Anna Geiger's Blog, page 10

How to improve comprehension by asking and answering questions

Welcome back to our series about reading comprehension strategies!

What are reading comprehension strategies?

First, let’s review what reading comprehension strategies actually are. According to Shanahan et al (2010), comprehension strategies are deliberate mental actions to improve reading comprehension.

“Comprehension strategies refer to intentional (not automatic) actions a reader takes to keep his/her head in the game.”

Timothy Shanahan, 2018

In other words, you do something on purpose to help you understand the text.

Teach comprehension strategies to help students understand complex text

It’s important to teach reading comprehension strategies to help students understand text that is challenging for them – otherwise, what’s the point? If they understand the text at face value, they don’t need a comprehension strategy.

This isn’t something I always understood. As a balanced literacy teacher, I thought that I was supposed to start with the strategy. So I would look for books that lent themselves to predicting or making connections. Then I would teach the same strategy for a few weeks, using different books.

This was backward!

Start with the text, not the strategy

I should have started with a quality text – and that’s what I’m encouraging you to do when it comes to teaching the strategy of asking and answering questions.

Choose a challenging text that will teach your students something important. Then show them how to ask and answer questions to support their understanding of it.

ReQuest: A questioning technique

ReQuest is a questioning technique that has been shown to help students focus on text and pay attention to detail (Manzo, 1969).

Here’s how ReQuest works:

Have students read an assigned text (a few sentences or paragraphs).The teacher should turn over the text and invite students to ask him/her questions about the text. It helps to post question words so students know how to begin their questions: Who, what, when, where, why, and how. The teacher answers the questions without peeking and provides feedback about the quality of the students’ questions.Next, the students turn over the text while the teacher asks them questions. The students answer the questions without peeking.The teacher and students repeat the sequence for the rest of the text.

I love ReQuest because it supports what we know from research: if you want to remember information, it’s much more effective to practice remembering it (by answering questions) than to keep rereading the text. In fact, neural pathways get stronger when a memory is retrieved and students practice what they’ve learned (Argawal & Bain, 2019).

Important tip: Whenever possible, have students answer questions in pairs or in a small group. After students answer in pairs, you can randomly call on a student to share his or her answer with the class.

This technique increases student participation and ensures that everyone is doing what is necessary to remember the information … not just the regular few who raise their hands.

Question-Answer Relationship

This technique improves comprehension by helping students understand different types of questions (Raphael & Au, 2005).

Explain that there are four types of questions that students may answer about a text:Right There questions have answers found directly in the text.Think and Search questions require readers to combine the information from different parts of the text.Author and Me questions require that a reader read teh text and relate it to his or her own experience.On My Own questions require students to rely on their background knowledge.
Choose a passage. Read it aloud to your students, have them read it in pairs, or read it chorally as a class.

3. Ask questions related to the passage. Help students classify each question and find its answer.

Guess what? ChatGPT can help! I asked ChatGPT to write a second grade passage about natural
resources and provide examples of the four types of questions. Here’s what it gave me:

[image error]

Here are the questions that ChatGPT provided.

Right There Questions:

What is water, and where does it come from?What is soil, and what do plants need it for?

Think and Search Questions:

How do trees help us, and what are some things we get from them? *Why is sunlight important for plants, and what process does it help them with?

Author and Me Question:

Why do you think the author says that trees are like nature’s giants?

On My Own Questions:

Can you think of ways we can take care of the air around us?How can we use water wisely in our daily lives?

*This is a weak question, because both parts of the question have the same answer. Nice try, ChatGPT.

Summary

This post gave you two techniques that you can use to help students comprehend challenging text. ReQuest will help them learn to ask questions about the text they’re reading. Question-Answer-Relationship will help them learn to answer different kinds of questions that are posed to them.

Let me know if you try them!

Also be sure check out the rest of our comprehension strategies series by clicking the image below!

References

Agarwal, P. K., & Bain, P. M. (2019). Powerful teaching. Jossey-Bass.

Manzo, A.V. (1969). The request procedure. Journal of Reading, 13(2), 206-221.

Raphael, T.E., & Au, K. H. (2005). QAR: Enhancing comprehension and test taking across grades and content areas. The Reading Teacher, 59(3), 206-221.

Shanahan. T. (2018, May 24). Where questioning fits in comprehension instruction: Skills and strategies Part II. Shanahan on Literacy. https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/bl...

Shanahan, T., Callison, K., Carriere, C., Duke, N. K., Pearson, P. D., Schatschneider, C., & Torgesen, J. (2010). Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade: IES Practice Guide. NCEE 2010-4038. What Works Clearinghouse.

The post How to improve comprehension by asking and answering questions appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Teaching expository text structure

Welcome back to our series about reading comprehension strategies!

An awareness of the different kinds of expository text structure can help students understand informational text.

In this post I’ll list the five different kinds of expository text structure and share a routine you can follow when teaching them.

What is text structure?

Text structure is how an author organizes a text. Research shows that explicit instruction in text structure leads to gains in reading comprehension (Williams, 2005).

Because expository (informational) text can be organized in a variety of ways, it’s tricker than narrative text, in which stories follow a reliable pattern.

I like Nell Duke’s (2013) recommendation to make at least half of your read alouds expository text. This way you expose your students to more complex text while also building knowledge.

Types of expository text structures

There are five major expository text structures: description, sequence, cause and effect, compare/contrast, and problem/solution.

[image error]A routine for teaching expository text structure

1. Find a short expository text that is organized according to a particular text structure. Make sure that each student has a copy.

If you’re wondering where to get this text, look no further than ChatGTP.

I’ll be honest – ChatGPT and AI in general make me a little nervous – but I won’t deny how useful ChatGPT can be for teachers!

COMPARE & CONTRAST

I told ChatGPT to “Write a paragraph using the compare and contrast text structure that compares aardvarks and anteaters. Make the paragraph appropriate for third grade.” This is what it gave me:

Aardvarks and anteaters are two animals that like to eat ants and termites, but they have some differences. Aardvarks live in Africa, and they have big ears and a snout like a pig to dig into termite mounds. On the other hand, anteaters live in Central and South America. They have long snouts and tongues that help them slurp up ants from nests. Aardvarks are strong and live in African savannahs, while anteaters have sharp claws and can climb trees in the forests of the Americas. Even though they both love ants, aardvarks and anteaters are special in their own ways, adapting to where they live to survive and thrive.

Impressive, huh?

DESCRIPTION

“Write a paragraph for third graders using the description text structure to describe anteaters.”

Anteaters are amazing animals with unique features that help them eat their favorite food ��� ants! They live in Central and South America, where it’s warm and full of trees. Anteaters have long snouts and tongues that they use to slurp up ants from their nests. Imagine a long, sticky tongue reaching into an ant’s home! Anteaters also have sharp claws that they use to dig into the ground and find more ants to eat. They are like nature’s superheroes when it comes to hunting for tiny insects. With their special tools, anteaters are experts at finding and enjoying their delicious ant meals in the forests where they live.

PROBLEM & SOLUTION

“Write a paragraph about aardvarks for third grade using the problem and solution text structure.”

Aardvarks sometimes face a problem because their favorite food, ants and termites, can be tricky to get. You see, these tiny insects hide inside hard termite mounds. But guess what? Aardvarks are like nature’s little superheroes because they have a cool solution to this challenge! They’ve got super strong, shovel-like claws that work like special tools. These claws help aardvarks dig into the tough termite mounds and grab those tasty ants and termites. So, even though it might be hard to find their food, aardvarks have a clever way to solve the problem and enjoy their yummy meals. Go, aardvarks!

SEQUENCE

“Write a third grade paragraph using the sequence text structure about anteaters.”

Anteaters do things in a specific order that helps them find and eat ants. First, they use their keen sense of smell to sniff out ant nests. Then, with their long snouts, they dig into the ground to uncover the ants’ homes. Once they find the ant nests, anteaters use their super long tongues to slurp up the ants. It’s like a special sequence or a step-by-step plan that anteaters follow to make sure they get their favorite food. Sniff, dig, slurp ��� that’s how anteaters go about their ant-hunting adventure!

CAUSE & EFFECT

“Write a cause and effect paragraph for third graders about aardvarks.”

Aardvarks have some special abilities that help them find and eat their favorite food, ants and termites. One cause is their long snouts, which act like powerful shovels. The effect of this is that aardvarks can easily dig into hard termite mounds to uncover the insects. Another cause is their excellent sense of smell. The effect of this is that aardvarks can sniff out where the ants and termites are hiding. So, because aardvarks have these amazing features, they can cause the ants and termites to be found and enjoyed for a tasty meal!

Okay, that last one was a little weak. But overall, ChatGPT came through.

2. Have your students read the paragraph alone or with a partner. If reading in pairs, students can take turns reading a sentence. If they finish before everyone is finished, they should read the paragraph again.

3. Read the paragraph chorally.

[image error]

4. Identify signal words and invite your students to highlight them. A tip: If you had ChatGPT create your paragraph, you might want to add signal words that will make this task easier for your students. Use the chart earlier in this post to find signal words associated with each text structure. (The above passage is weak on signal words.)

5. Ask students questions about the paragraph.

Where do anteaters live?What do anteaters use to slurp up ants?What are two words that describe an anteater’s tongue?

6. Have students form questions and ask a partner. Then, have them ask and answer their own questions. They must turn over the page before they answer the question.

7. Complete a graphic organizer together. You’ll find free graphic organizers at the end of this post. If possible, project the organizer onto your dry erase board and fill it in with student feedback.

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8. Together, write a paragraph using the graphic organizer. Walk your students through the process of writing a topic sentence, detail sentences, and a concluding sentence. Model this process many times before asking students to do this on their own.

[image error]

I hope this post gave you some insight into how to teach expository text structures!

Get your free graphic organizers!
CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

And check out the rest of our comprehension strategies series by clicking the image below!

References

Duke, N.K. (2013). Starting out: Practices to use in K-3. Educational Leadership, 71(3), 40-44.

Williams, J. P. (2005). Instruction in reading comprehension for primary-grade students: A focus on text structure. The Journal of Special Education, 39(1), 6-18.

The post Teaching expository text structure appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Teaching narrative text structure

Welcome back to our series about reading comprehension strategies!

In this post I’ll explain how an awareness of text structure can help students understand text. I’ll also share a simple routine for teaching narrative text structure.

What is text structure?

Text structure is how an author organizes a text. Research shows that explicit instruction in text structure leads to gains in reading comprehension (Williams, 2005).

There are two types of text structure: narrative and expository.

Narrative text – tells a story or describes a series of eventsExpository text – gives information

If readers can anticipate that a text will contain certain types of information, and that information will be presented in a certain way, they’ll have an easier time picking out the key ideas and are more likely to remember them.

Moats & Hennessy, 2010

When should we begin teaching text structure?

We can begin teaching text structure even before students begin to read – as early as kindergarten! We can do this through interactive read alouds (Oakhill et al, 2015).

I recommend starting with narrative text structure, because story elements are much easier for students than expository text structures (coming in the next post of this series).

[image error]A routine for teaching narrative text structure

1. Choose a familiar story or variation of a popular tale.

2. Before reading, present a series of questions that you’ll be pausing to ask as you read aloud the text.

Who is the story about?What is he or she trying to do?What happens when he or she tries to do it?What happens in the end?

3. Pause to ask each question at an appropriate point in the read aloud.

4. As a class, complete a graphic organizer. You can display the organizer on a large screen and fill it in with your students’ input. Eventually, they will be able to complete an organizer with a partner or independently.

5. Teach your students to retell the story using five fingers as a scaffold.

Another retelling option is to use an anchor chart or bookmark with a series of images as prompts. Paris & Paris (2007) found that students who received explicit instruction in these kinds of techniques showed better comprehension than those who did not.

I hope this post was helpful!

Get your free graphic organizers!
CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

And check out the rest of our comprehension strategies series by clicking the image below!

References

Moats, L. C., & Hennessy, N. (2010) Digging for meaning: Teaching text comprehension. Sopris West Educational Services.

Oakhill, J., Cain, K., & Elbro, C.(2015). Understanding and teaching reading comprehension. Routledge.

Paris, A. H., & Paris, S. G. (2007). Teaching narrative comprehension strategies to first graders. Cognition and Instruction, 25(1), 1-2.

Williams, J. P. (2005). Instruction in reading comprehension for primary-grade students: A focus on text structure. The Journal of Special Education, 39(1), 6-18.

The post Teaching narrative text structure appeared first on The Measured Mom.

How to teach comprehension monitoring

My second son is currently a teenager with those silly cool bangs that are in style right now. Today’s post brings me back to when he was a kid learning to read.

He was a good decoder from early on. But by fourth grade he had developed the bad habit of speed reading.

Since he would much rather play outside (or do anything rather than sit with a book) he saw reading as a word reading task only. Just read the words, and you’re done. I noticed this during a summer reading challenge at home.

After he read his assigned chapter, I asked him to tell me about it. “What was this chapter about?”

He looked at me blankly. “I don’t know.”

My prompting didn’t help. He had nothing to say. I realized that he didn’t understand the true purpose of reading: to understand it.

We had to back up all the way to the paragraph level; after he read each paragraph aloud to me, I helped him summarize what he read. Eventually he could read a whole chapter without checking in.

What is comprehension monitoring?

My son needed to learn the comprehension monitoring strategy, which is being aware of whether or not you understand the text. In other words, it’s when you reflect on your understanding.

Even proficient readers have to monitor their comprehension

If you’re like most people, you can think of a time when you were reading and had to stop because you realized you weren’t paying attention to what you were reading. You backed up and read the section again.

You were monitoring your comprehension.

Or maybe you’ve read a sentence and paused because you read a word incorrectly, and the meaning didn’t click. You went back and re-read the sentence; this time you read the word correctly. Now everything made sense.

You were monitoring your comprehension.

How to model comprehension monitoring

1. Start by modeling comprehension monitoring as you read aloud to your students. After each page or section, stop and summarize what you’ve just read.

If I’m reading aloud Amos and Boris, by William Steig, I could stop after the second page.

“I’m going to stop for a second and talk out loud about what I just read. I want to make sure that I can remember what I’m reading.

This book is about a mouse named Amos. He likes the ocean, and he wonders about faraway places. He built a boat so he can sail far away, and he filled it with things he thinks he’ll need to stay busy and to fix the boat if it needs repairs.”

2. As you model comprehension monitoring, you may need to manufacture some misunderstandings so you can model what to do when you’re stuck.

“‘Overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything, he rolled over and over and right off the deck of his boat and into the sea.’ Wait … what? He rolled into the ocean? Why would he do that? Let me read that again …

‘Overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything …’ Oh, I get it. I think Amos was so busy thinking about the beauty of the sky and the sea that he wasn’t paying attention. That’s why he rolled into the ocean. It was an accident.”

3. As you read aloud, stop periodically to ask your students if they can picture the story in their mind. Have them describe the picture to a partner. Then randomly call on students to share what they picture.

“I’m going to read the next page without showing you the picture. Try to make a movie in your mind as I read this page.

‘Then all of a sudden he was in the water again, wide awake, spluttering and splashing about! Boris had forgotten that he had a passenger on his back and sounded. When he realized his mistake, he surfaced so quickly that Amos was sent somersaulting, tail over whiskers, high in the air.’

Boris the whale forgot that he had a little mouse on his back! What do you see in your mind? Turn to your partner. Ones, describe what you see in your mind. Then Twos have a turn … _______, tell the class what you see in your mind.”

4. Model the use of fix-up strategies as you read aloud.

Fix-up strategies are what good readers use to “fix up” their comprehension. For example:

Reread the sentence. If that doesn’t help, back up and reread the paragraph.Read more slowly.Look up unfamiliar words.Take notes about what you’re reading using a graphic organizer.Keep reading. Stop in a page or two to see if things are starting to makes sense.

