don't turn turn off. If you're not an educator, like why do I care about literacy, because you really should understand the value and importance if you have somebody who's serving you, or if you're participating in a survey, or if you're concerned about voting, and if you're concerned about global citizenship, then you should deeply care about literacy. So the book that we are gonna discuss is called literacy reframed how to focus on decoding vocabulary, and background knowledge. Because it improves reading comprehension. So welcome to the podcast, Gene.

Dr. Gene Kerns: Glad to be back.

Sucheta Kamath: So as we do, like any podcast, since the topic is about literacy, I'm just curious about your own journey of literacy as a learner, how would you describe yourself as the knowledge seeker?

Dr. Gene Kerns: Um, it would depend on the what period of life but I will say is, you know, as a third generation educator, I mean, here's an example, my middle school, used to shorten the periods each Wednesday, so we could all have a independent reading period. And that was great. So you got, you know, 30-45 minutes to read. Now that I look back on it, I realized how supported I was, because my family was going to make sure that in my hands wasn't really good work of young adult literature, like there were some book at the appropriate level, appropriately challenged, high quality. Sitting on either side of me might have been two kids reading Mad Magazine, because either that's what brought or, or there wasn't, they didn't bring anything. And so the teacher just grabbed, you know, something out of the bin. But I realized that as a as a third generation educator, I have a lot of members of my family that we're going to make sure that like I was, well, in summertime, too. We used to have quiet time in the summer, and it was 30 minutes, you had to go to your room, and you could you know, you could take a nap or whatever, or read and we usually went long, often. So that 30 minutes turned into, but didn't matter again, because we had, we had books and we liked reading and we were encouraged to read. I will say, I did pretty well with that K to 12. But you know, to your point about like the power of wide reading. When I went to college, my first my first degree was in English education. And I remember, you know, for every literature class that I had, we were expected to read a novel that week. So I was reading well, more than I'd ever read before. Yes, and that has extreme impact on our on our on your brain. And you know, I It's interesting, everybody is all you know, all the chatter about Chat GPT, you know, large language models was Chat GPT is going to do and AI and all this kind of stuff. Think about it. Think think about this. Chat GPT does what it does, because it's read a lot. That's it. That's it, it has read a lot. And so in the same way that we're training large language models to consume massive amounts of information, so that they can do things for us and give ideas back. Our brains work almost the same way like they need to be fed, the more feeding of massive amounts of information that we give to our brains, the more we're going to be able to do and it's you know, you put your finger on when you said most people I mean, I don't know the date on the adult levels. I'm there's a study you're referencing, but here's what I can tell you. We have for more than 25 years seen in our data Renaissance, that students who read for less than 15 minutes a day outside of what's going on with their school expectations. They're falling further and further behind. So 15 minutes is kind of really tipping bladder are and that's kind of like you're treading water. So 15 minutes is the tipping point and that that's one piece. But then here's the other dynamic. Slightly more than 50% of kids don't read that much each day. So as we're talking, yes, I guess like right now is we're talking as we're having this podcast, more than half of kids out there aren't reading enough to keep up with rising levels of expectation and performance. And that's as simple or as complex as it needs to be. So an important challenge we've got to solve.

Sucheta Kamath: Wow, that's very overwhelming, just listening to it, like 15 minutes outside school. So as you know, it's such a simple thing I often think about we are so obsessed about inoculating children with vaccines, and we're really not talking about powerful ways to inoculate the brain from rotting or not growing? Yeah, yeah plays on the body where you want wrinkles is your brain.

Dr. Gene Kerns: Well and there was a great book, Bauerlein's the author it's the title is like The Dumbest Generation subtitle something like Why You Should Never Trust Anybody Under 30. Sorry if I offended anybody listening. But but here's the irony that he outlined in the first chapter, he said, at this moment right now, there is more access to text for children than their Well, I mean for all of us. But there's more access to text and information than we've ever had in all of the time that human beings have ever been on the earth. And yet, at the same time, that access has gone through the roof in general, students reading is going down. You know, and those of you that our company was founded by a reading product that was invented by Judy Paul, she was our creator, she was a mother, she wanted her kids to read more. And Judy, one time was doing a speech and she said, You know, when she was a kid, she read more books than she could get her hands on. It made me think about that when you said you read all the books in the library. She was in Baxter, Iowa, tiny little town. And like you she'd read all the books in the library and the bookmobile would come every two weeks. And she said, The problem was she read faster than the bookmobile it'll make it back. So she bribed the farm boys with her lunch money, like she would pay them off to get them to go get the books. She told them what books to get. And, you know, they got their brownies or whatever, from her lunch money. But, you know, the whole point was she read as much in fast forward so. So as a child, she's paying off the farm boys to get the books from the bookmobile. When she went off to university. She said at first, it was really kind of hard, she was intimidated, because here she was from this tiny little community, Baxter, Iowa, she said, there were kids who would come from all these big prep schools and all these places. And she said, they taken courses with titles I'd never even heard of, like I just, and she said, I was a little overwhelmed. And she said, but when we got into it, she said, I realized, because I'd read a lot. I had a lot of background knowledge. Like I knew these things that we were talking about in class. And she said, even though I was intimidated, because I hadn't taken all these courses, what I had done is read a lot, read a lot. And she's like, for a while, you know, once I'd let the intimidation factor, get away, you know, once I could let go of that I realized I was going to be okay, even though is from a tiny little town, I read a lot. And again, just like chat GPT does what it does, because it's read a lot, our brains to work in a very different situation than that.

