Anna Geiger's Blog, page 12

Why it’s time to stop using guided reading levels

Breaking up is hard to do.

But I’m doing it.

I’m breaking up with a system I’ve held onto for twenty years.

I’m breaking up with Fountas and Pinnell’s text leveling system. You know – the guided reading levels from A to Z.

I was all in on F & P. I spent countless hours leveling my classroom library. I even helped other teachers level their libraries.

Read on to learn why I’m replacing my popular post, “Printable Leveled Book List” (viewed over 200,000 times), with a post about why I’m letting go of the levels entirely.

Where did the guided reading levels come from?

Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, leaders in balanced literacy, introduced the Fountas & Pinnell Text Level Gradient in 1996. When I began teaching in 1999, I was thrilled to discover a system that (I thought) would help my students find their “just right” level.

Never mind that I could never quite figure out why this book was a level N, and that book was a level O. (They looked the same to me.) And how could this book be a level E when it was so hard for my students, while this other level E book was a piece of cake?

I was confused, but I trusted Fountas and Pinnell. After all, their work was based on the work of Marie Clay – and apparently she’d done her research. (Turns out her beliefs were based on observations, not on how the brain learns to read, but never mind.)

I loved that Fountas and Pinnell worked with “literacy experts” to level their books according to these factors:

genretext structurecontentthemes and ideaslanguage and literary featuressentence complexityvocabularywordsillustrationsbook and print features

The levels made my teaching life easier because grouping my students by reading level helped me organize my small group instruction.

And even though Fountas and Pinnell didn’t recommend leveling classroom libraries, I did so because a leveled library made it simple to help students find “just right” books (or so I thought).

Guided reading levels are based on a faulty understanding of how reading works

Fountas and Pinnell tell us that their Text Level Gradient is useful to “support the child’s development of self-initiating actions that he will be able to apply to a range of texts of similar difficulty.”

Huh?!

What does that even mean?

Unfortunately these “self-initiating actions” in the early grades include teaching kids to use the picture and the first letter to identify words instead of reading through words from left to right. This is known as three-cueing. It bypasses orthographic mapping and is actually a hindrance to reading development.

The early guided reading levels (levels A-D) consist of predictable, repetitive books with words students can’t yet sound out. The only way they can “read” these books is with three-cueing!

If Fountas and Pinnell had this foundational piece wrong (and they still aren’t budging), why should I trust them at all?

Guided reading levels are arbitrary

I have to admit that I was often puzzled by the guided reading levels assigned to particular books. Two books could be assigned the same level; a child would find one very difficult and the other easy. Why? I assumed that my confusion was due to my own lack of knowledge. (Surely there couldn’t be a problem with the whole system.)

But the fact is that readers don’t have a single level. What they can read is influenced by their interests and background knowledge. When I taught my youngest to read, I used decodable books. But early in his journey he started reading the “Who Would Win” series apart from our phonics lessons because I’d read them to him so many times already. With a great deal of effort, he could read these books because he was so interested in the topic, understood the series’ text structure, and already knew much of the vocabulary.

Guided reading levels don’t give us useful information

“This child is reading at a level E.”

So what? What does that even mean? Does it tell us what skills the student has? Does it tell us what the student needs to learn next?

Instead of giving our students an arbitrary level (based on a system created by people we can’t trust), we should note how they’re doing in basic reading skills like phonemic awareness and phonics. Do they read at an appropriate rate? Do they understand what they read?

Using a universal screener like Acadience or Dibels 8 will let us know whether these students are meeting benchmark for their grade level or if they’re at risk for reading failure.

Diagnostic assessments will help us nail down the issue so we know exactly what to teach them next.

Now that’s useful information!

Teaching students to read at their “instructional level” isn’t based on research

As a teacher, I spent a lot of time using running records to find each student’s independent, instructional, and frustration level. It took a lot of time, but I thought that teaching them in small groups using their instructional level made perfect sense. I thought that directing kids to their independent level during free reading was best.

Despite claims to the contrary, leveling is not based on research. According to researcher Timothy Shanahan, discussions in favor of leveling text are “tainted by selective citing.”

People have cherry picked studies to support their claims.People have made claims the researcher didn’t make.People have ignored limitations specified by the researcher.People have cited expert opinions as if they were research findings.

The bottom line?

Shanahan writes that “there is no credible evidence supporting learning benefits from teaching kids at their levels.”

Students benefit from reading complex text with support

It’s time to let go of the idea that we need to find the instructional level for students to read in small groups. Scores of research has shown us that students show greater gains when they read complex texts (at or slightly above grade level). See references here.

An important aside: Please note that students who are still learning to decode are not ready for complex text. They should receive explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics and fluency and practice with engaging decodable text.
Learn more here.

This doesn’t mean that we throw students into complex texts and expect them to swim.

We support them by doing one or more of the following:

Build background knowledge before reading.Have students read a simpler text on the same topic before reading the complex text aloud.Pre-teach challenging vocabulary.Read the text aloud before having students read it.Before the group lesson, have students read along with a recording.Ask questions after students read short portions of the text.Help students use a graphic organizer during or after the reading.Teach students to ask and answer questions as they read.So how do we help students find books they can read on their own?

The fact is that once students move out of decodable text, we need a way to help them find texts they can read independently. Reading at their approximate level is important when they’re reading without support. Despite what some science of reading advocates like to say, just because students know the code doesn’t mean they can “read anything.”

But if not guided reading levels – what?

I’ve let go of the idea that this is a perfect science (it’s not science at all). It’s an art. Lexile levels, which level books by word and sentence difficulty can get you started, but they won’t get you all the way there. Remember – the more interest and background knowledge students have on a topic, the more difficult text they can read.

When you organize your classroom library by topic, your can look in the “animals” bin to help an animal lover find a book that that isn’t overwhelming. It might feature fewer words with a reader-friendly layout. But be prepared for that student to surprise you by reading a more challenging text when he or she has the interest and background knowledge to make the text more accessible.

When you also organize your classroom library by chapter book series, you can help students find a series they love and encourage them to read more of them.

What to tell parents

If your school has traditionally reported guided reading levels to parents, communicate exactly why you’re making a shift. “Guided reading levels don’t give us much information about a reader’s strengths and weaknesses. Instead of assigning levels, we’ll be identifying exactly what your student’s skills are and what he or she needs to learn next.”

So … what do you think? Are you ready to break up too?

For further reading

Buckingham, Jennifer. Benchmarking assessments and levelling should be consigned to history , an article for NomanisShanahan, Timothy. Rejecting instructional level theory (blog post with links to research)Shanahan, Timothy. Eight ways to help kids read complex text (Reading Rockets blog postShanahan, Timothy. Should we teach students at their reading levels? An article for Literacy LeadershipShanahan, Timothy. To Lexile or not to Lexile – that is the question . An article for Reading RocketsShanahahn, Timothy. Why children should be taught to read with more challenging texts . An article published in Perspectives on Language and Literacy. Supporting All Learners with Complex Text , an article from Achieve the CoreVaites, Karen. Leveled reading groups don’t work – why aren’t we talking about it?

The post Why it’s time to stop using guided reading levels appeared first on The Measured Mom.

When should children stop using decodable books?

What are decodable books and passages? Why should we use them? And when should children stop using decodable books?

These are all important questions that I’ll be answering in today’s blog post!

What are decodable books and passages?

Decodable texts are written to reinforce a particular phonics pattern. The vast majority of the words can be read using phonics knowledge.

I like this definition from Iowa Reading Research.

Decodable readers are texts that introduce words and word structures in a carefully planned scope and sequence. The order in which that word structure is introduced often aligns with the scope and sequence of the curriculum. In this way, students have the opportunity to apply the phonics skills they are learning and to build confidence in their abilities to read full sentences and short stories.

Iowa Reading Research

A book or passage’s decodability depends on the reader. For example, if you have a decodable passage that features CVCE words like make and bike, but the reader has only learned CVC words, that passage is not decodable for that particular reader.

Why use decodable books?

In the old days (ahem years ago), when I began teaching first grade, I was required to use a very systematic phonics program that came with a set of decodable books that I would assemble by folding and stapling.

The decodable books were awful.

They were boring, stilted, and just plain weird.

I’m sorry to say that they turned me off to explicit phonics instruction in general, and I went on to spend years using predictable, leveled books with beginning readers in a readers workshop format.

I wish I had understand the problems with that approach.

The problems with having beginning readers read predictable, leveled books

They get very few opportunities to apply what they’ve been taught in phonics.Since many of the words are not yet decodable for them, beginners have to use the picture and the first part of the word to guess at words. This trains children to use pictures rather than read through the word. It also teaches them to be comfortable guessing.Predictable, leveled texts can give the false appearance of fluent reading. Since students can memorize the pattern and use the pictures to “solve” words, these books can mask underlying reading difficulties.Even if students appear successful with these books, many of them hit a wall in third grade when books are less predictable and there is little picture support.

Why decodable books are a better alternative for beginners

Students get many opportunities to apply the phonics skills they’ve been taught.Since they can decode most of the words, students gain confidence as readers.The more students decode a particular word, the closer they are to orthographically mapping it so that they recognize the word instantly, without needing to sound it out. What makes a quality decodable book?

Bad decodables are out there – but wonderful new decodables are coming on the market all the time.

A quality decodable book or passage …

Follows a solid scope and sequence, like this one Includes many words featuring the new sound-spellingTells a story or gives useful informationSounds the way we talk


Decodable Books & Lessons Set 1a: CVC Words & Common Digraphs

$18.00

This is our first set of decodable books, featuring CVC words and simple digraphs. Students love the characters and stories!

Buy Now



Looking for a quality decodable book series?

The ultimate guide to decodable books



Decodable texts should not be used indefinitely

The big reason we want our students to move beyond highly decodable text is that too much of it can lead to a misunderstanding about how English orthography (our spelling system) works. They need to learn that straight decoding will not always lead to the correct word. For example, if a child encounters the word mother, she might read it as moe-thur or moth-ur, both of which are phonetically correct. But the child should recognize that this is not a real word and adjust the pronunciation to come up with the correct word: mother. This mispronunciation correction is called set for variability.

We should also keep in mind that it���s impossible to teach all 250+ sound spellings; there simply isn���t enough time! According to David Share���s self-teaching hypothesis, students with sufficient decoding skills can figure out the rest of the code over time as they attempt to read more difficult words (words which they won���t find in highly decodable text).

Finally, nondecodable text also gives students practice with statistical learning. As they read authentic text, they will notice that some sound-spellings appear more frequently. This will help them apply phonics patterns appropriately.

When should students stop using decodable books?

Research doesn’t say, and experts have various opinions.

Heidi Ann Mesmer believes that the appropriate transition is after 2-3 months of reading instruction, when students can easily blend CVC words. (I think this is too soon.) Linda Farrell says that typically developing readers are ready for nondecodable text when they an read single syllable words with short vowels, digraphs and blends, and two syllable words with schwa, r-controlled vowels, and silent e – at a rate of at least 35 words per minute. Jocelyn Seamer believes that students should first learn the core 75 graphemes and read about 70-90 words per minute.

Agh! What’s a teacher to do?

Decodable books are like training wheels; we remove them when they are no longer necessary. While I think that decodable text always belongs in a phonics lesson to reinforce the new sound-spelling, I think we should encourage students to practice their reading in nondecodable text when two things are true.

First, their word identification strategy should always begin with putting their eyes on the word ��� not the picture or their teacher. Second, they know basic phonics skills (CVC words, blends, digraphs, CVCE words, some vowel teams, and r-controlled vowels) and can also read simple two syllable words.

Not sure? Have the student read a simple book like Henry and Mudge, Frog and Toad, or Fly Guy. If the student can read one of these books independently, they are likely ready for nondecodable text. For many students, this will be some time between the middle and end of the first grade year.

The bottom line is that there’s no simple answer. The more experienced you are, and the better you know your students’ abilities, the better equipped you’ll be to make this decision on a case by case basis.

Looking for more discussions of this topic?

Moving away from decodable readers (Sounds-Write) When do you get a child off decodable books? (Reading Elephant?) How will I know when it’s time to stop using decodable texts? (Informed Literacy) When should children stop using decodable texts? (PhonicBooks)Sign up for my upcoming FREE workshop!LEARN MORE & REGISTER!

The post When should children stop using decodable books? appeared first on The Measured Mom.

How to help students who have problems with letter recognition and letter sounds

Do you have students who can’t seem to remember letter names and sounds? This post is for you!

Step 1: Examine your current methods.

Make sure that what you’re currently doing aligns with the research (references are at the bottom of this post). Here’s a summary of what we know:

It may be best to teach letter names and sounds at the same time.Teaching letter names and sounds in isolation is effective. Research isn’t clear about whether we should teach upper or lowercase letters first, or the best possible order for teaching letters. The traditional letter of the week approach is not ideal. One study found that students did better learning 2-4 letters per week.We should choose key words that do the best possible job of highlighting the letter’s sound. Use multisensory methods to increase engagement, but know that research doesn’t tell us that this is what makes a difference in the actual learning.Embedded mnemonics are an effective strategy for teaching letter sounds. (This is where a picture that starts with the letter’s sound is embedded in the letter.)Step 2: Think about your goal.

Letter names and sounds are a means to an end … this knowledge is useless if students don’t also learn how to blend the sounds to decode words.

If you’re teaching a preschooler, time is on your side. If you’d like, you can focus on letter names and sounds apart from decoding.