More ways to teach comprehension monitoring

When you have a student who reads but doesn’t remember, teach him or her to use the Read, Cover, Remember, Retell strategy with your support. This requires students to pause and summarize what they’ve read at different points in the text. I’ve found it to be very helpful. Learn more in this blog post.
Another summarization strategy is to have students do paragraph shrinking during partner reading. It’s a fantastic way to make sure students pay attention to what they read, and it can be used in second grade and up (some teachers have even used it in first grade). I love this video from teacher Lindsay Kemeny , which shows exactly how this evidence-based strategy improves fluency and comprehension.

Create a short text with inconsistencies or errors – such as nonsense words and items that conflict with general knowledge. Read the text with the class or an individual student and have them spot the errors.

What have you found to be helpful when teaching students to monitor their comprehension? We’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Check out the rest of my comprehension strategy series by clicking on the image below:

The post How to teach comprehension monitoring appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Should we build knowledge or teach reading comprehension strategies?

A current debate in the science of reading community is whether teachers should build knowledge or teach reading comprehension strategies. In today’s post I’ll explain why both are necessary.

What’s the science of reading?

But first … what’s the “science of reading,” anyway? Five years ago, most teachers had never even heard the term. Now it’s everywhere!

The science of reading is simply a body of scientifically-based research about reading. It’s not a fad, a pendulum swing, or a curriculum. It’s just a body of research.

If you follow “science of reading” influencers on Instagram or Facebook, you’ll find that most of the conversation centers around phonics. Unfortunately, this has led many people to believe that the science of reading = phonics, which is simply not true.

The reason that much of the “science of reading” conversation centers around phonics instruction is that many balanced literacy approaches haven’t done a great job with it. We know from the National Reading Panel that phonics instruction should be systematic and explicit. But many balanced literacy programs do not follow a phonics scope and sequence. They often teach phonics implicitly or through very brief mini-lessons. And they have students practice using leveled, predictable texts which give them very little opportunity to apply their phonics knowledge.

Phonics instruction has gotten a lot of attention because it needs a lot of attention. It’s something many of us (I’m raising my hand here) needed to improve, and the way to do this is relatively straightforward.

The science of reading is more than phonics

But there’s much more to the science of reading than phonics. A lot more. Such as vocabulary and comprehension.

Unlike phonics, which can be mastered in a few years, comprehension is much more complex. It’s an unconstrained skill – which means that it continues to grow over one’s lifetime.

Because comprehension is so complex, it’s hard to pin down how to improve it. This makes the conversation a lot more nuanced.

Reading comprehension strategies … and what I got wrong

Reading comprehension strategies are are deliberate mental actions to improve comprehension (Shanahan et al, 2010).

[image error]

A great deal of research has shown that instruction in these strategies improves understanding (National Reading Panel, 2000).

The problem is that many teachers (including yours truly) have gone about strategy instruction backward. I remember compiling lists of books that lent themselves to a particular strategy – books that would help kids practice predicting, making connections, or inferring. Then I would spend days or weeks teaching a particular strategy. My main focus wasn’t helping students learn from the text – instead, I focused on helping them master the strategy.

This was backward.

Instead of using the strategy as the starting point, I should have started with a quality text and then taught the strategies that would best help students understand it.

The importance of building knowledge

According to Daniel Willingham (2006b), “teaching reading strategies is a low-cost way to give developing readers a boost, but it should be a small part of a teacher’s job. Acquiring a broad vocabulary and a rich base of background knowledge will yield more substantial long-term benefits.”

If you’re wondering why we need to teach information in a world where search engines and Siri are right at our students’ fingertips, here’s the scoop:

Background knowledge helps readers make inferences. Inferences are conclusions we reach based on the information we have. We get this information from the text itself and from our background knowledge (Adams et al, 1995).
Background knowledge gives us a place to attach new information. Marilyn Adams (2014) calls it “mental velcro.”
Background knowledge frees up space in working memory. If everything you’re reading is new information, it all takes up space in your working memory. Before long, you’ll reach cognitive overload and comprehension will suffer (Willingham, 2006a).
Because background knowledge frees up working memory, our brains are freed to think more deeply. Therefore, background knowledge improves critical thinking.Why reading comprehension strategies are still important

Knowledge building is incredibly important, and I’m thankful for Natalie Wexler’s popular book The Knowledge Gap, which brought this to the forefront.

I also appreciate the work of the Knowledge Matters campaign and their accompanying podcast.

But I’ve seen an unintended side effect of their important work … the tossing out of reading comprehension strategies entirely.

It’s not that any of these experts would support that … in fact, Natalie Wexler (2023) wrote, “it’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with teaching strategies. The problem is that American schools have gone way overboard on teaching them.”

We need to get the order right.

When we start with the text (and not the strategy), reading comprehension strategies are very useful tools for helping our students understand the content.

When teaching a strategy, use what you know about explicit instruction.

Identify the strategy.Explain what it is.Stress how it will help students take conscious steps to better understand the text.As you read, think aloud by saying what you are thinking while you read.Guide your students in using the strategy.Eventually, have your students apply the strategy on their own.

Always keep in mind the end goal – that students create a mental model – an overall representation of the meaning of the text. Strategies are only useful insofar as they help students understand and remember what they read.

This post is the beginning of a series about comprehension strategies. Just click on the image below so you can see all the posts as they are published!

References

Adams, B. C., Bell, L. C., & Perfetti, C. A. (1995). A trading relationship between reading skill and domain knowledge in children’s text comprehension. Discourse Processes, 20(3), 307-323.

Shanahan, T., Callison, K., Carriere, C., Duke, N. K., Pearson, P. D., Schatschneider, C., & Torgesen, J. (2010). Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade: IES Practice Guide. NCEE 2010-4038. What Works Clearinghouse.

National Reading Panel (U.S.) & National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.). (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Wexler, N. (2023, July 5). No, teachers don’t have to choose between knowledge and strategies. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliew...

Willingham, D. T. (2006). How knowledge helps. American Educator, 30(1), 30-37.

Willingham, D. T. (2006). The usefulness of brief instruction in reading comprehension strategies. American Educator, 30(4), 39-50.

Other resourcesTimothy Shanahan’s blog post (Shanahan on Literacy) – Knowledge or Comprehension Strategies – What Should We Teach? Joan Sedita’s blog post (Keys to Literacy) – Background Knowledge and Reading Comprehension Natalie Wexler’s book, The Knowledge Gap The Knowledge Matters podcast

The post Should we build knowledge or teach reading comprehension strategies? appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Differentiating with small groups right from the start

TRT Podcast #147: Differentiating with small groups right from the start – with Linda Diamond

Linda Diamond explains why it’s important to differentiate initial instruction in foundational skills using small-group instruction and a mastery-based approach.

Listen to the episode here

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Hello, this is Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom, and today I'm speaking with Linda Diamond. Linda Diamond is a co-author of the "Teaching Reading Sourcebook," which is a big purple book that's fabulous. It's very thick, very long, very useful, and very readable about how to teach reading. It covers all the grade levels, and it's used in some schools of higher education for helping their teacher candidates learn how to teach reading according to the science of reading.

In her long career, Linda has focused on teaching children to read, especially those with word reading difficulties like dyslexia. She's worked as a public school teacher, a principal, a director of curriculum and instruction, and more.

Today, we're going to zero in on a particular topic. She recently wrote a white paper about differentiating small group instruction from the start, versus teaching a whole group phonics lesson and then differentiating. I hope that you can listen today and think about how you might be able to make some aspects of this work in your situation. Let's get started!

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Linda!

Linda Diamond: Hi! Thanks for having me, Anna!

Anna Geiger: Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk to us about small group reading primarily, but maybe we'll touch on some other things as well.

First, could you introduce yourself and let us know what you've done in your career?

Linda Diamond: Sure. I'm Linda Diamond, and I'm the author of the "Teaching Reading Sourcebook," also "Assessing Reading Multiple Measures." The Sourcebook is used in many of the universities that are doing a good job preparing teachers. I also launched CORE Learning, oh gosh, it must have been in 1994.

Anna Geiger: Oh my goodness.

Linda Diamond: Then I retired in 2020 and began doing some consulting for publishers, for state departments, and for policy makers that are writing legislation pertaining to reading science and structured literacy. I also led the analyst team that reviewed teacher prep syllabi for the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). That's what I've been doing of late. I don't tell people I'm retired anymore, I say I'm unretired.

Anna Geiger: That seems to be the theme for a lot of people that I talk to on the podcast, they're never done.

I often recommend the CORE Sourcebook, but for anybody who's listening who hasn't heard of it, they should definitely look into it. It's a very thick, accessible book. What makes it great for a college or university class is that it covers all the grade levels in elementary, versus just the primary grades. It also is extremely clear and practical. There are a lot of lessons scripted out to show you examples of how things would look. It is truly excellent and I've shared it on Instagram and Facebook often to let people know that it's a must-have, so thanks for your part in that.

You came to my attention recently because you had published a white paper about small group reading and, as of this recording, you've got a webinar coming up. By the time this comes out that will already have aired, but the white paper you published is called "Small-Group Reading Instruction and Mastery Learning: The Missing Practices for Effective and Equitable Foundational Skills Instruction." In it you talked about a concern you had that too often a lot of the elements of reading instruction are taught in whole class instead of according to students' needs. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Linda Diamond: Sure, and indeed, there will be two different webinars coming out. One with the Facebook group, Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College, and one with the Center for the Collaborative Classroom.

If we go back and look at the research, what we'll see is that most of the researchers that are often cited as comprising the science of reading with their work actually reference small group instruction. This is not just because they did their studies with small group instruction, but because they found the greatest efficacy with small group instruction.

This goes back probably to the work that Benjamin Bloom did when he talked about the importance of differentiating and meeting kids at their skill needs. Then we have Siegfried Engelmann of "Direct Instruction." All of the direct instruction programs were designed with placement, which is key, to small group instruction. I was trained by Siegfried Engelmann. We have a number of curricula that are still DI programs, Reading Mastery and Language for Learning, for example.

Then we have a lot of what we call little DI. They're based on the same principles, SIPPS would be an example, Bookworms would be an example, and Success For All certainly utilized the same explicit, systematic, small group mastery approach to instruction.

The reason I'm saying it's a missing part is that what's happened in the science of reading community, of which I'm a strong proponent, and structured literacy, is we're teaching the word recognition skills, and we're really focusing on those skills. If we think about Hollis Scarborough's Reading Rope, we have the word recognition skills that need to become increasingly automatic. That's your phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, and sight words.

Then we have the language comprehension or linguistic comprehension: vocabulary, syntax, genre, literacy concepts. Those are not increasingly automatic; they're increasingly strategic.

Another way to think of it is the word recognition skills are also referred to as constrained skills, and that's because they can be taught and mastered if taught well, in a constrained amount of time. Whereas with reading comprehension, language comprehension, writing, vocabulary, and syntax, those are unconstrained because they continue to develop over time. Text gets more complex; vocabulary gets more complex.

So I'm really talking about why teaching word recognition skills in small group instruction, differentiated small group instruction, right from the start, is important.

Interestingly enough, Dr. Stephanie Stollar just wrote about this. Literally it hit my desk this morning. It's part of our LISTSERV.

We know that when we're teaching word recognition, we want to be able to hear the students. We want to be able to see their mouths when they're articulating. We want to be able to have many opportunities for response and the ability to give corrective feedback on the spot. We can't do that well in a whole class setting with 25 to 30 kids. With a small group, we can really attend to them, and we can push them much farther.

One of the things Sharon Vaughn said, one of the key researchers, is that she really worries about these students who are obviously going to struggle from the start. When they're in the whole class, they already are missing it, but when they're in the small group, even with grade level phonics skills, we can catch it and we can accelerate them and move them much more quickly to get through those grade level skills.

We just can't do that in a whole class, and that's why I have said they're missing. They're missing largely because the publishers of most textbook materials teach word recognition from the start in a whole class setting and then recommend that you differentiate. Well, that differentiation is too late for the kids who already were struggling and already felt lost.

For those kids, and there are those kids, and if you're familiar with Nancy Young's Ladder of Reading & Writing, we do have a group of kids who start school already reading. They're bored, and we can keep moving kids at their skill level if we work at a small group structure for word recognition.

I'm not advocating that for all the language comprehension and the text reading; we need to build that community as we're reading complex text and listening to stories and discussing vocabulary. But we can get these constrained skills mastered in a relatively short amount of time if we do it right.

Anna Geiger: I was thinking about this the other day when I was helping my fourth grader with her piano practice. We have six kids and we're teaching them all piano, and I thought, this kind of matches up because it would never work to have all of them have a whole group piano of lesson, of course, because they're all at such different levels. But if we were going to have something like a music appreciation time, that would make sense.

So that was talking about the difference between constrained and the skills that continue on. Now what are the reasons why small group instruction has been found to be more effective than teaching these types of skills in a whole class?

Linda Diamond: Well, it's for the reasons I said that I think are important. I want to be able to see these kids and hear them. I want them close to me. I want to be able to catch those students who are not getting it and are not being successful.

Then in a multi-tiered system, let's say I'm doing my small groups right from Tier 1, but I'm seeing and hearing these students who, even with my small group intensive, explicit instruction, are not quite getting it. I can now double dose in Tier 2 and I know exactly who needs it, and I can give them more opportunities to respond and I can make a targeted correction. Those are the predominant reasons.

Then with my students who are already advanced, if they come to school already reading CVC and long vowel words, why would I start them there? A key to this working is knowing where kids are. Placement tests are critical.

Only a few of the published curricula, the ones I named, actually have built-in placement tests, so we have another tool. We can use one of our screeners and begin to look across them, as Stephanie Stollar just did in her nice report today, where we can see the lowest skills and start to think about how we can use that information along with some survey assessments where we dig deeper. Which phonics skills have they mastered? Which haven't they? Then we can start to group these kids and then we're meeting them at their skill level, which is really critical.

Anna Geiger: I think one challenge that teachers might have is they have these things that they want to fit into their word reading lesson. Maybe they start with a phonemic awareness warm-up, they teach the new phonics skill, they have some blending practice, some word building, some dictation, and some decodable text reading, but that can take a long time. Do you have any suggestions for that, like an ideal length of a small group lesson and how to fit them all in?

Linda Diamond: Sure. Shanahan talked about this as well. We're really looking at word recognition lessons not taking much more than about 30 minutes in total. That includes what you talked about. It's that quick, short phonemic awareness, because once they're already decoding we don't keep doing oral-only phonemic awareness; we link it rapidly to the letters. We're quickly doing enough work with decoding and encoding, and we're working on reading those decodable texts. That can happen in about 30 minutes.

So the question then becomes, what's the rest of the class doing, right? That's going to be a challenge.

If a teacher has two groups, which is the ideal, then while one group is doing their direct work with the teacher, the teacher might not get to the decodable books with that group. She might only get to the phonics instruction and the decoding and encoding, and then move to another group. Then she comes back for the decoding while the other group, probably the higher group, is doing more work, more practice, and then they get their decodable text.

You can do a quick read of the decodable in the same first sitting and then have them reread during their seat time. The ideal is not to exceed two groups, and the challenge is how to do that.

What we found out is that the schools that do it effectively do it across the school. They do it at least across two or three grade levels where they regroup kids. That's what Success for All did. That's what Reading Mastery does. That's what Bookworms does. We call it a walk to reading model. No teacher has more than two in her class at a time.

However, if you don't have a whole school, then it becomes a challenge, and there are ways to overcome that challenge.

Anna Geiger: Before we get into that, when you said not exceeding two groups, do you mean not exceeding two groups that a single teacher has to teach, or do you mean her whole class should only be divided into two groups?

Linda Diamond: Not exceeding two groups that a teacher has to teach.

