In 1990, George Bush signed a proclamation declaring that the upcoming decade would be "The Decade of the Brain." The proclamation stated that the coming years would "Enhance public awareness of the benefits to be derived from brain research appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities." In fact, the amount of learning-related brain research completed in that decade through neuroimaging exceeded all prior brain imaging studies devoted to educational research. Yet with all the data from that decade and the continued research of the past seven years, the scientific and educational communities have not reached agreement on the best way to teach reading.

What the research has provided is a wealth of information about how the brain responds to the written word, which areas of the brain are most active during the complex processes of reading, and some of the strategies that seem to increase brain activity and efficiency. The most difficult part is to correlate brain scan activity with objective qualitative improvement in reading skill. The educational literature is saturated with reading controversies that sometimes mix fact with opinion or interpret data with biased, propitiatory interpretations. The goal to strive for is objective data from functional brain imaging that objectively correlates with cognitive response to specific reading strategies.

The more information provided from the research about how the brain learns to read better, more efficiently, and with more intrinsic motivation, the greater the expectations that will be placed upon teachers to keep up with this research information and the strategies that are derived from it. Parents read about reading breakthroughs in parenting books and magazines and don't hesitate to express their expectations to their children's teachers and school administrators. Rightfully so. In the 15 years I practiced adult and child neurology before returning to university for my teaching certification and Master of Education degree, I expected parents to be active partners in my neurological evaluations and treatments of their children. As I've written before, no parent of a child with epilepsy ever came to my neurology office and said, "Just do what you think is best without explaining my child's condition or your approach to me. Whatever happens to my child is all in your hands because you are the expert neurologist and I'm just the parent."

If parents were so removed from their child's medical care I would have been concerned about that child's well being. Similarly, as teachers we can and should expect parents to be advocates for their children, especially with the most critical of all academic skills—reading. With this book I will offer a background in the brain research related to how the "average" brain is activated sequentially as data passes along neuronal networks to the multiple processing centers that are engaged in sequence from the time print is seen on a page to various culminating actions such as verbal or written response to what was read (reading comprehension and critical analysis). Just as physicians are not specialists in all fields, general educators cannot become experts in all areas of reading difficulties and differences. There will always be the need for reading specialists. Yet, just as involved parents become allied with the physician to partner in their children's medical care, teachers with an understanding of the research about reading problems and remedial strategies will be in the best position to partner with the reading specialists, families, and students to make the process of learning to read as successful as possible. It will then fall primarily upon classroom teachers to use the art of teaching to instill in their students the love of reading.

As educators, we are in the privileged position to recognize that the learning process never ends. Just as science is always questioning itself, professional educators continue to examine, test, deconstruct, and reconstruct strategies to become better at the important job we are entrusted with. In this time of brain research focused on learning, and especially learning to read, we are in the exciting position of having neuroimaging that shows us what takes place in which parts of the brain when the intake of sensory information is successfully encoded and passes from sensory response regions through the emotional limbic system filters and on through to short term, working, relational, and ultimately long-term memory storage. We can see on scans and special quantitative electro-encephalogram recordings what strategies culminate in increased metabolic activity in the visual response centers, relational processing regions, long-term storage areas, and frontal lobe regions known to become active during executive functioning (highest level processing of information gained from reading such that it is used to form judgments, prioritize, analyze, and conceptualize).

When my daughter Malana was a student in education graduate school she acknowledged the difficulties that lay ahead but also wrote to me about the opportunities, "Teaching is not meant to be a practice in perfection. Rather it is an opportunity to continuously grow, learn, ask questions, be confused, and overcome challenges. Teaching is an especially collaborative effort. It is the classroom teacher's responsibility to work with the student, the family and a variety of professionals as part of a group to make learning to read a positive experience for all."

That is what I hope to encourage with this book—to provide the opportunity for educators to read about the latest research about how the brain reads and build enough background knowledge to form opinions about which studies seem valid and which appear biased. As you increase your understanding about the current state of brain-based reading research, you will be able to select carefully from future research claims and apply the results to develop additional classroom instruction strategies based on the new research to further promote reading success in all of your students.