Sucheta Kamath: I just love that that story. And I think, you know, again, cultural culture has such a powerful role to play. I grew up in India, as I mentioned, one of the the community activity, it was called kathaa kathak, which means storytelling. And this storytelling was a thing that people went for, where the a generator gave aeration for two hours. They were hilarious. They were all about life's journey. These were writers but who became storytellers. So there is not a stand up comedy. So this is not really entertaining you as in a traditional sense that as somebody standing in the mic, but it is like a whole group of people. So I grew up with to cultural elements that to me have had very important impact on my brain is reading which you know, like, but literature from many, many perspectives and generations. But second was this guitar, this participation in oral language. And I feel now going as in a group where you have 100 people in a room, listening to oration it's not political. It's about life, like journey of life, you know, and I feel that had a really wonderful transmission of what we believe as a culture, what is what do we believe in terms of our values? What do we consider? We should Who should we be, as you know, like, together and I can really name any parallel experience, because this was not a drama. This was not a a one man show. It was a very cultural thing. So small villages had this, and and even like communities had this. So I'm just wondering, as you think about as you were mentioning about this impact on the brain, 15 minutes, more than 15 minutes has significant academic impact. I'm wondering if you can, I know, we haven't even launched yet, but just this idea of oral language, does that have any merit on developing the brain? 

Dr. Gene Kerns: Oh, absolutely. I mean, and I think that that's why some for some students, you know, that the first part of reading is is so easy, because we because we know that you know, if you use the simple view of reading, which is one of the constructs of the science of reading, decoding ability, so you know, word language skills, plus the oral language piece. If you have both of those you get quickly to comprehension. So children who were read to a lot who heard a lot of words, you know, there's plenty of research about, you know, the variance between kids is on the factor of millions of words when they arrive at school. So some kids are gonna walk in with this really robust oral vocabulary sitting next to them is gonna be another kid who just doesn't have that. When we teach them decoding, that we've taught them the same skills, we taught them how to associate letters and sounds in English, one kids off to the races so fast, because now they can decode a lot of words they know. And when they sound out the word, they go, Oh, I know that word. I've heard that word before. I know what it means. The kid next to them may be just as proficient as decoding. But when they sound that out, and they say, I've never heard that, I don't know what that means. So you know, a lot of a lot of research just talks about the advantages that kids come with or the disadvantages that they come with the school. And clearly exposure to oral language is a major factor that makes a tremendous difference.

Sucheta Kamath: And you know, colloquially speaking, again, like when you grew up in, again, another country, another language, I was very good at idiomatic expression. When I came to us, I had a test that we used to give to patients with brain injury, and it was called Ross Information Processing Tests. And it had a very peculiar idioms to see if your metaphoric language is impaired or not. Your ability to infer and extrapolate was a phrase that said, your eyes are bigger than your stomach. Now I had I was 25 years old, I could not understand why the meaning of that phrase meant you thought you could eat lot more or you were deceived by your own system or whatever, the multiple meanings. And so what happened is, I was so not proficient in assessing the patient's performance, it was erroneous or not, because it was a learned language. It was not learned idiomatic expression. It's not it's not natural forte, you know what I mean? 

Dr. Gene Kerns: Well, I mean, what was going on? There is the concept of idioms, crosses languages. But the actual idioms that we use, often, most often do not, which means, you know, an English speaker would have heard that, you know, a dozen 15 However, many times you go, I know what that means. We'll figure it out after a while. But you know, I'm sure that you could give examples of you know, idioms from your from your mother tongue that would make no no sense no sense whatsoever. To and again, that has, because I mean, really what we did in literacy refrained. And and we began by saying, Well, what is reading comprehension? Like, how do you get there? What are the core elements, we talked about the big three in the book, and part of it is decoding. But then once you can decode, you can associate those letters and sounds, then what you're talking about is tapping into all that oral language you've heard. And the know that if you've heard a lot, then great, this process is going to go pretty well for you. But for students that have not been read to a lot, not heard a lot, which is why we also advocate in the book, reading to kids every day. You know, we are as human beings, we are all pre wired by learning to learn language by hearing it spoken. And so I was that crazy, high school senior English teacher that read to my students every day. Now, you know, what the research that? Well, two things, I did it for two ways. One, the research says is read to kids about two grade levels ahead of what their tested reading level is. So if you'd read things to them that they couldn't access Now, the problem is, it changes as kids age, somewhere in late middle school, seventh or eighth grade are, generally speaking, when we're younger, our listing vocabulary is more advanced than our reading vocabulary, which makes perfect sense. Those things start catching up somewhere at about seven through eighth grade for most kids, they become in terms of text complexity, they become equal. So some people say, Well, what does that mean? We don't read to older kids. Absolutely not. I read to them genres that were different things from different time periods, things that required more background knowledge, or information, because, you know, one of the ways we measure text is, you know, a Lexile level or text complexity level, but that only tells part of it, you know, those measures do not consider your background knowledge point being, you know, if we, if we handed you an advanced text, on, you know, on parts of India, you get a lot more background information and a lot of people listening to us today, which means you'd have no problem with that text. Someone that never lived there has never visited there has never studied there, they would not be able to read that same text and it has nothing to do with our general reading ability. It has to do with our background knowledge, which was another major theme for us in the book that we were adamant about talking about because not enough people talk about how knowledge can tributes to reading ability.