Anna Geiger: Okay, that makes more sense.

Linda Diamond: It's very possible in fact, we've seen this when we give placement tests, that the class may have as many as four or five different skill levels.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, that makes sense.

Linda Diamond: Now if I only want to take two, I might take a very low one and a middle one. My colleague might take the highest one and another one. I'm taking her kids that fit, but we want to still keep the group size down to about six to eight.

In regrouping across the school with added adult support, most of those schools that have done it very effectively have other adults who become highly trained and deliver the curriculum. You have to understand that most of these direct instruction or little DI curricula are scripted, and we can teach paraprofessionals, parents, and even high school students how to teach these curricula. That's what those of us who were trained by Siegfried Engelmann did often. Now a lot of schools have coaches and interventionists as well.

When I was a building principal of a middle school, a 5th-8th grade middle school with very very low performance, my fifth graders were doing a DI intervention program, Corrective Reading, and I took the lowest group. It also was a nice break for me as a principal; I couldn't be bothered with other things during that time. There are ways to do it if there's the will to do it and the understanding that it's important.

Anna Geiger: So imagine, and of course this is true in some cases, where a teacher wants to do this, but they are kind of a lone wolf and nobody else is on board. What are some things they can do to make this work? Are there some things they can pull out and just do as whole group so they have abbreviated small groups, or how would you recommend they go about it?

Linda Diamond: Yes, so we have a school like that that I've worked with. It's one of our Bureau of Indian Education Schools. Now, the Bureau of Indian Education Schools, many of these on the reservation are tiny. They might have anywhere from three to five teachers, so regrouping across a whole school is difficult, if not impossible. What we've done, and what we've seen that these schools have done, is they have trained parents. The beauty of that is even though many of these very tiny schools have high teacher turnover, particularly on the reservation, but by training parents, not only are they giving skills to their BIPOC populations, they're also training their next generation of teachers. So parents have come in the classroom, and that can be done with a single teacher.

The other thing that you can do is when you see you have too many groups to possibly manage, you're going to make some decisions where you're going to push the mid to high into one group, and then just the low is another, so you still don't have more than two.

It's not a perfect one-to-one skill placement, but it's close, and you could do reviews of sound-spellings together, as long as they're quick. You could, again, have kids rereading their own decodable silently while the other group is with you, and they can be doing much more work.

Now that we have some very effective computer programs, we also can have a group working on a program that reinforces what they're working on. With our DI programs, we did have a very good computer program that could reinforce. If we have other curricula that can reinforce, we can bring those in so that some kids are on the computer while the teacher is providing direct instruction.

But here's the key, and Anita Archer talks about this all the time, this instruction should be short, brisk, zippy, and not have to take a lot of time.

Anna Geiger: A "perky" pace.

Do you have any more suggestions for what the students can be doing when they're not meeting with the teacher?

Linda Diamond: Well, in our DI programs, and in many of these programs, they have their own independent work built in. That may include alphabet practice where students are matching uppercase and lowercase letters, or handwriting where they're forming and working on forming their letters. They're definitely doing rereading in decodable text, or if they're past that stage, they're able to read in text that's more authentic, but they're doing it for rereading practice. They also can be working on their handwriting, and they're also matching a letter to pictures that might start with that letter. Those are the various things.

Typically in small group instruction, at the start, some skills need to be taught to the whole class right at the beginning so that everyone could do them when they're in small groups. That would have to do with letter recognition, alphabet, letter formation, maybe some connection of pictures to words that start with the sound. Similarly, you could have some vocabulary where they're matching a picture to a word if it's a word that they've already heard and they know that word. If they've also been taught a set of high frequency words, they can be repracticing those words. Those are all examples.

Anna Geiger: What would you say when teachers who like to use the whole group method and then differentiate afterward would say, "Well it's giving them all exposure to the grade level skill, so that's being more fair," or "It's giving them access to grade level skills because they might not get there by the end of the year."

How would you respond to that?

Linda Diamond: Okay, so I love that question. First of all, exposure does not lead to mastery. Only mastery leads to mastery.

Anna Geiger: Could you define mastery really quickly before you move on?

Linda Diamond: Yes, mastery is when you achieve that automaticity that is so important that Linnea Ehri talks about all the time. If we don't have automaticity, we aren't going to have comprehension, so we want automaticity.

The way that curricula that are structured this way do this is they make sure that in each lesson, about 90% of the lesson, has previously learned skills and there's about 70% new. What that does is it means kids have a high success rate. You want to see them about 90% of the time getting the skills they already were taught right because, remember, you're still interleaving skills throughout. When they see those that they've already learned, you want them to get them right 90% of the time. Whereas the new skills, at least at the first attempt, 70% of the time get it right. Then you can reteach and correct.

If they start to achieve that mastery, we'll be able to build, and we'll be able to build more swiftly because the student's not frustrated.

The problem with exposure, if I am a student who is struggling... Let's say I spent 30 minutes, which is what most of the publishers have for those skills in whole class instruction, hopefully not more, and I didn't understand or master much of it, then I have essentially lost 30 minutes. Then I differentiate and I get, say, 20 minutes targeted instruction, maybe 30 if I'm lucky, in Tier 2.

So now I've had about 30 minutes where I was lost much of the time, and I've now had about 30 minutes where I'm really targeted, and it's those skills I need. They could be the grade level skills. They could be skills I missed from the grade level before. I don't just skip over them because they build these word recognition skills.

If I started Tier 1 in a small group, I could have 30 minutes right at my skill need, and then if I have to double dose, I could have another 20 or 30. Now I have 50 minutes at my targeted need. I think that's an important distinction.

For those students who already came reading, I know what their parents say, and they're bored fairly early on when they could accelerate. This really frankly gets to, in my opinion, the equity question, which is very important.

A lot of people misconstrue grouping as tracking. We are talking about grouping at the skill level, and again, with word recognition. Well, we had some very good research done by a Greek researcher, Valiandes, who actually saw the opposite, and so did Lou, who studied small group instruction, so did Sharon Vaughn. We all saw that, in fact, they all got to the grade level standards much more quickly when they had the targeted language instruction.

I think of that great graphic that kind of clarifies the confusion people have about equality versus equity. I don't know if you've seen the image. It's one of my favorite.

Anna Geiger: Standing by the fence?

Linda Diamond: Yeah, the three kids standing by the fence, and two of them are fairly tall and one is short, and they're all on the same size boxes. That's equality, but the short child still can't see over the fence. You give that child a taller box, and now that child has equal access to the same opportunities, and that's equity.

It's giving children what they need when they need it. It only becomes tracking if we don't have an explicit, systematic, structured, mastery-based, accelerative curriculum. If we don't realize that we have kids who are stuck and we just keep doing the same thing as opposed to really digging in and figuring out what their needs are in order to target. Then we can accelerate.

We see this all the time. We see it with schools, for example, using SIPPS, where they give a program mastery test every two weeks on what was taught. They regroup just about every two weeks, so you'll see kids moving to another teacher or others coming to another one because they are not stagnant.

We always have talked about flexible groups. Well, how do you do it unless you've done this really good skill-based placement, which Matt Burns is going to talk about. This is how we achieve equity, by giving the kids what they need when they need it, not treating everybody the same.

I will tell you one of the biggest concerns that I hear from my colleagues who work in the multilingual community is that it's all one-size-fits-all curriculum. We know that we have children who come to school from, let's say, alphabetic languages who already have developed phonological awareness, and we can move them much more quickly because we can transfer that knowledge.

Because of that, I think we need to be mindful for all our children that equity requires giving children what they need when they need it, not just treating everyone the same.

Anna Geiger: Thank you for explaining that so well. It sounds to me like you're also saying that when people are choosing a curriculum, they should look for a curriculum that has all this in mind. One that gives them materials to help them set up their groups, gives them progress monitoring tools, and even activities for the other kids. I don't know if that's something people always look for when choosing a curriculum, so that's really good advice.

Linda Diamond: They don't. You know, those of us old timers who were trained by Siegfried Engelmann, and then people like Anita Archer, who was also trained by Siegfried Engelmann, and the late John Shefelbine, who developed SIPPS... Having an understanding of direct instruction models will help when looking for curriculum.

I have to say too, I'm not saying don't do it whole class. I would rather see it done than not done, if it becomes too much of a struggle. There are some very good whole class curriculum out there, for example, UFLI Foundations. Holly Lane and her colleagues did a beautiful job.

But I'm also saying that we do even more by starting kids in a small group, mastery type approach. Yes, it requires some work with the whole school, it requires planning, and it ideally would require having really strong curriculum that's already designed that way.

Anna Geiger: Well thank you very much. I'm really looking forward to the presentations you're giving later this month. Those will be out already when this airs, so I'll make sure to link to the replays, if they're available, in the show notes.

Is there anything else you'd like to share? Any projects that you're working on?

Linda Diamond: Well, let's see. I am working on California, my home state, and where we're headed. We have a number of universities that are starting to revise their teacher prep, which is a good thing, and I'm engaged with some of them.

I'm working with, as I mentioned, a couple curriculum publishers, and we're in the process of making changes or revision.

Then I have a project of my own that I've been working on now for over a year with a former colleague, B.J. Thorsness. We've been working on a curriculum that teaches writing from a syntactic grammar approach. That's taken us a long time.

Anna Geiger: Interesting. What grade is that for?

Linda Diamond: It's targeting really upper elementary through. We're making assumptions that there are a lot of students who don't really understand a linguistic approach to grammar, and they don't understand the syntax of the sentence, and then the paragraph. That's where we're headed with this particular project.

Anna Geiger: Well, that's very exciting. Any guesses when that might be ready?

Linda Diamond: No, we thought it would be ready already. I would guess we need another year to get done with this.

Anna Geiger: Do you have a publisher already?

Linda Diamond: No, we're going to be looking for one.

Anna Geiger: Okay, because I would keep an eye on publishers' newsletters, but I'll just wait to hear when it comes out. Hopefully this will get announced in the big Facebook group once that's ready.

Linda Diamond: Good! Thank you.

Anna Geiger: Well, thank you so much for taking time to talk to me and clearing a lot of things up. I really appreciate that.

Linda Diamond: You're very welcome.

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode147. Talk to you next time!

Closing: That's all for this episode of Triple R Teaching. For more educational resources, visit Anna at her home base, themeasuredmom.com, and join our teaching community. We look forward to helping you reflect, refine, and recharge on the next episode of Triple R Teaching.

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Books by Linda Diamond Teaching Reading Sourcebook Assessing Reading Multiple Measures Vocabulary Handbook Other resources from Linda Diamond Website White paper: Small-Group Reading Instruction and Mastery Learning: The Missing Practices for Effective and Equitable Foundational Skills Instruction

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The post Differentiating with small groups right from the start appeared first on The Measured Mom.

How to use assessment data within MTSS

TRT Podcast #146: How to use assessment data within MTSS – with Dr. Stephanie Stollar

Dr. Stephanie Stollar has been supporting schools to use MTSS to improve reading outcomes for more than 25 years.  She explains the importance of using screening data to reflect the effectiveness of Tier 1 instruction, how to use assessment data to form differentiated small groups, and how to avoid common mistakes that schools make when implementing MTSS.

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Hello! This is Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom, and today I'm very excited to welcome Dr. Stephanie Stollar. She's the founder of Stephanie Stollar Consulting and the creator of the Reading Science Academy, which is a wonderful, affordable, fabulous membership for people who want to learn more about the science of reading. I've been a member for a couple of years now. She has excellent trainings that she gives as well as guest speakers, big people in the science of reading community like Dr. Anita Archer and others, and also a really fabulous community of people who come together to help each other problem solve through issues they might be facing when it comes to implementing the science of reading.

Dr. Stephanie Stollar has worked as a school psychologist and educational consultant. She's also an adjunct professor at Mount St. Joseph University. I was actually able to take a class from her, and in that class we discussed many of the things that we'll be talking about today, specifically how to use assessment data within MTSS.

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Dr. Stollar!

Stephanie Stollar: Hi, Anna. Thanks so much for having me!

Anna Geiger: So I have really appreciated everything I've learned from you both at Mount St. Joseph and then in Reading Science Academy and also through a recent course that you published about MTSS.

In this podcast series, we're learning how to structure a system so that everyone gets their needs met, but I think there's a lot of confusion and uncertainty about how that looks. So today we're going to dive into that a little bit. In the previous episode, I laid out MTSS and how all that works, and today we're going to talk starting with the screener data.

Let's say that we've done the universal screener at the beginning of the year, and we're teaching first grade. What do we do first?

Stephanie Stollar: Yeah, good question because I think there's an opportunity that is unrealized in most schools for using screening data to prevent reading problems. I think everybody's familiar with using screening data to identify students who are at risk. We're doing a good job now of doing that, but we're not doing such a good job using screening data to identify SYSTEMS that are at risk. What I mean by that is specifically using screening data to reflect the health and effectiveness of your classroom reading instruction.

The first order of business in building a multi-tiered system of support is to use your classroom reading instruction to shrink risk, to reduce the number of students who need something additional to a very, very small number, something like 20% at the grade level.

So the first thing to do after you've done universal screening is to look at what your students need. Screening should tell you how students are doing on their path to reading, whatever grade level they are. Screening should indicate, do they have those essential skills? Can they understand grade level text, for example? If you look at your screening data, then you know what your students need. You know what they already know and what they need to learn next.

Then you can reflect on your classroom reading instruction. What are you about to teach? Does that make sense? Is it a match? Is your instruction going to be aligned to where students are currently with their skills?

If not, then that's the first order of business as a grade level team to sit down with the percentage of students who are at risk at your grade level and start unpacking what the students need. How are we going to meet that need with our first reading instruction, regular classroom reading instruction, in Tier 1?

The mistake I see many schools making is they do the screening and then they're going from a score on a screener, usually unfortunately something like a composite score, which shouldn't be used this way, straight to a tier in the three-tiered model.

So they'll say, "Everybody who scored below benchmark is going to get Tier 2, and everybody who scored well below benchmark is going to get Tier 3." They're just using screening to sort students in terms of individual student intervention, and they're missing the biggest opportunity of MTSS, which is to use the classroom reading instruction to shrink risk.

So then people are overwhelmed. They've got 40% of their grade level who are at risk or 60% of their grade level who are at risk, and they're running around furiously trying to build more intervention opportunities, get more intervention minutes, get more intervention people, get a different intervention program, and they're trying to build intervention on top of a shaky foundation of Tier 1.

They're like hamsters on a wheel trying to just run faster and faster with more intervention when they're not addressing what's going on in the place where students spend most of their instructional minutes, that's regular classroom reading instruction.

Here are some things to think about if your Tier 1 is not showing to be all that effective; if you've got more than 20% of students at a grade level who are at risk on screening, what should you think about?

Well, you should think about what you're teaching and how you're teaching it. You should look at the scope and sequence of your curriculum. What skills are you teaching and are they lined up to what your students currently need, or are you about to teach over their heads? How are you teaching those skills? What are you using to teach those skills in terms of instructional routines and materials? What do teachers know about teaching those skills? What's their knowledge base? How are you grouping for that instruction? Have considerations around what you're going to teach whole group and small group. How are you supporting that differentiation? In MTSS, we call this flexible service delivery.

When I talk about aligning Tier 1 instruction to the needs of your students and doing that primarily through small group, I'm not asking classroom teachers to do that all on their own. I'm also not saying that the teacher should be with one small group while everybody else is fending for themselves. I'm talking about flooding the grade level with every available adult resource so that you can get that small group differentiated instruction that is the hallmark of Tier 1.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. So what if we do the screener and our percentages are looking pretty good? A great percentage of kids are getting their needs met in Tier 1, but then I do have the children that are below benchmark or well below. Now what? How do I decide the balance between whole group and small group?

