P. David Pearson passed away in late August, and literacy scholars across the field are taking time to reflect on the impact of his life and work. He was a mentor to many of the leading literacy scholars who are driving the work of teaching reading in classrooms today. He authored a multitude of journal articles and book chapters, and the number of conference presentations, policy briefs, and other contributions is honestly a tally best left to others. He was a true influencer in education before "influencer" was a word.

But even if his name doesn't ring a bell, you have almost certainly been influenced by, and maybe even used, one of his most elegant ideas: the Gradual Release of Responsibility. (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983).

Where the Idea Came From

The concept emerged as Pearson, Meg Gallagher, and a group of doctoral students and emerging literacy scholars searched for a way to capture and describe what teachers could do to help students build comprehension skills (McVee et al., 2018). Dolores Durkin had recently completed a landmark study (1978–79) exploring how reading comprehension was actually being taught in schools. Her findings were sobering: instruction largely consisted of asking questions and assigning worksheets.

That approach failed a lot of students. What tended to happen was that students who were already skilled at giving the "correct" answer kept improving, while students who couldn't produce that correct answer were left to flounder.

Pearson and his colleagues wondered: what about all the student knowledge this right-or-wrong split was missing? What about the students who answered a teacher's question with real thinking behind it: thinking that wasn't quite right, but wasn't exactly wrong either? Was there a way for students, with the help of more knowledgeable others, to build on the knowledge they did have and make genuine progress toward fuller comprehension?

The Napkin

During a lunchtime meeting, Pearson sketched out an answer on a napkin (McVee et al., 2018). [view images from publication.] In the beginning, students need a lot of support from the teacher to develop a skill. But over time, teachers can gradually decrease that support, and students can take on more of the responsibility themselves.

You've seen this, right? It's the "modeling, guided practice, independent practice" sequence that shows up whenever we teach a new skill or strategy.

Gradual Release of Responsibility in Action

In STARI, this idea is threaded throughout our work. The way we introduce fluency during the early lessons of Unit 1 is one example.

We start with modeling: students listen to examples of fluent and disfluent reading and discuss, with the teacher's guidance, what separates the two. That's the first fluency lesson.

Over the next several lessons, students engage in guided practice, working through each step of the two-day fluency routine with plenty of support from the teacher: the more knowledgeable other who already knows what fluent reading sounds like and why it matters so much.

Finally, students take on independent practice, running the fluency routine on their own with a partner. It takes a while to reach that point. But once students get there, their capacity to absorb feedback and sharpen their skill takes off.

That's the Gradual Release of Responsibility: a simple idea, sketched on a napkin at a lunch with friends and colleagues, that changed the way an entire field thinks about instruction.

Big ideas don't always announce themselves. Sometimes they start as a rough drawing, shared between people who care enough to keep asking a hard question until they find an answer worth passing on.