Sucheta Kamath: So it brings me to this question. So I love the framing that you reframed is really bringing attention to decoding as a foundational skill. I like to call it what attention is to executive function, gateway to information processing. But once you got the decoding the sound symbol relationship, then comes the idea of vocabulary. Do you understand nuggets of in the lexicon, the units of information that carry bundle of information about it, but that vocabulary without the context is really not really going to propel you to the like a rocket, which is knowledge? Why did you even have to propose that? Like, isn't that the pain of bloody reading? or teaching reading it? 

Dr. Gene Kerns: Well, it is and it isn't. And I think it comes to two things, priorities, nuances of messages. I mean, let's face it, people don't deal with nuances as well. So when I talked about the big three of reading comprehension, we've named them in you, and I've referenced them and you and I read the book. So let's just lay it out for listeners. Point number one decoding like you have to be able to associate letters and sounds, part number two vocabulary that like when you sound out the word you actually have to have heard it, you need to know what it means and have, you know, meaning that you can bring to a part number three is knowledge. Well, let me back up a little bit. Please don't anyone who reads my book or hears me, don't let anything that I say be perceived as putting down the phonics skills, they are absolutely important. They are the foundation. But you don't live in a foundation you live in a house. Okay. So once we have the right analogy, yeah, once we have the funding skills in place, we have to add on top of it, because again, I can take a kid and I can teach them phonics to a mastery level. But if they sound out a word using the skills that I taught them, and they've never heard the word before, they are no closer to comprehension, that that's where the vocabulary piece comes in. So we teach as many vocabulary words. But then there's also this nuance nuance of knowledge that if somebody says to you, oh, that was a Trojan horse. Well, I hope somebody taught you some mythology somewhere because you're not gonna understand Trojan horse or Herculean effort. Or if someone in a passing war effort looks at her and says, Oh, that was her Waterloo moment. Well, I hope you learned enough or, you know, history to understand a reference to Napoleon there and a great defeat or Half-Life, litmus test, what's your litmus test for that situation? Well, you know, there's a vocabulary that came from science class. And that's the whole point. In addition to learning to decode in addition to needing to learn vocabulary, we also need certain general names and dates and places and references that come from all of the content areas and from the arts. And the more you have read, and ideally, the more widely you have read, the more names and dates and places and references you will understand. And then it just opens up. And here's also the difference. And I'll stop talking and talking. But this is so important to me. There are 44 phonemes. In English, we are not creating any new ones. So once a kid has mastered all 44, they are done, there's nothing else to ever learn, that will improve your literacy after that. Now again, I'm saying you got to learn them. They're really important. Because English, the way that this language was formed, there's a boatload of irregularities, that said, you're done learning your phonemes, probably by the time you're in third grade, for the entirety of your life, you will have the capacity to learn new vocabulary and new knowledge. Your whole life, it never stops. I can always learn a new word, I can always learn new contents. And new words and new content also make me a more literate person. So it's all got to be taken. It's a more holistic view, perhaps on literacy, then sometimes we allow ourselves to have.

Sucheta Kamath: Wow, well, first, your passion comes through. And thank you for being so emphatic. Because sometimes I think, again, I appreciate now why you're saying reframing because we can get into the weeds and forget the big picture. So you're bringing us all the particularly educators back to the bigger picture, which is, don't forget the starter kit, but then keep adding fuel because this is a motor that needs to run. And as more it runs. Go ahead.

Dr. Gene Kerns: Well, and it's two parts we had to reframe because we needed to get the whole picture. But let's also be honest, we are in one of the reasons we titled it literacy refrained is because what we're doing right now isn't working. I mean, the results, look at the results. It's just not working. So we must reframe literacy because we're working too hard to get income or to get outcomes that are not substantial or enough to many kids below proficiency to to low levels of literacy. It needs to be reframed, because what we're doing right now it's just not paying the dividends that we need as a society.

Sucheta Kamath: It's so interesting, as you say, my adult experience, you know, in spite of being a voracious reader, not in English, but then have learned train mice, I'm very slow in English reading. So it's really painful for me, I tend to move to, you know, audiobooks are much faster you would be Yeah, I mean, that's perfectly, like my lexicon is very diverse. It's interesting, though, Gene, you will be shocked. It was yesterday, or Monday, there was some podcast that I was listening to, that they use the word caucus, caucus thing, and I just had never thought that caucus is a verb, you know, or first of all, I don't understand that word at all. So I keep my definition next to me, which says, you know, it's a parliament, parliamentary mentary party, but it always caucus to me sounds like cocky. So I'm still confused, like what the word to be understood. I will caucus I've understood some random like word, but it's empty. Like I just struggle as a full grown person with vibrant brain to understand the full meaning. I just cannot even imagine what must happen to kids, when they're left to make meaning with words. They're randomly appearing or robustly appearing. And they have no idea what what to make of it to make cohesive meaning. It must be a Swiss cheese of information processing? 

