I help teachers get struggling readers to grade level in weeks, not years. Founder, Reading Simplified · Lead developer, IES-funded TRI · https://xitter.cf/t.co/Dj9T7Qyufd
Colorado Springs, CO
Joined June 2013
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"We're flipping them like pancakes!" Amy's pull-out kids now exit intervention in as little as 8 weeks.
Why do kids sit in intervention for months? We wait for mastery. Move on at about 70%. They'll keep practicing the old pattern inside the new one.
Marnie Ginsberg retweeted
Teens are my jam. After 5 sessions, one of my private clients came in and told me that she wrote 5 words without needing to stop to think how to spell them! These are words like perception, invisibility, and beneficial. Huge. I will always remember the sparkle in her eye!
I am so grateful for @EBLIreads and @ReadSimplified that have helped me streamline my process for these students. Success builds motivation which increases engagement. These are key factors in literacy intervention found in the IES guidelines for adolescents. And we finally have a pedagogy that addresses these factors for our older students.
“It’s thrilling to hear what Engelmann could do in a preschool classroom 60 years ago. It also shouldn’t be a relic, plangent evidence of what we could have done but didn’t.”
The second season of ‘Sold a Story,’ a podcast about education, opens in 1966 in an Illinois classroom. The teacher is a former Chicago marketing executive named Siegfried Engelmann. Before him sit seven Black children. He calls out arithmetic questions and they answer together, as is the norm in direct instruction, the teaching method Engelmann pioneered. The lesson moves on to algebra. The children keep pace. Then the creator and host of the podcast, Emily Hanford, cuts in. The children, she notes, are in preschool.
Sixty years later, we have UC Berkeley math teaching professor Zvezdelina Stankova complaining, in a San Francisco ‘Standard’ op-ed that went viral this summer, that students at the University of California’s flagship campus were struggling with “fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.” What happened?
A year after Engelmann showed off his method in a recorded half-hour lesson, President Lyndon B. Johnson instructed education officials in his administration to evaluate the best way to teach poor children. They landed on Engelmann’s direct instruction — but it was never implemented nationwide. The reason was Engelmann’s “militaristic” approach to education, as the education writer Alfie Kohn explained in his criticism of direct instruction, which he said is today favored by “right-wing activists” who “wanted to make sure that learning itself is conceived as a fundamentally passive process.” Engelmann’s supporters’ politics were off, which meant his ideas were bad. And since Kohn gave this assessment in 2022, it seems that little has changed.
Read more about how we’ve forgotten the art of teaching kids math, from the second season of ‘Sold a Story’: nymag.visitlink.me/1BaDzx
❝Andrist said other program leaders experienced rage. She felt grief.
“Just thinking about so many kids’ lives who could be dramatically different than what they’re going to be,” she said. “That is probably the heartbreak of my career.”❞
Why America’s massive educational experiment didn’t transform schools
apmreports.org/story/2026/10…
I’m assuming the disruption of our environment has greatly exaggerated the symptoms of menopause for many women, making it not the original design.
Agreed that interests-only ain't working. However, teaching them well and attending to their interests are not mutually exclusive ends. We do both.
Marnie Ginsberg retweeted
My kids now have to solve age appropriate math problems before each episode of Bluey, thanks to the miracle of AI reverse engineering and upgrading my TV 🔥🔥🔥
Tonight!
“If the kid hasn’t learned it, the teacher hasn’t taught it.”
That line from Sold a Story Season 2 is why I started Reading Simplified 25+ years ago.
Tomorrow 8pm ET: @BuildMathMinds (math) + me (reading) on episodes 1 & 2. Same factions, different subject
❝So, the year that Ronald Reagan was settling into the Oval Office, I learned to write, 'i hav a gœt.'❞
Can you read this? If not, you might not have grown up in rural Kentucky in the 1980s.
I was taught to read using a language that no longer exists: shorturl.at/XIwKI
Watch on Facebook: facebook.com/share/1Gnib2R5Y…
OR YouTube: youtube.com/live/FI6oylNH9VY…
“If the kid hasn’t learned it, the teacher hasn’t taught it.”
That line from Sold a Story Season 2 is why I started Reading Simplified 25+ years ago.
Tomorrow 8pm ET: @BuildMathMinds (math) + me (reading) on episodes 1 & 2. Same factions, different subject
“We’re flipping students like pancakes. Their teacher tells us they’re struggling and then we work with them and send them back in 3 weeks.”
That’s how an interventionist’s colleague describes her work: struggling readers come in, and they’re back in class in 3 weeks.
It’s a vivid line, and it deserves to be taken seriously. It’s one clear example of what can happen when instruction is efficient, diagnostic, and targeted. It isn’t a guarantee or a promise that every struggling reader needs 3 weeks, which is still unusual even for Reading Simplified, and it’s no reason to minimize students with more complex needs.
We’ve had 5+ years of Science of Reading momentum, and state regulations, training requirements, and district conversations have shifted.
That progress matters.
Yet in many places the 95% reading success goal researchers have shown is possible still feels far away.
So it’s fair to ask whether we’ve lost some urgency, whether we’ve lowered expectations because the work has felt so hard, and whether we’ve confused “more aligned” with “more effective for this child today”.
Teachers are not the problem. They’ve been working inside systems that often give them too many disconnected pieces and too few tools for fast, responsive decision-making.
Reading Simplified is built for a different kind of instructional rhythm: assess what the student can do, teach with high-leverage routines, watch the response and adjust quickly, then move the student into real reading and writing as soon as possible. That kind of instruction can renew momentum because it gives teachers clearer next steps and students more chances to show measurable growth.
The 95% goal should keep pressing us toward better tools, higher expectations, and faster evidence of progress, instead of becoming a slogan we admire from a distance.
This week, look for signs that students are moving faster than before: more accurate blending, stronger word reading, better spelling attempts, smoother connected text.
What’s one measurable sign of faster progress you’ll watch for in your next reading group?
#ScienceOfReading #ReadingIntervention #StructuredLiteracy #ReadingSimplified #LiteracyInstruction
Kids who resist reading aren't lazy. They're sick of getting it wrong. I'm speaking on day 1 of the free Close the Reading Gap Summit (Oct 19–25) with Dr. Louisa Moats and more. Free ticket: link.closethereadinggap.com/…
Big Claude user here with some agentic actions for my online biz.
Where should I start with Grok bot?
Marnie Ginsberg retweeted
Prepare yourselves! The upcoming season of Sold a Story gets at deep-seated cultural fears that systemic instruction will turn kids into robots, says @ehanford: