Literacy and Learning Summer Reading Recommendations
from Our Founder
For many teachers and administrators, summer isn’t a break. It’s a chance to brush up on professional learning you didn’t have time for during the school year, such as how to teach new and struggling readers the skills they need to reach fluency.
There’s been a lot of discussion recently about what’s the best way to teach reading. To help you navigate this, Dr. Carolyn Brown, Co-Founder and Chief Academic Officer, pulled together a literacy summer reading list to translate and share the latest learnings about the science of how students learn to read. Here are a few resources to get started – more will be added throughout the summer.
Carolyn’s Literacy Summer Reading Recommendations
make it stick
By Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger, and Mark A. McDaniel
Through an engaging storytelling format, powerful principles of learning from cognitive science are demonstrated to be generalizable across many different disciplines—from neurosurgery to playing an instrument to flying an airplane. These same principles can be applied to skill development in education.
Although apparently counterintuitive, it provides compelling evidence for the need to incorporate new thinking from the science of learning into our understanding of memory retention and retrieval, particularly as it relates to automatic word recognition in reading development.
The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition
By Wesley A. Hoover and William E. Tunmer
This book is a well-organized overview of the cognitive processes required for students to become proficient readers and how teachers can most effectively advance their development.
- The initial sections focus on the cognitive structures required to learn to read.
- The following sections discuss practice in light of standards, assessment, curriculum and instruction.
It provides specific background knowledge on the subject of learning to read, while Make it Stick focuses on learning principles that generalize across multiple subjects and disciplines. The two books also serve as a contrast of a traditional role of practice and mastery with one that is organized for complex skill development and automaticity.
