As an undergraduate English Literature major, I studied John Keats’ theory of “Negative Capability” for my thesis, rather than pursue a teaching certificate.  Invigorated by Keats, Camus, Euripides and the like, I began my teaching career in 1970 in Neillsville, Wisconsin at a residential treatment center for children identified as “seriously emotionally disturbed.” I realized quickly that those children were at greater risk for a more insidious problem—they didn’t know a lot of basic stuff that caused them to lag significantly behind their same-age peers in school achievement. This surely compounded their social-emotional and behavioral health challenges.

While teaching, I realized I too didn’t know some basic stuff, like “how to teach,” so I could reliably move students from not knowing or partially knowing to knowing more fully (ala John Carroll). Nor did I know how to help students leverage knowing at a high criterion-level of performance and automaticity. None of this was a focus, by any measure, in the teaching certification courses I pursued between 1970 and 1975.

To address this blank spot, I found my way to the University of Oregon (UO) in 1975 to learn how to best teach students struggling in the classroom. Although my intent was to return to the classroom to engage that work after my master’s degree, I was captivated by how I might move the work beyond a single classroom. Thus, I entered the doctoral program at the UO and conducted applied research in schools as part of the Direct Instruction Model of Project Follow Through (1976-1980).

Over 40 years, I had the privilege of conducting two programs of research different in both focus and scale. The first (1976-1996) concentrated on an arguably esoteric topic—the design or “architecture” of instruction with theoretical roots in the work of Bruner, Gagne, and others (e.g., Tennyson & Christensen; Markle & Tiemann; Smith & Ragan) including the father of information theory, Claude Shannon. This research was animated in critical detail by Engelmann & Carnine’s theory of instruction that allowed me as a researcher to experimentally examine intricate micro-features of instructional tasks (e.g., number, kind and sequence of examples), and lessons. In addition, I studied teaching sequences across content areas (language concept learning, reading, math) in which the architecture, when implemented with fidelity, was designed to reliably transmit information to all learners from a teacher, curriculum, program, or text.

The second program of research (1996-2005; 2007-2018) was more complex and costly and less experimentally clean, as it focused on implementation of a schoolwide reading model in grades K-4. This research included developing and testing beginning-reading assessments and instruction for use at the school, school district, and state levels. This work required collaborating with local, state, and federal education agencies across the U.S. (e.g., Alabama, California, Hawaii, Oregon) and internationally (e.g., Virgin Islands) to implement and evaluate the efficacy of a beginning-reading model designed to maximize reading achievement outcomes, especially for readers struggling to learn to read in English and Spanish.

I was honored to serve on the faculty at the University of Montana (1980-1983), Purdue University (1983-1987), and the University of Oregon (1988-2018). I also served two stints (1987-1988; 2005-2007) in the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, DC. In addition, I had the privilege of serving as:

• Committee Member (1996-1998), Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children, National Academy of Sciences.
• Co-author (1998). Reading/Language Arts Curriculum Framework K-12. Sacramento, CA: California Department of Education.
• Original Advisory Board member (1998-2005), PBS television programs, “Between the Lions” and WETA’s “Reading Rockets.”
• Invited speaker (2002), The White House, Conference on Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers, Spotlight on Teaching Reading. “The Teaching of Reading: Beyond Vulgar Dichotomies to the Science of Causality.”
• Founding Commissioner (2005-2007), National Center for Research in Special Education (NCSER), Institute of Education Studies (IES)—the research, evaluation and statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Education.
• Invited speaker (2007) with First Lady, Mrs. Laura Bush, UNESCO Roundtable on “Teacher Training and Literacy,” Paris, France.