Read Like a Champion (with Doug Lemov)

EconTalk

Library of Economics and Liberty

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2025

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

Many students graduate high school today without having read a book cover to cover. Many students struggle to learn to read at all. How did this happen? Listen as educator and author Doug Lemov talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the failed fads in reading education, the mistaken emphasis on vocabulary as a skill, and the importance of background knowledge for thinking and reading comprehension. Lemov and Roberts also discuss their love of difficult-to-read authors, the power of reading in groups, the value of keeping a reading journal, and how even basketball can be more enjoyable when we have the right terminology.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is July 8th, 2025, and my guest is author and educational entrepreneur Doug Lamov,
0:43.3	the chief knowledge officer of Teach Like a Champion, an organization that does professional
0:47.5	development for teachers and rights curricula for them. This is Doug's third appearance on the program.
0:53.0	He was last year in November of 2016 talking about reading.
0:57.7	We're going to talk about reading again today, specifically based on his new book, co-authored with Colin Driggs and Erica Woolway,
1:05.7	The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading.
1:09.7	Doug, welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:11.6	Good to see you, Russ. Thanks for having me.
1:13.6	This is a handbook for teachers, but it also has deep lessons for anyone who reads, for parents of children who are readers.
1:23.6	And I want to start off with how you start off in the book with what went wrong with reading in America, the teaching of reading in America in recent years, and the reporting of Emily Hanford, an investigative journalist who wrote a, did a podcast on this topic, and we will link to that what did she what did she uncover
1:48.1	yeah uh i mean it's it's tragic what she uncovered to describe her work as the most
1:52.4	important piece of education and journalism in the in the 21st century what she discovered is
1:57.6	that early reading programs in american schools so so this is when students learn to read.
2:04.6	The most popular programs have been based more in ideology than on science, and we have learned a lot about the science of how people learn to read. And they really ignored science
2:21.5	that was out there. It was in the, you know, it was, it was available to them. And for a variety
2:30.0	of reasons that we can get into the most popular early reading programs, instead of teaching students' systematic
	...

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