Dr. Gene Kerns: Well, it is and I mean, that's why we're, you know, we're always measuring book levels. And considering you know, the text that we're giving young kids, but but here's the deal. That's a controlled environment, we're preparing kids to go out into an uncontrolled environment called a world where their boss or their employer or whatever expectation may hand them any text. And the assumption is, you're going to read and understand now your vocabulary piece, let's let's add a little research there again, please don't anybody think I'm putting down the phonics skills have to be there. And in the we know more about the role of phonics based instruction to support student learning English than anything else, and it's an unquestionable research base. But let's talk about the vocabulary piece. Do you? Do you know what percentage of unknown words a reader can tolerate in a text and that's the pain you were pointing to Sucheta? Most people, some people say, Well, maybe 10-15% unknown words, no 2% 2%, you might find an author that would go as high as 5%. And even though every state in this country has said that, here's, here's the what I call it the ubiquitous standard. It's everywhere. Every state wrote an educational standard that said, students will use context clues to determine the meaning of unknown words. Now, everybody expects kids to do that what no one tells a teacher is how much context do you have to have 98% much more 2% unknown words, and our frustration goes through the roof, our level, I mean, eventually, we just disconnect because it becomes mentally, overloading and in and people. And I mean, we can't do it, because verbal here, I have like visual examples of texts that one of my colleagues created a third grade passage, third grade, where she obscured 5% of the most advanced words. And when I put it in front of a roomful of highly credentialed people, they will all agree they don't fully understand what's happening in the text. So we've got to do we got to be able to decode, we have that skill is foundational, we've got to have it there. We've got another vocabulary words, and we don't deal well, when there's many unknown words. And then even when we can decode the words, sometimes we need those knowledge pieces that again, if someone says to you, oh, Berlin Wall, maybe you know, there's a city called Berlin, and maybe you assume the Berlin Wall is a wall in Berlin. But that is not sufficient to understand the reference, the historical significant reference that someone is making when they say, a Berlin Wall, and the story that associates there. So you know, Daniel Willingham, major cognitive science...

Sucheta Kamath: He's been a guest on our podcast, and he's come multiple times, but you talk a lot about his work, which I appreciate.

Dr. Gene Kerns: Yes, he's huge in here. But you know, what he says is, you know, writers don't explain everything, when they write a text, they assume that they can just drop in something like Berlin Wall, and they're not gonna have a footnote that explains the Berlin Wall was a major dividing line divided East and West Germany, but as World War II, they're just gonna say Berlin Wall, and assume that the readers understand and you either do, or you don't, which either means within that text, you will be literally or illiterate. And those are the decisions that knowledge is making. And that's part of the equation as well. So the big three, again, for us are decoding plus vocabulary plus knowledge. If you're good on all three factors, you're going to comprehend, and if any one of those factors is lacking, then comprehension will be compromised.

Sucheta Kamath: So I think the the question really is and for the purpose of tying executive function to these three aspects. Yeah, you know, like even By the way, the way I see self regulation in knowing when you have failed to achieve your goals is a very powerful way, how we activate our executive function to rein in our goal attainment, right, like maybe I'm not getting it even that awareness is very critical precursor to changing the course in comprehension or changing the course in producing academic performance. So the, the question I had was about the particular area of knowledge, which we have been talking a lot about, How can teachers so there's, I see a chicken and egg phenomenon often described in the context of educators getting very frustrated when they don't see the results, particularly fourth grade reading or seventh grade reading, that they consider certain kinds of aspects of knowledge to be a precursor to their ability to teach. And they don't lead with sometimes and may I may be wrong about this, you know more about this. They don't check, what's the knowledge base to know where they should begin? Or what should I do to upscale your knowledge, context or knowledge base. So you're not just inferring and extrapolating based on little crumbs that may be left without really like a Trojan horse, I can maybe infer it's a horse. But if I'm culturally sensitive, then I may know Trojan is a condom brand, you know? I'm completely derailed at this point, right? So what what is being getting, like what can educators do or think about when it comes to one, doing something specific to improve the student's knowledge, so they don't become the primary provider of the knowledge, but they make the students sicker, have the knowledge to bridge the gap in comprehension? 

