Snow Days

By the time she was seven years old, Professor Catherine Snow, a pioneering researcher in the language and literacy field, had learned her first lesson about reading: It’s not easy for everyone. 

Snow herself had always been a good reader, cracking the code with the help of her English teacher mother before she even started elementary school in Toledo, Ohio. As a second grader, Snow was even teaching other kids how to read. 

“I was the person who was always asked to sit with the poor readers and help them read, help them practice reading,” she says. “It was kind of a useful early exposure to how hard reading could be for some people.” 

It’s a lesson that Snow has carried with her throughout her long career, even though a career in the reading world wasn’t exactly what she had in mind when she started at Oberlin College at the age of 16 as a psychology undergraduate. She says she chose that major, in part, because she would “never be a big success in hard science areas” like physics or math. (She jokes that skipping third grade back in Toledo and missing out on learning long division started that downfall.) At Oberlin, she enjoyed languages and literature, but didn’t see those as supporting long-term career possibilities. “The social sciences were kind of a default rather than a burning choice,” she says, although she admits that she fully supports the American liberal arts tradition, where “you have a few years to explore and think about things, as long as you don’t need desperately to earn money the minute you get out.” 

The minute she got out, graduating from Oberlin in 1966, Snow went to McGill for her master’s, where she wrote her thesis on conjunctive (both/and) and disjunctive (either/or) thinking in children. She stayed at McGill for her Ph.D., this time focusing on language acquisition and mothers’ speech to children. It’s also where she met her husband, Michael Baum. Baum wanted to go to the Netherlands for a postdoc fellowship “and I was totally happy to go, too,” Snow says. They planned on staying a year. A year turned into two, which turned into eight after Snow got a job teaching at the Institute for General Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. As she jumped deeper into linguistics research, she also started to focus on language acquisition for second-language learners.

By the time she moved back to the states and joined the faculty at the Ed School in 1978, Snow was still focusing on language acquisition, especially related to parent-child interactions, but that’s when her focus started to shift a bit. 

“The students at the Ed School were not as interested in kids as young as two, which is the main target of that sort of research, and so they kind of dragged me into thinking about somewhat older kids,” Snow says. “But I was still very much not in any sense a literacy researcher.” 

Geography also played a role. When she first got to Appian Way, she was squatting temporarily in the office of Professor Courtney Cazden, a reading expert who had contributed to Sesame Street’s literacy curriculum and was on sabbatical. (Snow would also put her stamp on Sesame, helping the show integrate Spanish and multiculturalism into the program.) The office was next door to Professor Jeanne Chall’s in Larsen. Chall was an iconic researcher whose 1967 book, Learning to Read: The Great Debate, was considered a landmark in the literacy world. She was also “a formidable, feisty human being,” Snow remembers, and one of the initial reasons Snow had no intention of wading into the fiery reading wars that were raging across the education landscape — the same wars happening now over the “right” way to teach reading, the same wars that Snow says have happened “every 20 years since the founding of the Republic.” 

But back then in Larsen, Snow remembers that “Jeanne was on the phone regularly, yelling and screaming at people. And I thought to myself, oh my God, this reading business, this is a horrible field. People in this field are always engaged in aggression and conflict and it really is not something I ever want to do.” 

And at first, she didn’t, instead applying for grants from places like the Spencer Foundation to study the social psychology of language and from the Milton Fund to look at Spanish grammar acquisition. She became the editor of Applied Psycholinguistics (for nearly two decades) and wrote books like Unfulfilled Expectations: Home and School Influences on Literacy. She authored dozens of articles on topics ranging from bilingualism to parents as language teachers to English speakers’ acquisition of Dutch syntax. 

And then in the mid-1990s, Snow’s focus started to shift, in part because of Tom Hehir, Ed.D.’90, who would, a few years later, become one of Snow’s faculty colleagues at the Ed School. At the time, Hehir was an undersecretary for special education in the Clinton Administration and had identified poor reading as the major determinant of classifying students as special needs and in need of special education. 

“He thought, well, we really ought to think about how to prevent the emergence of reading difficulties, some of which might of course be related to special needs, but some of which might be related to poor instruction or poor content,” Snow says. 

In 1995, Hehir got his office to help fund a literacy study through the National Research Council. “I don’t know if you know how the National Research Council operated, but when somebody in government decides that it needs advice about something,” Snow says, “they put together a study committee, and attempt to make that committee as neutral and balanced as possible, especially when it’s a situation that requires delicacy, as the reading wars definitely did at that time.”

The committee included what Snow calls “some heavy phonics people” (a method of teaching reading that matches sounds with letters) and those who favored a “whole-language approach” (which prioritizes making meaning from words and sentences). When they went looking for a committee chair, they needed someone who hadn’t yet taken a side and hadn’t published anything on the topic of how “best” to teach reading. 

Snow remembers that “every single legitimate reading researcher was already committed to one side or the other.” But she had been focusing her research more on reading development, not specifically on reading instruction, and so she fit the bill. “I was kind of ideologically pure.” 

For the next three years, Snow and the committee met, and then in 1998, they published a report called Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, which made the case that the majority of reading problems faced by adolescents and adults could have been avoided or resolved in the early years of childhood. The report also “rejected the simplistic dualism between phonics and whole language and raised new questions for fruitful inquiry and research,” wrote Professor James Kim in a chapter on the reading wars published in When Research Matters, a 2008 Harvard Education Press book edited by Frederick Hess, Ed.M.'90. 

Snow says chairing that committee taught her a lot, not just about reading instruction, but also about how the reading wars were, for lack of a better word, mislabeled. 

“I learned a huge amount about the research and the personalities in this field and the degree to which adherence of the different points of view — although they thought they were in opposition to one another — actually agreed on about 90% of what they believed but exacerbated the 10% where they differed into major conflicts. Really, I thought extremely counterproductive conflicts,” she says. “This is sort of like what happens to political discussions today.” 

The report was, by government and education research standards, a blockbuster, with a wide distribution. State education commissioners across the country even asked their superintendents to provide copies for every elementary school principal.

For Snow, however, the blockbuster report, and the research behind it, was only a first step, she says. On the day that Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children came out, she was in Washington, D.C., where she took part in a press conference and briefings to members of Congress. It’s also where she dashed off a quick one-page memo that stated that while the report focused on preventing reading difficulties up to grade three, that wasn’t enough.

“If we have 100% success in preventing reading difficulties up to grade three, we will not be generating success in the American education system,” she wrote in the memo. “There’s a huge amount to learn about language and literacy beyond grade three, and we ought to start to think about that right now.” 

That memo became the basis for Snow’s next report, Reading for Understanding, which went beyond thinking that young readers needed simply to read words accurately and fluently. Comprehension was also critical. 

Overall, it was these reports, and the research done to create them, Snow says, that “kind of got me involved in and interested in mechanisms for improving vocabulary, for improving academic language, for improving the use of language in writing and in critical thinking. And that’s the work I’ve been doing for the last 20 years or so.”

At Work 

Along the way, Snow has been involved in many other influential research projects and studies in the field of language and literacy development that have impacted thousands and thousands of districts, schools, and students around the world. In fact, says Professor Meredith Rowe, Ed.M.'99, Ed.D.'03, “pretty much every five years or so she’s made a substantial theoretical or practical contribution to the field. And the unique thing about Catherine is that she’s contributed to so many different areas and across different historical moments.” Rowe cites a long list of papers and projects, including what she calls “one of my favorites,” a piece Snow authored on the role of schooling in children’s ability to provide formal word definitions. She also mentions Snow’s work with Boston Public Schools, where she developed the Word Generation curricula in 2009 to help students debate and use diverse vocabulary in classrooms. But Rowe, who had Snow as a doctoral adviser when she was a student at the Ed School, says Snow’s influence on the field goes beyond just projects and papers.

“It’s her larger perspective on the field, on the work, and her approach to the job that I admire and have learned the most from,” she says. Calling Snow a “selfless team player,” Rowe says “Catherine is infinitely curious about children’s language and literacy learning and about how to best promote it, with a focus on children’s social interactions with parents, teachers, and peers. She has addressed this issue from so many angles and always seems to be one step ahead of the field. She is always pushing people to articulate why their work is important and what it adds. She is supportive yet also critical in the most helpful ways. And she has an uncanny ability to synthesize information extremely efficiently and identify gaps or strengths.” 

This uncanny ability is something that Patrick Proctor, Ed.D.'05, a professor at Boston College, says he greatly appreciated when Snow was his doctoral adviser. 

“When I was writing my dissertation, I’d send her a draft of something, and she would turn it around in a day or two max,” he says. “Now that I’m on this end of it, as a professor, I think, oh my God, how did she do that? And the feedback was always just incredible. It would never be extensive, but it would be perfectly placed and big-enough picture that it gave you freedom and guided you at the same time.” 

That efficiency also worked well for Youngsuk Grace Kim, Ed.D.’07, an education professor at the University of California, Irvine. Kim describes her first impression of Snow as a “commanding presence,” someone who “cut straight to the point without any unnecessary detours.” 

This straightforward communication style didn’t work for all students, of course. As Snow wrote in an online tribute piece about Professor Bob Selman when he retired in 2021, “I want to thank him for all the times over the years in which he was there in his office on the sixth floor so I could send students who burst into tears in my office on the third floor up to him because he knew how to deal with weakened students much better than I did.” 

For Kim, in time, “Catherine became a guiding and stabilizing figure as a doctoral adviser, quite akin to the father figure in my cultural context,” she says. “Growing up in Korea, the father often embodied stability and direction within the household.” This extended to her research, too. “Despite my dissertation work focusing on phonological awareness, which was not her primary area of expertise, Catherine’s extensive work on language development had a significant influence on my research.” 

Snow’s research was also why Proctor initially decided to come to the Ed School. His father, a superintendent in Connecticut, sent him an op-ed that Snow had written in 1997 for The Boston Globe on the rationale for bilingual education instruction for teaching native language. “I read it, and I was like, oh, I think I have to go study with her,” he says. 

After she became his adviser, “she was very hands off, which for me was perfect,” he says. “I had a kid and a family life. She clearly trusted me to do the work that needed to be done. I think her perspective was until I have a reason not to trust him, then I trust him. It was a sort of extrinsic motivator for me. Like, all right, she trusts me. I better do a good job.” 

Professor Paola Uccelli, Ed.D.’03, felt the same trust when Snow was her adviser. (And adds that she has never seen Snow stressed out, “Not even once!”)

“Working with Catherine has always meant having exceptional freedom for my ideas and projects while getting the most insightful and immediate feedback from her,” she says. Part of that could be in the way Snow approaches her own work, Uccelli says. “Big ideas and big problems, more than what she considers irrelevant details, occupy her mind and illuminate the world of educational research and practice.” 

Mariela Paez, Ed.M.'96, Ed.D.’01, an associate professor of education at Boston College, says she appreciates that Snow’s mentorship doesn’t end when you graduate from the Ed School.

“Everybody knows about the scholarly prowess of Dr. Snow, but what people may not realize is that she shows the same dedication to mentoring and developing new scholars in the field,” she says. “When I first started as an assistant professor at Boston College, I was overwhelmed with the responsibilities of my position. I contacted her, and we met one afternoon at one of her favorite Indian restaurants in Brookline to discuss my new role. We discussed everything from attending faculty meetings to keeping my research program going, and she had excellent advice for how to approach academia and grow in the areas of research, teaching, and service to make tenure as a professor. She has been a source of inspiration and continues to champion my success in academia.” This includes serving on advisory board panels for Paez’s projects, citing Paez’s work in her own research, and inviting Paez to present in her classes. 

At Home 

Perhaps one of the people Snow has influenced the most career-wise is her son, Nathaniel Baum-Snow, an economics professor at the University of Toronto. “He took a path in between neuroscience, which is what his father does, and human psychology, which is what I do,” says Snow. 