If the child is in kindergarten, however, you don’t want to wait until halfway through the year to start reading instruction. You might teach just a few letters and sounds at a time to mastery. Use those letters to teach students to read simple CVC words. Add more letters and sounds as students are ready.

Many teachers have found success with a speech to print approach like Reading Simplified, where letter sounds are taught in the context of words (which, incidentally, can also be used in preschool).

Step 3: Decide how you’ll measure progress.

Make sure you have a weekly method to check your students’ alphabet knowledge. This way you’ll be able to tell if what you’re doing is working, or if you need to switch things up. One thing to try is to use the progress monitoring tools from Acadience or Dibels 8. You can use the Letter Naming Fluency assessment and see if the child can name more letters per minute each week.

Step 4: Directly introduce each letter and its sound using a mnemonic alphabet flash card.

1. Say words that begin with the target letter, and have your student identify the words’ beginning sound.

Say each word after me. (Emphasize the /d/ at the beginning of each word as you say it.) Dinosaur. Duck. Dog. Dip. Door. What sound did you say at the beginning of each word? The sound is /d/. (Make sure you don���t add ���uh��� to the end of the sound.)

2. Talk about how you form the sound.

Look at what my mouth is doing as I say /d/. Now you try. What is your tongue doing when you say /d/? Put your hand on your throat as you say /d/. Is it a quiet or noisy sound? (noisy)

3. Introduce the letter.

(Hold up a letter d flash card.) This is the letter d. When we see this card, we say, ���d spells /d/.��� Your turn. (Students: ���d spells /d/.���)

4. Teach your student to form the letter using sky-writing and finger-tracing.

To make the letter d, we start in the middle, pull back, around, go all the way up, and down.

Watch me put my hand in the air and write a d in the sky. I start in the middle, pull back, around, go all the way up, and down. Now you try. Put your finger in the air. Start in the middle, pull back, around, go all the way up, and down.

Make a d by moving your finger on the table. Start in the middle, pull back, around, go all the way up, and down. (Other options: sand or salt tray, shaving cream, etc.) Now do the same thing while saying ���d spells /d/.��� Remember to underline the d when you say /d/. (Practice multiple times.)

Step 4: Choose a method (or a combination) to review the letters and sounds you’ve taught.

Make a plan for how and when you’ll use these interventions. It’s tempting to switch from activity to activity, hoping something will work.

Instead, choose 1-2 activities and decide on a specific routine you’ll use each day of the week. When the routine is the same, kids can devote their mental energy to learning the letters and sounds rather than the routine.

Stick to your plan, and don’t forget to do a quick assessment at the end of each week. Chart your progress. Alter or switch your intervention if you don’t see a change.

Below you’ll find activities to choose from. Don’t use them all – choose a small combination, decide on a routine, and get started.

Image credit: HeidisongsMATCH LETTERS ON A COOKIE SHEET

Match magnetic letters to letters on a baking sheet. Heidsongs has a cookie sheet activity bundle on TPT (pictured above).

Image credit: The Daily AlphabetALPHABET ARC ROUTINE

Match magnetic letters to letters to an alphabet arc. Learn more at The Daily Alphabet.

Image credit: Informed LiteracyALPHABET FLUENCY GRIDS

Informed Literacy has a wonderful blog post (with videos) about fluency grids and how to use them to reinforce letter names and sounds. Learn more here.

ORTON-GILLINGHAM INSPIRED DAILY REVIEW.

Simply use flash cards or put the letters on a screen as you guide students through a daily visual drill. “P spells /p/.”

PULL & SAY

Put the magnetic letters you’ve taught on a baking sheet. Have students pull down each letter as they say its name, and push it up as they say its sound.

USE AN APP OR VIDEO

Disclaimer: Except for Letter Factory and Starfall, I have not used any of these; however, they have been recommended by other teachers. Try them first before using with students.

Free digital alphabet arc Hairy Letters Lively Letters (uses a mnemonic alphabet) Phonics with Phonograms Watch and sing along to the Leap Frog Letter Factory DVD every day EBLI Island Letterland Word Builder UFLI Blendable Sounds on YouTube HeidiSongs alphabet songs with video Teach Your Monster to Read Lalilo Starfall ABCs Poio Teach Your Monster to Read Articulation Station

I hope this post has helped you develop a plan for children struggling with letter names or sounds!

Letter Sound Games & Activities

$24.00

This collection of 30 total activities for beginning, middle, and final sounds will build phoneme isolation skills while helping students master letter sounds!

Buy Now


LEARN MORE & REGISTER! ReferencesGeiger, A. (Host). (2019-present). What does the research say about teaching the alphabet? with Dr. Shayne Piasta. [Audio Podcast]. Triple R Teaching.Roberts, T.A., Vadasy, P.F., & Sanders, E.A. (2020). Preschool instruction in letter names and sounds: Does contextualized or decontextualized instruction matter? Reading Research Quarterly, 55(4), 573-600.Piasta, S. B. (2023). The science of early alphabet instruction: What we do and do not know. In Cabell, S. Q., Neumann, S.B., & Terry, N.P., Eds., Handbook on the science of early literacy (p. 83-94). The Guilford Press.Moats. L.C. & Tolman, C.A. (2019). LETRS Volume 1. Voyager Sopris Learning.Roberts, T.A., Vasady, P.F., & Sanders, E.A. (2019). Preschoolers��� alphabet learning: Cognitive, teaching sequence, and English proficiency influences. Reading Research Quarterly, 54(3), 413-437.Ehri, L.C., Deffner, N.D., and Wilce, L.S. (1984). Pictorial mnemonics for phonics. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, 880-893.

The post How to help students who have problems with letter recognition and letter sounds appeared first on The Measured Mom.

What structured literacy looks like in first grade

TRT Podcast #132: What structured literacy looks like in first grade

Have you ever heard that structured literacy is boring for kids? Not in Gin Quinn-Mooney’s first grade classroom! Take a walk through her daily schedule and learn how she uses every minute to keep her students learning!

Listen to the episode here

Full episode transcript




Transcript




Email



Download



New Tab

Hello, Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom, and this week you get to hear from an experienced first grade teacher, Virginia Quinn-Mooney. She's going to talk to us about what structured literacy looks like in her classroom. She talks to us about her phonics lessons, her morning message, her read alouds, her writing time, and her small groups. I know you're going to get a ton out of this.

Listen to the end because we'll give you the link to the show notes, and you'll be able to go to the website to get the links as well as her email address, because she's offered that to anyone who wants to ask her questions. Let's get started!

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Gin!

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Well, thank you! I am quite pleased to be here.

Anna Geiger: So I have heard from you many times, you're very active in the "Science of Reading - What I Should Have Learned in College" Facebook group. Also I really loved seeing a presentation that you gave for one of the Unlocking SOR conferences where you basically took us into your classroom. You showed us how you implement a structured literacy approach with your first graders, and it was amazing. You had those kids just right with you. There was no boredom there. It was so much engagement.

I wanted to talk to you today so you can share with us how to implement the science of reading in a fun way and meet the needs of all your kids.

Tell us about your feelings about balanced literacy and structured literacy. I know before we hit record, you shared that you were never quite on the balanced literacy train, but maybe talk to us about that, because I know that you were in a district that was more balanced literacy. How did you work through that?

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: I always look at it as I was balanced literacy-ish, mostly because as teachers we are contracted employees. When people say, "Just shut your door," I understand the theory behind that, but at the end of the day, we do need to respect our district and we do need to respect the curricula that we've been handed, whether or not we agree with them. But I did do a lot more of what I thought was right and what I thought they needed.

I stumbled upon a three-ring binder in a classroom that I had acquired many years ago, and I don't even think the font exists from these pages. It was all word work, and I was using smart words, and segmenting and blending, and letter manipulation before I knew that it was actually a thing. I could see the results in the kids, and I could see when they would do their own work, they would always refer back to the word work part of our day.

Reading is a skill, and it has to be taught just like anything else. I always use the metaphor of crocheting, my mom was a big crocheter, and she crocheted in front of me every night. I sat on my mom's lap while she crocheted, sort of like kids sit on parents' lap when they read to them, but my mom never taught me to crochet. I think we know how the story ends. I still can't crochet.

My mom never covered the needle so I could guess what was going on behind it. My mom never said just crochet more and more, because she knew that it would not have worked. Now if I had ever asked my mom to please teach me crochet, we would've done it sequentially and systematically, but she didn't, so I can't crochet.

It's why so many kids can't read. We can't just suggest reading and read around them and think that they'll be able to read.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, I love that analogy.

I know a lot of people are wondering about the science of reading. What does this look like? What's a daily schedule look like? Can you walk us through your day in your first grade classroom?

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: I am a UFLI gal. I love the program of UFLI. It is so user-friendly, and it's so much fun for the kids.

So the morning starts with quick drills with phonemic awareness where it's just sounds, and the kids will blend, and then they'll segment, but it's all just strictly about the sounds.

Even with that, I really appreciated your kind words about when you saw my teaching. It's sort of like multisensory on steroids. If they can stand, why don't they dance? Right? Or if they can talk, why not sing it? So everything I do, I try to make sure that they are up and moving because they're six and it's just better.

So when they segment, they will either dance it or they can jumping jack it. They'll do the hype, they'll do the humpty, whatever it is, but they are just happy as can be.

So we'll go from the phonemic awareness, and then we'll add in a visual component where they'll correspond their letters and sounds, graphemes and phonemes.

Then there's an auditory component where I will give them the grapheme, and they'll write it down for me. It's a big assessment sweep because I'm seeing everything that every child can do.

From there comes my favorite part of their day, and that's the word work. I always look at that as like kneeding bread. It's when we take our words, we manipulate the letters, we pull them apart, we put them back together.

They just absolutely love it because they know that they're learning. They know what they're getting. They know how much smarter they are, and they know that they're going to apply this as soon as they sit down to write, or as soon as they sit down to read. They absolutely know how far they've come from the beginning of the year.

I use puppets a lot. We use blending boards, anything again to get them as multisensory as we can.

So then from the word work, typically, it's new learning, and then they will apply all that new learning to a decodable that aligns with whatever phonics pattern they just learned.

It's fun and it's lively, and it's very much first grade specific.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. You mentioned UFLI, which for people who aren't familiar with that, it's a wonderful affordable phonics program from the University of Florida with Dr. Holly Lane as I think the primary author of that. It's very easy to use. One single spiral bound manual for K-2 phonics, I believe. And then the extra materials you just print from online. It's an extremely affordable program compared to many other programs.

So that's one part of your day. What else are you doing?

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: I have a morning message, it's authored by me, and I can use it for any sort of social emotional learning that I need to tap into or for more reinforcement of whatever phonics patterns we've been going over. That's where also I am an absolute nut for handwriting.

Letter formation, it's got a lot to do with the brain, I didn't make it up. I just happened to have always believed in it in my career. I made up a very goofy handwriting instruction for them, and it works and we sing songs. But their handwriting has to be perfect on the morning message as well, and that's an easy way for me to check them all as well.

Then my read aloud is very much aligned to my writing instruction.

Natalie Wexler is another person who has transformed my teaching strategies and teaching philosophies. So what I've learned from The Knowledge Gap and from The Knowledge Matters Campaign, a podcast that came out this summer, is content, content, content.

In my read aloud, sometimes they're nonfiction fun, but oftentimes we are very involved in a content area, and then that's where their writing goes.

The first time I ever heard Natalie Wexler was on a podcast, and she was saying how if you align reading with content, now you can hit content. That was like another life-changing moment for me.

You know, it's funny, now content is sort of like All About Me units. Well, they know about themselves, and I like to learn about them so that can be the first week of school, but let's move on and let's get some genuine learning for them. So now it's bats, and it's penguins. I had my kids out at recess playing an echolocation game because now they know all about bats.

And their writing is so connected to what they're learning that I am seeing such improvements.

Anna Geiger: So one thing I've read about is using text sets, like picking a particular topic and then reading a variety of books, maybe fiction and nonfiction about that topic over a period. Do you do anything like that?

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: I do. I do. Stellaluna was in there, yeah. Bats is such a great example to do in October, but I had very much both. And during penguins it's Tacky. If you don't yet know Tacky the Penguin, you're welcome!

Anna Geiger: Yes. So tell us a little bit about how you do your writing, because I get a lot of questions about that. How do you start the year, and then how do you move forward with that?

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Sure. So I start the year keeping it on a word level. They're coming to me right out of kindergarten. They're young, and our kindergarten team is remarkable with what they're doing, so if they can send them to me on the word level, that's a really big plus. Some of them are coming to me on the sentence level, but for the most part, we're on just a one-word level.

And then my goal, truly, is to get them just to a sentence level. I'm not of the write more and more camp. I'm really not. I'm of the write well and write correctly. I want them to have the conventions, have it start with uppercase, have your periods, have your spaces, have your handwriting.

If I am successful with every child on the sentence level, then I feel like I have been successful. One sentence will then move on to other sentences. But for me, it has always been about quality and not quantity.

Anna Geiger: Which is very different from the writing workshop approach, which is what I did for a long, long, long time. I think there's some value in writing workshop. There are some things there that are research-based, but I think, again, it's a lot of this circling around writing, without actually getting to a lot of the specifics about how to break it down to its smallest parts. It's more like, let's write this big story about something, even though I don't know how to form a sentence, maybe I can't even really speak a complete sentence, but somehow this is going to appear on my paper.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: I agree with you. And also so much of it is experiential. And I've said this before, these kids have only been upright and walking for four years. They're not coming to us with this big bank of experiences.

There's a unit on Small Moments, and I'm always, "Well, don't leave the moment."

But the kids were like, "Well, yeah, but after the birthday party, I went to McDonald's. I really want to tell you about that."

But again, being a contracted employer, and this was my curriculum, I was like, "Yeah. But no, no, let's stay right here. What more can you tell me?"

And they would look up at me and their thought bubble was like, nothing. "I really can't. I swam at my cousin's pool."

Anna Geiger: This is so funny. I know I've experienced that exact same thing, but I thought it was the right thing to do. So I just felt, I don't know, I just had to keep pulling stuff out of them.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Correct. And you know what Anna, I think this is a really important thing to say, and I go back to this a lot as well in the happy hour, we ALL did what we were taught, we did what the manual in front of us said.

I did that with my kids' best interest in mind because I was like, "No, it's a small moment." So for whatever reason, it was important that that would be a small moment. And I worked overtime to keep them in that moment, even though my wheels are spinning up here with something else.

The other distinction that I always made was I never really embraced invented spelling, because I thought, well, we just spent all morning on r-controlled vowels, and you're not applying an r-controlled vowel. So figure it out. Which one would make sense here?

Anna Geiger: I think invented spelling is a tricky one because I know that there is something to be said for writing something you can read back, but I totally am with you that what you've been taught should absolutely be applied.

How do your kids feel about the writing time and how do you keep them interested?

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: They absolutely love it because they're invested in it. And again, they know what they know. They can feel what language they have acquired. They're teaching other kids in other classes about things.

I had done a penguin unit, and then in the spring we hatched ducklings. I was reading a book to them, and it was so cute! I was reading about how ducklings have down, and I looked up at them and I was like, "Do I need to explain that?"

And they're like, "Nope!" because they knew what down was. So to be six years old, and to just shrug your shoulders like, "Yeah, doesn't everybody know what down is?" But they don't necessarily know what down is, but they did because they were invested in the penguins.

Anna Geiger: So just as a recap for people who are listening, we're talking about structured literacy in first grade. You've got a good phonics part of your day that you use UFLI for, and you start with review and hearing the phonemes, and then getting into the word work, and the decodable book work. You do a read aloud and you teach writing, and those are very connected to whatever content knowledge you're teaching your students for a period of time. Am I missing anything? Oh, and your morning message, which you use as a way to highlight some of the phonics skills that you're teaching and support some other things that they're learning.

Is there anything else that you would include as part of your literacy? I know you talked about handwriting.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Well, small group.

Anna Geiger: Okay. Tell us about that.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: So when I pull the small group, I still love centers. I have been doing centers my entire career, and I still-

Anna Geiger: That's great.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: ... am a huge believer in centers. I use a lot of your stuff, by the way.

Anna Geiger: Oh, great!

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Yes. I always have, ironically.

So I have a word center that, again, is connected to whatever pattern we've been working with. I have a word center, I have a writing center, I have a content center, which is usually a video with whatever content we are working on, and a heart word center so that they can practice with their heart words, and a listening center, and a smart board center.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Yeah, and each center lasts about 15 minutes, and I pull two groups a day.

They are very independent to the point where I have a bulletin board where whatever their center is goes on the board, so they can go see it if they don't remember what their center is, even though it's in the bucket, again, they're six. You have to prepare for everything. But I have a bulletin board with jobs and one of them says, "Ask me." So if you are in the word center and you don't remember what your responsibility is, look up and see who's the kid this week to ask for what the expectation is. So they're just pulling each other, and again, they know that it's theirs and they take ownership in it. They're very proud of how they really stay busy, and they hold each other accountable a lot.

Anna Geiger: So without going into too much detail, because it could probably be a whole other episode, but can you just give us an overall look at how you form those groups and what you're doing with them?

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: I probably go against the current when it comes to differentiation in the world of education. For me, differentiation, it's organic. Whoever needs me the most, gets me the most.

So in the morning when we're doing our whiteboards, I can see who just didn't hit the objective the way that I needed them to. On my center board, I would just throw that name up next to a picture of me, and I pull them. Every student doesn't get the same amount of time with me because they just don't need it.

Usually in my small group, it's the child that needs me the most. It's usually based on whatever UFLI lesson we did that day, or a very big indicator for me is the writing that we did the day before. I look more to their encoding to see who needs my help with decoding. So what I think-

Anna Geiger: So looking at their spelling to figure out who needs help with reading.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Yes. Yeah. So writing is a really important part of it. I need every child to write every day so that I can keep my eyes on their encoding and how they're applying or not applying everything that we've done so far.

Anna Geiger: So have you had any students that were so far behind that that the whole class phonics lesson wasn't really serving them?

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: I haven't, actually.

Anna Geiger: Which is so interesting, because I know my way of doing it in the past has always been this idea of testing everybody to see where they are diagnostically, and then grouping them according to where they are in the scope and sequence and move forward.

Tell me why you're doing it the way you are and why you think you're successful with it.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: There are assessments, certainly. Typically the child who struggled on their screener is the same child who is struggling with their phonics in the morning and their writing in the afternoon. Not always, but I know who my eyes are on. They're on everyone, but I know who to linger on just a little bit longer.

But the reason why I do it that way is because it's an evolution, and I want to make sure that I'm hitting exactly what we did that day, because I want to make sure that they are getting their digraphs, because I know we're coming up to diphthongs.

Since it is systematic, I need to make sure that I'm picking them up and I'm taking them with me, so that they're not falling too far behind. So if I just base it on a universal screener, it's not hitting the daily curriculum and the daily expectations for them.

Anna Geiger: So you teach the grade level skill to everybody, and you notice the kids that it's hard for, and then you pull them and teach it in a more scaffolded way or supported way.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Right.

Anna Geiger: What kind of things are you doing in your small groups?

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Word work. I'll do a lot more application with the word work. I will try to make it even more multisensory. That's when I'll bring in my sand trays and my carpet samples or my sandpaper to just try to get those, as my kids always say, those neurons popping. So I do whatever I can to get their neurons popping.

So I will do more word work, more intensive word work, and now they have my full attention. For me, the most important part of small group is you have my undivided attention, and I can see the second there's a hiccup, and I can try to determine where the hiccup is coming from.

After the additional word work then I will do a decodable book with them, and I try to do a different decodable from whatever passage the class is doing. I'll try to pull a decodable that's using the same pattern, but with different text.

Anna Geiger: Sure. Would you be able to share any resources, like favorite books or people you follow, that you would recommend for people that are trying to learn more and start to do more of what you're doing?

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Well, definitely the Facebook page, "Science of Reading - What I Should Have Learned in College." Aside from being lucky enough to be aligned with it, the learning on there, it's just nonstop. Again, I'm so lucky that I am a moderator because I get to see the cutting-edge stuff the second it's coming out. That is a phenomenal resource.

I know you're going to think I'm blowing smoke, but yourself, your podcast has been huge for me. Anything Emily Hanford, anything Natalie Wexler, you cannot go wrong. There's a new book, "7 Mighty Moves." That's a really good one.

Anna Geiger: Yes, really good.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: "Reading Above the Fray," that's a great one. Twitter. And, like I was told, see who other people that you follow are following, and just start following people, and it will start popping up for you.

You can't walk into a room without getting hit by science of reading now in the world of education, and I am beyond grateful for that because it's time. It's time that we start teaching.

Anna Geiger: And you've been taking kind of a leadership role in getting more teachers talking about it. Can you tell us a little bit about your virtual happy hour?

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Yeah, sure. My pleasure. So I listened to Sold a Story, and it was such a transformational moment for me, and I couldn't sleep. I was laying in bed, and I thought, I have such big, big feels for this. I don't know what to do with it. I was happy that it was out there. I was angry with so many of the things that I learned, and I thought, there's just no way that I'm the only person feeling this way.

I'm far too big for my britches, and I thought it was okay for me to send a direct message to Donna Hejtmanek, who is the leader of the page, the Facebook page, and she's wonderful. She got back to me within a minute, and I told her my idea. I said, "I'd like to host a Zoom where teachers can come on and talk about what this means for them."

We are here because we love children, and we are here because we all want to do the best for kids. Then listening to that podcast, it was very jarring, and it was a big water cooler moment. So I wanted to keep it, if possible, light.

So I said, "Well, what would you think if we did it on a Friday night, and we made it a happy hour?"

She got right back to me, and she said, "My husband loves it!"

I was like, "All right!"

So it went from an insomniac who came up with this crazy idea, and because her husband liked it, now we have this virtual happy hour.

It began with lots of tears and lots of big emotions, very much so. That was probably the first two or three episodes.

But after a few episodes, I thought, okay, we've talked about it. We deserve to talk about it. We've earned to talk about it. We needed to talk about it, but now let's not look in the rearview anymore. Let's look to the road ahead and what are we going to do? What can we do? And that's what I have tried now to morph these happy hours into.

Personally, I love the fact that Emily Hanford's came out first and it was the decoding, because that was actionable. We could all do it. We could jump into that. We have lots of materials to make that happen.

It's the language acquisition and the vocabulary, that is not quite as-

Anna Geiger: Cut and dry.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Yeah. So this podcast, the Knowledge Matters Podcast, this summer was great. And anyway, I'm digressing. They reached out to me and asked if I would be willing to host Natalie Wexler to talk about each podcast.

Anna Geiger: Oh, wow.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: I know, so I thought, "Let me think about it." Ha!

So I did, and now I'm rubbing virtual elbows with Natalie Wexler, and she's amazing and incredible. We did two episodes with Natalie Wexler, and I am better and smarter by far. It's not about me, which it's hard for me to say because I'm the youngest of eight.

Anna Geiger: Everything's about you.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: No. So this is very hard for me, Anna, but it's really not. And I have made it my mission to do whatever I can to move the conversation and to just move the needle for kids. I feel like we're in a really, really good position moving forward. I feel the momentum behind me. I feel it in the schools, I feel it in the big community. It's coming, and I don't see it going away.

Anna Geiger: It's such an exciting time. If someone wants to know, is there a way that people can be notified about when your next virtual happy hour is going to be? Are those publicized, or is it just in the Facebook group that you note those?

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Yep. Thank you for asking. I do put on the Facebook group, and I have a YouTube channel, Virtual Happy Hour. For the most part, every happy hour that I've done is recorded and on the YouTube channel, but definitely, I try to put it on every Facebook page that I can. Again, it's such an incredibly generous community that we all really try to support each other, but yeah.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. Well, that's wonderful. I look forward to watching the replays. Unfortunately I'm just not in the season of life where I can just sit down on my computer in the evening and watch something and talk with teachers. There's way too much activity go on around here in the evenings, but-

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Well, you're a little busy, my friend, a little busy.

Anna Geiger: But I will definitely enjoy watching those. Thank you so much! I'm sure people are going to hear this and want to know more.

Is there a way that people can reach out to you with questions, like maybe message you on Twitter?

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Sure. Twitter, yeah, please. I don't know my Twitter handle though, but if you want-

Anna Geiger: I'll get it and put in the show notes.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Sure. Or I would even share my personal email. This is really about moving the needle forward. I will do whatever it takes in our community to help people. That's my personal goal, so I'd be happy to share my email.

Anna Geiger: All right, well, I'll put in the show notes, and then if you decide at some point I'm getting too many emails, let me know and we'll take it out. I'll ask for that after we turn this off, and then people can reach out to you because, like I said, I know this is what teachers need. They need the how-to, and you're full of knowledge about that.

So thanks again, it was so nice to meet you and talk with you.

Virginia Quinn-Mooney: Thank you!

Anna Geiger: Thank you so much for listening. You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode132.

I want to let you know about a new podcast series that starts next week. We're talking to change-makers, so whether that's an individual classroom teacher, a district leader, a state leader, or even someone who operates on the national level. We're going to be talking to a variety of people about how they've brought the science of reading into their arena and how it's made a difference for the students in their care. So look forward to that. We start with it next week. I also know that many of you appreciate the shorter episodes that are more hands-on and specific, so for this series, I'm also going to be releasing Wednesday episodes that are more hands-on for teachers. So look forward to the big-picture episodes on Mondays and the shorter hands-on episodes on Wednesdays. See you then!

Scroll back to top




Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.

powered by




Resources mentioned in this episode UFLI phonics program Natalie Wexler’s Knowledge Matters podcast series Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast series Gin’s Virtual Happy Hour on YouTube Facebook group: The Science of Reading – What I Should Have Learned in College 7 Mighty Moves , by Lindsay Kemeny Reading above the Fray , by Julia LindseyReach out to Virginia Quinn-MooneyTwitter: Virginia Quinn-Mooney Email: vquinnmooney (at) yahoo (dot) com

 

The post What structured literacy looks like in first grade appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Practical ways to promote reading comprehension with Dr. Sharon Vaughn

TRT Podcast #131: Practical ways to promote reading comprehension with Dr. Sharon Vaughn

You’ve heard what NOT to do when it comes to teaching comprehension. But where are the practical ways to promote comprehension in the classroom? Dr. Sharon Vaughn has the answers!

Listen to the episode here
��

Full episode transcript





Transcript




Email



Download



New Tab

Hello, Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom, and I'm really excited today to bring you an interview with Dr. Sharon Vaughn. Not only is she a brilliant educator and teacher, she's also a wonderfully kind and generous person as I'm sure you'll see from this interview.

I learned about Dr. Vaughn through some books that she's written, but in particular through an excellent presentation she gave for the International Dyslexia Association all about building comprehension. She gets right to the point. She's also entertaining and easy to listen to. I know you're going to like this interview a lot, and I'm excited to get right into it. This is the last of our Old and New Podcast Summer Series. Let's get started!

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Dr. Vaughn!

Sharon Vaughn: Hello, how are you?

Anna Geiger: Very good, and thank you so much for taking time to talk to us today about comprehension, which is kind of a sticky topic for people that are trying to learn more about the science of reading.

Sharon Vaughn: It's hard to comprehend comprehension, isn't it?

Anna Geiger: Yes, it is! Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into education, and where you are now?

Sharon Vaughn: Yeah, I think I can. I'm a first generation college graduate. I grew up in St. Louis, and I grew up across the street from what used to be a psychiatric hospital.

Anna Geiger: Oh, wow.

Sharon Vaughn: They almost don't exist anymore, right?

Anna Geiger: Right.

Sharon Vaughn: There was a large grounds, largely so that people could walk around. I think it was supposed to be sort of refreshing to be able to be outside. But because it was across the street from where I lived, it was also a nice playground. I would go there and look at the range of people and interesting people and people that would, some of them, be talking to themselves, but there was also a school on the grounds, and I kind of just sort of got interested in the fact that there is so much variation in the way we all develop.

I then decided to be a teacher, and then I got really interested in variation in the way kids learn, and then I got really interested in reading. That's how I got where I'm at right now. It's a long story.

Anna Geiger: Tell us a little bit about what you're doing now.

Sharon Vaughn: Right now I work at the University of Texas at Austin as a professor, and I also am the executive director of the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, which is a center that really does a bridge between research and practice.

Anna Geiger: Oh, wonderful, wonderful.

I notice that whenever I try to get a definition of comprehension, there's no agreed-upon definition. We've kind of agreed on fluency, but comprehension is a little more complex. So could you explain to us how you define it and maybe talk a little bit about why it's so tricky to nail that down?

Sharon Vaughn: I think one of the reasons comprehension is so tricky is because most of us think of comprehension as something that we teach, much like we teach phonemic awareness or something we teach like we teach the components of phonics. I think what's tricky is that we don't realize that comprehension is a product, it's an outcome. It's what we get when we do all of the necessary things.

So if students can read the words, if we teach students how to read words, they're on the pathway to comprehension. If we teach students what the words mean so they understand the meaning and therefore can derive meaning from text, they're on the pathway. If we teach students background knowledge so they have a context for understanding how to put the word reading and word meaning together, they're on the pathway to comprehension.

Comprehension really is a result of teaching well those components of learning and reading that should be part of what we do all the time.

Anna Geiger: And I think what we're hearing now, people are saying that you can't actually teach comprehension. How would you respond to that?

Sharon Vaughn: I think you CAN teach students to comprehend. I think there's evidence that you can. Now, if what people are saying is that we don't teach comprehension directly, we teach it indirectly, then I agree. But if what they're saying is that we should give up on teaching comprehension because it's not possible, then I don't agree.

The way to think about this is that if we teach students these really important things like word reading, word meaning, background knowledge, we give students an abundance of opportunities to read a range of texts, then I can tell you what we have to do to promote comprehension becomes less of a lift.

So we're not so much focusing on all these strategies. Anna, you know how people are like, "Oh, we have to teach them strategies before they can learn to comprehend." Actually, I'm not sure that's true.

Anna Geiger: That would be, as I've heard it called, a balanced literacy hangover, where we thought for years that we had to just teach a reading comprehension strategy for a period of weeks and then apply that to all different kinds of text. For example, making predictions or comparing and contrasting. And now we're finding that we really need to focus on the text and then the strategies are in service of the text. Would you agree with that?

Sharon Vaughn: I think the strategies are in service of the text, but I don't like these simple statements. I mean, is that probably true? Yes. But is that all we need to know? No.

I think when we make statements like that, we are often encouraging people to say to themselves, text matters. You want to think about when you are teaching students, particularly ones that have reading difficulties, that a range of texts are necessary. They need to have chance to read easier texts, they need to read texts on their level, but also Anna, they need to read harder texts, texts that are above their level, and especially if they have supports from teachers.

They also need to read texts that cover a range of genres. You want them to read these hybrid texts like biographies that are a combination of information and narrative. You want them to read different types of narrative texts, and you want them to read really sort of enriching information texts, and not just older readers.

The fun thing that students love is to learn facts and to learn information. Sometimes it's about spiders or sometimes it's about everything you want to know about how something moves, but these kinds of information texts can be extremely valuable.

Anna Geiger: You make a good point about how we don't want teachers to give up on comprehension. I think unfortunately some people are sort of feeling like that's where they're landing because they don't have the tools to scaffold complex text and things.

In your presentation you really broke a lot of that down. So maybe we can start with background knowledge, and could you maybe help us know what we know about background knowledge from research first?

Sharon Vaughn: Yeah. I mean, have you noticed that it's really popular right now for people to talk about background knowledge?

Anna Geiger: Big time.

Sharon Vaughn: Yeah. And it's kind of like, well, is this really an invention?

Anna Geiger: Right.

Sharon Vaughn: Hasn't background knowledge always been important? And the answer is yes. So maybe the question is, why is it important now and what do we mean by it?

Maybe a way to think of it is like this, when it comes to the science of reading, people really have the most confidence about the science of reading as it relates to teaching students HOW to read. In those beginning grades when we're really teaching these foundation skills, our knowledge there is very firm. Some of the silly things like triple queuing that people are doing have been disproven for a long time, and the notion that these are persisting is really just a function of the fact that people are propagating ideas that are maybe fun for them. They like the idea of pointing at pictures and having people guess, but they are really harmful to students in that if that's all you do and you don't teach them how to read the words, you've really done a disservice. So those foundation skills are well established.

But I think one of the reasons background knowledge has sort of gotten such a big lift is because after we teach students to read, what we've observed is that as students get older, they do not understand what they're reading. So we've accomplished a big part of the goal, but not all of the goal.

The reason that's the case is because as we teach students to read, we also have to give them access to a lot of texts, and we have to give them opportunities to participate in a lot of knowledge acquisition, because if they have very narrow opportunities to read and very narrow opportunities to learn, whether it's about history, science, social studies, or whatever, when they then begin to read these more complex texts...

I mean, comprehension isn't an issue when you're seven years old. And the reason it's not is because everybody knows what a blue hat is, and they all know what a car is and that it is moving down the road so when you ask questions, background knowledge doesn't play the same role.

But as students get older, and then these texts get really complicated, and even people like you and I have to read them a couple of times because the density of the topic, the vocabulary, what we're talking about, which is the more you know about a topic, the more you are able to learn about a topic.

It's kind of like Velcro. You can start collecting more knowledge and before you know it, you can assemble a huge knowledge bank. And then when you go to read about black holes, it's not hard, because you already know a lot about black holes and you're just now accumulating bits of information you didn't know. Then you read the next thing about black holes and before you know it, you can read very complex things. So that's kind of how it all has to roll.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, and it's really interesting. I remember when my youngest was learning to read, I was using decodable books with him, but on his own he would start to branch out and read these Who Would Win books. I don't know if you've heard of those before, but there are two animals that meet together that probably wouldn't meet together in nature, and then you read they each have these different abilities or parts of their body that would help them win. He could really work pretty well through those because he had heard so many of them and he had a lot of the background knowledge. But if you had some of those harder words in a different book, they may have been tougher for him. So I understand what you're saying about how the more you know something, the easier the text is.

Sharon Vaughn: That's super helpful that you gave that example because I think a lot of people are going to be able to relate to that.

Also what you might notice with your son is that if he's interested in something, if it's a topic where he's interested in airplanes and all of a sudden what he's reading is about airplanes, he can read a harder text. He can read harder texts because he's engaged, motivated, and has background knowledge.

The level of text we can read really depends on both interest and background knowledge.

Anna Geiger: And then we think about when we have a text that we want the whole class to read together, a more challenging text we're working on, and yet the topic is NOT something that many of our students have background knowledge on.

I think as a teacher, I was often under this idea that it was always about activating prior knowledge versus building knowledge before we read the new text. I think you talked about that in your presentation about how to actively build background knowledge before reading with a class. Can you talk about some of those things?

Sharon Vaughn: Yeah. One of the things we have thought a lot about is what we kind of think of as a springboard for reading comprehension. And the springboard is, are there essential words? Are there essential ideas? Is there an overarching construct that if we can introduce, pre-teach, and provide information about prior to reading, can that serve as a springboard to make the understanding of the text they're reading more approachable?

We've been doing quite a bit of work in that area, and as it turns out, even three to five minute springboards can really help students construct a better understanding or comprehension of what they read.

Anna Geiger: So an example for that would be like watching a short YouTube video that explains the topic really briefly?

Sharon Vaughn: Yeah. What a great example, that's exactly what we do. Two, three minute videos, not long, not fifty minute videos. Sometimes it's showing pictures, here's a picture of an iceberg, here's a picture of a igloo. The story we're reading about today is going to focus on an iceberg and an igloo, so what are some of the features of these? See what I'm saying? It takes a couple of minutes. It just really helps kids kind of prime what they know and build what they don't know.

Now I want to say something because when we talk about background knowledge, what a lot of people think that means is that we say to students, "Take a look at the pictures and tell me what you know about this."

Anna Geiger: Yes, that's what I used to always do. It took so much time too!

Sharon Vaughn: It takes so much time. And here, Anna, is what happens. The students who know something about it get to say what they know about it. The students who don't know anything about it often say things that may not relate to what they're about to read, but we don't have enough time to correct and provide feedback, and so then they get confused.

This guessing and this kind of, if you will, idea popping when we don't have adequate time as teachers to sort out accurate, inaccurate, what you're going to learn, what you're not going to learn, serves to add to confusion. So I don't think it's a particularly good practice, and I would advocate for something more like springboards.

Anna Geiger: So instead of making a giant list of all the things our students say they know about a topic, we should have an active plan to build comprehension for three to five minutes as, like you said, a springboard into the passage.

Sharon Vaughn: That was a good summary. You've been doing this, haven't you for a while?

Anna Geiger: Thank you.

Why is it important for students to set a purpose for reading? I know as a teacher that was always told to me to be important, and I didn't really even know what to do with that exactly. Can you help us with that one?

Sharon Vaughn: Yeah. I'm not sure I know what you do when you set a purpose for reading. I think maybe what the idea is, is that intentionality and goal setting will help you regulate your behavior.

So if I say, "I have three questions that I'm going to answer at the end of this passage, and here's the three questions." Then I have a purpose, I'm going to read, knowing what those questions are. And for information text or learning, that might be a very good practice to put in place.

But I think, Anna, most of the time when we read, we don't really say, "What's my purpose?" I mean, your purpose is always understanding or learning. I think the idea though is that when students are reading deliberately and something we expect them to learn from and remember, we might ask them to look at questions or develop questions so they have a purpose for reading.

Anna Geiger: And like you said, it makes a difference in what text you're reading. So if you're reading a chapter book from a series that you've read a million times, you're just reading for fun. But when you're reading a hard textbook, you read differently. You read more slowly, you read more... You reread if you didn't understand something. So just maybe helping them understand that the type of text you're reading requires different amounts of attention would be helpful.

What does it mean to monitor comprehension, and how can we help our students do that?

Sharon Vaughn: Now that's the one I'm really quite interested in and pretty convinced that it's really important. The monitoring of comprehension for me is really sort of flipping a switch where I'm going to ask myself pretty consistently, "What's going on? What's happening?" I'm not going to ask complex questions. I'm going to read and I'm going to say, "Now, how does that go with what happened before?"

Monitoring means I am awake to what I'm reading, I'm awake to what I'm learning, and I'm aware when I'm confused. So if I'm monitoring, I kind of know if I'm putting the pieces together, and I know if I'm not and I know what I'm missing. I think a lot of students kind of just plow through text. They start at the beginning and they just start reading, but they don't really engage that sort of meta level of what's happening. So I think monitoring while you read is very important.

Anna Geiger: So we have six kids at home, and I would say-

Sharon Vaughn: You do?

Anna Geiger: Yes.

Sharon Vaughn: Good for you.

Anna Geiger: Oh, thank you.

So I'd say two are bookworms, two more are fine with reading, they like to read, and two would rather not read. They can read, but it's not their favorite thing. One of them is my second son, he's thirteen now, but I remember when he was reading at about ten or eleven years old, he would read a page and I would ask him about it, and he just had no idea. I think it just did not occur to him that the point of reading was to understand and not just read it because Mom said you have to read right now.

And so for him, we would stop. It was interesting, we had to stop after every paragraph and talk about it, and I had to keep shrinking the amount of text that we stopped after. At first I tried a page and he couldn't do a page. So it was like, "Well, let's talk about this half a page." No, we still couldn't. So we just had to keep breaking it down.

I think sometimes with kids, you have to explicitly tell them the point of this is that you remember it. The point is not that you said the words, but that it's actually making sense.

Sharon Vaughn: I really like that because, first of all, it's such a good example of what a really good teacher does, which is make a more difficult task easier. But I also like what you said because sometimes it really is telling students not a complex strategy, but that, "Hey, the idea here is that you're thinking and remembering this while you're reading. That's kind of what's up here." I think that was a great example.

Anna Geiger: Do you have any tips for teachers that have students like my son at that time, that they're just kind of getting the words out but not connecting to anything?

Sharon Vaughn: Yeah. We see so much of that and we've been thinking about what you might be able to do about it. So one of the things we do, Anna, is we have this set of practices called, Does It Make Sense? (DIMS). Does It Make Sense starts simply and then gets more complex. So in its simple version, there are sentences that are disconnected and numbered that either have or do not have something that doesn't make sense.

So it could be something like this, "Anna was on the podcast with a pickle that she used as a microphone." So then we would say, "Does that make sense?" And of course, if you were reading it silently to yourself, you would hopefully notice that the word pickle was not the right thing to say, and so you would underline that and then you would substitute another word.

We start kind of simply, and students like this game because it gives them a purpose and they like this game because they have to monitor what they're reading. It kind of gives them practice monitoring their reading. But we don't just say to them, "Monitor your reading," they're monitoring it because they're looking for something silly or trying to solve a problem.

Anna Geiger: So exercises that kind of build up that skill?

Sharon Vaughn: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Whenever you read about how to help kids with comprehension, it usually comes up with teaching kids to ask and answer questions while reading, and then I think that's definitely not a natural thing for kids to do.

Sharon Vaughn: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Can you offer any suggestions for how to help kids learn that, to make sense of what they read?

Sharon Vaughn: I really do think that learning to ask questions is a good idea. I don't think you have to ask that many, but I do think learning how to do it is a good idea.

I think one of the ways to do that is, again, to give it purpose. If you have students working maybe in pairs and reading different sets of text, and you have them maybe with index or cue cards, writing a question on one side of the cue card and the answer on the other side. Then they use these cue cards to test students in the class, so they have a purpose for asking the question. And then they want to have the answer so that when they ask the question, they'll know whether the student is right or not. They're sort of a motivation for what they're doing. So that's an example.

But I think learning to ask and answer questions, not too many, and to do that sort of deliberately so that you generalize it when you're reading independently is probably a good idea.

Anna Geiger: I really like that idea too, because that's a fun thing to do and it does give them a purpose versus just asking questions to yourself. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

What about summarizing? I've heard some interesting ways of doing this. I don't know if you're familiar with this, it's called shrink a paragraph. Have you heard of that? Paragraph shrinking?

Sharon Vaughn: Paragraph shrinking. Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Where they have the kids say the who or what, and then say what is the most important thing about the who or what, and then say that in a sentence in ten words or less. I've seen that work really well.

Do you have any other ideas for helping kids with summarizing?

Sharon Vaughn: Yeah. I mean I do think that's a very good way to do it.

I think another key way to do it is to use some of the social devices that students like so much. You can say to students, "Let's read this paragraph, and what I want you to do is write a very brief text to your friend about what this was about." It's not so important that it be a sentence or that the grammar be perfect because what you're trying to do is see what they understand.

Anna Geiger: Get the gist.

Sharon Vaughn: Yes. And so if they write it like a text, you get more and they're comfortable writing texts usually, or at least will be soon. And so then you get an idea if they get the main idea or not.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. Well, I think we got a lot done in about twenty five minutes, just a lot of really practical ways to help kids develop comprehension.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Sharon Vaughn: I think the most important thing to remember is that when students don't comprehend, you have summarized very nicely what the key reasons can be. They can be because they're not attending to the text. They can be because they're not remembering the text. They can be because they don't have background knowledge. They can be because they don't know what the words mean. And it also can be because they're not engaged or interested.

If we remember there are a variety of reasons and we kind of think of the practices that might solve that reason, I think we'll make more progress.

Anna Geiger: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for taking time to talk with us. Is there any of your work in particular that you'd like to direct people to?

Sharon Vaughn: Oh, I have a new book coming out with Guilford. This book is specifically about teaching reading comprehension to students with reading difficulties.

Anna Geiger: Oh, wonderful!

Sharon Vaughn: It's with Guilford Press, and it will be out I think in a month or two.

Anna Geiger: Oh, fabulous! That's so exciting. Okay, I will keep an eye out for that.

Sharon Vaughn: Thank you.

Anna Geiger: Well, thank you so much.

Sharon Vaughn: Thank you. And I'm sorry it took us a while to get together, but I'm glad we eventually did it.

Anna Geiger: No problem.

Sharon Vaughn: Thanks so much!

Anna Geiger: We did have to reschedule this interview about three times before we were finally able to make it work, but I'm so glad I was able to connect with Dr. Vaughn. You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode131.

Thank you for sticking with me through this Old and New Summer Series. It's been a crazy busy summer at our house with all six kids home and then doctors, dentists, orthodontist appointments, not to mention summer camps and vacation. It's been a little crazy, so I'm looking forward to the back to school routine coming soon and a new podcast series, which we'll start next week! I'll see you then!

Scroll back to top




Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.

powered by








Learn more from Dr. Vaughn












Effective Reading Comprehension with IDA (webinar)
The Five Pillars of Meaningful Intervention with ILA (webinar)
Building Systems that Support Struggling Readers and Students with Dyslexi a – California Dyslexia Initiative (webinar)
Research-Based Methods of Reading Instruction, Grades K-3 (book)
Research-Based Methods of Reading Instruction for English Language Learners (book)
Teaching Reading Comprehension to Students with Learning Difficulties (book)







��

The post Practical ways to promote reading comprehension with Dr. Sharon Vaughn appeared first on The Measured Mom.

7 Mighty Moves with Lindsay Kemeny

TRT Podcast #130: 7 Mighty Moves with Lindsay Kemeny

Today I’m talking with Lindsay Kemeny, author of the brand new book, 7 Mighty Moves. This book is a must-read for any teacher interested in applying the science of reading in K-3! Listen to today’s episode to get 7 practical tips you can apply right away.

Listen to the episode here
 

Full episode transcript





Transcript




Email



Download



New Tab

This week on the podcast I welcome Lindsay Kemeny, author of the brand new book, "7 Mighty Moves." I highly recommend it. It's a book that I now recommend for teachers who are new to the science of reading as well as for anyone else who just wants to learn more. There's a lot of practical information in here. It's a short, easy read, and an excellent book. With that, we'll get right into the interview!

Anna Geiger: Welcome back, Lindsay!

Lindsay Kemeny: Thank you! Thanks for having me.

Anna Geiger: So last week I replayed the episode where you joined me last year and talked about your transition from balanced to structured literacy. A lot of that revolved around your son being diagnosed with dyslexia. Since that time, you've actually written and published a book which is incredible, five stars, and everyone should get their hands on it. It's called "7 Mighty Moves" published through Scholastic.

Tell us about how this even happened and what your goal was in writing this book.

Lindsay Kemeny: Oh, it feels surreal that this has happened, but back when I was going through that journey with my son that I talked about in the other episode, I started a blog. I just felt really passionate about sharing the things I was learning with others, and I just thought every child deserves a teacher who understands this stuff. Every teacher deserves to know this stuff. I hadn't been taught it.

So just as I was learning, I started blogging. We don't have a huge blog. I don't blog a ton, but people were sharing it a lot on Twitter, and I assume that's where the people at Scholastic saw it because they saw my blog. Several people had been reading through it, and last year in May I got this email from the editorial director of Scholastic asking me if I was interested in writing a book.

I was like, "Is this a scam? What is this? Is this real?" And also it was May and May is a super crazy month for teachers, and I just was like, "I can't even think about this right now."

It took me a few weeks before I responded to the email, and as I was thinking about it, I was like, "Oh my goodness, yes, I would love to write a book. I really want to help teachers out there. I've been applying the things I've been learning in my classroom, and I've learned some things. I would love to share this because I see so many misconceptions about the science of reading, or I see people who understand it but still have questions about what it looks like and how do I apply it? I just had LETRS training, but now what?" So I really wanted to help answer those questions.

I met with the team at Scholastic in June, and they invited me to write a book proposal. That is pretty involved; there's several different things that need to be included in that and including a sample book chapter.

So I wrote that that summer and then handed it off to Scholastic, and then it had to go through several levels of the company. So it wasn't like one and done, it had to go through these cuts.

While I was waiting for that, it was summer and that's when I had time to write. So I just continued to write, and I was just thinking, "Well, if Scholastic decides it's a no, I'll seek out another publisher" because I really was getting into it.

It was the end of October when I learned that it was a yes from Scholastic. So that then began the process of revising every chapter, giving them to my editor, getting feedback, getting advice, and fixing things.

I came to really love the process. I was excited for the feedback I would get. Then I also reached out, after my editor had been through everything, I reached out to some amazing experts in the field to read through and check all my draft chapters because I'm like, "I want this to stand up to criticism. I want it to be accurate. I'm explaining how I interpret the research, and I don't want to say anything wrong."

Anna Geiger: So here we are and it just came out!

Lindsay Kemeny: Here we are.

Anna Geiger: We're recording this in the summer of 2023.

So tell us about why you came up with the idea of "7 Mighty Moves," the way you structured the book?

Lindsay Kemeny: Yeah. If you look back, I have an old blog centered around these seven major kinds of mistakes I found myself making, and the biggest changes I made in my classroom. If you've listened to my other podcast you know that I used to be a very strong advocate for balanced literacy and that's what I was trained in. So for me after learning about effective literacy instruction, I had to make changes. So these represent the seven big changes that I made.

Anna Geiger: So in writing this book was your audience primarily balanced literacy teachers who are moving to structured literacy, or is it a wider audience than that?

Lindsay Kemeny: Really, I think it's all teachers. I think it's very applicable to those that already have knowledge of the science of reading and fully embrace it because I think it's helpful to see how others are applying the things that we're learning in the classroom. So it's for both. It's for the balanced literacy teacher. It's for the science of reading teacher. It's for those just starting to teach. I think it helps everyone.

I love listening to the experts and reading. There are so many excellent books out there. I love professional development from these literacy gurus, and researchers, and cognitive scientists. I also highly value hearing from the teacher that's IN the classroom. That's perhaps what makes my book a little different is that I'm currently teaching. I plan to keep teaching and I'm sharing here's what I do, here's what I have found that works in my classroom.

Anna Geiger: I think that's really fabulous and I agree that it does reach all those people. I think for one thing, it's very easy to read and very relatable. So for anyone, especially a new teacher, it's helpful. Also, for someone who's in a balanced literacy classroom, you do lay out in a very non-judgmental way the changes that are helpful. Then I've also been studying the science of reading like you for years, and I still learned a few new things that I hadn't heard and just a new perspective.

What's really great is the practical application and photos of your actual students. Usually when I read these books I'm like, "Oh, I recognize that person" because it's all the same stock photos. "Oh, I know that one. I've used that on a blog post," but these are all real pictures!

Lindsay Kemeny: Yeah. Can I just say that's something I think is really fun because, yes, all the pictures are from my classroom and the videos are from my classroom. It's really kind of funny because for a couple of the pictures I had asked my literacy coach, "Can you come in and take a couple pictures during my phonics lesson today? Okay, awesome." And then for some of them... My daughter was in fourth grade last year and she took some of the pictures! She came in at her recess, and I'm like, "Okay, just-"

Anna Geiger: Oh, that's great.

Lindsay Kemeny: "... here's the camera. Just take a couple."

Anna Geiger: That's so wonderful.

Lindsay Kemeny: You'll see there are QR codes to videos, and I literally would just set up my cell phone, push record, go around to the other side, teach the lesson, then go back over. So it's all very authentic.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, that is so good, that is just what teachers need.

Well, what I thought we'd do today is just walk very briefly through each of the seven, and for each one I picked out something I think would be good to talk about.

So move number one was "Teach Phonemic Awareness with Intention."

We've certainly talked about that a lot on this podcast, and we've recently talked more about this idea that we need to get right to phonemic awareness. Kids don't need to learn to break words apart into syllables or onset-rime before we do phonemic awareness.

We know that's true based on research, but you also pointed out that at least for some children, backing up can be helpful, which is really good to hear from an actual teacher. So can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Lindsay Kemeny: Yeah, absolutely. I think some students do need more help with those larger units before moving to the smaller ones. I shared that example of working backwards.

So I was giving this little student phonemes to blend, three phonemes to blend, and he couldn't do it. He also couldn't do two phonemes to blend. I talk about that in the book that maybe some of those words were more abstract, and that's why it was harder for him, but he couldn't. He definitely had a deficiency in phonemic awareness. He also had a really hard time with attention. And so all those things came into play.

So I backed up and I tried onset-rime, and he still couldn't blend, "m-ap." He couldn't do that. So then I backed up and gave him syllables, "pur-ple." If he couldn't do that, then I would go back and do compound words like cupcake. "Listen, cup-cake. Put them together." He could do that one, and so I praised him, "Yes! You got it! Excellent!"

With that praise came a little motivation. And I talk about, especially for this student, he was only a first grader, but he already had a really negative experience with school. He didn't learn any letter names or sounds his kindergarten year; he was really struggling. I had to build him up as well and giving him some of those easier larger units helped him go, "Oh, I can do this. Okay, I can do this."

And then I moved back to, "Okay, listen pur-ple," and helping him blend that. Then I could go to... Oh, I skipped body-coda before. But body-coda is helpful if a student can't do onset-rime like "m-ap." If you put that vowel at the beginning and go, "ma-p," that's just a little bit easier. So for him that was easier and then he could do that. He struggled with the others. It took a little bit of time, but soon we got to the phoneme level.

So it's just being really aware, I guess, of that student and what they need. So for him those larger units were helpful in prepping him, but it's not that I did that for weeks and weeks and withheld work at the phoneme level because we're still saying, "Okay, now, tell me the first sound in this word." We're still working on that, and we're trying to get to the phoneme level as quickly as possible.

Anna Geiger: And the next mighty move was "Teach Phonics Explicitly and Systematically."

I just wanted to quickly discuss a tool that you mentioned that I had not heard of before, but I'm very excited about. It's called Phinder from Devin Kearns. People might know that he's done a lot of research on multisyllable word reading, but Phinder is spelled P-H-I-N-D-E-R. Can you tell us about that and how you use it?

Lindsay Kemeny: I love this! I find myself going to this site all the time. So yes, it's devinkearns.com/phinder. You type in the grapheme, and then it's going to come up with all these different phonemes or sounds that the grapheme can represent. You click that and then it's going to give you a word list of all the different words.

So that's so helpful if you maybe need to supplement your phonics program a little bit, or if you're saying, "Okay, we're teaching this sound spelling, but there are only a few words in the lesson. Are there more words I could use?" I can put it in and I can get more words.

Maybe I don't necessarily like the sentence in my program for dictation that day, or I just want some additional sentences. I will put it in, I will find some words in there, and then I can make a sentence with those. I find it really useful.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, it's really cool. It's really neat the way that it offers, once you type in the grapheme like IGH, it will tell you all the different ways that you can pronounce it. Then you click on the pronunciation and it gives you the word list so you don't have a bunch of mismatched words, which you'll sometimes find if you're searching online for a particular pattern.

Your next mighty move was "Teach Decoding Strategies, Not Queuing Strategies," and I really like the little procedure that you share. It's on page 74, and it's called, "Provide the Unknown Sound." Can you walk us through that quick procedure for correction?

Lindsay Kemeny: Yeah. So you want to point out the part they missed or don't know, and tell them that and have them re-blend.

In the book, I give the example of the word, house. "Point to the H, what sound? /h/. Point to the OU." I might first just point to see if they can self-correct that sound themselves. If they can't, then I tell them, "OU spells /ow/. What sound? /ow/. Good." Now, they're going to blend the /h/ and the /ow/. "Blend those /h/-/ow/. Great. Now, look at the last letters. SE. What sound? /s/. Yes, blend it altogether, house."

So you don't always just have to tell them. I wouldn't just tell them the whole word, but instead tell them the part they missed and have them go through that practice of blending.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, I think that's good because I've actually seen some well-meaning structured literacy people where their feedback routine is to just to tell the word a lot of times. I think you're right that we should definitely call attention to the letters to give them a chance to solve it, and to explicitly teach the parts they don't remember.

Lindsay Kemeny: When I have my kids working in partners, as a coaching procedure, I do tell the students to just tell them the word they missed because I mean these are first and second graders. It's going to be a lot to ask them to think about, "Okay, which spelling did they miss? Give them that sound, have them re-blend." So in that case I'll just say, tell them the word, have them repeat the word. But if it's me, if it's another adult, and for my parents, I teach them this procedure.

Anna Geiger: Agreed, agreed. I wouldn't expect kids to be able to do that. So it's good to have a different one.

The next chapter was "Use Decodable Texts Instead of Predictable Texts with Beginning Readers."

We've talked about that in this podcast many, many times. The biggest question I get from people, and I think it's really hard because there's not a clear answer, but I'd love to hear from you as a teacher, how do you transition kids out of decodable texts? You've taught multiple different grades in the past few years, how does that look different across the grades too?

Lindsay Kemeny: Yeah. I think this is something we tend to overcorrect on and people think the science of reading means decodable text, and then that's all they're going to use. Or I see a fourth grade teacher saying, "Oh, I need decodable texts for my classroom."

And I'm like, "Well, maybe a couple of your kids will, but most of them shouldn't."

It's so important to know that they have a purpose and the goal is to transition out of them as soon as you can, as soon as the child is ready.

What is tricky is that that's not exact science. You can't say at this point of the year they're ready, or once they know this, they're ready. It's a little bit different for each student. I think by the time that they have the majority of the code and the most common grapheme-phonemes, a lot of them are going to be ready to transition.

It was so fun teaching first grade this last year because this is really the year that they're transitioning, I feel like. Some of my students were ready the end of January, and they were transitioning. Some took a little bit longer, but we're working on that transitioning. We're all in complex texts as a whole group. That's going to help them, and scaffolding them. And by the end of the year, all of my students except one were able to be successful with an authentic text.

In the book, I share the preferred guidelines of Linda Farrell and Hunter. I would add to theirs because I think students need vowel teams. So once they know digraphs, they can read words with those consonant clusters, they know r-controlled, they know vowel-consonant-e, and vowel teams, you can start seeing if they're ready to transition.

What I have found is that if I transition them and I'm listening to them read and they resort back to a lot of guessing and they're missing a lot, then I'm like, "Oh, they're not ready." And so I go back to decodables for that student.

Anna Geiger: What about somebody who would say, "Well, what's the problem with keeping them in decodables a lot longer?" What would you say to that? What's the point of getting out of decodable text, for everyone listening that's where the majority of the words can be decoded based on what they've been taught.

Lindsay Kemeny: Well, the goal that we have for our students is to read anything, right? The goal is not to read decodables. And there's also research that supports that complex text and getting them into the complex texts. So we want to push them towards the goal. We don't want to keep them in decodables forever. Decodables serve a purpose, and then the whole goal is to have them reading anything.

Anna Geiger: And there are things they can't practice as well in decodables, like set for variability where you get to an unfamiliar word that you can't 100% sound out and they have to be able to adjust it, and you need practice doing that because that's what many, many words are that we come across. Phonics gets us so far and then we have to adjust it to a word we know or a word that makes sense in a sentence.

But of course we start with decodables because that's the only thing that's going to work for a beginning reader for them to actually orthographically map the words because the other option is leveled predictable text where they use the picture and context and that teaches bad habits. It's not true reading. I like the way you talk about that in here.

Move number five was "Embrace a Better Approach to Teaching 'Sight Words'" - in quotes. We've talked a lot about what sight words actually are, and most people listening are probably familiar with the Heart Word Method, so let's go in a little different direction and just talk about an old method of helping kids with unfamiliar words, which is still valid.

I think some people call it Say It to Spell It. Is that right? Do they call it that? Where they take a word like Wednesday, which is obviously not phonetic 100%, and they just teach kids to do Wed-nes-day. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Lindsay Kemeny: Yeah. So don't you do that as adult? I do that. I say Wed-nes-day. And so we'll do the same thing, and in the book I share my procedure, my routine for teaching a word, and then we're going to kind of analyze it like the word, friend. In fact, the first time one of my students said, it looks like fri-end. And I'm like, "Yeah, it does," and we all kind of laughed.

And then every time after that, whenever I would say to write the word friend, they would all go, "Fri-end." Everyone would remember that and it was the same for the word many. They would go man-y. It was just this silly little trick and my students would get into it. They just thought it was so funny and it would help them remember the spelling. So that's great.

Anna Geiger: And that's just a classic that teachers have been using for decades. Just as a reminder, we don't have to reinvent the wheel in everything that we're doing.

Lindsay Kemeny: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Chapter six, move number six was about "Meaningful Fluency Practice." This is a great chapter and I often refer people to the workshop that you gave for PaTTAN at their last conference, about partner reading and paragraph shrinking. I ask them to watch it. Whenever people email me about fluency practice for older kids or second grade and up, I always send them to that one because it's wonderful, and I really liked watching how the kids did the paragraph shrinking, even young kids.

Can you talk us through that procedure a little bit?

Lindsay Kemeny: Yeah. Partner reading and paragraph shrinking I learned from Dr. Matt Burns. It's a classified intervention, and it's like a paired down version of PALS, P-A-L-S. So if you've done that in your classroom, it's like a shorter version. It takes twenty minutes.

You have two partners, and you've intentionally paired these students. One is more fluent student and the other is less fluent, and the stronger reader goes first, so that's going to be Partner 1 or Partner A, whatever.

So Partner A is going to read for five minutes aloud and Partner B is following along and going to do an error correction procedure if they miss. Then I stop my timer and it's Partner B's turn. They go back to the beginning and they read for five minutes while their other partner monitors and follows along.

Then my timer goes off and we switch again. It's back to Partner A, and now they're going to continue reading wherever the other reader left off. And they're going to stop at the end of each paragraph, and they're going to do what we call shrink that paragraph. I'll tell you what that is in a minute, but let me finish the routine. After they do that for five minutes, it goes back to Partner B, and now they're going to continue reading wherever Partner A left off, and they're going to stop after each paragraph to paragraph shrink.

So in paragraph shrinking, one partner asks the one who is reading, "What's the most important who or what in that paragraph?" and they determine that.

And then they ask, "What's the most important thing about the who or what in that paragraph?" and then they answer.

And then the third question is, "Now say that main idea in ten words or less."

So they're going to take that information they just shared about the most important who, and what was most important about the who, and they're going to condense it down into ten words, which is so fun to watch them do, and they just move their fingers to count. I do have a video in that presentation where you can hear the student do it incorrectly, and she corrects herself and then gets it ten words.

So it's great. It's a great activity and I saw huge results in my classroom, which I share in that presentation too.

Anna Geiger: It is brilliant because it teaches summarizing, which is so hard to teach little kids. And then the finger thing, when watching that I loved that because you could see them start and they realized, "Oh no, this sentence is going to be way too long." So they learn to be very concise.

How much modeling did it take for the kids to understand how to find the who or what and what happened? Because that's not easy.

Lindsay Kemeny: I know. You have to do a LOT of modeling, especially the younger the student is. This procedure is meant for grades 2+, grades 2-8.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Lindsay Kemeny: But I did do a version of it in the first grade last year! We could talk about that another time.

So lots of modeling, and returning to it, and then giving them a chance to try and they're doing it, but then you're doing it too. We could do this any time. When we're reading our complex texts together, I can model this for them.

The who or what is usually not so hard. Sometimes they had a hard time, and then they would raise their hands then I would go over and help.

Sometimes they were just disagreeing and it was really kind of fun. "Well, she says the most important who is this, but I think it's this!" So then we talk about why. But showing them too, what is each sentence referring to? And you can circle those pronouns. What is this referring to? Look, each one is about the turtle, so the most important who or what is the turtle.

So yeah, it's great. But yes, it requires modeling.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. I think that is just one of the most brilliant things I've seen. I love it. What's great about it is it works perfectly for any grade above two. The text is harder, so they just have a more challenging job writing the summary.

We're going to finish up with number seven, which was "Improve Comprehension by Developing Vocabulary and Background Knowledge."

That's been a big thing in the science of reading community lately about how we need to step away from this idea that we need teach all these strategies for long periods of time, but we need to focus instead on the content of the text.

You had a keyword outline procedure, which I thought was interesting. Could you talk to us about that?

Lindsay Kemeny: Yeah, absolutely. There's been a lot of talk, and strategy instruction is important. The thing is, especially for me, I was neglecting the importance of background knowledge and vocabulary. So that was the focus of this chapter.

The keyword outline procedure I learned from the Institute for Excellence in Writing, IEW. I love this procedure because you take a passage, and you start with a really short passage, like maybe six sentences. First, we're going to read it, I might read the whole thing to the class or we might choral read it.

Now we're going to take it apart sentence by sentence. So we're going to read the first sentence, and I'm going to say, "Choose the three most important words in this sentence." Then we're going to talk about it and discuss what do you think it is?

So in the book... Let's see, this is on page 138. So the passage we read, the first sentence was, "A fox sometimes hunts for insects." And so one student might say, "Okay, I think it's fox, hunts, insects." Or someone might say, "Oh, sometimes, hunts, insects." We discuss the three. They circle the three most important ones.

A lot of times we say, "Oh, we don't need to put fox in there because it's in our title. We already have that at the top."

Anyway, we choose our three words, and then they're going to write them. We're going to make an outline.

Then we go to the next sentence, choose three words, write them on that line, go to the next one, go to the next one for the whole passage.

Then they're going to take the passage and put it away. We're not going to look at it again because now we have our keyword outline, and now we're going to write a summary from that outline. This is so great for writing too because how many times do you have those students that are like, "I don't know what to write about," and they lose all this time because they just don't know what to write about. Well, we have something for them right here to write about. And they're writing about something they read, which is excellent.

Anna Geiger: Really good for comprehension.

Lindsay Kemeny: Yes. So now they can take this and they see, "Okay, sometimes, hunts, insects." And they're going to come up with a sentence, and we do this all orally first. "Can you turn those three words into a sentence?" And then they're going to tell it. I have them tell it to their partner. And so they'll go through the whole outline. We have six lines of our keyword outline, and they're going to orally retell them to their partners. Then they will write them.

It's great because we can add a lot more writing. We can talk about adding strong adjectives, strong verbs, and different things into their writing. So it's a great, great strategy.

Anna Geiger: So the goal is not to recreate the original paragraph, but to summarize the paragraph in an interesting way, using the keywords that you've noted.

Lindsay Kemeny: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Well, this book is full of things like that that we just shared, things you may not have heard of before. Not to mention just the practical research base for why we teach this way. So I can't recommend it enough! I hope that everybody listening will go out and grab it. "7 Mighty Moves," you can get it on Amazon, and be sure to leave a review too, because that will allow more people to see the book!

Is there anything else you want to share with us, Lindsay? You can talk about your podcast or any place else people can find you?

