EBP Exchange · Podcast Recap
Based on a conversation with Dr. Carol Tolman — literacy expert, LETRS leader, and co-president of the Reading League New Hampshire chapter.
"You can know all the great information and knowledge, but if you don't know how to transfer that into practice in the classroom, it just falls flat."
— Dr. Carol Tolman
We talk a lot about the science of reading. We talk about evidence-based instruction, structured literacy, phoneme awareness. But according to Dr. Carol Tolman, one of the country's leading literacy experts, the real problem isn't knowledge. It's transfer.
In a recent conversation on the EBP Exchange podcast, Dr. Tolman was direct: researchers and educators often can't hear each other. Research happens in sterile environments with small, controlled groups. Teachers stand in front of 28 kids, someone vomits during a vocabulary lesson, and life goes on. The gap between those two realities is vast, and pretending otherwise sets teachers up to fail.
One of Dr. Tolman's sharpest observations: too many schools equate buying a program with implementing one. Evidence-based instruction, she argues, means teaching students, not the program. Fidelity matters, but so does flexibility rooted in data. Without both, even the best curriculum collects dust.
That's where coaching comes in. Not a once-a-year PD day but real, boots-on-the-ground coaching. Modeling. Co-teaching. Looking at student data together and adjusting in real time. The states making the biggest gains in literacy, including Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama, have one thing in common: coaching is treated as infrastructure, not a line item to cut.
Dr. Tolman was equally clear about what derails progress: siloed change. You can train every teacher in a building and still go nowhere if the principal is scheduling ELA blocks wrong, or if a new central office hire decides to cut coaches to save money. She's seen it happen in other states and right here in New Hampshire.
Real, lasting change happens when everyone, from legislators to paraprofessionals, shares a common language about how kids learn to read, what the data says, and what to do next. That's not a training program. That's a culture shift. And it takes three to five years minimum, not one good PD season.
THE TAKEAWAY
Knowledge is the foundation, but it's not the finish line. If we want every child to become a reader, we need to stop treating teacher training as a one-time event and start building the systems that make sustained, evidence-based instruction possible for everyone.
Listen to the full episode of the EBP Exchange to hear Dr. Tolman's complete conversation, including her thoughts on the prison-to-school pipeline, what evidence-based instruction actually looks like in practice, and why New Hampshire is at a pivotal moment for literacy reform.
