Literacy Now

The International Literacy Association (ILA) has announced the appointment of a new editorial team for The Reading Teacher (RT), ILA’s leading journal focused on connecting literacy research with classroom practice. Bringing complementary expertise across early and middle childhood literacy, teacher preparation, and research methodology, the incoming team is committed to maintaining RT as a trusted source of rigorous, relevant, and accessible literacy scholarship.

Representing institutions across North Carolina, this six-person team brings extensive experience in literacy research, teacher education, classroom practice, and scholarly publishing.

 
• Dennis S. Davis, professor of literacy education, North Carolina State University

 
• Jill F. Grifenhagen, associate professor of literacy education, North Carolina State University


 
• Yolanda Dunston, professor, North Carolina Central University


 
• Annemarie Horton Hindman, professor of applied developmental science and special education, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill


 
• Rebecca Lee Payne Jordan, associate professor of literacy education, Salem College


 
• Jackie Eunjung Relyea, associate professor of literacy education, North Carolina State University

New editors bring a commitment to connecting rigorous literacy research with the needs of educators

The team’s vision centers on the distinctive role RT plays in bridging literacy research and practice. They aim to balance rigorous peer-reviewed scholarship with relevance and accessibility for classroom teachers, teacher educators, reading specialists, and other literacy professionals.

“In our view, there is no other journal in the educational research landscape quite like RT. It occupies a unique space as a practitioner journal that carefully balances usable insights with methodological rigor,” the team said. “We are proud to be in a discipline with such a vibrant community of authors dedicated to moving knowledge across the so-called knowing-doing gap.”

At a time when educators have access to a growing volume of information about literacy instruction, the team sees RT’s commitment to research-informed, peer-reviewed scholarship as increasingly important. They plan to build on the journal’s reputation by ensuring that educators have access to timely research and practical insights grounded in rigorous inquiry.

A central priority will be keeping the journal responsive to the questions and challenges educators encounter in their work. The editors plan to seek regular input from practitioners about the research they need, using those insights to help identify timely topics and inform future journal content. They also intend to strengthen the author and reviewer experience through clear expectations, efficient editorial processes, and high-quality peer review.

Davis and Grifenhagen have collaborated for a decade at North Carolina State University, and the larger team brings together literacy leaders from a range of higher education institutions, including public universities, a historically Black university, and a small private college.

Together, the editors plan to build on RT’s longstanding role as a trusted resource for educators, supporting scholarship that addresses the most pressing questions in literacy while providing clear and actionable implications for practice.

The incoming team’s term begins this year and concludes in 2030. 

RT provides the latest peer-reviewed scholarship to literacy educators working with children up to age 12. RT’s classroom-ready articles cover topics from curriculum, instruction, and assessment to strategies for teaching diverse populations of literacy learners. Full text views of RT articles garner more than a half million per year.

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This is Part II of a series. See Part I for a more introductory exploration of the topic.

Small-group reading instruction (SGRI) is a targeted teaching approach that provides focused support, practice, and feedback to students with similar reading needs. Research has identified several key elements that contribute to effective SGRI, including:

Use assessment data

Teachers work with students who bring a wide range of skills, backgrounds, and learning needs. Universal screeners may be used to identify classroom-level trends and highlight students who are in most need of support. However, varied forms of assessment, including diagnostic assessments and progress-monitoring tools, must be embedded in reading instruction. As explained by Laurie Elish-Piper and colleagues, authentic and ongoing assessments are needed to make grouping adjustments and focus lesson topics throughout the year.

Keep it brief

Every minute of instructional time is critical; it is important to provide whole-class, small-group, and individualized instruction every day. Concise small-group lessons reserve time for the other instructional grouping contexts. While the number of minutes may vary with students' age and the total instructional time available for reading instruction, 10 to 20 minutes per group is typically recommended.

Stay flexible

Small groups should be flexible. Grouping students based on a specific skill or strategy need (e.g., decoding words or making inferences) allows the teacher to provide short, targeted lessons, providing explicit teaching in areas of need, while allowing the teacher to constantly monitor and assess student progress.

Target specific skills

SGRI allows teachers to provide explicit teaching and modeling, followed by immediate opportunities for purposeful practice and active participation.  Student learning increases when instruction is targeted to a specific skill. In addition, Kristin Conradi Smith and Elfrieda Hiebert remind us of the importance of selecting texts that align with the instructional objective and students' interests.