Dr. Gene Kerns: Well, I think there's two parts there. I mean, one, what do we do curricularly. to spell it out? You know, we use the words explicit and systematic around phonics instruction. And the reason that those words have lingered, is that's the words that were used in the National Reading Panel Report where the body of research came forward and said, We need explicit and systematic phonics based instruction, I believe, and I can't take credit for it. I don't remember exactly who penned this one. But I read an article the other day that said in the same way that we attempt to be explicit and systematic, around teaching phonics, we also need to be equally explicit and systematic about teaching knowledge. If we know that there are numerous references to Greek mythology, that that people will be expected to understand when they graduate school. Well, who's going to teach mythology? Like where what grade? Are we going to assign it too? What are we going to cover? If we know that there's certain names and dates and places of reference from history? When are those things covered? Do we spell them out explicitly? Or do we leave them for chance? That is why you are seeing more and more. And Natalie Wexler read about this, in her book, the knowledge gap has been a guest too. Yeah, you've got an all star guestlist there. But that is why you're seeing more curricula, like the CK, Core Knowledge language arts curriculum that says, here's our reading curriculum, and it is also a sequenced order of knowledge building. So one part is, we can spell out the general knowledge and do a good job with that. Because, you know, we want to say, okay, what are the names and dates and places or references that when a kid finishes school, we expect them to know, so that we're sending them in the world with a high level of general literacy. The other thing when you say executive function, I mean, you're talking about kids that are also motivated. How do we make kids desirous of even more information, because I mean, one of the one thing why I want to guarantee this, this base threshold for all kids, but then I also hope to unleash kids to be consumers of information. And, you know, it's not like you're gonna have a kid that's gonna learn every term in science, and every term and math and every term, kids are gonna get interested in certain things. How do I excite them to dive into topics to read more widely about them? To go deeper? And, you know, we didn't get to that point extensively, we had some elements in the book. But you know, I remember years ago, Howard Gardner at Harvard said, we don't let kids deal with any one topic long enough to become any kind of expert. We were on to the next. Cover, cover cover cover. And you know, other people have said that sometimes our coverage is an enemy to understanding. How do we balance that the balance that we have to cover a lot of topics, but also, when are the opportunities for a kid to dwell on something and go deep? Because it's when you really start connecting some ideas when, when you've been working on a topic and learning some things in school and then you turn on the TV and it shows up on the History Channel. I mean, I remember my kids running in the door one morning, Mr. Kerns, Mr. Kerns. I was watching this show last night. And, you know, they brought up this topic or that topic that we were talking about, when kids see something that they've been learning in the school actually out there in the world. I mean, the best ones are when the kids have learned something, and their parents are talking about something, and then they can contribute to the contribution or to the conversation. So amazing, it's that, it's that balancing that I don't know, there's an easy way to achieve, yeah, we got a lot of general stuff we need to cover and kids need to learn, but also to how then do we shift gears every now and then to dwell on a topic or a theme? You know, and I love some of the integrated units that people do where they connect a theme either throughout an entire year, and they have through lines through their course or where the school, you know, identifies a theme that for a marking period, topically everybody's connecting to as they could, you know, the brain is always seeking to connect new learning to what it already knows. And if we can spell out things in mathematic way for kids, we're making it more likely that it'll be sticky and compelling and come together for them. 

Sucheta Kamath: And I'll tell you, to your point, I think probably you are probably one of my students, favorite teachers, just like your teaching style, I think I had a fantastic literature teacher in my 10th and 11th grade, and he literally used to read out loud, which no other teacher, I would say after not even in middle school, read out loud to us. And he he was a little bit, you know, temperamental, but he would stay sit on the desk, he would have his book in his hand. And he would read a sentence and it would look like he has taken a swig of his best scotch. I mean, of course, I'm using this very western reference, which now nobody was drinking, but I and he would just say, Isn't this beautiful? And we were like, oh my god, there he goes again, like loving words, you know. And what he did, though, he would take something very poignant and pause, and a piece of literary ways the author's expressed, and just say like how beautiful it is as good as watching sunrise. And of course, we I look back at that, even though I thought like, can you just go faster, so we can get more of you. But I also appreciate one thing about that, that he was one of my only teacher who actually demonstrated he being in love with reading.

Dr. Gene Kerns: And the words and the language.

Sucheta Kamath: The language, the words, the drama, the sentiment, the joy, the its capacity to influence him as a human. He kept talking about it, talking about it. And imagine two years of that, you just become that kind of person. You remember, he romanticized the learning, of deep meaning making, you know, it was just really profound. I thought it was beautiful.

Dr. Gene Kerns: And I two things that came to mind there one, I really and I'm probably a little bit biased by my background, which was I was trained in classical debate. So I went did a lot of debate in forensics in high school. So when you talked earlier about the you know, the the reading aloud, I heard the forensics competitions. But I also think for secondary kids argumentation, like getting them to go deep into topics to consider both sides of issues, I think those can be powerful motivators, to develop critical thinking on the part of kids and to want them or to encourage them to go deeply into topics. So that was one thing I want to put, I think, particularly in secondary argumentation is a powerful tool that we just don't avail ourselves. And there's a great Greenhaven Press has a series called Opposing Viewpoints. And they take the very issues that kids are hearing in the news, and they have essays on either side. And I remember one time reading an essay with kids, and we and we read the essay on one side. And then right after we read the essay on the other side, and this kid named Reggie raised his hand he said, Mr. Kerns, I don't get it. I said, What do you not get? He said, I don't get it. We just, we just read one argument or one author that said one thing, and we just read another author that said something else. And I said, Reggie, welcome to the adult world, things are not black and white. They're shades of gray. But but here's the other thing. I'm gonna say too, as you talked about your teacher reading to you, I firmly believe that in every classroom, there's three kinds of reading that are current reading to kids, reading with kids, and creating time for kids to read independently. I want to read to kids things that are two grade levels ahead of where they are. Sometimes I would read the first chapter of a book. The kids could read just for motivational purposes. Like you read the first chapter, and you put it down and you tell them if they want to know where the story goes. They've got to pick it up and read it themselves. So I read to my kids every day, most of what I do instructional is reading with kids. You know, teachers don't throw the textbook at kids and say read a cover to cover and get back with me. That's where we do the pre reading and that's where we do the deep questions and the you know, in the think alouds, and the modeling and all that kind of stuff. And that's most of what we do in language arts classroom. But we also need to that independent reading time that we want kids to read things of their own choice. Beyond what we're doing in school, maybe they're related, maybe not related, maybe it's just for pleasure. If every day and we're really good at the reading with kids, I mean, there's your instructional piece, we're pretty good there. We're not nearly as good as reading to them every day, and creating dynamics for them to read on their own every day, if we can add those two elements, I think we've moved the needle substantially in what's going on in terms of our literacy outcomes.

