Finding fluency at the heart of comprehension, with Doug Lemov
Transcripts and additional resources:
Meet Our Guest(s):
Doug Lemov
Doug Lemov is a former teacher and school principal whose books describe the techniques of high-performing teachers. His best-known book, Teach Like a Champion, has been translated into more than a dozen languages. The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading, published in July 2025 and co-written with Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway, looks at how cognitive science can be better applied to the teaching of reading. Doug holds a bachelor’s in English from Hamilton College, a master’s in English Literature from Indiana University, and a Master’s of Business Administration from the Harvard Business School.
Meet our host, Susan Lambert
Susan Lambert is Chief Academic Officer of Literacy at Amplify and host of Science of Reading: The Podcast. Throughout her career, she has focused on creating high-quality learning environments using evidence-based practices. Lambert is a mom of four, a grandma of four, a world traveler, and a collector of stories.
As the host of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Lambert explores the increasing body of scientific research around how reading is best taught. A former classroom teacher, administrator, and curriculum developer, she’s dedicated to turning theory into best practices that educators can put right to use in the classroom, and to showcasing national models of reading instruction excellence.
Quotes
“When you know the science, you should have the autonomy to make real decisions and to solve problems in your classroom. That's how education works.”
“If you're not a fluent reader, you can't be a deep reader.”
“The research is clear that when you start to read expressively externally, then your internal reading voice while reading silently is much more expressive and therefore infused with more meaning.”
“Fluent reading, when it includes prosody, is meaning made audible.”
“I just think it's easy for us to overlook how profoundly groupish we are, how we yearn for group formation, how stories, when they're told well, when they're shared, they bind us together in an experience.”
“When we're sharing this experience that we're able to connect with the text itself, we're able to infuse some meaning through how we're reading that text. That lends us to a depth of comprehension that's really where we want any reader to get to.”
“Comprehension just isn't coming out of a book knowing what the author said; it’s deeply connected to the content that you just experienced.”