Why You Should Buy into the ‘Sold a Story’ Podcast
Let me get this hard sell on the table right up front: You should listen to “Sold a Story,” a podcast about reading instruction in U.S. schools. After all, you can be concerned that 1 in 3 American fourth graders read below a basic level and still not want a deep dive into how literacy is taught. But “Sold a Story” is about more than a national problem; it’s about a deeply personal struggle experienced by families of all kinds.
In the hands of adept reporter and storyteller Emily Hanford, that deep dive unfolds with crystal clarity, emotional anchors and dramatic cliffhangers to spotlight why many students struggle to read: It is because many schools don’t teach them the specific skills they need to successfully do so.
The podcast’s basic premise is that extremely popular approaches to teaching young kids to read — to decode written words — give short shrift to explicit lessons that connect letters in words to the sounds they represent. In many schools, this explicit phonics instruction is sprinkled into reading lessons, but in woefully inadequate amounts and crowded out by other strategies, including “three-cueing” — which coaches students to use context or pictures to guess what unknown words are. Research, much of it decades old and now called the Science of Reading, shows that systematic phonics instruction is key to helping students become fluent readers. But these other approaches have largely ignored it.
Why? In six episodes, Hanford and her colleague Christopher Peak deftly stitch together the complete picture: an overview of those popular approaches to reading instruction, the national political battle over how to teach literacy and the reading guru whose three apostles, with their billion-dollar publishing company, championed this flawed approach.