Stephanie Stollar: If most students are on track, then you could probably provide most of your instruction in whole group. This is one of the ways that we act on data-based decision making. Is your data saying that most of your students need the same thing; they're mostly at the same skill level? Then it makes sense to teach mostly in whole group, though that small number of students who are at risk are going to need something additional. That's where Tier 2 or Tier 3 intervention might come into play.

In that case, Tier 2 and Tier 3 can be supportive of the whole group instruction. So maybe you're pre-teaching vocabulary words or you are reteaching a phonics skill to that small number of students who are struggling so that they can keep pace with what's going on in the whole group classroom instruction. Then you're also using that extra dose to catch them up to close the gap so that you get to the place where you need to be, which is 100% of your students meeting those grade level expectations.

All of the things that I'm suggesting are based on the data. I'm giving a framework of a model that is not meant to be rigidly applied; it's meant to be contextualized to the needs of your students.

The main thing I would say is if what you're currently doing isn't working, you need to think about doing business differently. This is where I don't think people are having enough conversation. It's still about what's wrong with the student and it's still about screening. The child's at risk so they're going to go somewhere else to get something else.

I want to encourage people to take ownership of this and to build a system that's actually designed to match the needs of the students. If what you're currently doing isn't working, you're going to have to think about one of these variables that I mentioned about Tier 1 instruction. You're going to think about changing something there to get a different result.

Anna Geiger: Let's just get really specific and say I've done the screener, and let's say 80% of the kids are at benchmark or above, and then there's a few that are really below. I happen to know that these particular children are really below, I'm teaching at the beginning of first grade, and they don't know how to decode words at all, or maybe they're still struggling with letter sounds.

What would be the next step in terms of my whole group and small group? Would you recommend keeping them with the whole group even though we're farther than they are, and then just differentiating in a small group right after, or something different?

Stephanie Stollar: When it comes to phonics instruction specifically, in my experience and what I've seen in the research, matching instruction to the student's skill level seems to work best. I'm giving you, again, my understanding of the research, my personal experience in schools.

I don't think students learn through exposure. I don't think that it's helpful for them to take a pass through something just to be exposed to it. I think that's what causes frustration. I think it's what causes students to either act out or internally withdraw. Students are very aware of how they're performing relative to their peers, and if they are in instruction that's too difficult for them, there are negative social and emotional outcomes of that.

So my preference is going to be to match the point of instruction, for those initial decoding and word recognition skills, to do that to the extent possible in small group. And to do that from the get-go in kindergarten and first grade so that you don't have to continue to do that every year.

This is why it's really important to direct resources to those early grade levels and to do the small group differentiation and the double dose at Tier 2 and 3 so that kids actually catch up by the end of first grade. Because to do this kind of thing with fourth, fifth, or sixth graders, the research indicates it's going to take something like an hour to an hour and a half of reading intervention every day to catch kids up, and we're just not typically organized to do that.

So what I'm describing is really best applied with urgency in kindergarten and first grade so that everybody leaves first grade on track.

Anna Geiger: And just to clarify that the differentiated instruction that you're recommending in small groups would be the Tier 1 instruction?

Stephanie Stollar: Yes.

Anna Geiger: And then the Tier 2 or, if necessary, Tier 3 would be provided possibly by another teacher, but building on what you're already doing in the Tier 1?

Stephanie Stollar: Yes. It's in addition to, not instead of.

Anna Geiger: Right.

Stephanie Stollar: So kids don't come out of Tier 1 to get their Tier 2, or Tier 3.

I don't get too rigid about WHO it is. It could be the classroom teacher who's doing Tier 2 or Tier 3. It could be a different educator. Schools are different in terms of the resources and personnel that they have.

The concept is that kids who are behind, students who are at risk, need more and better instruction. They need more minutes, they need more repetitions, they need more direct and explicit instruction. They need more immediate corrective feedback. They need more opportunities to practice and respond, and that happens best in small group, and they're going to need not just one small group each day, probably that double dose. That's what I would recommend.

Anna Geiger: That's what I appreciate about MTSS now that I have wrapped my brain around it. This idea that it's not just that you're stuck in this small group forever and you'll always be the lowest reading group, but the point is you're setting a goal and we're tracking it, and we're doing what we need to do to get you there as quickly as possible. What that means is you need extra instruction.

Stephanie Stollar: That's right. The purpose of Tier 2, I think people forget this, the purpose of Tier 2 is not to take you back to where your skill is and keep you there forever, or even to have you make parallel growth to your age and grade peers. The purpose of Tier 2 is to accelerate your growth so that you catch up.

If your Tier 2 system is not doing that, then you need to analyze and improve your Tier 2 system. If nobody is catching up, it's not the kids' fault. There's something in that instructional system that could be improved.

Anna Geiger: Let's dial down to a very specific classroom. Let's say a teacher has their screener data and they've, like I said, they have a few children that are quite behind. Maybe they don't have other teachers that they can work with, so they're on their own in terms of having teachers coming together to take different groups at the same time. They're responsible for the Tier 1 for all their students.

How do you recommend doing that? Do you have a large group over here, and then the small group of the kids who are struggling, but what are they doing when you're meeting with the large group? How would all that work out?

Stephanie Stollar: Well, first of all, I'm not sure of a scenario where there's absolutely no other adult who can help with that differentiation.

Even if there's one section, one classroom, for each grade level, there's probably a special educator in the building. There's probably a speech language therapist or a school psychologist or a counselor or a social worker who serves that building. There's probably a librarian, a music teacher, a bus driver, or a principal who serves that building. I've seen all of those people trained to do small group reading instruction.

This is where people have to get creative in identifying who are their resources, adult resources, and what's the best way to use them and train them so that they can help with that small group instruction.

Putting that aside, what are other students doing while the teacher is with a small group is a question that we could entertain. I would say the best thing to have students do in partners or in small groups or even independently, is to practice for the purpose of moving from accuracy to automaticity.

Don't send students off to work on their own on anything that you haven't seen them perform accurately in front of you. I think that's where we get into trouble, when we have sort of blanket literacy stations or the same centers that everybody's going to rotate through. That doesn't always go well because if the students can't actually perform the skill, they can't do it independently, so they're going to choose to do something else.

Anna Geiger: Yes.

Stephanie Stollar: They're going to get into misbehavior. They're just going to flounder and waste the time.

I think you have to differentiate that independent or partner work just as much as you differentiate what you're doing in a teacher-led small group.

Kids need practice as they're learning to read, so if you can structure that as independent practice or partner practice, which works really well in a variety of ways, then even if you have to send them off to do something while you're with a small group, you can make it practice of a skill that they can do accurately. Then that's time well spent to move them to the level of automaticity and fluency that's required with these foundational reading skills.

I love partner reading activities. I love repeated reading in partners. There's a couple of different ways that you can get support to do that. I love repeated reading with paragraph shrinking. That's a great thing that can be adapted to struggling students or accelerated in advanced students. I love collaborative strategic reading, which is a small group intervention that Sharon Vaughn has published. There are ways to use that time wisely if that's your situation.

Anna Geiger: I think that is such a good reminder because I think that's a mistake that I made as a teacher, thinking that the small groups or the centers were supposed to be application of what I had just taught versus, like you said, a review thing.

When I was balanced literacy teacher, to me that just felt like kind of a waste of time. I hadn't really studied how important automaticity is and how much we know about retrieval and how much they need to practice remembering those letters sounds or sounding out those words. So yeah, thanks for clarifying that.

It also relieves some pressure from teachers who are worried that, like I just got another email about this week, how will I know that they're not practicing mistakes at the centers? If you're giving them review and they can do it, you're still doing something really important, you're building automaticity.

Stephanie Stollar: That's right.

Anna Geiger: So what if you've decided to do some small group Tier 1 instruction, but you have students who have multiple areas of need, so they've scored low on different sections of Acadience. How do I decide what I'm going to start with? Or do I do a combination? What's my number one focus in my small groups?

Stephanie Stollar: Yeah, you ask tough, complicated questions. In general, I think about sort of a path to reading, a sequence that students need to move through. It's not quite this linear; there's lots of back and forth. The skills are reciprocal, I know that.

But in general, there's a sequence that we have to move students through. If we think about the word recognition skills, it starts with phonemic awareness, and then they have to map sounds to print. They have to develop the alphabetic principle. They have to unitize basic CVC words. Then they have to become accurate in text and then fluent in text. Then they have a chance of understanding what they're reading, if we have also had simultaneous effort directed at the language comprehension skills.

So I try to keep that path or sequence in my mind when I'm thinking about what I should focus on for small group instruction, or intervention, for a student. When you get older struggling readers, it's complex because they're probably missing all of those skills.

So, in general, you want to go back to the lowest skill in that sequence that the student hasn't yet mastered, because you can't skip over any of those, right? They build on each other. It's cumulative knowledge that gets created. There is value even for older students to take them back and fill in the gaps.

When I started in education, we didn't think that was the case. We used to think if they get to fourth grade and they're a struggling reader, they haven't learned through phonics, so we should scrap all that and just teach them through the whole word method.

Anna Geiger: Right.

Stephanie Stollar: Well, now we know that's not how the brain reads, right? Even with fourth graders and above, we should go back and establish phonemic awareness if that's what they're missing, and build the alphabetic principle through decoding and encoding. We should take them back to those earlier skills and solidify those because that's what's going to create the foundation, along with language comprehension, for reading comprehension to take place.

A way that I think about this is that there's kind of a balance between, if I dare say the word balance, it seems like it's a crappy word, but there's a balance between a focus for your small group instruction or intervention and an integration.

Let me say what I mean by that. In your small group instruction, you're going to have this priority focus, right? So let's say you have a third grader who has not mastered phonemic awareness. You may be having a focus on phonemic awareness, but that doesn't mean it's the only thing you're going to teach, because we also know that there's value in integrating across these skills. This is why it's so complex and difficult.

Anna Geiger: Yes, rocket science.

Stephanie Stollar: It is rocket science for sure! So even though I'm focusing on the fact that I have to fill in this gap around phonemic awareness, I know that the best way to learn phonemic awareness is through reading and spelling, so I'm integrating the alphabetic principle and phonemic awareness. I'm not just teaching one skill in isolation.

I know that there's value in knowing the meaning of words for building phonemic awareness and decoding, so I'm not keeping vocabulary out of my explicit phonemic awareness and phonics lesson. If students are reading and writing words that they don't know the meaning of, I'm going to quickly, incidentally and on purpose, bring that meaning in.

My focus might be on that lowest skill area, but I'm integrating the instruction across the skill areas. Does that make sense?

Anna Geiger: That makes sense. It does.

Just a quick question about progress monitoring. You're just picking one thing to focus on for that though, right?

Stephanie Stollar: Yes.

Anna Geiger: And just picking one thing you're tracking, which should be the lowest skill.

Stephanie Stollar: That's right, yeah. I think of progress monitoring differently, where my instruction is going to be a little bit more integrated and take advantage of the reciprocal nature across the skills. I want to be more focused with the progress monitoring because progress monitoring will capture growth when it's lined up to the point of instruction.

If I'm progress monitoring on a skill that's a couple of steps down the line from where the student's current knowledge is, that progress monitoring won't show growth on a weekly basis. Then I might make a mistake. I might think the student isn't growing and I should change instruction, or I should intensify support, when really the problem is I've been measuring in something that's too distant from where their skill level is and it's going to be a long time until the progress shows up on that distant measure, that grade level measure, if you will.

Anna Geiger: So the progress monitoring is kind of a waste of time if I'm doing it that way, because then I can't tell if I need to change instruction because it's not even measuring what I need to do.

Stephanie Stollar: That's right. Even worse than it being a waste of time, it leads people to make the wrong decision. That's what I've found.

If you're only monitoring in grade level material, but the student's skill level is below level, and you're actually intervening in a below grade level skill... If all you have is grade level progress monitoring, you are probably not going to see growth. Then again, you could make the wrong decision. It's going to lead you down the path of perhaps changing instruction when that might very well be the instruction the student needs. So make sure to line up the progress monitoring to that point of instruction.

Anna Geiger: That would be one mistake that people make is progress monitoring in the wrong skill. If they're performing below grade level, and that's what we're teaching them with, that's what we progress monitor.

What are some other mistakes to avoid when implementing MTSS?

Stephanie Stollar: Oh my gosh, there's many. We've talked about some of them, not using screening data to design your systems of support, that's a mistake.

I think it's a mistake to go straight from screening data to tiers of intervention.

Anna Geiger: Versus examining what you're doing in your Tier 1, and starting with that first.

Stephanie Stollar: Yes. Skipping the Tier 1 altogether. It's a huge mistake that people make.

What else? People make the mistake of taking kids out of their Tier 1 literacy block to get their Tier 2 or Tier 3, and nothing is more disjointed for a struggling reader than to be plopped back into something that's like a movie that's ongoing and you missed a piece of it, that's problematic.

Not learning to do problem solving. This is a huge mistake that I see schools making.

Not seeing MTSS as the framework for implementing the science of reading. This is a campaign that I'm on currently because we shouldn't have separate efforts and initiatives and teams within our district for reading improvement, for school improvement, for responding to dyslexia legislation, for science of reading, and then MTSS as something separate. MTSS is the framework for all of those other projects if you will. It's what brings everything together.

Anna Geiger: So you have spent a lot of time educating teachers in many different ways. Can you talk to us a little bit about your Reading Science Academy and your course that you just published?

Stephanie Stollar: Yeah, I'll start with the course because it's specific to MTSS. I have spent a lot of time consulting with school districts and other agencies about implementing MTSS. A lot of people, as they're trying to implement dyslexia laws or improve their reading outcomes, have been coming to me for that kind of support to implement MTSS.

Honestly, I can't respond to the demand and I see the kinds of mistakes and missteps that people are making, so that MTSS course was an effort to try to disseminate some information about how to use MTSS to improve reading outcomes to a larger group of people.

It breaks it down to the really big and important steps, gives people some tools and some guidance, and serves as kind of a map for moving forward to implement when I can't be there to provide that kind of consultation and guidance. I can't do the PD school by school, so having an online asynchronous course was my attempt to try to support more individual educators and more schools.

The Reading Science Academy is a different entity altogether. It is a community for learning about and implementing the science of reading. It is a responsive educational community. It's not a course, so there's not an A to Z, start to finish.

What the members need, they bring forward to me in a variety of different ways. We have a private Facebook group that we interact in and where they say what they're struggling with, what questions they have, and what they're reading or learning about. I create content in response to what they need.

Members get new content every week. The first week of the month, we get together on Zoom for just an informal Q & A opportunity. The second week of the month, I release a masterclass on one of the topics of interest. The third week of the month is what I call a cheat sheet, some kind of implementation guide, or a summary of a research article, or an area of research. The fourth week of every month, we have a guest I call the "substitute teacher."

All of those materials are housed in a password-protected website. All of our live meetings are recorded, and it's not that people should go through and consume all of the content. I mean it to be responsive to what people need, so in the moment, if you're looking for a resource, you can go to this now vast three-year library of content and find what you need.

In addition to the content that's housed there, it's the community. I think that has been really the most rewarding for me, and I think the most helpful for members. I created it for people who were sort of new to learning about the science of reading, but the unexpected and wonderful thing about it is I have members, like yourself, who are very knowledgeable, members like Nancy Eberhardt, who are just like literacy legends to me. So it's the interaction and mix between people who are farther along on the journey and people who might be just starting out and what people have learned from each other.

I've just created the environment to make that possible, and what I've seen in terms of growth from the members has been amazing, remarkable. We have people writing books, and we have people, again, like yourself, hosting podcasts and blogs, and people who were classroom teachers who've now been elevated to being coaches, or reading interventionists, or district administrators. Now they're being asked to provide PD for their entire district on the science of reading.

It's just amazing what individual educators have accomplished in the last couple of years, so I'm really happy to be connected to people like that. It's very inspiring to me. It makes me feel optimistic. We might finally get this right for kids this time around.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, well I can't recommend it enough. I'm a member for life. I will be.

Stephanie Stollar: Well, thank you. That's awesome.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, I love all of your trainings. You have a very concise way of presenting and also are very easy to listen to.

Stephanie Stollar: Thank you.

Anna Geiger: Also, like you said with the group, that's a really good place to go. I do like to post in the big science of reading group sometimes, but you'll get all kinds of chatter there. It's really nice to be with the supportive smaller group, and you're always extremely responsive, which I really appreciate.

Stephanie Stollar: Thank you.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, it's wonderful. And your guest teachers are amazing, like Anita Archer, Shayne Piasta, and researchers. It's so great. So thanks for all you do.

Is there anything else you'd like to share before we sign off?

Stephanie Stollar: I would like to share a message to teachers who might be listening to this. In my years of experience, I've seen a lot of things come and go. There are a lot of factors that contribute to reading outcomes in schools, and what I want to say to teachers is, YOU are the most important variable. You might not feel like you have much power within your system, but in your classroom, YOU are the most important variable in what contributes to reading outcomes. Wherever you are on your journey in learning about reading research, stick with it. Take the next step. It will matter in terms of what your students learn.

Hang in there, especially here at the beginning of the school year, I want to send encouragement to all of you. What you do in your classroom is really important. It matters, and at least I want to acknowledge and recognize it. So thank you to all the teachers!

Anna Geiger: Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode146. Talk to you next time!

Closing: That's all for this episode of Triple R Teaching. For more educational resources, visit Anna at her home base, themeasuredmom.com, and join our teaching community. We look forward to helping you reflect, refine, and recharge on the next episode of Triple R Teaching.

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What is MTSS?

TRT Podcast #145: What is MTSS?

I explain how to use MTSS as a framework for implementing the science of reading. We look at four different types of assessment and describe what happens in Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 instruction.

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Hello! Anna Geiger here from the Measured Mom, and this episode is going to kick off a series about getting Tier 1 right within MTSS and also providing interventions for students who need it.

Today I want to really define some terms, talk about what MTSS is, and share the assessments that we use within that model.

MTSS stands for Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, and it is a framework for implementing the science of reading. Just because you have a great science of reading-based curriculum and you have good teachers, it does not mean that your core instruction, the instruction you give to everybody, is going to be enough for all of your students.

We all know that even when you give that good instruction to everyone, there's always someone who needs extra help, extra support, or, we could say, an extra dose of instruction. MTSS is the framework for making sure everyone gets what they need, which may be different levels of intensity.

A lot of schools attempt MTSS, but it's not always implemented properly. The three things a strong MTSS system will have include a collaborative problem-solving model, an assessment system, and then the three tiers of instruction.

A collaborative problem-solving model is the idea that when you want to solve an issue, no matter what that might be, you're going to have a team of people come together to work on that.

I know when I was a classroom teacher I would go next door and sometimes ask advice from the teacher there, but I didn't really see myself as part of a whole school team. I kind of thought of myself as a little island, I was responsible for my kids; they were responsible for their kids.

But with an MTSS system all teachers see all students as belonging to everyone, as in we're all responsible for their growth. We're all responsible to make sure those students reach grade level benchmarks.

You might wonder, "Well, how can that be? I'm not teaching her students." Sometimes there's a team effort across a grade level to teach different tiers of instruction, and we'll get to that in later weeks.

First, let's go back to the second element of a strong MTSS system and that is an assessment system. MTSS uses data-based decision making; we make decisions about what we teach based on the data. There are four types of assessments that we can talk about.

The first one is screening. Screening, sometimes called a universal screener, is usually given three times a year: beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes you see BOY - beginning of year, MOY - middle of year, and EOY - end of year, that's what those refer to. You may have heard of universal screeners like DIBELS 8, Acadience, and FastBridge. Those are examples, and the nice thing about universal screeners is they don't take long to administer. You can usually assess each child in under ten minutes. The things that you assess them on are different depending on their grade and what part of the year you're in. We won't go into that now, but I'll be talking about that later on in this series.

The point of a screener is to figure out who is at risk, so who is not meeting benchmark for a specific skill. Benchmark is the minimum score that students should be at in order to be on track to be an adequate reader. It's not great, but it's okay. It's really important to know who's on track because if someone's not on track, then we can prevent possibly reading difficulties in the future by giving them extra support now. Screeners should be given at the beginning of kindergarten and onward.

Now let's say you've given a universal screener and you see that someone is below benchmark, and you're trying to figure out why. Why are they not reaching the benchmark score for this particular assessment?

That's where you go and use a diagnostic assessment to dig a little further. A diagnostic assessment may help you find out, for example, what specific phonics skills they are lacking, or, if you can get your hands on a good comprehension assessment, you can figure out where the gaps are there, or a phonemic awareness assessment. It really helps you dial in to figure out exactly the issue.

You don't have to give a diagnostic assessment to everyone unless you're differentiating your Tier 1 phonics instruction and you want to find out where your students are along your phonics scope and sequence.

Progress monitoring is the third kind of assessment, and that's what you're going to do with students who you're giving special intervention to.

Let's say I give my whole class the screener, and I find out this group of children is struggling. I'm going to give them a specific intervention for six weeks, maybe it's going to be working on phonemic awareness and we're going to be doing a specific thing related to that, or maybe it's going to be working on blending so they can blend sounds into words. Whatever it is that I'm working on, I'm going to have a specific goal for that period. I want them to reach a certain score on this progress monitoring assessment so that every week or every other week I'm going to see how they do on it.

A progress monitoring assessment comes with your universal screener. If they scored well below benchmark in something on Acadience, you could use the progress monitoring tool for that particular skill.

Let's say that they are struggling with nonsense word fluency; they're not able to sound out words using their phonics skills and they only got X number of words correct per minute on the screener. When you do the progress monitoring you're going to be testing each week to see if the number they get correct goes up, and you're going to mark that on a graph because you want to see if the intervention is working. If you're spending all this extra time with them and they're not really making progress, well then you need to change what you're doing. That's progress monitoring.

There are also outcome assessments which are given usually at the end of the year to see how well your overall instruction served your students.

Finally, MTSS has three tiers of instruction. I want to be clear about that, we're not talking about three tiers of students; it's three tiers of instruction. Tier 1 is that core instruction that everyone gets, and this should be a total of 90 to 120 minutes every day of that literacy instruction. That can include decoding work, spelling, language comprehension through read alouds, and writing. I'm not saying it's 90 to 120 minutes of phonics, it's everything included in your literacy block.

Now here's where some people are confused. I think some people think that everything in Tier 1 is delivered whole class, but that's simply not true. You can do some things in whole class and some things in small group.

My preference is to do whole group for things like language comprehension, so that would be reading aloud, teaching sentence structure, writing, and so on, but I personally prefer to do differentiated small groups for those foundational skills like phonemic awareness and phonics only because I've always seen that kids are all over the map in those skills. I feel that they can be moved more quickly to mastery by dialing in on exactly what they need to know versus teaching the whole class a phonics skill and then differentiating after.

Now there are plenty of teachers I respect and I've interviewed on the podcast that do a whole class phonics lesson. I would never want to say that what they're doing is bad or inappropriate. I just would encourage you to think about what might be the most effective and efficient way to get your students up to grade level phonics skills, and that may be dialing in on specifically where their gaps are to start the year.

Okay, so I'm doing Tier 1, but I know from my universal screener that some kids are quite behind. In addition to that whole class phonics instruction or the differentiated instruction, I'm going to give them Tier 2 instruction.

We like to call this a double dose. If you're using small groups for your Tier 1 phonics instruction, these kids would get a second small group. It would probably be even smaller and it could be with a different teacher, and it's going to be focused on one particular thing, and you're going to do progress monitoring as they receive that intervention.

It might be something where you say we're going to do this for six weeks, this specific thing, and we're going to see if it brings improvement. It's not saying that the child is in Tier 2 all year; it's that we're going to work on the specific thing for this period of time and see how it goes. If they make progress, great, they could possibly be moved out of the intervention, or it might be time to work on something else that they need practice on.

Tier 2 instruction is typically given three to five days a week for about 20 to 45 minutes per session. The bare minimum would be three days a week, 20 minutes each time.

Now what if you're doing Tier 2 intervention with someone, so they're still getting Tier 1 and then they're also getting Tier 2, but they're not making the progress you'd like to see in Tier 2? The other kids in their group are making progress, but they are not. Then you might want to switch them out of Tier 2 and put them in Tier 3.

Tier 3 is even more intensive; it's typically every day of the week for 45 to 60 minutes per session. If we want to talk about percentages, in a strong MTSS system where Tier 1 instruction is good, we can expect about 80% of kids to not need Tier 2 or Tier 3. If your Tier 1 is good, then you should expect that only 20% of kids would need additional intervention. Then we would expect that about 15% of those remaining 20% will have their needs met in Tier 2, and just 5% will need that Tier 3.

If you're in a situation where you find that way more than 80% of your students are below benchmark on that universal screener, you're going to be overloading your Tier 2 and Tier 3 supports, right? So maybe only 30% or 40% of your students are meeting benchmark in a particular skill. What you do not want to do is overload your Tier 2 and Tier 3 because you won't be able to keep up, right? It's very difficult to have that extra instruction for so many students.

Instead, you want to make that Tier 1 instruction strong. Think of Tier 1 as the primary way to prevent reading failure. We want to reduce the number of kids who need Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention.

We're going to talk more about MTSS next week with Dr. Stephanie Stollar, who is really a pro at MTSS and helping schools implement it. I'm looking forward to speaking with her next week. Then in the following weeks we're going to be looking at how to differentiate Tier 1 instruction. We'll also be talking more about how to intervene, so what to do for kids who are scoring below benchmark on particular skills.

You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode145. Talk to you next time!

That's all for this episode of Triple R Teaching. For more educational resources visit Anna at her home base, themeasuredmom.com, and join our teaching community. We look forward to helping you reflect, refine, and recharge on the next episode of Triple R Teaching.

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The post What is MTSS? appeared first on The Measured Mom.

What does it take to change teachers’ minds?

 



TRT Podcast #144: What does it take to change teachers’ minds? with Faith Borkowsky

Faith Borkowsky is a dynamic literacy leader who understands that patience and love are two key ingredients when it comes to helping teachers become open to learning more about the science of reading. This is the perfect episode for those who feel alone in their science of reading journey – listen and be inspired!

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Hello, this is Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom. This is the last episode of our Change Maker Series, and I'm thrilled to welcome Faith Borkowsky to the podcast. She is the co-host of The Literacy View podcast. She's also an author of multiple books for parents and teachers, and she is the founder of High Five Literacy.

Faith has been in education for a long time, and she has seen the switch from whole language, to balanced literacy, and now to an understanding and applying of the science of reading.

She's certainly worked with all kinds of teachers, some who were open to learning more and others not so much. So if you find yourself alone on your science of reading journey, I think you're going to get a lot of encouragement and inspiration from this episode.

A couple of things. You'd think after doing this for four years, I would remember to click the correct microphone, but again, I did not. I apologize for that. I'm a little fuzzy, but Faith comes in loud and clear. Also, while I was recording this episode, we were having some technical difficulties, and so I was typing in the chat to our software provider. I apologize for those clicks that you hear. I promise I was listening to every word that Faith was saying and I'm sure that you will too. Here we go!

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Faith!

Faith Borkowsky: Thank you, Anna. Thanks for having me!

Anna Geiger: I've really been enjoying binge listening to your podcast, "The Literacy View," where you talk with other people that may not share your same perspective, and it's really neat to see how you're able to talk things through with people. You slowly help people see things from a different angle, and so I thought this would be wonderful for our listeners to hear from you as we talk about making change.

Maybe you could start by introducing yourself and telling us about what you're doing today?

Faith Borkowsky: Sure. My name is Faith Borkowsky, and I have been in education for over 35 years. I started out as a classroom teacher, became a reading specialist, then I became a regional reading coach for Reading First many years ago. Now presently I am a consultant. I've been tutoring children for years and it's my passion. That's what I do.

Anna Geiger: When you started teaching that was in the whole language era, can you talk to us about that and how you saw there were some changes that you needed to make?

Faith Borkowsky: Yeah. Well, the first grade I taught was third grade, and at that point you would expect that kids would already come in knowing how to read for the most part. They didn't. Many of them did not know.

Just when I entered teaching, there was this big shift to whole language, and that's what I was taught in college, and it's basically the idea that if you immerse children in wonderful books the they will just pick up learning how to read. I wasn't seeing that.

I decided to get a master's in reading hoping that that would further my education so that I would know how to help kids, but it really wasn't very helpful. We did not have phonics in that program. It was more about genre studies and appreciation of children's literature, but it did not really help me to teach children who were struggling how to read.

I ended up doing my own research. The internet at the time was not something that was really around to be able to get information, so I got all my information by going to the library and bookstores. I started to learn that there was another way to teach by reading this book by Diane McGuinness, I wrote about that in my own book, and it was called "Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do About It."

I started to go for my own professional development, and I learned that basically there was a way to teach kids other than just immersing them in books. From there on, I wasn't turning back. I entered into working as a regional reading coach, and here we are over twenty years later, still discussing the same things that I thought would've ended many years ago.

Anna Geiger: The science of reading has become more of a household word in the last couple of years. Can you talk to me about what you noticed and why you think that happened?

Faith Borkowsky: Well, the internet. I think these problems existed many years ago, but because of Facebook and these groups, there's power in numbers. I think that back then there might've been parents on their own dealing with school systems and just trying to navigate this. I think that they were embarrassed, and they didn't talk about this years ago. Basically, if you had a child who was struggling in school, it was kept a secret. The parents just dealt with the schools on their own.

Now here we have it with people really airing their dirty laundry on social media and all these platforms and people say, "Hey, you had that problem? I had that problem." The more they spoke to each other, the more they realized that they were not alone.

So there's a new world now where people have come together, even if they're across the country or from a different country. I've met so many people this way. Look how you and I are communicating from different states. It's just a new world, and that didn't exist years ago.

Anna Geiger: You came to this much sooner than a lot of us did, and you were teaching with other teachers who were maybe still using whole language or later a balanced literacy approach. What did you find was helpful in helping people rethink practices and maybe what didn't work?

Faith Borkowsky: When I first started to spread the word, people really did not want to listen. I think they thought this was for other people, other teachers, other children; it did not apply to them.

What I learned quickly was that research alone doesn't change minds, and that's what I thought. I was naive, I was young, and I really thought that if people just read research or read the importance of certain types of strategies or programs, that there wouldn't really be an issue. I thought that they would just want to learn themselves and want to come around and try things.

What I learned quickly was that that's not the case, and this really became a study into human nature and people. I think probably why I have gotten to a point where I can talk to so many people about this is because I am a student of human nature and it really is psychology, learning that we all have common attributes and how we all respond to the same things positively or negatively.

Anna Geiger: I would agree that pointing someone to research isn't necessarily going to change minds. I know Mark Seidenberg talks about that a lot in his book about how research just feels like something completely separate and sterile and, "Why would I be interested in that? Those aren't people that really understand teaching."

Of course, it's very interesting once you start learning about it, and lots of researchers were actually teachers, so it's not just this random group of people that are disconnected from the classroom.

If it's not the research itself that's going to get someone's attention, is there something else you would suggest?

Faith Borkowsky: Yeah, I think we are emotional beings, right? Emotion, feeling.

Anna Geiger: Yeah.

Faith Borkowsky: That's where we work from, that part in us, that emotional part, and that's where we have to reach people through their emotions and their feelings.

Intellectually, they can hear something and process it, but they could be disconnected. They could say, "Well, this just doesn't apply to me." But when you get to the aspect of feeling and really that emotional component, it could flip the switch. That's kind of what we need to think about, these primal emotions that we all have.

That's kind what I've learned about people in general. It goes beyond education; it's really about fear and love. If we get it down to those two basic components, fear and love, we could really begin to see what's going on here, because most resistance is about fear.

Anna Geiger: Yes, agreed. Agreed.

Faith Borkowsky: People are fearful about change, they're fearful of being exposed as though they don't know something, and we all want to be loved, right?

Anna Geiger: Yeah.

Faith Borkowsky: So if we respond in a way where we are trying to do a "gotcha!" it's not going to have the effect that we want. We still have to try to love people who might not agree with us and show them that we care, even though I don't agree with you.

Anna Geiger: I think that's a really good point, what you said about the "gotcha," because that's what happens on social media, right? Although that's not always the case. But person-to-person, when we're really trying to make changes, then trying to show how much smarter we are or how much further along we are is not going to work for people.

For me it was Emily Hanford's "At a Loss for Words" article. It just struck a chord, and I think so much of it can be said for sharing things like that, and certainly sharing episodes from your podcast because there are different perspectives, and it's good to hear that conversation happening.

I also think your podcast is useful for people who are trying to help others see more about what we've learned from the science of reading, to see what the other side might, where they might be coming from. When you can understand someone else's perspective, that helps.

I know in your, I think it was in your book, you talked about specific examples. You said that once you were trying to reach out to somebody, and she just shut her door and put something in front of it so you couldn't even see what was happening.

So sometimes you were successful and sometimes not. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Faith Borkowsky: Yeah. So one thing I would recommend is what I learned. You always try to work with the people who are willing to work with you.

This particular teacher really had only a few years left before retirement and did not want to be bothered to learn anything else. But it was my job to go into rooms and do that embedded training and to co-teach, and she knew, she expected me.

Then right before I was supposed to arrive, she had all the kids sitting on the floor, and she put this pocket chart on the back of the door and used it so that I couldn't open the door and come in. She had the kids kind of blocking the door.

Anna Geiger: Oh, my.

Faith Borkowsky: Which really was a strong statement, and it was really literal and figurative, if you think about it. She was putting up the walls, right? "Do not enter my world. I don't want you entering my world."

For someone to go to that extreme, it was like, okay, I am not going to enter right now. I'll spend my time with other people I can work with.

What happened really was that she was so fearful that it was better for me to just leave it alone at that moment in time. That doesn't mean that she was going to be off the hook forever, but it just did not make sense at that time to push and say, "Well, I'm coming in, move those kids." That would not have been successful.

By working with others and allowing her to learn that, well, I'm not as bad as maybe she thought that I was. I'm not that evil person, and I can work with her in a different way. It ended up eventually where I was able to get in, not that we got very far, because she decided to retire sooner than later, but there was somewhat of a breakthrough. She just did not want it. That was just her own thing.

But it's a good lesson. It's a good lesson not to waste time with the people who are most resistant. Let them learn from others because they will talk to others. What you want to do is you want to spread that positive energy rather than letting somebody negative really take over, because that spreads too. That's continuous as well.

There's a lot of learning going on here. It's not simply like, "Okay, here's the research. Now let's get a program in and let's do it."

I think a lot of times programs will hire people, they'll hire consultants, with very little teaching experience. You see that. They'll just hire representatives, and they're just kind of doing the lessons for that particular program, but they haven't dealt with this other component because they don't have the experience in the classroom. They don't have the experience as a trainer and the coaching experience of working with people because that's an art form too.

Anna Geiger: When I think about the other episodes that I've recorded for this, and talking with other people about ways to approach this with colleagues who may not be on board, some of the other things we've talked about include the fact that data talks. Teachers can use a good benchmark assessment like DIBELS or Acadience, and then share that information. It can be helpful, especially if you're talking to an administrator.

Another idea someone else mentioned, if you're having trouble getting people on your grade level team to listen, then you can bring in an administrator and show them what you're doing so they can see what's happening in your classroom.

Another one was to lead by example, of course, which is what they're doing already.

Then you just said don't use "gotcha!" moments, but lead with love.

Then sharing articles with people can be a way. Of course, you can't guarantee they're going to read it but you could say, "Can we read this and just talk about it? Can I meet you for lunch or whatever because I'd to hear your perspective on these points?"

What about starting a book club? Do you think that could be a good idea, but what if people aren't really on the same page?

Do you have any other ideas, dos and don'ts, for trying to get the conversation moving and change happening?

Faith Borkowsky: Yeah, so I think a book club is great if you have a group of people ready to learn. Again, it goes back to where they are in their heads and their hearts. You can't just have people open books and say, "Okay, now we're all going to learn together." You first have to win them over before you can get to that point. I think a book study is great, but it has to be introduced in the right moment, not at the very beginning.

There were people who used my book as a book club type of read, but they were all people wanting to learn. They were looking for answers, so the discussion was already with people who kind of knew that they wanted something better. It wasn't really about changing minds at that point.

Anna Geiger: That makes sense.

Faith Borkowsky: As I said before, a lot of this is psychology, a lot of it is about the mental games that we have to realize. People are people and we all have the same desires, we all have the same fears, and a major fear is not feeling adequate in your job, right?

Anna Geiger: Yeah.

Faith Borkowsky: Not feeling that we're going to be loved, feeling that we're going to be judged if we make mistakes. Once people could get past that - the insecurity, the fear, the feelings of being judged, the feelings of being inadequate - I think that's your turning point, right?

Anna Geiger: Yeah.

Faith Borkowsky: All people kind of function on the same page of wanting to be loved and the fear of not being loved. If you kind of look at it that way with the most basic instincts.

Anna Geiger: I think that's good to remember because I do see some people get kind of nasty on social media, and it's like they really believe that some other teachers don't want the best for their students, and I really don't think that's where people are coming from.

There is resistance and we all have issues with ego, which can certainly be playing a part, but I think overall it's fear and because it feels a little overwhelming, like, "Well, if I have to listen to you, then I may have to rethink a lot of things and I just don't feel that I... I'm afraid to do that. I don't feel prepared to do that."

Then also, "Well, if I've been doing something wrong, I'll have to admit that," and nobody wants to have to do that.

I think the hard part for someone who's trying to bring change about is that it's a very urgent issue. They feel, "Well, how long do I have to wait for this person to come around because they're using three-queuing in kindergarten and their kids aren't making the right progress?" Any thoughts on that?

Faith Borkowsky: Yeah. I feel that when I'm honest with people, and I am, I'm very open and I tell people, "I didn't know this. I didn't do this. I wish I could go back and apologize to all the students I had before I knew better." I think that that opens the door to trust, and then people are more willing to put themselves out there. But it has to come from somebody admitting, "Hey, I didn't know this. I did not do this well. I would love a do-over, but we can't go backwards."

That honest talk helps to move people along saying, "Okay, I'm going to do this."

There are people who now will call me into their rooms and say, "Faith, take a look at this. What do you think?" It flips where people start looking for me because they really want to know if they're doing it correctly or what I think.

Whereas at the beginning, it's a lot of me doing my own development, talking about my own professional development, and how far I had to come and putting myself out there.

Before I ask teachers to do anything, I do it myself. I think leaders need to really consider that. The best leaders are willing to put themselves out there and show they are vulnerable. That's one of the most important things that we could do as people, is to show that we are all vulnerable, we're not perfect, we don't expect perfection right away, but let's inch a little bit toward making that change.

One of the things that Judy and I wanted to do on "The Literacy View" was to really have this brand of no BS. With the BS Button, we make a joke out of it, trying to make light of this, but at the same time not backing down and being fearful. We like going to those places where I don't think a lot of other people do.

You see a lot of people in their echo chamber. They'll get the same people on, you see the same names that come up, you see the same thing just being recycled over and over again, and that's great, but you're not winning anybody else over that way.

That's one of the reasons I wanted to come together with somebody like Judy. She's really open and really honest that she tries to do the best she can, and she's always on this journey, and she doesn't back away from the fact that she really loved Reading Recovery.

She still will say she loves some aspects of Reading Recovery and that she learned so much, and that's healthy to be able to kind of sort through this and get rid of what doesn't work and embrace what does work.

That's really the goal of the show. It's not for us to TELL you what to do, I don't think that works; I want you to come to your own conclusions based on the conversations that we have.

Anna Geiger: Well, definitely, it's one of a kind. I listen to a lot of education podcasts and I've not heard anybody else doing that. You're very brave to people on your podcast that may disagree with you, I think, and the way that you react to them is always very respectful. I really appreciate that. It's a good example for people who are working to help other people change their heart and mind.

Thanks also for the reminder about humility, because most of us trying to bring about a change did not start out in this place, and it's very good to be honest about where we were and what brought us to where we are.

Maybe we can close with suggestions for first steps or first talking points. When you're a teacher who feels alone in your school and no one else really seems to care or be interested in learning about the science of reading, what might you do?

Faith Borkowsky: I think you could make small changes in your own room.

Teaching is a very unnatural profession if you think about it. You're with kids all day long. You're by yourself for the most part. You don't see adults until maybe your lunchtime, and then sometimes you're so busy, you just stay in your room doing what you have to do. You're really alone through your whole workday with little kids, and you don't really get much interaction unless you meet with somebody after school. You're in this silo not really knowing if you're doing the right thing or the wrong thing, and everything is trial and error.

So I would say start off small and see those small wins. See what happens if you just start off trying things.

I did that. I started off when I first became trained in something called Phono-Graphix, which is a speech-to-print program. I started using some of this in my classroom, going in that direction with words and breaking words down and thinking about the letters that match up with the sounds, and I started to see kids really getting it.

So I started to share these small changes that I was doing, and I think then people become curious, "Oh boy, that child never was able to do this. What did you do to get this child to do that?"

I mean, this happens even today where there are kids in school where they're going out to intervention and they're not making any progress, but then when I work with those kids, all of a sudden they start to make great gains. That's not to pat myself on the back, it's just from years of trial and error and experience, I'll recognize what to do to move them. Then that opens the door for more conversation.

So I think starting small, not expecting yourself to be able to take on everything at once, but maybe starting off with something where you could just try it. Then sharing it with people on your grade and an administrator, and having people watch and see and share, not telling people what to do or that they're wrong because that doesn't work.

It doesn't work to tell them that they're not following the science because there are a lot of deniers out there. It's not going to work really when you're just telling them to change like, "What's wrong with you? Get on board. There's something wrong with you." No, that just creates more resistance.

So I think the way to do it is to show those small wins, open up conversation, and remember that people are people and that if there is resistance, don't take it personally. I try to kind of have a Teflon coat on myself; I don't take anything personally.

I just approach it as, "Well if that's how you feel right now, I'm sure it's because you're fearful that maybe you won't be able to still continue working in the same realm. You won't have the same opportunities or maybe what you thought will not be accepted anymore."

A lot of this is fear, and so we have to attack that with love. "I still care about you. I disagree with you, but I still care to know what you have to say." Maybe if we continue to have these conversations, we will see that maybe we could have this dialogue that wasn't there before.

Anna Geiger: Well, that is wonderful advice. Thank you so much for sharing all of that.

Can you remind me the name of your book, and did you write additional books in addition to the one for parents? Can you talk to us about those and anything else that you'd want to share with people who are listening?

Faith Borkowsky: Yeah. My latest book is "If Only I Would Have Known." It is a book that is a narrative play based on conversations a mother is having with a pediatrician, a preschool teacher, and a librarian. She had older children who went down this road of intervention, and now she wants to do something different for her youngest child and learns through these different community professionals what she should be doing.

Through this narrative, through this play format, I'm hoping to get parents aware of what to look for before their children even get to school. It's meant for parents from birth to age seven where they can learn about this, and hopefully people could give this book as a gift to pediatricians, to preschool and daycare workers, and to librarians, so they can learn it in a very easy, basic way. It's written for somebody who has very little knowledge about this and could just get the basics down. That's my latest book, "If Only I Would Have Known."

Then "Failing Students Or Failing Schools?" was the book that was recognized and won an award. Actually, my first book was "Reading Intervention Behind School Walls: Why Your Child Continues to Struggle," and then it was republished as "Failing Students Or Failing Schools?" Those books are pretty much for parents with kids in the school system already, and their children are in services and not advancing.

Anna Geiger: Wonderful. Anything else you'd like to share about where people can find you or learn more from you?

Faith Borkowsky: Sure. I'm on social media. I have a Facebook page, "High Five Literacy and Academic Coaching." I'm on Twitter, @FaithBorkowsky High Five Literacy. I'm on LinkedIn, and I have a little bit of a presence on Instagram. That's not really my favorite platform, but I have High Five Literacy, which I have to get better at using, to be honest. All the fancy videos, it's not really my thing, but I guess that's what people are looking for today, right? I have to get with the program.

Anna Geiger: I know, so do I. I'm not a big fan of making videos, but that has to be on my list.

Well, it was so nice to meet you, and thank you so much for sharing all of this.

Faith Borkowsky: Thank you, Anna. It was really a pleasure meeting with you. Thank you.

Anna Geiger: Thank you so much for listening. I want to give one more plug for Faith and Judy's podcast, "The Literacy View." I really love it because they do such a great job of interviewing people who may have different opinions. Also what's really interesting, if you start with the very first episode and go through now, which is what I did, you'll see how Judy's perspective has changed in a lot of things. It's really exciting. I hope you'll check that out, and all the other resources in the show notes, which you can find at themeasuredmom.com/episode 144. Talk to you next time!

Closing: That's all for this episode of Triple R Teaching. For more educational resources, visit Anna at her home base, themeasuredmom.com, and join our teaching community. We look forward to helping you reflect, refine, and recharge on the next episode of Triple R Teaching.

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The post What does it take to change teachers’ minds? appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Why are so many professors reluctant to let go of balanced literacy?

TRT Podcast #143: Why are so many teachers reluctant to let go of balanced literacy? with Dr. Pam Snow

Dr. Pam Snow and I discuss why balanced literacy is still taught in colleges and universities in both America and Australia. When you understand the problem, you’re in a better position to start solving it!

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Hello! This is Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom, and in this episode I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Pam Snow. She's a professor of cognitive psychology in the School of Education at La Trobe University. I became familiar with Dr. Snow through some of her work as well as her blog, The Snow Report, which has very interesting articles about how to teach reading, and also quite a few clear criticisms of balanced literacy.

In our conversation today, we talk about why it might be that higher education professors are often reluctant to let go of balanced literacy. We tried to work through why that might be. I can't tell you that we came up with any big solutions, but I think that understanding the problem is the first step. And she certainly offers encouragement at the end of the episode for people who are trying to change things in higher education to reach out to her, because they've made some big changes at their university.

Normally I trim my episodes so they're not quite this long, but I really didn't want to take out any of the things we discussed. I think there are a lot of interesting things that Dr. Snow shares that are worth thinking about.

I also apologize that I did not click my proper microphone, so I'm a little fuzzy, but Dr. Snow is the main speaker in this episode. I hope you enjoy it!

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Dr. Snow!

Pam Snow: Welcome to you too, Anna! Thank you for having me.

Anna Geiger: It's such an honor to have you on the podcast. I've been reading your Snow Report for a number of years now, although it was a little hard for me at first because I was coming out of balanced literacy, and you're pretty hard on balanced literacy. You have a great place in a university to educate people about the science of reading, and so I wanted to talk to you today about why it's so hard to get this out of our higher education systems, and maybe steps that can be taken to get there.

I'd like to start by you telling us about yourself and what brought you to what you're doing now.

Pam Snow: Okay. Well, when you're my age, there's always a bit of a long story there, Anna. I don't want to take up all of our time, but it seems to me that a lot of academics in particular land in certain places for a variety of reasons, and that's certainly the case for me.

By background, I'm a speech-language pathologist. I'm also a registered psychologist. My PhD a very long time ago was in the field of acquired brain injury, which meant that I learned a lot about neuropsychology, which has stood me in good stead in various different ways in my career.

After I finished my PhD, I deliberately wanted to go wide and widen my knowledge and skills, and I worked for three years as a research fellow in a role that was essentially an adolescent mental health well-being and health promotion kind of role. It had a focus on drugs and alcohol, but really it was about adolescent mental health and well-being.

That really got me thinking about factors that drive adolescent mental health and who flourishes in adolescence. I couldn't take off my speech language pathology hat in that work that I was doing, and I was reading more and more about risk and protective factors in adolescents and thinking more and more about the role of academic achievement as a protective factor.

It was a kind of a metaphorical peeling of the onion, I suppose. Who succeeds academically, and what are the factors that contribute to academic success? Of course, that got me thinking about reading as a driver of academic success and therefore as a mental health protective factor.

Now, protective factors collude with each other as do risk factors. So one protective factor on its own is not going to do all the work that we need done for children and adolescents to promote their well-being. But we know that succeeding academically is an important protective factor, and we know that struggling academically is an important risk factor when it comes to children and adolescents' well-being.

That led me then to do research kind of metaphorically down the bottom of the cliff and look at language in particular, but also the literacy skills of young people in the youth justice system, young people in out-of-home care, and in the child protection system.

Then more recently, I looked at young people in what we in Australia call flexible or alternative education systems. These are young people who are not managing the demands of mainstream schooling, but everybody wants them to stay connected to school in some way. I'm sure you have similar kind of settings in the United States to what we call flexible education settings.

Of course, that research that I did over a couple of decades showed me just how vulnerable children and adolescents are with respect to language and literacy. But it really got me thinking in public health terms about the role that schools can play as an intervention, as something that can, if we get it right, be a protective factor and can contribute to better trajectories, particularly for children who are coming from behind in some ways.

They might be coming from behind because they come from a very chaotic and sometimes, frankly, dysfunctional home environment. They might live in crime-prone, socioeconomically-disadvantaged communities. They might be plagued by that awful soft bigotry of low expectations that everybody has for them.

So what is it that school can do to actually alter the life trajectories of those young people? To my mind, it can't do very much if it doesn't get reading instruction right.

That's how I really became engaged with the importance of reading instruction as a public health intervention. It's something that we have to get right for all children, but particularly for those who don't have a raft of other protective factors around them, like affluent, well-educated parents who are doing a lot at home with respect to language and literacy, who can pay for tutors, and who take their kids to libraries.

As I said, risk and protective factors hang around together, and this is a protective factor that we are in a position, the grown-ups are in a position, to actually do something about.

Anna Geiger: So about what decade was it that you started getting interested in and started paying attention to what was happening with teaching reading?

Pam Snow: In the early 2000s. I've always been interested in reading, and my own children, who are now in their mid-thirties, went to primary school and elementary school in the early 1990s, and so they were exposed to...

I wasn't playing in this space then, but I remember them bringing home predictable texts. I think they were getting some reasonably-okay phonics instruction, decoding instruction, but they were bringing home predictable texts.

I can remember as a parent thinking, "This is just silly," and feeling like I was breaking the rules by actually teaching them phoneme-grapheme correspondences and teaching them how to decode through the word.

I did that really just using the logic that applied in my mind from my speech pathology and psychology background. These were skills that my kids needed, and I was going to teach them those skills.

But as a researcher, it was really in the early 2000s.

Anna Geiger: So balanced literacy kind of took hold in the United States in the late '90s, early 2000s, and whole language was a couple decades before that. Did you follow the same kind of path in Australia?

Pam Snow: Unfortunately we have. When you have a bad idea, we say, "Oh, can we have that too? Send it our way!"

We have been inclined to adopt big ideas, I think, in a very uncritical way, like the big idea of whole language, and the whole zeitgeist that that was part of really. Even going back a bit earlier to the 1970s and the social upheaval, that in many ways needed to happen and was positive and important when we think of feminism and protests about Australia and America's involvement in the war in Vietnam. There were a lot of entrenched ways of thinking that needed to be challenged.

But of course, what was happening in schools got caught up in that slipstream, including ideas about how we teach children how to read.

There were ideas that had good face appeal, and if they were correct, would've made everybody's life easier. It would be easier for teachers if whole language and balanced literacy worked. It would make a teacher's job easier. It would make policymakers' jobs easier. Everybody's life would be easier if it worked.

Unfortunately, the grown-ups managed to create and buy into a big illusion or delusion, probably more of a delusion, that this was a good thing to do.

But once you deconstruct how learning happens in schools, which we've shown can be done relatively quickly, it's very difficult then to rebuild that knowledge. Because now we've got a generation of teachers who themselves are products of whole-language, balanced-literacy classrooms, who have an implicit knowledge of how language works, but no explicit mastery of spelling or rules of grammar, so they can't articulate a rule. They can see that a sentence is not grammatically correct, but they can't articulate that this is not a sentence because it doesn't have a subject and a predicate, and a predicate has to contain a verb. That's perhaps an obvious example of the kind of knowledge.

Once that knowledge is taken out, it's not just a matter of a policymaker flicking a switch one day and saying, "Okay, as of next week, next year, we're going to teach this stuff again," because teachers can't teach what they don't know.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, that's very interesting. I hadn't really thought about that so much, that it's not just people who've been teaching for decades who don't want to change, but it's new people who don't even know the difference.

I was reading one of your posts and you were quoting someone. I don't remember exactly what it was, but how they were complaining about how learning to read with phonics was very boring, and they wanted to do something different.

Your point was, "Yeah, but you learned to read."

It's funny because I used to say that too! I remember that I loved to read, but reading class was very boring. That's probably because there wasn't really differentiation, but I did very well with reading, and spelling, and all of that, so obviously the instruction worked. And we can certainly throw in things about the art of teaching that can improve the delivery, but that's just interesting to think about.

I know Margaret Goldberg, when she talks about the teaching that she does, she's a bit younger than me, but she was in California. I learned phonics out East, but she was a whole language baby. For her, she really didn't know, like what you said, she really didn't know how English works. That really puts people in a tough position.

Why do we have so many people in colleges that are... I would guess many of them learned the phonics way, they learned how to decode using phonics, so why do we have so many of them that really jumped on balanced literacy and don't want to let go?

Pam Snow: It's such an important and interesting question. As with all big, complex questions, I don't think there's one simple answer. But I think it's partly a paradigm issue that schools and faculties of education in colleges and universities - and I'm going to make a generalization here, but I think it's a generalization that holds up - are more influenced by sociology than they are by cognitive psychology.

There have been decades of research going on in cognitive psychology, in the field of cognitive psychology, in psychology buildings that might be on the campus adjacent to the education building. This is on everybody that there hasn't been enough knowledge translation. Perhaps the cognitive psychologists have assumed that by putting this research out there in the peer-reviewed literature, that education academics would seize upon it and say, "This is really interesting and useful," but they haven't.

The education academics have been very much swimming in sociological water and seeing the world through different lenses, and I think have bought into the - I'm going to say it, but people won't necessarily like this - but bought into the fantasy of whole language and balanced literacy.

Because as I said earlier, if that were right, everybody's life would be much easier. Universities wouldn't need to have people on faculty who have a detailed knowledge of the structure of the English language linguistically. We wouldn't have to expect our students to learn that information.

Now we've got a whole lot of food chain issues here, and I can probably speak for Australia - I can't speak with any authority for America. But in Australia, it's not that difficult to get into an education degree. For a school leaver, how we accept students into university courses is basically an issue of supply and demand. It's very difficult to get into a medical degree, because there are a lot of students who want to do medicine and a smaller number of places. Not all universities offer medical degrees, so the supply and demand curve favors academically very high-achieving students. They have to satisfy other criteria as well to get into medicine, but you've got to be an academically very strong student.

Now in Australia, you don't have to be academically very strong. There've been some changes in recent years that have meant that, in theory at least, universities need to be only accepting students from the top 30% of school leavers, but there are some workarounds to that.

So then if we are going to move away from balanced literacy, we've got to deal with the fact that we're going to be teaching some conceptually really quite complex information to students who in some cases may not have adequate levels of prior knowledge and preparation in terms of their own language skills, their own mastery of how the English writing system works.

I see this in my own work in the School of Education with students coming in as first year students. Bear in mind that in Australia, school leavers can go straight into a four-year university degree. We don't have the tiered college system that you have, that I don't completely understand.

We, and when I say we I mean Australian universities, take in students who have, in many cases, very weak language and literacy skills. That's not their fault.

I wrote a blog post about this a while ago called "This is Not a Sentence," reflecting on my frustrations in marking the first year essays of those students. Actually, one of our PhD students in the SOLAR Lab, Emina McLean, is doing her research with academics across the board, their perception of the writing skills, in particular of university students. She's not looking just in education, but in law, in social sciences, in health sciences, everything, and the data is very depressing.

So going back to your original question of why is it so difficult to shift balanced literacy, I think it's the level of disruption that truly shifting it is going to create. There are signs in Australia that our federal government is up for that level of disruption, but they may not fully appreciate what it's going to mean in terms of bringing the whole house of cards down because we're going to need academics who actually have knowledge of reading, not of literacy, of multiple literacies, of digital literacies. Which - I think, again, people won't like me saying this - in some cases, I think they're really fluffy concepts. If a child can read, then they're digitally literate. All this business about multiple literacies and viewing texts, don't get me started on us asking children to view texts.

So I think the status quo is very appealing because of the level of disruption and upheaval that is going to be created at a number of levels in the system if we are serious about moving away from balanced literacy. As a fantasy, it's served us well. As a reading instruction approach, it served us very poorly.

Anna Geiger: That's a great quote. I'll have to remember that one.

I like what you said about how if balanced literacy worked, it would make everyone's lives easier, because it was so appealing. That's why so many of us did it.

I was recently giving a new webinar to people that follow me, and it was about using data to form small groups and give differentiated instruction. It was a lot of time and study to put that together compared to the one I gave four or five years ago about using running records to form guided reading groups. That was so simple. You just listen to them read and figure out their level, and then put them in groups and follow this lesson plan. But now we know that there's nothing to be said for text leveling like that in research and a lot of other things. But it was simple. It just was so beautifully simple, four simple steps.

With the webinar I just gave, I thought, "Oh boy, I hope I don't end up confusing people because this is deep. There are so many things to think about in terms of screening data and diagnostic data." People were up for it, but like you said, it's a challenge.

Another thing you said too about the literacies, that was interesting to hear because when I was in grad school, I thought I was learning all the right stuff. This is what I was doing. But there was a lot of that, and I never really understood it. I remember taking a class about learning disabilities, and I did not get a thing out of it. I don't know what we talked about every class, but it was very fluffy. I don't think she mentioned dyslexia at all. There was nothing practical. I don't even know what we talked about! But even as I was in it, I was thinking, "I'm not sure what I'm supposed to learn from this."

Pam Snow: Yeah, and people are paying for higher degrees that, in many cases, are not fit for purpose. In Australia, a number of education academics have really railed against the most recent federal government-auspiced review of initial teacher education, so not just reading instruction, but initial teacher education.

The basis of the protest is, "Well, is the federal government going to turn on medicine or engineering next? Are they the next ones who are going to be told that their initial university programs are not good enough?"

My answer to that is, well no, because those professions have really managed themselves very well, and they've managed the trust that has been placed in them by government, by the community. We are not having inquiries into nurse education, or medical education, or engineering education, because the community and government are not anxious about the content of those courses. But we have had, by some estimates, more than one hundred inquiries into initial teacher education in recent years, and where there's smoke, there's fire.

Anna Geiger: I was in a Facebook group earlier today, and often, if you're in a really big group and everybody's on a different page, someone had a question about... I don't remember... It was something about balanced literacy versus science of reading practices. One person chimed in to say, "This is just another pendulum swing. They did balanced literacy because it was backed by research, but now we've learned more research, and now I do this."

I wondered, does anyone in the higher education sector, do they think that balanced literacy is backed by research? Do they really believe that, or do they just not think about it?

Pam Snow: Well, as I said in a presentation that I gave recently at a conference, if there's a research study somewhere that says that balanced literacy is a preferable, optimal, superior way of teaching children how to read at scale, then I will read that study tonight. I will cancel all of my plans because I'm not aware of any studies that say that balanced literacy at scale is preferable to teaching in a structured, explicit way with a scope and sequence, and ensuring that teaching is delivered by very knowledgeable teachers.

Balanced literacy doesn't ask us to be creating a knowledgeable teaching workforce, and I think that is really pernicious for teacher professionalism, because that's the other kind of angle here, of course, that teachers are professionals so we should leave them alone. They know what's right for the children in their classroom. You've heard this kind of reasoning.

But as I also point out when I give presentations, the professions in my society, and I think in yours too, Anna, that we hold in high esteem are the ones who actually have low levels of professional autonomy.

Airline pilots don't get to make their own decisions about how they take off and how they land airplanes. They don't get to create their own safety checklists. They use safety checklists that are provided by the airline industry, and they're expected to adhere to those safety checklists.

For medical practitioners, the example that I often use is of your local emergency department. If you arrive there with chest pain, the nurse or the doctor who is going to triage you is not going to just kind of put their finger in the air and see which way the wind's blowing. They're going to follow a care pathway that says you're going to get an ECG and you'll get some bloods done. There's a set of narrow parameters to be followed.

So if we're going to talk about professionalism, we have to have this conversation about accountability, and about professionalism not meaning choose your own adventure. It actually means that we need teachers to have some specialized knowledge and skills that other people don't have. We know that about pilots, we know that about engineers and doctors. They know stuff that we don't know. Well, I want teachers to know stuff that other people don't know. I want them to have that really, deeply specialized knowledge. Now I'm only talking about literacy, but of course it has to apply numeracy and other areas as well.

Then we have to expect that teachers apply that in the same accountable way that we ask members of other professions to apply their knowledge, because members of other professions are actually held to account. We make notifications to regulatory authorities when a nurse or a doctor makes an error, a medication error, or they behave inappropriately, or they don't order a test that should have been ordered. This can have really serious consequences for people.

But in our system at least, people aren't held to account. Teachers aren't held to account if they don't teach someone how to read. That gets explained away as being, "Well, the parents didn't read to them enough," or "Some kids don't like reading," or "We haven't found something that they like reading yet." It's never the instruction. It's always externalized, and I think that's very bad for teaching as a profession.

Anna Geiger: That is so interesting. I'd never thought about that before about how the more respected professions have criteria and all that stuff that they have to follow. That's really interesting.

I agree with you that this idea of teacher autonomy is a big barrier to teachers being willing to learn more.

I think another one too is the idea that for some people... I think I put something on my Facebook page about, "Teaching reading is rocket science," quoting Louisa Moats.

Someone responded like, "No, it isn't. I taught my child to read."

The thing is, for plenty of kids, it doesn't seem like rocket science. But it becomes rocket science when you're trying to help kids who don't learn through balanced literacy or whole language, which as we've found is quite a large percent.

So that's maybe another barrier is for people that have an easy experience doing it, or at least they think they do, to realize there's more to it.

Pam Snow: That's part of the problem with balanced literacy, that it works, or it works well enough, for a significant proportion of students. Nancy Young's Ladder of Reading & Writing is a good way of demonstrating that.

But then my question for balanced literacy proponents is, "Well, is it okay to build an entire education system around the proclivities and advantages of maybe 60% of students?" It's not unusual to go into a school where 40% of students are needing some kind of intervention.

At a public health level, we wouldn't be accepting measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines that work for 60% of babies. We want as close to 100% coverage as we can. In fact, RtI, Response to Intervention, as you know, is really fundamentally a public health framework. It's a public health way of preventing difficulties.

Just because something works for some children, and probably the children who, going back to the early part of our conversation, have more of an aggregation of protective factors - not always, because there are children from advantaged families who struggle. But again, at a population level, there's more of an aggregation of protective factors, so they're the ones who are going to get across that metaphorical bridge in the first three years of school, and other children are not going to.

How is that okay? How have education academics who cast themselves, in many cases, as social justice warriors, how have they been able to sleep at night knowing that balanced literacy is leaving so many children behind?

Anna Geiger: Yeah, that's a really good question.

When we think about, like you said, the academics, the people who are teaching future teachers... You mentioned in one of your blog posts about how we want to teach our students to be excited about learning new things, and yet for some reason, there's a barrier to learning new things about the science of reading in many in higher education.

Then also, I don't know if the autonomy goes over to them too. In higher education, do professors get a lot of freedom in general about what they get to teach, or is it more oversight?

Pam Snow: It's a good question. There is this thing called academic freedom that does bestow a high level of autonomy on what people teach and how they teach it, except in the case of vocational courses like teaching allied health professions like physiotherapy, speech-language pathology, or you say physical therapy, medicine, where there is a professional body that's accrediting courses. That's a kind of gatekeeping mechanism, so there are accreditation requirements that have to be met.

But this is where things - I'll use that word fluffy again - can get fluffy, because there can be some box ticking in saying, "Yes, we do that. Yes, we do that, and this is where we do that," but the actual detail of how we do that...

Phonics is a good example of where there may, for argument's sake, be a requirement in accreditation documents that pre-service teachers learn about phonics instruction. Well they could learn about phonics instruction in the context of balanced literacy, being very low-touch and incidental, and probably something that's not really favored or preferred, or they could learn about phonics instruction in the context of a structured, explicit approach to reading instruction that's built on a deep knowledge of the English writing system.

Now, both of those things will earn you a tick in the box to say, "We teach about phonics," but this isn't a binary thing. It's a dimensional thing.

What we've done at La Trobe University in the last couple of years is really said, "We are not teaching balanced literacy." We've been the first mover in this space, and we've gone down the path of structured explicit teaching really privileging teacher knowledge. We've been building up the knowledge of our pre-service teachers about the nature of the English writing system, historical factors that give us the spelling conventions that we have, obviously sentence structure and figurative language, the whole Reading Rope if you like.

BUT we will meet accreditation requirements just as much as another university that's doing full-blown balanced literacy will meet accreditation requirements. There's not been enough attention to detail. That may change, if the recommendations of this most recent review are actually implemented and become real.

For structural, political reasons, it's difficult in Australia for a federal education minister... It's probably similar to you in the United States because we've got eight states and territories, and education is predominantly managed at a state level, and we obviously don't have as many states as you do. It is difficult to pull the right levers to get things penetrating down into individual universities.

Anna Geiger: So back to universities and not wanting to learn new things - that's not how they would see it - about the science of reading. I think one issue probably is the same issue that a lot of classroom teachers have faced, that I did this wrong. Nobody wants to have to say that, and maybe for them, the stakes are higher because if they really publicly say that, that's saying that we've mistrained teachers. Do you think that's a lot of it?

Pam Snow: Absolutely. I think human nature is such that it's difficult to acknowledge when you've been on the wrong tram and been on the wrong tram for a long time. It means letting go of your affiliations. Sometimes those affiliations with colleagues are deeply personal as well as professional.

We've known for decades that one of the barriers to people giving up smoking was having to let go of friendships. In workplaces, Australia's very, very well down the track on anti-smoking policies, but it certainly used to be the case that the smokers would go outside in morning tea breaks and afternoon tea breaks, and hang out together. So if you decided to stop smoking, then you kind of were betraying your little smoking network.

I think human nature is such that it is difficult to say, "I think we got this wrong, and I'm going to now join this other group."

The debate has been fierce. I don't see any other option to that, because it matters. We're not talking about whether we like pink or purple more. We're talking about whether children learn to read and what that means for their entire life trajectories, so the debate needs to be quite forceful. Any attempts at kind of meeting in the middle have given us balanced literacy, and the fallacy is in it's name, that when there's two opposing ideas you just meet in the middle and everything will be all right.

I think human nature is our biggest barrier in this respect. That's probably going to be the focus of my next blog post, actually, the one that's sort of writing itself in my head at the moment, because it IS hard.

BUT teachers are doing it and school leaders are doing it, and kudos to them. We need education academics to step up and have the mea culpa, I was wrong, conversation that teachers at scale are starting to have, and school leaders at scale are starting to have. If it's good enough for them, why is it not good enough for education academics?

Anna Geiger: Do you have any thoughts about how that change can happen, or have you seen a positive change among professors where they've shown an interest in learning about the science of reading and turned their backs on balanced literacy? Sometimes it feels like you're just hitting a wall.

Pam Snow: Yeah. I would say that the silence is fairly deafening in Australia when it comes to change.

La Trobe University has definitely broken away from the pack and is not teaching balanced literacy. We're teaching ABOUT balanced literacy, because we think it's really important that our students understand the broader context, and understand that reading instruction is a contested space. Also they may be going on to placements in schools where balanced literacy is the favored pedagogical approach, so they need to be prepared for that and know how to manage that potentially challenging situation.

There are another couple of universities that I won't name here, because it's not my place to name them, where I think there are positive indications. But I think the majority of Australian universities are going to try and dig in and build the fortress even higher around balanced literacy for a range of reasons because they don't want to acknowledge that the way that they have been positioning reading... In many cases, reading itself is not even a word that turns up very much in...

Anna Geiger: Yeah, interesting.

Pam Snow: It's all about literacy, and as I said earlier, multiple literacies, digital literacies. Talking about reading is somehow dry and boring, and very teacher focused.

So no, I think unless our federal government can find meaningful carrots and sticks, and it needs to be the right combination of both, then we're not going to see a lot of change, and we're going to continue to lag behind on global indicators of reading proficiency or continue to fall further behind.

Anna Geiger: Talk to me about La Trobe University. Was your university ever teaching balanced literacy?

Pam Snow: Absolutely! Absolutely. La Trobe University is a relatively new university in Australia in the sense that it was established in 1970, and it was established in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, which didn't at that stage... Unless you count Melbourne University, which is just slightly on the north of the Yarra River in Melbourne, but Melbourne University is one of our sandstone universities. It's a prestigious university.

La Trobe was created really to serve a growth corridor in the 1970s, and has a very strong social justice imperative in everything about its establishment, but it was like every other faculty of education in Australia, very much a balanced literacy school of education.

In late 2019, my colleague Tanya Serry and I were appointed to the School of Education by the then newly appointed dean, Professor Joanna Barbousas, who I really need to give a big shout-out to here, because she has been a very strong advocate of explicit teaching in general. She sees the importance of positioning the science of reading within a broader science of learning context.

Tanya and I were appointed from different positions in the university, so we were in different... In fact, we were and are still on different campuses. I work at the Bendigo Campus, which is about 170 kilometers away. What's that in miles? Maybe about 130 miles north of Melbourne. Tanya works at the Melbourne Campus.

We came across to the School of Education in January 2020, which, as you know, was a very interesting time to be doing anything in this world. We were really charged with responsibility for overhauling reading instruction in the School of Education at La Trobe, which of course was not popular with everybody.

Joanna has supported us all the way. We said we wanted to create a specific platform for our work in the school, hence the SOLAR Lab, the Science of Language and Reading Lab, which is just a virtual entity that supports our research, our teaching, our PhD supervision, and consultancies that we do with various departments of education. Then we've been fortunate more recently to appoint Dr. Nathaniel Swain, who you know, and Dr. Tessa Weadman.

So we've got a strong team that is working on a complete refresh, which we've already obviously started. We're not just working on it, we're already delivering that, in our initial teacher education programs and in our master's level programs.

Some people become teachers through a master's entry program if they have an existing degree. We have a master's of education for practicing teachers, and other professionals can do that too. That now has a language and literacy specialization.

Then we've also designed and delivered three online short courses that we've had over 10,000 participants complete in three years. Overwhelmingly it's been teachers from all around Australia. We've had some people from other nations as well, but predominantly Australian teachers, so we know there's a big appetite for this knowledge.

And teachers are angry. As you would know, there's a lot of emotion in the realization that there have been a lot of children in my career who I could have taught to read. Teachers remember names and faces; it's not just a general sense of all those kids. It's that little kid called Rebecca, or that little kid called Kai, or whoever. They still feel very strong emotions about the fact that the knowledge that they have now would've worked with those children. The feedback on our short courses has been very powerful actually.

Anna Geiger: So you're doing what a lot of universities need to do, which is switch over. But obviously, like you said, that's going to be really hard.

I know in a lot of American schools, they train their whole elementary school, or the whole staff, primary teachers maybe, with LETRS with Louisa Moats. Is something like that needed for a staff of a university? How do you even get started with people who are pushing back?

Pam Snow: Well, you can lead a horse to water, I guess, and making it drink is very difficult.

There was some work done, a report done. I don't know whether you're familiar with the Five From Five website, but your listeners would be interested in that. Jennifer Buckingham did a desktop audit back in roughly 2018 I'm thinking, of the publicly accessible curricula for initial teacher education programs in Australia at that time. She looked at what they said about reading instruction and what the prescribed texts were, because that's often a very strong indicator of the orientation of the teaching. She looked at the qualifications of the people who are actually delivering that subject content, and sometimes, those people had no discernible background in language and linguistics at all. They could have been drama teachers, art teachers, or have physical education backgrounds.

I think this is a genuine challenge for universities. I don't think it's the one that they are happy to talk about. I think they want to position the debate around academic freedom, around, "No, we've got this. We're doing this. It's all fine. You are overstating the extent of reading difficulties. You're just kind of drumming up a moral crisis by saying that there are children who aren't being taught to read. And if there are children who aren't being taught to read, it's because schools aren't being given enough money," because we have an inequitable funding system for schools in Australia, which is probably a fair argument.

But we know that there are many schools in low socioeconomic status communities who've overhauled their instructional model and are doing amazing things, and getting amazing results without getting any extra money. So you can't just keep playing the money card and say give schools more money, because it's what schools do with the money that matters. If they just keep spending it on sets of leveled readers, low-impact teaching practices, and low-impact teacher professional learning, then they're not going to see any changes. They're going to keep blaming the parents, the children, the color of the walls, I don't know, anything but the instruction.

Anna Geiger: So do you have any advice for professors who are seeing the light, and they want to make changes, but they're on a staff with people who aren't interested? Any tips for next steps?

Pam Snow: That's a good question, Anna. Tanya and I do connect with such people from time to time. We have to meet in a dark alley, metaphorically. No one's allowed to know that they're talking to us. It's in the same way that over the years, teachers have contacted me and said, "If my principal knew I was talking to you, I'd be in so much trouble." We are happy for people to reach out to us and make contact.

This is as difficult for university academics to make change in as it is for individual teachers in schools who want to move away from balanced literacy. It is just as challenging.

Similar to the United States I would guess, a lot of academics are on fixed-term contracts, and you are vulnerable if you rock the boat. If you're a junior academic on a fixed-term contract, without tenure, without job security, then rocking the boat isn't going to be a very strategic career move, unfortunately.

Anna Geiger: So do you have any answers? What's it going to take?

Pam Snow: I hope that it doesn't take ten years for people to see that La Trobe graduates are graduates of choice, and probably staying in the workforce longer because they're going to be more satisfied with their knowledge and skills. Because that's another big problem that we have in Australia, the attrition after five years away from the teaching workforce. I think a lot of that comes back to initial teacher preparation and not having a proper toolkit around classroom management, the science of learning, the science of reading, and so forth.

What I can see is that there are more and more examples of ground-up shift occurring. That's individual schools, the teachers, and in some cases, sectors saying, "We're going to change the way we teach reading."

I just don't want it to be one school at a time. The bottom-up stuff is very powerful, and we support that as much as we possibly can. We roll up our sleeves, work with those schools, provide guidance, and advice, and so forth.

But this needs to be happening top-down. Policy makers need to be leaning in and saying, "At a population level, this is a public health issue. And yes, the research may not answer every question that we want it to answer, but there is enough research to tell us that on the basis of probabilities, we're going to get more success if we prepare our teacher workforce this way, and we're going to see better outcomes for students." It's a slow burn kind of proposition, and it really needs bipartisan political support.

Anna Geiger: Which that's hard to come by around here.

Pam Snow: It's very hard to come by. Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Well, I know that people who are listening, especially people who are professors, would really like to learn more about how things have progressed for you. Are there specific places that I can send them to?

Pam Snow: Yeah, thank you. We will have a website going live hopefully next week. You and I are talking in late September, so hopefully in early to mid-October, there will be a SOLAR Lab website, and that will continue to evolve over time. We're always happy to chat to academics who are keen to make changes, recognizing that within a university, some top-down leadership is really needed to make this real.

For example, one of the things that our dean, Joanna Barbousas has done, is worked with us on the staffing profile that's needed in the School of Education, recognizing that we can't do all of this on our own. The school or the faculty needs to have an appropriate staffing profile. It's not just a matter of saying to two people, "You fix this whole thing on your own. You do this."

We're not there yet. We're well underway. We are still a work in progress, and we fully acknowledge that. We need to continue to have some hard discussions about what we mean by the science of learning and how we can be sure that our programs have coherence and consistency. We talk about subjects where you talk about courses. We've still got work to do, and I think that will be an ongoing process of ensuring the coherence and the consistency in our messaging.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, it's a process with a lot of moving parts. I'm sure people will be really happy to know they can reach out to you to get help with some of those, because it just takes someone that's gone through it to help you, encourage you, and maybe give you a few small steps to focus on.

Pam Snow: Yeah, absolutely.

I think we need to kind of zoom out and ask ourselves how history is going to judge us on this time, and what history is going to record about what actually was the best way to teach children how to read. All children, not just the fortunate ones who are going to get there anyway by hook or by crook, by virtue of their circumstances, and their parents' resources, and so forth.

As you know, Anna, as a former balanced literacy teacher, even for those children who do get there in balanced literacy classrooms, many of them have major deficiencies in their spelling. Explicit teaching is not just about getting to efficient automaticity with decoding as quickly as possible. It's also about improving spelling and writing.

But I think history already tells us that there is a preferred method. It just happens to be harder and require us to walk up a steeper hill. We need to work out how to do that in ways that produce better outcomes. It sounds so cheesy and simple, but better outcomes for all children because, at the end of the day, this is about children and children's futures. It's not about the academics' egos, and their tribal affiliations, and their preferences. Adults who are proficient readers and writers need to be very careful about decisions that they make about other people's children.

Anna Geiger: Well, thank you very much. Thank you for the voice that you've been for so long, and continue to be, and for all the day-to-day work you're doing to train future teachers in Australia. It was such a pleasure to talk with you!

Pam Snow: Thank you, Anna! And thank you for all that YOU do. I love your podcast. I always am excited to see a new Triple R Teaching podcast episode dropping, and I hope that we get to talk again at some stage.

Anna Geiger: Thank you so much.

Thank you for listening! You can find the show notes at themeasuredmom.com/episode143. Talk to you next time!

Closing: That's all for this episode of Triple R Teaching. For more educational resources, visit Anna at her home base, themeasuredmom.com, and join our teaching community. We look forward to helping you reflect, refine, and recharge on the next episode of Triple R Teaching!

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Dr. Pam Snow’s work

The Snow Report: Dr. Snow’s blog

List of Dr. Snow’s books and book chapters

Dr. Snow’s academic articles since 2000

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The post Why are so many professors reluctant to let go of balanced literacy? appeared first on The Measured Mom.