Boost engagement

Seth Parsons and Joy Erickson explain that motivation and engagement are crucial components of reading success. Well-designed SGRI increases accountable, meaningful student talk and allows for deeper engagement with texts. It also provides students with the appropriate level of challenge to increase success and build confidence. This, in turn, motivates students to read.  

Review the research

SGRI allows teachers ample opportunity to provide each reader with personal, specific, and immediate feedback. A review of research conducted by Karianne Megard Grønli and colleagues suggests that effective feedback develops skills and fosters student agency and motivation. 

This post was developed in conjunction with members of ILA’s Administrator Collaborative, which includes Heidi Becker, Nabat Erdogan, Brigid Gala, Lisa Hill, Aileen Hower, Kristin Johnson, and Jill Tussey. For more information, register for the webinar on September 30, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. ET, for an opportunity to explore SGRI more deeply and ask questions live.

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Sunday, August 30, 2026, brought news that I was simply not prepared to receive—the passing of my dear friend and colleague, P. David Pearson.

I am still trying to absorb the reality that David is no longer with us.

There are some people whose presence in our lives becomes so familiar, so enduring, and so deeply connected to the history of our professional journeys that it is almost impossible to imagine the world without them in it. For me, David was one of those people.

My memories of David go back much farther than many people might realize.

I first had the opportunity to meet David when I was a very young graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and he was a very young assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. Neither of us could have known then where our professional journeys would take us, but I remember being impressed by David.

There was something about his intellect, his curiosity, and the way he thought about reading and learning that made me believe I was meeting someone who was going to make a significant contribution to our field. In fact, I made a prediction: P. David Pearson was going to become a world-renowned scholar. (Spoiler alert: I was right.)

One of the things I admired most about David was his unwillingness to accept simple answers to complicated questions. He understood that literacy learning is complex because children are complex. He knew that teaching is complex because teachers make consequential decisions every day. And he understood that research should illuminate that complexity rather than erase it.

David challenged ideas without diminishing people. He understood that rigorous scholarship did not require intellectual arrogance. He could disagree with you and still make you want to continue the conversation—a truly rare gift.

Years later, when I served as president of the National Reading Conference (now the Literacy Research Association), I invited David to deliver the keynote at our annual conference. I knew what he would bring to that audience: Intellectual rigor, insight, provocation, humor, and an extraordinary ability to make us think differently about questions we thought we already understood.

He did not disappoint.

When David finished speaking, he received a 15-minute standing ovation. And as I watched hundreds of literacy scholars rise to their feet to honor him, I thought about the young assistant professor I had met years earlier when I was a graduate student at Wisconsin.

I will never forget that moment.

It is impossible to talk about David without acknowledging the magnitude of his contribution to our field. He fundamentally changed how generations of educators understood reading comprehension by helping us recognize that comprehension is not something that simply happens after children decode words—that readers actively construct meaning, bringing knowledge, experiences, language, expectations, and purposes to their encounters with texts. And his work on the gradual release of responsibility provided educators with a powerful way to conceptualize teaching: Teachers model and support learning, students participate with guidance, and responsibility gradually shifts until learners can act independently.

Right now, however, I am not thinking first about P. David Pearson, the internationally renowned scholar.

I am thinking about David, the person.

I am thinking about my colleague.

I am thinking about my friend.

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Editor's note: This article is part of a series of reflections honoring P. David Pearson's lasting legacy. For more, read his memorial and Celebration of Life.

On Sunday, August 30, 2026, P. David Pearson, one of the all-time most influential scholars in the field of literacy education, died after a yearlong fight with bladder cancer. He was 85.

His son, Matthew, shared the news in a public post on Pearson’s Facebook page and included a link to the online cancer journal his father had been keeping. The last few entries were not from Pearson, but by Matthew and his sister Susan, whose poignant contribution referenced Pearson’s “epic academic career” only briefly.

“I can't and won't recount his contributions to the field of early childhood literacy here,” she wrote. “That's a task for his colleagues and professional friends.”

Those from the literacy field who spoke at Pearson’s Celebration of Life, however, kept the focus on Pearson the person—and for good reason.

“The culture of academia can sometimes be prickly and competitive,” said Gina Cervetti, Pearson’s longtime friend and collaborator. “But David’s instinct was to acknowledge and include and lift up everyone around him.”

“His attitude toward life and work was ‘the more, the merrier,’” she said. “His deeper instinct was always to make people feel like they belonged.”

To illustrate her point, Cervetti shared an anecdote about helping Pearson put together the invitation list for his Festschrift a few years back.

