Pedagogy

Note: This document is intended as a comprehensive explanation of the pedagogy behind the program. Prospective users who are curious are free to read it. However, reading this full document is not required to use the program. A large part of this research is implemented in a way that is completely transparent to students and tutors. For parts that require explicit introduction, the user manual includes concise definitions and instructions on how they are applied.

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Pictures Are For Babies is built on a foundation of best-in-class pedagogy, drawing from a multidisciplinary body of research in cognitive science, expert performance, optimal learning, the science of reading, and writing instruction. These disparate fields do not only align, but reinforce each other, forming a coherent theoretical and practical framework for effective literacy instruction.

Unfortunately, while the research has been replicated and validated for decades, classroom instruction and most commercial programs are, at best, decades behind, and, at worst, actively hostile to it. Some programs correctly and thoroughly execute parts of the research, but none can claim to integrate all of it into a coherent whole.

Pictures Are For Babies is the first program to do so. The objective of this document is to provide an overview of each of these fields and how they inform the program's pedagogy. For simplicity, Pictures Are For Babies will be referenced as PAFB in the rest of this document. Trane is the name of the practice engine that powers PAFB.

Cognitive Science

• Learning and immediate performance are not the same. Immediate performance in a task is not a guarantee of long-term retention or transfer of that skill.

  • PAFB asks students to repeat the same task multiple times at optimal intervals. Mastered exercises are shown occasionally to make sure foundational skills remain solid.

• Working memory is the type of memory used for immediate performance. This type of memory is very limited in capacity and duration. Any type of instruction that requires working memory incurs a cognitive load that must be effectively managed.

  • PAFB follows this principle in many ways. For example, it scaffolds exercises to ensure only a small amount of new information is introduced at a time, uses a simple UI to minimize distractions, and does not teach complicated phonic rules by name.

• Just like working memory, attention is limited and must be guided.

  • PAFB uses a simple UI to minimize distractions. The sessions include explicit instructions to take breaks to replenish attention. Instructions guide students to focus on the correct aspects of literacy and avoid activities not backed by research.

• In contrast, long-term memory has a vast capacity and retains information for long periods of time. Complicated tasks are performed by moving building blocks to long-term memory. Very complex skills like literacy involve repeated instances of this process.

  • PAFB starts at the very beginning with learning to read and write single letters and very basic words. Once they in long-term memory, sentences and more complex words are introduced. Then real texts and writing tasks in increasing level of complexity.

• Subconscious processes do not require active effort and are performed much faster than tasks that require it. Moving information to long-term memory enables the skills to become automatic and free working memory and attention to work on more advanced skills.

  • Trane was designed from the ground up for this goal. Together with the scaffolded lessons, it supports the process of turning new skills into automatic habits.

Expert Performance

• Deliberate practice is the essence of expert performance. It is effortful, structured training with immediate feedback aimed at improving specific aspects of performance. It is not meant to be fun, inherently enjoyable, or easy.

  • PAFB uses Trane to primarily surface exercises at the edge of the student's current abilities. The lessons break literacy into small skills and students receive immediate feedback on their performance. A tiered model of instruction ensures that additional instruction is given only when students need it.

• Experts continually seek to improve their performance instead of falling into automatic patterns.

  • Trane is always gently pushing students past their current edge of ability. Over time, students build on their current skills until they master more and more difficult ones.

• Experts organize skills into large chunks to process complicated information faster.

  • Trane allows skills to be split into smaller skills and to explicitly encode the relationships among them. As students progress through this connected graph, they are given tasks that require they build these mental structures to demonstrate mastery.

• Expert performers engage in self-regulated learning, setting specific goals, monitoring progress, and adjusting strategies when necessary.

  • Trane tracks learner performance and adapts exercise difficulty accordingly. Tutors can guide students toward deliberate strategy use, especially when progress stalls.

• Experts possess strong metacognitive skills, allowing them to reflect on their performance and make effective adjustments.

  • PAFB trains students to identify confusion and rely on tutors to clarify misunderstandings, building foundational metacognitive habits early.