Sucheta Kamath: And if I can add to this point of you know, how these are foundational processes through which you talked about critical thinking, brain evolves to become a master of higher order thinking, my favorite research researcher, Robert Sapolsky, talks, one of the coolest ways he presents information about how the brain functions got became adaptive, you had ancient systems that were designed to perform a particular function. And reading, by the way we were not designed to read, are designed to write. And so these are evolutionarily new skills, but the brain had. So he talks about this, he has a quote, he says, in order to handle metaphor, when we humans transition from being a species that could merely handle sensory disgust, to handling moral disgust, we took the insular cortex and it expanded its portfolio to include both the literal and metaphorical versions of things. And that's why it has trouble distinguishing the two at times. And one of the great, greatest research indulge me if you what, if you don't mind? They the researchers studied this, what they did is they wanted to present this United States policy about what is our view about letting people come in, you know, like, people from other countries, and what they did, they created two conditions. Okay. In condition one, they had people read a paragraph before they read the policy. And the paragraph was about invasive pathogens. Okay. And the second group received a paragraph that was neutral. And guess what the minute, those people who read the invasive pet pathogens paragraph, how body is invaded with pathogens, it attacks, it destroys. And then they were given a policy about immigration. So they actually had a negative viewpoint on immigration. So when you talked about this exercise of presenting your student with two different contract, contradictory viewpoints, it is a way we are training your insular cortex to say, if this is true, I believe this wait, how can this also exist? And what do I do with this conflict that I'm experiencing, and that resolving this conflict of two opposing viewpoints is really leads to reduction in cognitive dissonance, and those who do this work, and which is what executive function training is all about? Is I am learning to tolerate the conflict, that this can be true. While this too can be true. And I need to kind of form a very wide range of opinions.

Dr. Gene Kerns: And there was another which I always thought was a very truthful statement as well that people would would make in the debate community and it went like this. Unless you understand your opponent's arguments, you do not fully understand your own, you know, or until you understand your opponent's arguments, you do not fully understand your own. You know, it's also that idea of, you know, like an unquestioned belief is not a particularly strong belief. So, you know, and that's what debate I think, was so good. And, and again, I you can see, I build an entire secondary experience for kids wrapped around argumentation and debate and, you know, researching around both sides of the issue, because I just don't think that there's anything that encourages kids to, you know, read information more, or to think more critically about the world and the things that they are studying there. But it is, you know, in, there was another meme image to have, you know, you know, when you were debating issues like that you are polishing your brain against the brains of others, like the idea of you know, that friction and burnishing our brains that like we don't ever really get to the deep understanding of what we believe or how the world works or what the tensions are, unless we're willing to step into that space and, you know, take issues and look at both sides of them and understand what the arguments are. You know, and that's a tough space to be in sometimes, but boy does the, you know, unquestionably the precipitant of that is critical thinking and a deeper understanding.

Sucheta Kamath: And you know, here, you probably get this, I get this a lot, how do we improve student engagement is the top question I hear, which is motivational management? And second is how do I get my students to care about our interest? Basically, how do I cultivate interest in something that, and to me that, you know, Introduction to expansive background, like if you're introducing concepts that are to grid above their, their capacity right now, you're challenging them, don't be afraid to by challenging, you're diminishing their ability to engage, in fact, that may activate. But also, I think, to me, it's a way of honoring students intelligence and saying, Hey, you are a student by definition, which means you're in the process of learning. And since you don't know what you're learning, you will learn when you begin to learn. So I'm never afraid of this idea of a you haven't known something that is because you haven't learned something. And the cultural context can be set as well. So as as you think about, you know, you kind of alluded to this idea of, we're living, there are digital natives who actually are born with an iPad, or their parents digital technology, right? And so researchers kind of quite jarring that when you read with using physical material, like a printed paper, your comprehension is better. And and so it was interesting, a Daniel Willingham, who was talking about study strategies. And he says, It is not the researcher doesn't say that if you took handwritten notes, your there's any difference in what you consider important or what you're processing, but the act of physically doing it improves your ability to come back to something that's much more concrete that you can evaluate, that you have interacted with. So I do feel so what what is your worldview about? Number one, all information is available to anybody, if you care to read, I mean, we are in right now signing agreements and privacy policies without reading them. So I have not much hope I read somewhere that the policy makers language is or the highest vocabulary is under eighth grade. So what are we doing? What should we aim for? What's a reasonable expectation of digital natives?

