Reach All Readers

Reach All Readers is the interview podcast Anna Geiger built out of her earlier show, Triple R Teaching. She hosts, and the episode announcing the rebrand puts the mission plainly: help teachers understand and apply the science of reading so they can reach every student. Geiger ran the Measured Mom website for more than a decade and wrote a book that shares the podcast's name, and the show notes for each episode still live at TheMeasuredMom.com. The guest list moves between research and practice. Dr. Louisa Moats, author of Speech to Print, appears in an episode the host frames as the start of a series on spelling, and she makes the case for word origins: the doubling rule in words like shell and stuff belongs to the Anglo-Saxon layer of English, and so do compounds like coattail. Drs. Heidi Anne Mesmer and Katie Hilden discuss their book There's Research for That, and the conversation works through what the fluency studies actually found. Rereading and wide reading both help; reading aloud with corrective feedback is the piece that matters most. Then the show turns to the classroom floor. Jessica Farmer of Farmer Love Phonics describes review the way she runs it, one grapheme per slide, fast, with the whole class answering in chorus so a student who has forgotten a sound hears it from everyone else. John Bennetts, whom Geiger heard present with Dr. Devin Kearns at the Plain Talk conference, raises a quieter problem. Teachers in different tiers and grades word basic routines differently with no ill intent, and the example of the word sheep with its digraph underlined shows how that drift can confuse a child moving between settings. Parents get episodes of their own. Michelle Henderson, a reading specialist and parent coach, names the red flags, guessing strategies, three-cueing, leveled books sent home, and insists that a child is not a reading level. Dr. Irene Daria talks about discovering her son's school was not teaching him to read, and about the fear of pushing back in a New York City system where a principal's word could shape a child's next school. Geiger interviews with an obvious appetite for the material. She had read Mesmer and Hilden's book before they sat down, she asks guests to go a little further on the point that interested her, and she closes every conversation with directions to the show notes. Some episodes are replays and are labeled that way. A fall series brings in classroom teachers for shorter conversations, which the host describes as ten to twenty minutes each. The production is homemade in the best sense; one summer recording carries the sound of her son practicing saxophone in the background. The Triple R Teaching sign-off, a promise to help teachers reflect, refine and recharge, still closes several episodes, and it remains a fair description of what the show is trying to do.