The first chapters will focus on what has been concluded or deduced about the brain's processing of the written or spoken word including what differences in children's brain scans correlate with their reading successes or difficulties in the distinct aspects of the complex act of reading. This will lead into chapters about the influence of stress on the development of reading and fluency skills and neuroimaging research and strategies to improve reading comprehension and vocabulary.

Brain research has shown us the positive and negative impact of students' emotional states on the affective filter in their amygdalas. This original work related to Krashen's research on the affective filter revealed the stressors that impaired and delayed English language learning in non-English speaking students in American schools. Through neuroimaging, there is now evidence confirming the importance of preventing metabolic overload of the brain's affective filter in the emotional-limbic system. Strategies will be provided to help students maintain the ideal state of emotional homeostasis needed for sounds and words to enter the brain's reading comprehension pathways without being blocked by this affective filter. This information will be built upon with the brain compatible strategies that provide students with the motivation to persevere with the challenges of improving their reading proficiency.

Brain research compatible whole class and individualized reading activities will be detailed including specific examples of multidisciplinary units of reading across the curriculum, techniques for building reading comprehension and memory, and strategies for bringing newly acquired knowledge from reading into the highest cognitive function regions of the brain's frontal lobe where this information is used to make the connections, comparisons, and analyses that represent judgment and wisdom. Also offered will be the strategies that encourage students to choose to read in our time of the powerful siren's call of multimedia games, videos, and Internet surfing.

The emphasis of this book will be the brain research and associated strategies for reading instruction beyond decoding. The first chapter will provide a review of what has come before and preview of the possible strategies to come by describing the strongest validated research in the neuroscience regarding the earliest parts of the reading process. This chapter will therefore briefly review things like alphabetic knowledge, phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences, and use of phonetic cues to decode words as a lead-in to the main emphasis of the book—how the brain learns to read beyond decoding.

Beyond Decoding

In subjects such as brain patterning of information, development of reading fluency, vocabulary building, reading comprehension, and long-term memory storage of information learned from reading, the research is more specific and gaining more support from multicenter confirmation of data. Similarly the strategies suggested by this postdecoding research are more defined. It is therefore the strategies that coincide with the brain's activities that follow decoding that will be the emphasis of this book.

These are the parts of the reading process when the brain links the abstract orthographic representations it decodes with its system of phonological codes. This is when patterning begins to take the decoded words and process them into comprehensible categories and when words and phrases are associated with meanings in the process of developing fluent reading. Simultaneously, word vocabulary is increasing and strategies are available to facilitate vocabulary-building skills. Ultimately the patterning of phonological coding, enriched by greater vocabulary, combines with the increased fluency to reach the later reading stages of comprehension of increasingly complex text.

Included in each chapter will be the background brain terminology for teachers less specialized in the science of reading. This will be a review of the research that has stood the test of time and has been confirmed by multicenter testing. That background will be followed by my description of the cutting edge research from smaller studies too new to have been reproduced at other centers. This is the work carried out by the experienced and respected research groups whose work I have followed for over a decade. This is the brain-learning research that was conducted with such attention to controlling variables and confirming evidence and with no link to vested interest groups, that in my opinion it will be the research that becomes doctrine. Some of this more complex information will be set aside in sidebars designated Gray Matter.

Accompanying the research I review will be the implications for teaching and learning—the specific neuro-logical strategies that support what the brain reading research interpretations suggest. Some of this information has already been supported by follow-up neuroimaging and cognitive testing.

Throughout the book there will be detailed, explicitly described strategies presented as step-by-step activities adaptable for different grade levels, taken from my classroom and ready for educators to apply in their classrooms today. It is my hope that these brain research compatible techniques can help other educators as they have helped me to increase students' motivation to read and enjoy the wealth of pleasure and knowledge available to people who develop a lifelong love affair with reading.