Dr. Gene Kerns: Well, I mean, I think so we are referencing we did have a section on there about you know, when reading in the digital world. And so a couple things one, yeah, the research is pretty clear. Kids tend to say they enjoy reading digitally more than paper, sometimes. What we know is shorter things to read like an article, it doesn't really matter whether that's a digital format, or print format, people's performance on what they comprehend is pretty on par, it's when you read longer works, and not just for pleasure. So if you will just pick up a novel and read it digitally, that is fine. In fact, a lot of kids who, you know, aren't readers, just the fact that they don't see that there's another 400 pages to go they do a little bit better. What I'm talking about is like that deep, close reading the kind we're in the in the end, you're gonna have to answer an open ended question. And that question is gonna require to use evidence from what you read and building your case, much more than about and I think the metric was somewhere near 800, 1000, 1500 words, something like that much more than that. That's where when kids are reading digitally, things do start dropping off. And and I think we, we sometimes feel this as adults, but we wonder what like, what is the difference for the kids that idea of when I would highlight in my Kindle and try to go back and find something, I couldn't find it as easily as if I highlighted it in a paper book. Like I remember just about a third of the way through the book on the right side up towards I mean, like my brain stored that somehow encoding Yeah, and those reference points were just completely lost when it was the digital text. So one of the things that we talked about is, it's critical that, you know, one, and there was a series of, you know, D's, and there's like, digital is different, the digital is decided. And what we talked about was, there is so much of the information that's in digital format that like whether you're going to do that or not, we're not gonna say we're not going to do digital, it just has to be on paper. That's not going to work in our world right now. But we do need to acknowledge that it's different. We have to teach kids how to deal with it. So highlighting tools, annotating tools, those things are all very, very powerful. You know, if I, if I see a tool that's got those, and an online reading tool that does not have those for students, I definitely want to go and at Renaissance we have a, we have a digital platform that provides books, 70%, informational texts, 30% literature, and what's in there is we've got all the analytic tools, and that's because we know the research that says you got to have that kind of stuff. So I think we just have to teach kids how to read digital text and that reading something digitally is different from reading something in a paper format in particular, believe that this is when you are the most exposed to having a challenge by going with a particular platform or not.

Sucheta Kamath: So you this probably that may not sit well with you. But I'm just curious what your thought about things like Blinkist? Have you heard of this is a new app that summarizes the book, How to appear intelligent at a dinner party. So they take famous books and make them bite size.

Dr. Gene Kerns: We called those Cliff Notes or Reader's Digest back when I was a kid. I mean, you'd have the same thing. I'll read the Cliff Notes, or, I mean, my mother subscribed, Reader's Digest for years, that was a summary of major books. And basically, I mean, the hope was by reading the summary, you'd say, well, I want to go read the full book. So I don't know. 

Sucheta Kamath: But this whole idea of looking smart without doing the work like I'm against that.

Dr. Gene Kerns: People, always people, people have been doing that for decades, whether we have the technology or not, there's not I mean, like, you know, in fact, I had my 11th grade English teacher, I swear to you her her name was Mrs. Pickles. And we'd love she was great. Mrs. Angie Pickles. And her response if we ever said Mrs. Pickles. When are we ever going to need this? She would say cocktail chatter dear, cocktail chatter. So anything, which you're going to couldn't fit in? It was it was cocktail, someday at a dinner party somewhere, you're gonna, you're gonna reference this, and that's gonna be meaningful?

Sucheta Kamath: Well, I've been like, so enthralled by this discussion. And really, I think the point for me that has stuck out is nothing is going to happen differently unless there's some deliberate effort. And we need to just come to terms with that fact, explicitly teach something and systematically teach it. And I, you know, even in my executive function curriculum with ExQ, one of the things that we say teach executive function as explicitly, systematically and in a personalized way to all children, and don't wait for a disorder, disability or difficulty, because by design, you're going to have a difficulty because you're doing something challenging, otherwise, you won't be having difficulty. Yeah. So as we close out, what are oh, I had a question about this, which is one of my favorite books series was a series of unfortunate events with Lemony Snicket, one of the most famous things he did, which was always have higher order vocabulary words, with an explanation as if you know, so he kind of aided students children reading by using like a mirror, like, let me explain, but Violet is explaining or something I forget, now, the, but I love books that introduce concepts and didn't leave the reader, younger readers stranded, but kind of aided them along the way. And that's really, my, my children were totally hooked on it and obsessed about it. And we stood in line once for all close to five hours to get his signature, when my son was in third grade, and he had come. So from 3pm until 11pm, we stood in line. So what are your thoughts that what's a great, like, do you have an author or that has done a good job of roping children in to engage them? And, of course, there's so many of them. So I'm really not don't mean to put you on the spot. But just curious what you think about that? 

