Paige C. Pullen wrote a marvelous book about literacy education that I (JWL) discussed on Special Education Today (18 July 2026). This post provides the results of a back and forth with my much admired colleague and friend about the connections between The Canon and special education and disabilities (dyslexia, for example). Dear Readers should understand that Paige and I collaborated on this post, but she’s provided the intellectual content.
Here are SET’s questions and Paige’s answers.
John Lloyd for Special Education Today: Paige Cullen Pullen, thank you for agreeing to respond to these questions about your 2026 book, The Canon of Literacy: A Three Sciences Framework. Lots (and lots) of SET readers know about your book, and they also know a bit about you from earlier posts on SET, such as the photos page from 15 April 2022 featuring you and Dan Hallahan. Many will know that you have a wealth of experience as a classroom teacher, a professor, a researcher, a coach, a consultant, and more, as will come out in your responses to the following questions.
Because many readers of SET are familiar with The Canon and because you have already talked about it in interviews with people like Holly Korbey, let’s avoid recounting it in great depth. I’d like devote most of this set of questions and answers to connections between special education and The Canon. Still, let’s establish common ground here: What would you say about the book in the proverbial elevator pitch? If you had only 60-90 seconds to describe what the Canon is about, what would you say?
Paige Pullen: Start with the problem the book answers. Our field has five decades of reading research and no shared standard, which is how “evidence-based” ends up stamped on two practices that contradict each other. In the area of literacy, educators are data-rich and synthesis-poor.
The book is the standard, a measuring rod for instruction. The rod has three parts, and each one begins with something every educator has seen.
First, fifty years of research tell us which skills actually build readers and writers, and in what order. That’s literacy science: what we teach.
Second, a child is shown ten new concepts in one lesson and retains none, because working memory holds only a few things at once and skills fade unless they’re retrieved and practiced cumulatively. That’s learning science: how students learn.
Third, two teachers deliver the same content and get different results, because some practices, modeling before asking students to perform, sequencing so each skill builds on the last, reliably produce durable learning, and others don’t. That’s instructional science: which practices work.
Hold any lesson, program, or policy against all three, and you can diagnose it. When a child does not learn, you can ask which science broke: the content we chose, the load we placed, or the way we delivered it. Special educators will recognize that reasoning immediately. It is what a good special education teacher already does with one child, but it is applied to a whole system.
SET: So, let’s retrace your connections to special education. Before grad school, you had taught primary and elementary grades, but then you entered a doctoral program at the University of Florida. When? With whom? Why?
Paige: I taught elementary school, first through third grade, and then moved into a Title 1 resource program to teach reading. Before Title 1, I thought I was a good teacher. My students were making progress, so I assumed I knew how to teach reading. I did not. My students were reading in spite of me, not because of me. Some children learn to read almost regardless of what we do. The children who do not are the ones who tell you what you actually know.
I went to the University of Florida to study reading, and I found my answers in a doctoral seminar taught by Cecil Mercer. His textbook had trained a generation of special educators, and his discipline was the one I had been missing: define the skill precisely, teach it directly, verify the learning. I realized the questions I had carried out of my classroom—why some children do not learn to read and what to do about it—were being asked in the special education and learning disabilities literature, and answered with data. I changed course into special education, focused on learning disabilities and reading in the early childhood years, and never looked back.
My first faculty position was in early childhood special education at the University of Virginia, and Virginia is where the threads pulled together: I joined Dan Hallahan and Jim Kauffman as a coauthor of Exceptional Learners, the introductory text that has defined this field for decades. That work taught me the discipline this new book runs on: Take everything a field knows, hold it to one standard, and write it down clearly and understandably so that the people being prepared can use it. Serving as executive editor of Exceptionality] is the same work, deciding what clears the bar. So the Canon of Literacy is not my first canon. Special education handed me its knowledge base to steward before literacy did.
I came to special education because it was the place where the failure was studied honestly and the answers were held to evidence. That is the work I lead now as co-founder and Chief Learning Officer of Mindset CoPilot, where we are building Literacy Mindset, an instructional system that measures what educators know and can do, and closes the gap between the sciences and daily teaching. The questions came from special education. The answers belong to every classroom.
SET: Please talk about the research that you cover in The Canon. What are some examples of the influences of special education and students with disabilities from that research?
Paige: Start with a fact the wider field forgets: A great deal of what we now call the science of reading was learned from children who struggled to read.
The spine of the book is a special education paper. The simple view of reading organizes the whole framework, and it was published in a special education journal, Remedial and Special Education, in an article titled “Decoding, reading, and reading disability” (Gough & Tunmer, 1986). The formulation that lets a teacher separate a word recognition problem from a language comprehension problem came out of our special education literature, written about our students. Catts and colleagues (2006) then documented the profiles it predicts: weak word recognition with adequate language, adequate word recognition with weak language, and weakness in both. The content of instruction changes with the profile; the principles of delivery do not, only the intensity.
The instructional science chapter rests on the same origins. Engelmann and Carnine’s (1982) Theory of Instruction, Rosenshine’s (2012) principles of instruction, and Archer and Hughes’s (2011) work on explicit instruction describe the same core: model first, guide practice, check for understanding, build to independence. Direct Instruction was built and tested with the children the system was failing, and it became a mainstay of special education before the wider field rediscovered it.
The section of The Canon on intensifying instruction draws on intervention research from our field, including Vaughn and Fletcher (2021) and the Intensive Intervention Practice Guide (Vaughn et al., 2012).
My own line of work is in there as well. With Michael Coyne and colleagues, I studied tiered vocabulary intervention for kindergarten students at risk for reading disability. The finding that stays with me: students entering with the lowest vocabulary knowledge did not make meaningful gains from classroom instruction alone (Pullen et al., 2010; Tuckwiller et al., 2010). They needed the classroom plus supplemental small-group instruction. Tier 1 quality is the floor, and some children need the floor and a ladder.
The knowledge came from the children it was hardest to teach, moved into special education practice, and then generalized to every classroom. We should keep saying so.
SET: The Canon is about literacy in general, but I’d like to explore with you the connection to reading problems. It’s not a special ed book, not a dyslexia book, but there is a lot in The Canon that grew out of research on learning disabilities. What are some of the most important influences on The Canon that came from the special education world?
Paige: Three, and they are habits of mind more than specific studies.
First, consider where we look when learning does not happen. Engelmann and Carnine (1982) held that if a student fails to learn, the instruction is the place to look, and that instruction should be designed so precisely the student cannot help but learn. They called it faultless communication. That assumption is the moral center of special education, and it is why this book keeps returning to instructional design.
Second, precision. Special education taught the field to define a skill exactly, teach it directly, and check whether the students learned it. The definitions of explicit and systematic instruction in Chapter 4 of The Canon come from work on what makes special education instruction special (Pullen & Hallahan, 2015). Explicit describes how content is delivered, clearly and unambiguously. Systematic describes how content is organized and sequenced. Our field has been operationalizing those two words for decades while the wider field used them loosely.
Third, think of intensity as a set of levers. Intensification means moving the settings on instruction you already deliver: pacing, explicitness, feedback frequency, scaffolding, cumulative practice, group size, opportunities to respond. You move the levers on evidence of student learning, and you leave the learning goal alone. That idea was built in intervention research in special education, and it belongs in every classroom.
What special education gave this book is larger than a stack of studies. It gave the discipline of asking whether the instruction worked, and changing it when it did not.
SET: You have said what special education gave the Canon. Turn it around. What does the Canon ask of special education? Held against the three sciences, where does our own discipline come up short?
Paige: Fair question, and it turns the last one around. Special education gave this book its discipline. The book hands our field a standard, and we should be the first to be measured by it.
Hold our own instruction against the three sciences and the gaps show up just as they may in general education classrooms.
Content first. We are precise about how we teach and less precise about what we teach. A special educator may run a strong instructional routine on a weak scope and sequence, and the routine will not make up for teaching the wrong content. The literacy science tells us which skills build readers and in what order, and that sequence belongs in intervention as much as it belongs in core instruction.
Then load. This is the science special education needs most. A student who is behind is usually the student we ask to hold the most at once, because we are trying to make up ground. Working memory does not grant an exception for urgency. Fewer things, taught to mastery, brought back for cumulative practice. Likewise, continuity between general and special education is critical. If we teach one phonics program in general education, another in intervention, and a third in special education, we add to our students’ cognitive load. I have literally seen districts require three different programs for different tiers of instruction, rather than intensifying the instruction through pacing, group size, duration, and frequency. I’ve also seen districts require all special education students to receive reading instruction on grade-level material, significantly increasing cognitive load.
Then delivery. Intensification gets read as more minutes or a different program. The levers are the work, and you move them on what the student in front of you is doing.
Then the piece that stays ours alone. Special education has to stay special. An IEP has to be determined by data and delivered in the least restrictive environment, and that is not aspiration; it is the law and the daily practice. This Canon was written primarily for general education teachers. Differentiation should be the standard for every student. For a student with an IEP, it goes a step farther.
We spent fifty years proving that instruction is the variable we control. The standard is written down now. We should hold ourselves to it first.
SET: What’s the back story on this book? You wrote it for the Evidence Advocacy Center. How did you come to collaborate with those folks on this project?
Paige: The collaboration is older than the book. Linda Diamond and I have worked together for years; I contributed chapters to the Teaching Reading Sourcebook (Honig et al., 2018) the CORE volume that has trained a generation of literacy coaches and teachers. And Doug Carnine’s work was in my intellectual foundation long before I knew him; his Theory of Instruction with Engelmann is one of the pillars of the instructional science chapter. So when the Center took shape, the people were already connected. Doug founded the Center and chairs it. Linda is its executive director and a contributing writer on this book. I co-chair the Center’s Committee for State Boards of Education and Policy.
The Center works on the layer teachers do not control: how they are licensed, how they are prepared, how programs are accredited, and whether anyone verifies that evidence became practice. Its architecture starts with a shared knowledge base, a set of canons that define what competent practice is. I wrote the literacy one.
The Center funded the writing, and the proceeds go back to the Center, which is backed by Doug’s KINDR Foundation. Doug wrote the foreword, which felt right; the book stands on his shoulders in more places than that chapter.
The review is the part that mattered most to me, because a book claiming three sciences has to survive experts in all three. Anita Archer, Dan Willingham, Carl Hendrick, Maria Murray, Nathaniel Swain, Esther Quintero-Corral, Dan Hallahan, and you, John, read it and pushed on it. I did not want a claim in the book that could not stand up.
SET: The Canon fits in with a line of very important books about literacy. Although there historic titles by Huey and Flesch, the Canon fits more appropriately with Jeanne Chall’s (1967) Learning to Read: The Great Debate and Marilyn Jager Adams’s (1990) Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. How do you see if as similar to and different from those earlier books?
Paige: I am careful about that comparison. Those books changed the field, and The Canon has not earned that yet.
The similarity is the job. All three stopped and took stock while the field was fighting. Chall reviewed the method comparisons and settled the code emphasis question. Adams synthesized the cognitive science of word recognition and made the reading process visible to educators. Both were syntheses of existing evidence written into a public argument, and this book is that, too.
The first difference is the question. Chall and Adams answered the literacy science question with real rigor: What happens when a child learns to read, and what instruction supports it? The Canon treats that question as largely settled and adds two more. How does the brain acquire and retain a complex skill, and which instructional designs deliver it? A program can contain every component Adams described and still fail, because it overloads working memory, or never brings a skill back for cumulative practice, or leaves the teacher with no routine for the moment a child errs.
The second is the purpose. Chall and Adams wrote to inform the field. This one was written to be used: a standard for the programs that prepare teachers, the states that mandate practice, and the districts that adopt materials.
Adams told us in 1990 what children need to learn about print. We are still arguing about it in 2026. The science settled; the field never did. That is not a research problem, it is a synthesis problem, and a synthesis problem is what a measuring rod is for.
SET: Of course, another landmark in literacy education was the National Reading Panel. How did the NRP reports influence The Canon? Do you see any connections from special education to the NRP?
Paige: The NRP is cited throughout the book, and it earned that. It set a standard for how you review evidence in reading, and its central findings have held.
The place I use it most carefully is phonemic awareness. The panel found stronger outcomes when phoneme instruction was connected to letters. That finding is often read as letters only, when many studies in the “with letters” category included both oral phoneme work and phoneme work with print. The instructional question is what supports a child needs to succeed with print-linked practice. Learning to read strengthens phonemic awareness, and phonemic awareness supports learning to read. The relationship runs both directions.