• Motivation plays a critical role in sustaining the effort required for long-term improvement.

  • Trane and the PAFB tutor model aim to foster intrinsic motivation by tying progress directly to increased competence and ensuring a clear sense of purpose in all tasks.

• Experts develop flexible, adaptable skills that allow them to transfer knowledge across situations while still relying on deep domain-specific knowledge.

  • Trane’s graph structure allows students to master discrete skills and apply them in increasingly varied contexts, from decoding novel words to understanding complex texts and expressing themselves in writing.

• Early advantages and perceived talent are not predictive of long-term outcomes. Students who appear "gifted" early on often plateau without the right kind of input, while those who build strong foundations through sustained, structured, and deliberate practice eventually surpass them.

  • PAFB produces this kind of quality input for all students, regardless of initial ability. It does not cater to "gifted" early learners or the fastest students. Instead, it supports all students, providing the same rigor, structure, and opportunities for growth. The only difference is individual pace, adjusted based on mastery, not superficial measurements of early ability. Excellence is developed over years, not discovered or accelerated in a race for early achievement.

Optimal Learning

• Mastery learning ensures that students do not progress until they have demonstrated mastery of the current material. This prevents gaps from accumulating and supports long-term growth.

  • Trane automatically withholds access to more difficult material until the student has demonstrated consistent success with prerequisite skills. Mastery is based on performance, not on completion.

• Spaced repetition improves retention by revisiting material in optimal intervals, just before it is forgotten.

  • Trane uses time-aware review scheduling to resurface lessons at optimal intervals based on each student’s history, ensuring long-term retention without overloading them with review.

• Retrieval practice is the act of recalling information from memory, and it has been shown to be more effective than reviewing material or taking notes. The act of trying to recall information strengthens memory and highlights gaps in knowledge.

  • All PAFB exercises are a form of retrieval practice. Students are first asked with recalling how individual words are read and spelled. Higher level tasks require recall of individual words, background knowledge, word meaning, and text structures.

• Interleaving different types of tasks strengthens retention and transfer by forcing students to repeatedly retrieve and distinguish between skills.

  • PAFB implements interleaving through randomized review selection and frequent alternation between decoding, spelling, sentence writing, and comprehension tasks.

• Mixing tasks of varying difficulty improves engagement and learning efficiency. Too much difficulty leads to failure and too much ease leads to stagnation.

  • Trane surfaces a blend of easier and harder tasks based on the student’s performance scores, maintaining an optimal difficulty range for learning.

• Implicit repetition strengthens learning by increasing practice on related tasks when a student struggles, and decreasing practice when a student does well.

  • Trane implements a reward system. When a student performs well, simpler and related skills are given a positive reward so that they are practiced less often. When a student performs badly, related, more complicated skills are given a negative reward so that they are practiced more often.

• Flow is a state of deep concentration and enjoyment that occurs when a task's difficulty is well-matched to the learner’s current skill level. It is characterized by sustained focus, loss of self-awareness, and high intrinsic motivation.

  • PAFB and Trane use all the strategies above to best match the exercises to the student's current abilities. Flow is the result of implementing optimal learning strategies, not of turning learning into gamified experiences or hacking motivation.

• Accelerating the timeline for mastering a complex skill is possible, but only under specific conditions. Research shows that true acceleration does not come from shortcuts, gamification, or early performance boosts. Rather, it comes from compressing high-quality, representative experience into tighter timelines using structured feedback, gradual complexity, and expert-like modeling.

  • Similarly to how PAFB achieves flow, acceleration is not a goal in itself, but the result of implementing optimal learning strategies, combining them with the best reading pedagogy, and a deep and wide curriculum that progressively exposes learners to all aspects of literacy.

The Science of Reading: Word and Sentence Reading and Writing

• Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds of spoken language. Phonemic awareness is a more specific skill involving the ability to isolate and work with individual phonemes, the smallest units of sound.

  • PAFB builds these skills from the beginning. Students learn to hear and manipulate sounds in words before mapping them to letters.