Says Baum-Snow, “Growing up, she constantly challenged me to think hard and analytically about topics of broad importance. This is something I enjoy doing and aspire to continue with throughout my life. The paradigm put forth by the field of economics is the most intellectually rewarding avenue I found to continue to improve my understanding of the world and perhaps help it to function just a little bit better. Observing my mom also gave me some tacit knowledge and intuition that has helped me greatly in navigating the world of academia.” For example, he says, “I learned that it is impossible to do this job well without immersing yourself in it. Being an academic is not a 9-to-5 job, but instead it is a way of life.” 

Baum-Snow saw this firsthand, at an early age. “When I was a child, Mom was always surrounded by her work. Before computers were widespread, she would always bring home big stacks of papers to read. These were drafts of qualifying proposals and dissertation chapters written by her students. Once she got a laptop, it was always out in the kitchen as she was both making dinner and getting caught up on work at the same time. She was ahead of her time in these ways, as this integration of work with life has become much more widespread in recent years across so many professions.” 

That integration with life also taught Baum-Snow about the larger world.

“She would throw big parties at our house for her students, usually once or twice a year, and make a point of inviting some students and/or visiting researchers from abroad every year at Thanksgiving,” he says. “Every year we had a few people from around the world eating with us and around the house. I learned so much from these experiences about how people from different backgrounds approach life differently.” 

When told that her son, in an article for Arizona State University, had also described her as a serious person, “with seriousness either in her genes or her upbringing or both,” Snow seems intrigued — and perplexed. 

“I think almost everything you could say about somebody is probably genes and upbringing, but the real question is, what’s the alternative to serious?” she says. “If you mean serious in the sense of not focused on trivialities, I guess I would agree. I don’t have a lot of tolerance for small talk. For example, I never get my hair done. I can’t stand the conversations one needs to engage in for that. 

“But if you mean serious as not funny, I would be deeply offended because I actually think I’m often quite funny,” she says. “I do think the only real pedagogical skill I have is to use humor as a way of looking at the other side of things. Pushing people to be too serious means taking things on faith, and I don’t think we should be encouraging our students to take things on faith. We should be encouraging them to turn things around and upside down and see what the alternatives are. But let’s assume he meant serious in the sense of not focused on trivialities.” 

Snow may not tolerate the social act of getting her hair done, but no story about her would be complete without mentioning her well-known flair for fashion. 

“Catherine is renowned for her distinctive and stylish fashion sense, often donning fedora hats and short skirts paired with stockings featuring interesting and unique patterns,” says Grace Kim. “She is the only female who looks so awesome in fedora hats. In fact, over the two decades that I have known her, I can distinctly recall seeing her wear a pair of pants only once!” During a centennial celebration on campus in 2020, Grace Kim remembers honoring Snow’s fashion sense. “Several of us decided to join in the fun by wearing skirts with unique stockings ourselves,” she says. “It’s a cherished memory that vividly captures the camaraderie and playful spirit Catherine inspired among us.” 

After 45 years at the Ed School, Snow is getting ready to retire from teaching at the end of this academic year. She’ll stay on as an emeritus research professor, and move from her big office in Larsen to a smaller space on campus. “It’s so depressing to look around and think, what am I going to do with all of this sh**?” she says. For now, though, Snow has become a self-described utility outfielder for the Literacy and Languages concentration, which she cochairs. Last year, when Uccelli was on sabbatical, she taught her module. This spring, when Rowe goes on sabbatical, Snow will teach her course on child language. Ironically, she points out, this was originally her course, before Rowe adopted it. “It’s still the topics and the focus of the course that I used to teach 20 years ago,” Snow says, “so it’s kind of coming full circle.” 

These days, she’s also circling back to the reading wars, which flared up again just after the pandemic, especially with the release of a podcast series on American Public Media that raised alarms about a literacy crisis. (Snow says she didn’t have enough blood pressure medication to listen to the whole series.) She’s surprised by the degree to which people are willing to invoke a literacy crisis, she says, when national reading scores have slowly grown. And while students do need phonics instruction — one of the concerns raised by the series and others who worry schools aren’t doing it enough — Snow says students don’t need hours and hours of phonics work every day. It needs to be a balance with whole-language work, she says. 

And that balance is doable — and we can teach students to read. As she said in a recent Harvard Magazine interview, “It’s not such a complicated thing to do. But people really want to go on fighting about this.”