The connection to special education is direct. NICHD convened the panel, and its learning disabilities research program funded much of the reading research the panel reviewed. A large share of the prevention and intervention studies in that evidence base were conducted with children at risk for reading failure and children with identified reading disabilities. The knowledge came from our field and then generalized outward, as it should.
Here is where that leaves us. The report answered what to teach with unusual rigor, and the field read it as a list of five components to purchase. It was never designed to answer the other two questions addressed in The Canon, how learning happens and which instruction delivers it. Those answers exist; special education has been building them for fifty years. That is why the measuring rod has three parts. When a child does not learn, we can now ask which science broke: the content, the load, or the delivery. The NRP gave the field the first question answered to a high standard. Special education has been holding the other two all along. This book puts the three in one place, so that what a good special education teacher has always done with one child can finally be done by a whole system.
SET: Paige, thanks for taking the time to respond to these questions. Very Thoughtful and informative.
Learn more:
Hear more from Paige on The Canon:
The Bell Ringer podcast with Holly Korbey
The Reading League Conference — The Canon of Literacy: A Three Sciences Framework for Coherent Instructional Decision-Making, 2 October 2026, 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. CT
References
Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. MIT Press.
Archer, A. L., Gleason, M. M., & Vachon, V. L. (2003). Decoding and fluency: Foundation skills for struggling older readers. Learning Disability Quarterly, 26(2), 89–101.
Archer, A. L., & Hughes, C. A. (2011). Explicit instruction: Effective and efficient teaching. Guilford.
Catts, H. W., Adlof, S. M., & Weismer, S. E. (2006). Language deficits in poor comprehenders: A case for the simple view of reading. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 49(2), 278–293.
Chall, J. (1967). Learning to read: The great debate. McGraw-Hill.
Engelmann, S., & Carnine, D. (2016). Theory of instruction: Principles and applications (rev. ed.). NIFDI Press.
Flesch, R. (1955). Why Johnny can’t read and what you can do about it. Harper & Brothers.
Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6–10.
Honig, B., Diamond, L., & Gutlohn, L. (2018). Teaching reading sourcebook (3rd ed.). Arena.
Huey, E. B. (1908). The psychology and pedagogy of reading: With a review of the history of reading and writing and of methods, texts, and hygiene in reading. Macmillan.
National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Pullen, P. C., & Hallahan, D. P. (2015). What is special education instruction? In B. Cook & M. Tankersley (Eds.), Research-based practices in special education (pp. 35–49). Pearson.
Pullen, P. C., Tuckwiller, E. D., Konold, T. R., Maynard, K. L., & Coyne, M. D. (2010). A tiered intervention model for early vocabulary instruction: The effects of tiered instruction for young students at risk for reading disability. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 25(3), 110–123.
Rosenshine, B. (2012). Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know. American Educator, 36(1), 12–19, 39.
Tuckwiller, E. D., Pullen, P. C., & Coyne, M. D. (2010). The use of the regression discontinuity design in tiered intervention research: A pilot study exploring vocabulary instruction for at-risk kindergarteners. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 25(3), 137–150.
Vaughn, S., & Fletcher, J. M. (2021). Explicit instruction as the essential tool for executing the science of reading. The Reading League Journal, 2(2), 4–11.
Vaughn, S., Wanzek, J., Murray, C. S., & Roberts, G. (2012). Intensive interventions for students struggling in reading and mathematics: A practice guide. Center on Instruction, RMC Research Corporation.
John, thank you for this interview. It was a lot of fun thinking about the connection with Special Education.
I want to clarify one of my answers on the NRP. The focus on phonemic awareness in the Canon is that it is an integrated system with decoding. Phonemic awareness instruction should absolutely include letters, and we shouldn't wait to teach it until students know all their letters and letter-sounds. We know that phonemic awareness develops independently of phonological sensitivity (Brady, 2020). After the NRP report, a lot of us focused on PA as a continuum, or a hierarchy, starting with words, syllables, onsets-rimes, and then phonemes.
What is the takeaway?
Yes, phonemic awareness and decoding are reciprocal.
Children do not need to master phonological sensitivity (larger chunks) prior to working on phoneme-level skills.
DO add letters to phonemic awareness. In the NRP report, studies that included letters also included oral phonemic awareness. If you include oral only, add letters as quickly as possible.
I'd love to chat with folks reading the post about the topic, or anything related.