• Most reading difficulties are caused by weaknesses in phonological processing, not vision or motivation. Students who cannot hear, segment, or manipulate sounds will struggle to decode and map words into memory.

  • PAFB targets these core deficits directly. Every word and sentence lesson includes tasks that strengthen the phonological system and link it to written language. No guessing strategies or visual cueing systems are used.

• Orthographic mapping is the central process that allows readers to store words in memory for instant recognition. It links the pronunciation, spelling, and meaning of words, and depends on phonemic awareness and letter–sound knowledge. Without successful orthographic mapping, students will not become fluent readers, no matter how much they are exposed to print.

  • PAFB's lessons on word and sentences are built on this concept. Tutors are instructed to mark words and sentences as mastered only when reading and writing is effortless and automatic.

• Orthographic mapping should extend beyond simple words to include irregular spellings, multisyllabic words, and morphologically complex forms. Fluent reading requires rapid retrieval of thousands of words, including those not easily decoded by rule.

  • PAFB is designed to support deep orthographic mapping. The system introduces increasingly complex word forms only after foundational skills are in place and goes all the way to ensure students master words needed to proficiently read undergraduate and graduate material.

• With proper instruction that targets phonemic skills and supports orthographic mapping, the vast majority of children can learn to read proficiently. Research estimates that 90 to 95 percent of children can reach grade-level reading ability with effective interventions.

  • PAFB is built on the methods shown to produce these outcomes. By addressing phonemic awareness, decoding, spelling, and comprehension in the correct order, it ensures that reading failure is not treated as inevitable, but as preventable.

• A hallmark of the most successful interventions is teaching phonemic awareness to the advanced level, including tasks like phoneme deletion, substitution, and reversal. These skills are essential for supporting orthographic mapping and are often missing in students with persistent reading difficulties.

  • PAFB gives explicit instructions on how and when to reinforce deficits in phonemic awareness with these advanced tasks.

• Research supports a tiered model of instruction, where all students receive core instruction and only those who struggle are given additional support.

  • PAFB follows this model closely. Every student receives explicit, structured lessons, but when a student struggles with a task, additional instruction and targeted phonemic work is introduced. This ensures that time is spent efficiently and support is provided only where needed.

• Phonics is essential for teaching how letters represent sounds, but it is not enough to produce fluent readers. Rule knowledge must lead to permanent connections between sounds, spellings, and meanings.

  • PAFB uses phonics to organize instruction and support orthographic mapping, but does not teach rules explicitly. Concepts like vowel types or syllable labels are avoided to reduce cognitive load. Every word, regular or irregular, is taught by mapping its phonemes to its spelling, and no word is ever treated as an unbreakable whole to be memorized.

• Reading and spelling are two sides of the same process, each reinforcing the other. Spelling is more difficult because it demands exact recall of letter sequences.

  • PAFB treats spelling as a core component of literacy. Each word and sentence reading lesson is followed by a lesson where students must correctly write the words or sentences from the tutor's dictation.

• Word-level spelling develops along a predictable path. Early attempts are phonetic but imprecise. Over time, students learn to spell words more accurately by internalizing common letter patterns and morphological endings.

  • PAFB follows this trajectory deliberately. Students begin with simple one-syllable words and progress toward irregular spellings and affixed forms once the foundations are secure.

• Sentence-level reading and writing introduce new challenges. Students must coordinate multiple word forms, apply grammar, and maintain fluency.

  • PAFB begins sentence work only after students can reliably decode and spell the words involved. Sentences are used to reinforce word reading in context and to teach syntax through both reading and taking dictation.

The Science of Reading: Comprehension

• The Simple View of Reading defines reading comprehension as the product of two components: decoding and linguistic comprehension. If either is weak, comprehension will suffer.

  • PAFB ensures decoding is fully mastered before comprehension is emphasized. Real texts are only introduced after the student can reliably read and spell all the words involved.
  • PAFB tackles linguistic comprehension by annotating texts with footnotes and briefings, with tutors available to cover any gap.

• Most comprehension problems in struggling readers are caused by poor word reading, not poor reasoning.