Lindsay Kemeny: Yeah. I'm the co-host of the Literacy Talks podcast, so if you want to check that out. We are three literacy nerds, and we just talk all things literacy.

Thank you so much, Anna, and I'm so glad that you liked the book! That means so much to me. So thank you.

Anna Geiger: Of course. Well, thanks for coming on.

Lindsay Kemeny: Thank you.

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode130. Talk to you next time!

Scroll back to top




Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.

powered by








Find Lindsay here












7 Mighty Moves
Literacy Talks podcast
The Learning Spark blog




Lindsay’s recommends:

Devin Kearns’ Phinder





 

The post 7 Mighty Moves with Lindsay Kemeny appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Give your students a reading boost with these back to school take-home decodable packs!

This post is sponsored by Just Right Reader. All opinions are my own. I only promote products I know and love!

Let’s start the new school year off right!

Did you know? Decoding is the literacy skill that slides most over the summer. Use Just Right Reader decodable books to reactivate decoding skills and give your students a reading boost! 

You can’t go wrong with Just Right Reader’s Back to School Take-Home Decodable Packs!

Here’s what each student will get

When your school or district purchases a take-home decodable pack for each of your students, each student in rising kindergarten to rising third grade will receive a pack of ten decodables. Students in rising 4th or 5th grade will get 5 decodables (longer high interest books).

Here are the phonics skills for each grade

Each of these back to school packs features phonics skills that were taught in the previous year of school … making these perfect for mixed review! (Bonus: Since these decodables include previously learned skills, students will get a boost of confidence as well!)

Rising Kindergartners: Letter recognitionRising 1st graders: CVC words with short vowel soundsRising 2nd graders: Digraphs, beginning and ending blends, final e, VCV words, r-controlled vowelsRising 3rd graders: Vowel teams, diphthongs, trigraphs, multi-sound consonants, final stable syllableRising 4th and 5th graders: Build upon foundational phonics skills, targeting multisyllabic words and prefixes, roots, and suffixes Pass these out on Back to School night!

When your school or district purchases a take-home decodable book pack for each student, you’ll be able to provide exactly what families need to get excited about building healthy reading habits at home. 

This is one of my favorite features … Each book comes with a QR code on the back so families can play a short phonics lesson before students read the book. The lessons come in both English and Spanish!

Here’s what educators are sayingMore reasons to love Just Right ReaderEngaging stories and colorful illustrations get students excited to read.With over 300 decodable books to choose from, there’s something for everyone!Just Right Reader even has Spanish decodables for bilingual students in dual language/immersion programs!CLICK HERE TO GET STARTED!

The post Give your students a reading boost with these back to school take-home decodable packs! appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Let’s talk sound walls – A conversation with Gina from Get Literacy

TRT Podcast#128: Let’s talk sound walls: A conversation with Gina from Get Literacy

Everyone’s telling us to switch out our word walls for sound walls… but what are sound walls, and how do you use them? Listen in on my conversation with Gina, a first grade teacher whose students love to learn with the help of their sound wall!

Listen to the episode here
��

Full episode transcript





Transcript




Email



Download



New Tab

Hello, Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom, back with another episode in our Old and New summer series.

If you checked out last week's episode, you got to hear a replay of my conversation with Gina from Get Lit. She shared her very interesting story of coming out of balanced literacy because she discovered that her daughter had dyslexia. It's a story with a wonderful happy ending, and now she continues to teach her students, her first-graders, as well as help many people on her Instagram account.

Today we're going to continue the conversation from last year and we're going to talk all about sound walls, what they look like, how to use them, and how they can help your students.

Anna: Welcome back, Gina!

Gina: Thanks for having me again. I'm so excited to be here!

Anna: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself for the people who maybe didn't catch last week's review episode?

Gina: Sure. I am a first grade teacher in a public school and I also tutor. I am an Orton-Gillingham Academy trained associate, working under the mentorship of a fellow, LETRS trained, and I was a balanced literacy teacher until my daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia. That brought me down the road of evidence-based reading instruction and the science of reading.

Anna: Tell us really quickly about how you share that with other teachers.

Gina: On my Instagram, I try to educate and advocate for dyslexia, and I just do little reels and little educational posts on my Instagram account, @get_literacy.

Anna: So the last time you were on the podcast, about a year ago I think it was, we talked a little bit about sound walls and how it would be great to have you come back and tell us more about that. Now you have another year behind you of using sound walls with your students. Maybe we could start by helping people understand what a sound wall is.

Gina: Sure. Okay. So a sound wall is a combination of a mouth picture, I like to use real mouth pictures, and the graphemes that match that sound. So there is the vowel valley which has all the vowels on one side, and then the consonant chart is on the other side. It is a visual for students, and I do explicitly teach everything on the wall throughout the school year.

Anna: All right. So just for people new to sound walls, there are two parts to it, like she said, there's the vowel valley and the consonant sound wall. The phonemes, the sounds, are usually represented by pictures of a mouth.

Now I listened to Jan Wasowicz, she was with SPELL-Links. I watched her training on sound walls, and she was not a fan of putting the mouth pictures up, so everybody's different. Just know that there are many different ways to do this. Most people, myself included, appreciate the mouth pictures, so those are there. That's representing the phoneme, the sound. Then when Gina mentioned grapheme, she means the letter or letters that represent the sound.

So a sound wall with a mouth making the sound of /ch/ would eventually have CH and TCH listed underneath because those are both ways to spell the /ch/ sound.

Maybe you can tell us what research says about sound walls.

Gina: There is not any research that I know of and that I can really speak to. I'm not sure if they're starting to do research, but there is research... This is more of a tool for students and for teachers to use that does have research behind it.

Anna: Exactly. I think some people are against sound walls because there is no research that I know of right now. There may be some being done, in fact I think there is, but there's no published research about the use of sound walls.

So we have to be careful when we talk about them. We don't want to say first of all, that they're not "the science of reading" because the science of reading is research. It's not a thing or a tool. But we can say that it's a tool to teach the things we know are we are supposed to teach like phonemic awareness and phonics.

We know very much that phonemic awareness is very important for success in reading, things like isolating, blending, segmenting, and manipulating phonemes.

Then, of course, we know that a systematic phonics instruction is also important.

Can you talk to us a little bit about your sound wall routine and how you use it to teach phonemic awareness and phonics?

Gina: Absolutely. Going back to even the mouth pictures, I know some people aren't fans, but having first graders, I really think it's an important tool for them to have that visual. I really got into it during COVID when we were still wearing masks, and I feel like it was very helpful, that's when it began.

What I do is, in beginning of the school year I put post-its over all the letters, the graphemes, and I unveil whatever the sound is that we are working on.

In first grade we start with short vowels, so I'll probably do one short vowel a week. My first graders are coming in already knowing their basic sounds of the alphabet, so we fly through that.

So I'll unveil the sound and let's say we're doing short A, I will hold up the short A card. I use Tools 4 Reading, that's where I was trained and that's the sound wall and the cards that I use. I'll hold up their card with A on it. All my students have a mirror, and so we practicing saying /��/, and we look at what our mouths are doing. We talk about what our mouth's doing.

Then I'll give them words with a short A sound in there for them to repeat. I want to know, "Where do you hear the short A sound - beginning, middle, or end?" I'll give them all different words, and they'll tell me where in the word they hear that sound. They'll continue to look at the mirror to make sure of their articulation and they're doing it to match the picture on the wall.

Anna: Is that when you're teaching the spelling of short A as well?

Gina: Yes, but this can go deeper once we get into long vowels. I won't be teaching all the long E spellings because I teach first grade. So I'll unveil it when we do maybe busy E, and then all those different spellings will still be up there, so my higher readers will look at it. But I tell them not really to pay too much attention to that, and we just focus on the one spelling at a time.

Anna: Okay, so you actually reveal all the spellings at once, but you just focus on one, is that right?

Gina: Right, yes, because I'm not going to cut that little post-it up and try to make it harder.

When it is helpful too is in the second half of first grade, when now my students are encountering more of these patterns. I see them look on the sound wall all the time, and they'll look at the pattern that they're trying to figure out. They'll look at the mouth picture, and they'll figure out on their own, "Oh, that's a long E, I should try the long E sound for this word." So it is helpful for them when they're trying to decode on their own.

Anna: Well, it's interesting too because I watched a live presentation with Wiley Blevins at the Wisconsin Reading League Conference last fall and he actually said that he doesn't like it when people are covering up everything before they teach it because there are advanced kids or kids who are further along that could use that information. So I think it has to be a balance for teachers. Having the whole wall open at once can be very overwhelming, but at the same time, we don't want to block information from kids. So it's probably just a trial and error kind of thing.

Gina: It is. That's really interesting, and it is what works in your classroom. I feel there are some people that like to put words under there too, instead of using a word wall, they move their words and put them up on their sound wall as they go. So it's whatever really works for your classroom and your students, and I think it depends on what grade you're teaching as well.

Anna: So what you're saying is that some sound walls have the phoneme pictured by the mouth and then underneath it, they reveal the graphemes in isolation, right? So if you're teaching the sound of /��/ and the spellings of /��/, then you might have just the letter E, the letter EE, letters EA. But the other option is to have an actual keyword with maybe those letters highlighted or in a different color or underlined-

Gina: Right.

Anna: ... so two different ways. I know Tools 4 Reading does the individual graphemes and not actual words.

Gina: Right.

Anna: So there's lots of different ways to do it. So that's how you introduce a new spelling, by having them practice the sound.

Tell us more about how your students use the wall.

Gina: So they will use the wall for both spelling and reading. I got really excited when last year I had a parent send me an email that said, "My daughter's in the mirror right now."

What's great about the wall and the mirrors and really diving deeper into the sounds and their articulation is a lot of students will spell "train" instead of with TR, it might be CHR or JR. So I teach them, "Look in the mirror. What is our mouth doing?" And they will even start doing it at home. They'll pay attention.

I don't remember which sound it is, because a lot of our sounds are very similar in how we articulate them. It's just a matter of if they are voiced or not.

So my students will use it to self-correct, to help with if they see a spelling pattern they don't know, or when they need to spell to remember it.

Anna: So maybe can you give us a very specific example of a child trying to read or spell a particular word and then how the sound wall would help?

Gina: Sure. So short I and short E are very easily confused by students, and if you start with short E, if you say /��/, /��/, it's just a slight movement in their mouth. So for a word like, "pen." If a student is trying to figure out if it's short E or short I, my student would grab a mirror, go up to the wall, look at where if they're trying to say "pin" or "pen," look at which sound they want, and try to make sure they're matching their mouth in the mirror to the picture on the wall.

When I do teach it, we talk about the vowel valley, which I don't know if you know, but the way it is set up is helpful for them as well.

Anna: Sure. The vowel valley has to do with how open your mouth is, so it's shaped like a V and like a valley. I'll provide links to my blog post about the sound wall in the show notes, but it talks about how you can actually have your students say all the sounds with you as you go down the wall and go up the wall and notice in a mirror how their mouth is getting more open.

There's other things you can do I've heard where you have kids see how much of their finger can fit between their teeth when they're saying certain sounds, and then how as you move down the wall more of your finger can fit. That can help them just think more about the distinction between those vowel sounds, which are very close.

What about your students that are more natural at reading and writing? Do they use the sound wall very much, or is this really more a tool for kids who are struggling?

Gina: You know what? Actually my high readers really were interested in the sound wall this year. I had the schwa covered up because we really don't get too much into that and they were BEGGING me. They're like, "We want to know what the banana sound is because it's awesome." There is also a picture that matches besides the picture of the mouth. There's also a visual of a picture, so it was a banana. So it actually was fun for them.

They liked learning that, and they're reading words that would have the /zh/ sound in it for like treasure. So it was helpful for them for words that they were encountering, and they picked up on how to use it really quickly. At times, they would even ask if they can look under a post-it and I would say, yeah, they could run up there and look.

Anna: Yeah.

Gina: It's not in hiding, it's not secretive. It's just to, like you said, to me it's not to overwhelm all the whole class.

Anna: Sure. So what is your feeling on teaching kids the words, the big words, that are connected with the sound wall like fricative, stop, and affricate? Have you tried it, not tried it?

Gina: Yes, I do use the words. I'm not expecting them to use those words with me. I'm not expecting them to know it either. I personally don't know if there is any research or anything that says that that helps kids when learning sounds.

I'll use it because my consonant chart is set up with tongue placement and then airflow. So I'll say, "Okay, this is a stop. That means we can't hold that sound." So I use it as an instruction when I'm doing the explicit instruction, but I don't know if it really makes a difference.

They love learning nasals for instance, because we all plug our nose when we're doing the nasals, so I'll say, "Oh, that's a nasal." But getting them to say fricative and know that is tricky. Plus, whenever I say that in my classroom, they all start cracking up. They think I'm saying a bad word when I say fricative.

Anna: I know.

Gina: I go, "That just means there's friction," and then I've got to explain what friction is...

Anna: Yeah. Well, I know there's some people that really love teaching it, and this is all just from basically what I read in Facebook groups. I don't think there's any research at all on this, but just they like teaching it because their kids like the big words. Then there's plenty of other people who are concerned that you're filling their brain up with something that's not useful, and you should make space in their working memory for what they really need, and you're wasting time. So again, it's really got to be just what a teacher feels best fits their class. But I would definitely want to say that that's not necessary for kids-

Gina: Right.

Anna: ... to know those big words.

Gina: No. No. They're still learning it. It's just, to me, a matter of instruction where I might as well say the word, but I'm not expecting them to know it on their own.