Dr. Gene Kerns: Well, I mean, I think the wonderful thing is there has been such a boon in young adult literature. I mean, the you know, there was young adult literature when I was a kid, but, you know, we did live through I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and all that kind of stuff. But wow, we really live through a really interesting period when you had Harry Potter. And I mean, when you think about the number of kids that started reading that, that didn't read anything else, and then the you transitioned into, I mean, I forget the exact order, but I know we have the whole vampire series. You know, so. And then we had the Hunger Games. And you know, so there, we've had these novels that were just so different and so compelling that just massive numbers of kids were willing to trust that author, you know, I think there's just so much good stuff. I would if I could give a short recommendation to people, what I would say is this independent reading piece, which we want kids to read independently, don't sweat the details ever so much about what it is they're reading, if they're reading and they're having so good. You know, a guy that I work on I wrote, I wrote a blog about this called Why reluctant readers I didn't say struggling because not every struggling reader is reluctant. You know, sometimes there are kids that can read or I mean, not every reluctant reader is a struggling reader. But I read a blog titled Why reluctant readers need authors they can trust. And actually it was pretty clear. I mean, it was related to Judy Blume. You know, read, and it was one of my colleagues who when they started an independent reading program, his middle school kid who was a very high scoring reader, all he'd read was Judy Blume. So the dads all frustrated my kids reading Judy Blume Shouldn't he be reading something more important, and he said I walked into the library because the library was doing this reading motivation program and it kept kept coming home with Judy Blume books. And he said, I walked into the library and I was gonna give that library and a piece of my mind and his principal. So he knew or so he could say these things. And he said, she held up her hand and she said, stop in your tracks. I know why you're here about the Judy Blume books, you think he ought to be reading something more? And she said, Let me tell you something, leave him alone. He's never willingly read anything else before and he's reading all of those books. And then she paused for a second said, besides, we only got two more Judy Blume books in the library. So then what is he going? Well, what he did is he found three more in the local county library. But But in that moment, look at the motivation and the motivation and motivation because later on what my colleague said was, that was the best advice that anybody ever gave me about my own child and I was I needed to leave him alone. Let's not worry too much when particularly when kids never read before. I mean, I I had high school kids that you know, when I taught senior Amis have walked up to me with, you know, the first book of Harry Potter, which didn't have the highest readability level and they say, Mr. Kerns, can I read this? I know it's a little bit below my ideal reading zone. But can I read this? The last thing I was ever going to say was no. I mean, are you kidding me? I would have been crazy. So you know, what we say is manage your love that independent reading practice, but not too rigidly.

Sucheta Kamath: I love love, love that. And, you know, my parallel is I worked with a lot of children with ADHD, one of the things that I saw reluctance to read because of attention. And also I think having very unique interests and not finding anything to read about or cared about, or nobody was talking about in the academic context. I had a kid who was obsessed with Captain Underpants. And the parents were getting really annoyed because many more of those books can come home. Exactly. And also it looked a little juvenile and he's enjoying it. When have you sit seen him sit and finish a whole book in one set? Like isn't that something worthy of celebrating?

Dr. Gene Kerns: I had a middle school kid that read goosebumps books, like candy? And I mean, we had eventually notice, we've negotiated like, okay, for every two goosebumps books, you're gonna read one other thing, but this was a kid that wasn't a reader and the teacher said he reads a book a night like he comes in every day excited to tell me about what he's reading, leave him alone, eventually he'll grow out of I mean, he'll find something else that want to be something else you know, and remember three kinds of reading he's still going to do the academic reading the reading to me reading with I'm going to do the reading to this is just part of it so you know know when to jump in and manage it as you can and know when you just need to back off and for kid that's never read when they find an author that they trust let them go with it and ride that train as far as it'll take them.

Sucheta Kamath: Gene You know, I could talk with you forever and keeping my listeners needs we might have to end our conversation so as you're very generous last time and in recommending some books is there anything top of the mind when it when it comes to literacy research that you would like to highlight? And you have mentioned a lot of fun books for young adults as well, which is always nice.

Dr. Gene Kerns: My book was profoundly impacted by The Reading Mind which we always already mentioned, Daniel Willingham's book. And Dehaene, you know, don't get a little bit more advanced. So if you read Willingham and you want to read something more advanced, go to Dehaene don't start with Dehaene that's, that's going deeper in the water. You didn't get anything but hey, it's an example. Willingham gave you background knowledge that allows you to then engage with Dehaene. The other one that was really important for me was E.D. Hirsch's book, Why Knowledge Matters. So

Sucheta Kamath: I saw you quoted her alot.

Dr. Gene Kerns: Yeah, it's Ed. Yeah. And then Wexler, you're probably thinking also, like Natalie Wexler's book, The Knowledge Gap that's out there. They're both very similar. They go in different directions. Wexler says, here's the research, here's what it means for curriculum. E.D. Hirsch. moreso says, here's the research, here's what it means for policy and assessment. So they they just, they begin with the same case, and then they just go in different directions. But my book if it wasn't for Willingham's book, and E.D. Hirsch's book, I probably wouldn't have written what I wrote. But they were just so many good ideas that needed to be pulled together and share, that's why we did it.

Sucheta Kamath: I really recommend this book for all those educators. Because I think one I love that it's very, very research based, but it's so practical, every section has guidance, you will have immediately you will be able to apply it. So you don't need to do that. Like who when I start the year, think about it. And parents, if you're just nerds like me, then you will enjoy it because even the young forming brains, I think it's so interesting. If you're not in the field that I am as a parent, you'd never think about vocabulary or phonics or anything. You're not even thinking about knowledge. You're just saying read and grow. So this is really, really helpful. Well, thank you so much for being here today, Gene. Thank you audiences for tuning in. Once again, thank you for considering Full PreFrontal exposing the mysteries of executive function as your go to podcast. Please share this podcast we will be linking to a lot of resources that gene has mentioned and his own writings. And keep in touch. share this podcast with loved ones, your family, friends, and always, always lead that brain grow. So thank you for joining.