  • PAFB follows this principle by focusing early instruction on decoding, spelling, and syntax. Comprehension tasks are introduced only after students can fluently access the text.

• Vocabulary and background knowledge are critical predictors of comprehension. Readers must know the meaning of the words and the context behind the ideas they are reading.

  • PAFB includes a wide range of text types to develop both vocabulary and domain knowledge. Students are exposed to literature, nonfiction, poetry, essays and more, curated and leveled to support gradual knowledge growth.

• Skilled readers construct a mental model of the text by integrating ideas across sentences. This process depends on decoding, vocabulary, working memory, and attention.

  • PAFB supports this process through carefully leveled texts. As students progress, the texts become longer and more conceptually demanding, giving them practice with sustained reading and inference-making.

• Good readers monitor their comprehension as they read and notice when something does not make sense.

  • PAFB trains students to say “I don’t know” when confused. Tutors are instructed to stop, clarify, and re-read as needed, helping students develop this metacognitive skill.

• Reciprocal teaching is a well-researched method for improving comprehension, especially in struggling readers. It involves the tutor modeling what skilled readers do when they encounter confusion by pretending not to understand and asking the student to explain or clarify.

  • PAFB uses this approach by having tutors ask questions aloud during reading, even when they know the answer. This strategy is used only when the tutor suspects the student may be confused, and is faded over time as the student becomes more proficient.

The Science of Writing: Composition and Syntax

• Reading and writing reinforce each other. Reading builds the vocabulary, syntax, and background knowledge that writing draws on, while writing strengthens understanding of how texts are structured, and exercises word and sentence reading and spelling skills.

  • PAFB treats reading and writing as interdependent skills. Each level of text reading courses is followed by a writing course that introduces students to increasingly complex composition tasks.

• Writing is not a natural skill. It must be taught explicitly, in a structured progression, beginning with sentence construction and extending toward paragraphs and full texts.

  • PAFB and Trane are built on small and repeatable exercises that are easily verifiable by a tutor. Writing production tasks do not fit this mold. They cannot be repeated many times without boring students, take much longer than reading and spelling tasks, and have open-ended answers that would require more training and effort from the tutor.
  • This problem is solved by turning writing production tasks into reading tasks. Instead of asking students to solve writing tasks, PAFB's writing track shows students how expert writers tackle the problems by having them read the problem and the solution.
  • The strategy makes the exercises repeatable, shorter, and removes their open-ended nature. Writing production tasks must be undertaken outside the program. PAFB supports production by exposing students to the same type of tasks and letting tutors use the writing questions as a starting point for their own production tasks.

• Writing instruction is most effective when directly tied to reading content. Disconnected prompts do not build transferable skills. The content of the curriculum drives the rigor of the writing activity.

  • Whenever possible, PAFB links each writing task to the texts students have just read. The model answers reuse the vocabulary and ideas from those texts, helping students internalize structure and content together.
  • As the texts become more complex, so do the writing tasks associated with them.

• Students must learn to write complete sentences before they can write meaningful paragraphs or essays.

  • PAFB begins with structured sentence tasks that train students to express relationships clearly and precisely. Students are shown how to use because–but–so, appositives, and sentence combining to add depth and control to their writing.

• Writing tasks at the paragraph and text level must be addressed after sentence-level writing. The two most important phases of the writing process are planning and revising.

  • PAFB teaches planning by showing examples of structured outlines. These outlines make the internal structure of writing visible and teach students how to organize ideas before writing begins.
  • Revising exercises show what well-revised writing looks like. Tutors are encouraged to ask students how the response could be improved, giving them an opportunity to reflect on clarity, logic, and structure without having to generate a full rewrite.

• Grammar and mechanics should be taught in the context of actual writing, not through isolated drills.

  • PAFB exposes students to correct usage by having them read and study well-constructed sentences. Each task models how grammar supports clarity and meaning in real communication.