Cervetti said she panicked when she saw that his list had grown to include 619 people (“Because rooms have maximum capacity,” she quipped). Pearson’s take was a bit different. He told her that he knew not everyone would attend, but regardless, he wanted all 619 to know that he had thought of them.

It was in the same spirit that Pearson’s family issued an open invitation to his memorial, both in person and via livestream. The majority of those who spoke were members of Pearson’s family or personal friends. Even the few who first met Pearson in professional contexts spoke very little about his extraordinary body of work.

Cervetti, for instance, began her remarks with the simple statement that Pearson “changed the way we teach children to read,” then added, “I could speak for hours about David as a scholar and leader, but that isn’t what’s in my heart today.”

The same went for Freddy Hiebert, who recalled how she had once mentioned to Pearson that driving California Highway 1 with the top down was on her bucket list. They were both living in the Midwest at the time, she said, but when they met up at a conference in San Francisco, Pearson was waiting for her with a convertible.

Hiebert and Cervetti both talked about Pearson’s mentorship and the incredible personal recommendations he’d written for them and countless others early in their careers, shaping the trajectory they would follow. It wasn’t unusual for the line between professional and personal to disappear in the process.

“My academic mentor became my collaborator, my collaborator became my friend, and my friend became one of the most important people in my life,” Cervetti said tearfully.

It turns out that Pearson was one of the most important people in a lot of lives. Their stories were punctuated by family members reading poetry Pearson had penned later in life as well as a friend who sang and played guitar. The eclectic, pre-event playlist included everything from “Amazing Grace” to “Graceland.” And for all of these reasons, despite being open to the public, Pearson’s memorial felt intimate and, at times, deeply personal.

More tributes to P. David Pearson will emerge over the coming weeks. And while many of those will include highlights from an extraordinary career, it is almost certain that Pearson’s legacy won’t be limited to what appears on his CV.

As Cervetti said, “David took pride in his accomplishments, but I think he took even more pride in all the people he had helped along the way.”

 

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Editor's note: This article is part of a series of reflections honoring P. David Pearson's lasting legacy. For more, read his memorial and a message from Patricia A. Edwards.

On Sunday, August 30, the field of literacy education suffered a massive loss when two of its most influential scholars, P. David Pearson and Peter Raymond Freebody, passed away within hours of one another.

Pearson and Freebody shared striking parallels across careers that fundamentally changed how literacy is taught around the world.

In 1983, Pearson co-developed the Gradual Release of Responsibility (GRR) model with Margaret C. Gallagher. The groundbreaking framework, often characterized as “I Do/We Do/You Do,” marked a fundamental shift in teaching by articulating how responsibility for learning can move purposefully from teacher to student.

Seven years later, on the other side of the globe, Australian literacy researcher Freebody and co-author Allan Luke published the first paper on their Four Resources Model, a framework that identified four reader “roles”: Code breaker, text participant, text user, and text analyst. The model recognized each role as necessary but insufficient on its own.

Both were recipients of the William S. Gray Citation of Merit (Pearson in 1990, Freebody in 2014), served on ILA’s Literacy Research Panel, and were inducted into the prestigious Reading Hall of Fame. They will also be remembered for their decades of mentorship to their students and colleagues alike.

The two shared something else: A rejection of the whole language/phonics-first binary central to the so-called Reading Wars, with both resisting efforts to reduce complex questions about literacy teaching and learning to opposing camps.

In 2001, Pearson penned "Life in the Radical Middle: A Personal Apology for a Balanced View of Reading." In it, he described how his positions had led some to characterize him first as a skills-focused cognitive behaviorist and, years later, as a whole language advocate. Neither, he wrote, fit. Instead, he argued for what he called the "radical middle," writing, "I have tried to promote paradigmatic tolerance and respect—not always with resounding success, but always with conviction."

Freebody similarly rejected the idea of opposing sides. Looking back on the Reading Wars in 2012, in an essay he penned for the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia, he referred to the divide as a "spurious dichotomy" that was "more handy than productive."

The deaths of Pearson and Freebody represent a stunning double blow for the field of literacy education. Their influence can be found not only in decades of scholarship, but in classrooms around the world—not to mention the generations of researchers and educators they mentored along the way.

ILA will share more about Pearson and Freebody in the coming days and weeks, including individual tributes celebrating their lives, work, and lasting impact on the field. Those of you who would like to share memories or reflections about Pearson or Freebody are invited to email social@reading.org.