Pedagogy gaps in other offerings

Cognitive Science, Expert Performance, and Optimal Learning

• Most programs make no attempt to incorporate findings from cognitive science, expert performance, or optimal learning. Concepts like spaced repetition, retrieval practice, cognitive load, or deliberate practice are not mentioned, much less implemented.
• There is no mastery tracking, no structured progression based on prior performance, and no attempt to match task difficulty to student ability. Tasks are selected based on curriculum scripts, not learning science.
• Even advanced programs that claim adaptability do not follow the principles of optimal learning. They use generic review schedules, present disconnected exercises, and treat success as completion rather than fluency.
• These are not minor omissions. They are a complete failure to build instruction on best practices.

Science of Reading: Word and Sentence Reading and Writing

• Most programs teach phonics but ignore orthographic mapping, the actual process that produces fluent readers. Words are either memorized as wholes or taught through isolated rule drills, with no structured process to link sounds, spellings, and meanings in memory.
• Phonemic awareness is treated as a warm-up or skipped entirely. Few programs include tasks like phoneme deletion, substitution, or reversal. These are essential for struggling readers and a hallmark of the most effective interventions.
• Spelling is often treated as separate from reading or not addressed at all. As a result, students are unable to internalize spelling patterns or apply them automatically.
• Sentence and text reading and spelling are introduced too early or not at all. Without a foundation of proper orthographic mapping, students will spend too many cognitive resources in word decoding and struggle with higher level tasks.

Science of Reading: Comprehension

• Comprehension tasks are introduced before decoding is fluent. This creates false positives, where students guess from context or pictures rather than read and understand the text.
• Most programs rely on comprehension strategy instruction rather than actual content understanding. Activities like predicting or summarizing are taught in isolation, without attention to vocabulary, syntax, or background knowledge.
• Vocabulary and background knowledge are not systematically developed. Texts are often leveled to reduce complexity, not to build knowledge. Students read simplified content that does not prepare them for real academic reading.
• There is no clear pathway from decoding to deep comprehension. Programs treat word reading and comprehension as separate skills instead of building them in a structured, dependent progression.

Science of Reading: Composition and Syntax

• Writing is introduced through open-ended prompts with no modeling or structure. Students are asked to write before they’ve seen what good writing looks like. Sentence construction is rarely taught explicitly.
• Programs skip the sentence level and jump straight to paragraphs or essays. This overloads students and leads to incoherent writing. There is no foundation of grammar, logic, or structure to build on.
• Writing is disconnected from reading. Tasks do not reuse vocabulary or content from texts. There is no reinforcement between reading and writing activities.
• Planning and revision are not taught. Students are rarely shown how to structure a paragraph before writing, and revision is treated as fixing errors rather than improving ideas.
• Grammar is either not taught or reduced to isolated worksheets. There is no integration of grammar into actual writing, and no opportunity to see how sentence mechanics support meaning.

Partial Alignment

• Some programs incorporate parts of the research correctly. Some focus on early phonemic awareness and decoding. Others emphasize orthographic mapping, structured writing, or background knowledge.
• However, these components are rarely integrated into a complete system. Decoding may be taught without spelling, writing without sentence-level structure, or comprehension without attention to background knowledge.
• Even when individual strategies are research-aligned, they are often isolated, loosely sequenced, or disconnected from a mastery-based progression.
• Even when the curriculum is perfectly designed and aligned with research, it is still the responsibility of teachers to plan lessons without the tools to track individual performance and to select optimal exercises in ways aligned with best practices.

Sources

The pedagogy outlined in this document is largely derived from the sources below. These are some of the most widely respected and research-backed works in their fields. Their authors are recognized leaders in reading science, writing instruction, and expert learning. These texts were not used for surface-level validation. They shaped the design and sequencing of every component in Pictures Are For Babies from the very beginning.

• Ericsson, K. A., Hoffman, R. R., Kozbelt, A., & Williams, A. M. (Eds.). (2018). The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Kilpatrick, D. A. (2015). Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. Wiley.
• Snowling, M. J., Hulme, C., & Nation, K. (Eds.). (2022). The Science of Reading: A Handbook (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Hochman, J. C., & Wexler, N. (2024). The Writing Revolution 2.0: A Guide to Advancing Thinking Through Writing in All Subjects and Grades. Jossey-Bass.