Anna: Yeah, no, I agree. What would you say might be some challenges with using a sound wall or things to avoid?

Gina: I think like you said with overloading them, their working memory, and giving them too much at once, like trying to do a bunch of sounds at once because you're trying to fly through it or catch up.

Also giving them sounds before they're ready. I've noticed with some kids, it is still overwhelming for them. It is still a lot to say, "Okay, now we're doing long E, now we're doing long A, all in one week."

Really, you have to be very prescriptive about it, I guess, to your class, and to your students. Maybe it's more of a small group thing that teachers can do if they feel like their class is such a wide span if they have their struggling readers all the way up to very high readers. Maybe it's too much to do whole group instruction, and they could do it more small group and really hone in on to what their student needs and how much they need of it.

Anna: And wouldn't you say that the sound wall lessons are coinciding with your phonics lessons, right?

Gina: Oh, yes, yes.

Anna: So then if you're teaching whole class phonics, then it would be probably whole class.

Gina: Right.

Anna: But if you're teaching new skills in small groups, then it would be there. The tricky part with that, I would think, would be when you're teaching phonics and small groups, which I'm all for if that's what needs to be done, then you have different parts of the wall revealed for different groups.

Gina: Right.

Anna: Have you run into that being an issue or a challenge for you with your class?

Gina: No, you know what I've gone through with what to do with the sound wall even with my tutoring kids more one-on-one. There are pictures, I think, printables that you can get of a sound wall. So I would just have my students have their own little individual sound wall in a binder or in a page projector and just do it more that way than having the visual up on my wall.

That is a question I get a lot on my social media and my Instagram. People say, "I don't have that kind of wall space." If you see a picture of mine, it is taking up a lot of real estate and I still, with my district, I am required to have a word wall as well.

Anna: Okay.

Gina: So people are asking, "How do you find the space?" and I said, "Well then find an individual one for each student or a smaller printable one that you could just have at your desk. It might not have the mouth pictures, but it's better than having nothing."

Anna: It's a reference for students.

Gina: Yeah.

Anna: So that's interesting that you're required to use a word wall. I know nowadays there's a million conversations out there, articles and everything, about, "Take down your word wall, put up a sound wall." Are you finding that you can still make use of a word wall or is it just a compliance thing?

Gina: I am still making use of it because if it's going to be up, I want it to have a reason. So the way I actually adjusted it, I asked for permission, and they said it's fine as long as I have my word wall up. I don't need to have the word coffins, like the shapes of the words.

Anna: Yes. Oh, yes.

Gina: Yep. So because now that we know we don't visually memorize words, we don't need to do it like that. So what I am creating, it's my summer project, I started doing it throughout the year, is sound boxes and putting those words in sound boxes. If they are irregular, I put the heart part, the heart on there for the irregular words, and I added digraphs, because my biggest aha for when I started studying about the sound wall was that our students are trying to find the word "there" and how to spell "there." What sound on the alphabet starts with nothing on our word wall? If there's a T, how do they know it's a T? T says /t/. So that was one of my big aha moments, plus knowing we don't need to memorize the word shape and the word coffins. So I added digraphs to my word wall, and I'm changing all my words that I'm required to have into sound boxes.

Anna: Oh, yeah. Tell me what you mean by sound boxes.

Gina: So if the word is "chat." "Chat," if you segment it, it has three sounds, /ch/ /��/ /t/. So then I'll have the CH in a box, the A in a box, and the T in the box because I do a lot of word mapping in my small groups so my students are used to seeing that.

Anna: Yeah, that's really smart. Of course, I know what sound boxes are, I'm not sure why I was brain freezing there, but I had never thought of doing that for a word wall. That's really cool. Of course, doing the digraphs makes perfect sense. I don't know why that never came to my mind. How do you choose what words you put up there?

Gina: It's the words that we're required to. I think they're the Dolch list.

Anna: Oh, okay. Okay. Gotcha.

Gina: Yeah.

Anna: Okay.

Gina: So that's what my district wants up and that's fine. Like I said, as long as I can alter it to make sense to my students and how I'm teaching those words, then let's give this a try. Again, I'm just coming up with this on my own, so we'll see how that works next year.

Anna: Yeah, I'd love to talk to you about that after you try it, because that makes perfect sense. When you're teaching the words explicitly and showing them why you spell each part the way you spell it, having it as a reference can be perfectly fine. I think the issue with word walls so much was that it was supposed to be like a memorization piece.

Gina: Right. Yes.

Anna: Then also, like you said, it was so hard to find some of those irregular words because of how they started.

Anything else that you'd like to share about sound walls? Maybe questions that people ask you on Instagram, commonly asked questions that you could answer for us?

Gina: Yes. A lot of questions are how do I use it? I think we covered a lot of them.

What does my instruction looks like? I do believe that with the sound wall, having a mirror available to your students is very important for them to make sure they're looking at their mouth themselves. So there is a mirror set up by my sound wall so that my students can walk up and self-check on their own.

Another question, "Is the real estate available in a classroom or in a reading specialist or interventionist office going to be enough?" Tools 4 Reading, who I took their course and whose materials I use, do have posters too. I don't know if I mentioned that.

Anna: Okay.

Gina: So it's a poster with the real mouth pictures. I actually have those in my basement where I tutor for my tutoring students.

Using the other question, do we really need to say affricate, fricative, stop, nasal? Again, like I said, I don't know if you really have to hone it in and have your students repeat those words to you, but use them for instruction.

What was the other one? I just think it's that I've seen huge gains with it with my first graders with just confusion of sounds.

Anna: Sure.

Gina: This is such a big age when they're coming in and they're spelling and we're not overloading, but their memory is becoming very loaded with this sound this week, this spelling, and now we're adding another spelling for the same sound, and it sounds so similar to this sound. Their little mouth without their teeth and everything else that's going on, they're growing, trying to figure it out. The sound wall really has made BIG improvements in my classroom, and I really see my students using it daily.

Anna: That is wonderful to hear. In the show notes for this episode, I'm going to share a free sound wall lesson. I don't at this time have a full set of lessons, but it's basically a template that somebody could follow to create their own. Also, if you would buy Tools 4 Reading, I'm assuming lessons are included with that.

Gina: Yes, they have a manual.

Anna: Also, Gina mentioned the Tools 4 Reading training, which I have taken as well for sound walls. We'll provide a link to that so you can check that out. Then also, I'll provide a link to Gina's Instagram where you can find her.

Also, she's got a special way where you could set up a consult call because anyone who runs an Instagram account knows how hard it is to keep up with all of those messages. I let so many go, it makes me feel really bad, but they just float away. I lose them if I can't answer them in the moment. So that would be a way to really pick her brain and get some really good answers.

Thanks so much, Gina, for joining us. I always like talking to you.

Gina: Oh, me too! Thank you again for having me. I was so excited to come back.

Anna: You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode128.

Scroll back to top




Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.

powered by






Related links and resources


How to use a sound wall
Sound wall classes from Tools 4 Reading

Find Gina here

get_literacy��on Instagram
Get literacy coaching from Gina

 

Get your free sound wall lessons!
CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

The post Let’s talk sound walls – A conversation with Gina from Get Literacy appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Teaching decoding: A conversation with Dr. Julia Lindsey

TRT Podcast#127: Teaching Decoding: A conversation with Dr. Julia B. Lindsey

In today’s conversation with author Julia Lindsey, we discuss how to explicitly teach decoding so that all that phonics knowledge gets put to good use.

Listen to the episode here
��

Full episode transcript





Transcript




Email



Download



New Tab

Hello, welcome back to Triple R Teaching. I'm your host Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom. This week I had the honor of speaking with Dr. Julia B. Lindsey, author of "Reading Above the Fray," and she's going to help us think a lot about decoding and how we can explicitly teach that to our beginning readers.

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Julia!

Julia Lindsey: Hi! It's so great to be here!

Anna Geiger: Can you talk to us a little bit about how you got into education and bring us up to where you are today?

Julia Lindsey: Absolutely. I'd be thrilled to talk about that.

So I began my career in education in college when I started working with a summer program called the Children's Defense Fund Freedom Schools, and I fell in love with supporting children in listening to complex texts and discussing all of the beautiful things that they were learning.

But it also started me down a path of kind of scratching my head about when are we focused on teaching kids the act of reading, of how to read. So that program is specifically quite focused, and it knows this and it says this, on comprehension and also on supporting children in culturally responsive texts. But actually even my second year in teaching in that program, while I was still in college, I came to the program director and I said, "Could I teach a phonics program too? Could I add this element in to the kindergarten, first, and second grade kids' experience? Because I think it's sort of weird that we aren't teaching them how to read words." So I created a very slapped together phonics experience for students based on the information I had access to, and that was kind of the first time that I started getting really interested in that side of word reading.

Then I went on to teach, I taught kindergarten and first grade. I taught in a district that was really balanced literacy. I wouldn't have necessarily known that that was what it was at the time, but that's what we were doing. We taught phonics, but we also primarily used guided reading and were really focused on moving kids up in their Fountas and Pinnell guided reading level. That was THE metric that we were thinking about for reading.

So again, I experienced some strange disconnects between what I was telling kids about language and phonics and what I was asking them to do in texts. And like so many of us, I had the experience of having students who I just simply could not support through individual words. They would be encountering so many words that I didn't know what to say, like, "Okay, sound it out, hmmm, that's weird. I don't know. That one's strange," and just kind of mucking through things.

Then I decided to get my PhD, so I went to the University of Michigan, and even though at that point I had a master's in teaching and I had taught children and I had different experiences, I was utterly floored by learning about the actual research that we have on word reading development specifically. I had, for example, never heard the term phonemic awareness before I stepped foot in a doctoral program and was pretty shocked to start learning things about what I could have done differently in my classroom. And also was shocked to then learn it wasn't about me, this was a very widespread disconnect between research and practice.

That led me into wanting to do more research and work around supporting teachers in foundational literacy instruction and in decodable texts and in really bridging this gap between how we teach phonics and how we think about teaching reading in other times of day and how do we bring in actual research into classrooms to give kids the best chance at becoming proficient readers.

Anna Geiger: So many teachers talk about that, about how they went through a master's program and still didn't learn about the importance of decoding.

I remember when I was teaching, for me it was about the books, getting the right books in their hands, and I didn't do a lot of explicit instruction in blending and decoding. I thought that moving them through the levels was the way to go. That was, like you said, what I learned in my master's degree program, we learned about running records and all of that. So it is definitely a new way of thinking about it.

And yet it's not new at all, it's been around for a long time, but we got distracted for quite a few decades there.

Maybe you can talk a little bit about the difference between decoding and phonics and why decoding sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. We're figuring out that, yeah, phonics is important, many people have known that for a long time, but why does decoding get lost sometimes?

Julia Lindsey: Yeah, so phonics is really a type of instruction, specifically it's that instruction in sound-spelling relationships and then using those to read and spell. But in my classroom, for example, and in many classrooms, what phonics really turns into is that explicit experience with some sound-spelling patterns and maybe some work in isolation with them. But there's not necessarily the same level of explicitness towards how do you actually use those sound-spelling relationships to read a word, to spell a word, and then to do any of that in context.

So you might be teaching a lot about how this is a long vowel team and it spells this sound, but we might not always bring that same level of attention to the actual act of decoding a word.

So for me, decoding is different because decoding is really how do we use those sound-spelling relationships to read a word. And we're bringing to bear not just that knowledge that we got from sound-spelling relationships and phonics, but also phonemic awareness and our ability to hear and manipulate those individual sounds, and in particular in decoding to blend them together.

I think oftentimes decoding gets lost because it feels like a side note or it feels like something that we might think would happen spontaneously. So we might say, "Okay, I've given kids this information, now I'm putting a word in front of them that includes this information, they should be good to go." But if we know anything about kids, it's that they aren't always just ready to go with that kind of information.

So I like to focus on thinking about how decoding is different than phonics, and by really foregrounding that to help us understand that the whole purpose is to give kids the chance to use these skills to read words and also of course to spell words. And that we need to bring the same level of awareness to telling them, "All right, now I'm looking at a word. Here's exactly the steps I'm going to take to recognize this word and how to get through it." And really keeping that at the foreground because after all, the whole point of all of these skills is to be able to use them to be readers and writers.

Anna Geiger: So let's say we've got a new kindergarten or first grade teacher listening and they understand the importance of phonics. They have their phonics lessons. What would be the steps that they want to teach their students to decode a word? So after they've taught them the sound-spelling relationship, what's next?

Julia Lindsey: Great question. So say you're teaching kindergarten and you have just been teaching alphabet sounds and spellings, you might be surprised to know that you can go ahead and support kids in starting to decode when your students know at least about thirteen to fifteen sound-spelling relationships, maybe even fewer.

We have research at this stage that shows that by that point, kids are ready to start practicing decoding. So they need about thirteen or so sound-spelling relationships, obviously including some vowels. They also need that phonemic blending, that ability to say "/s/ /��/ /t/, okay, that's three sounds. I can hear them, I can say them, I can separate them or segment them."

So if you're working on that skill along with the letter-sound relationships in the alphabet, then what you can say is, "Okay, we're going to put this together. We're maybe going to start with CV units." That's consonant-vowel units, they're not words most of the time. But we're maybe going to start there and we're going to start with some continuous sounds so that we can really hold the sound through so we're not distracted by any schwa that we're adding to those phonemes.

And we are going to start out by saying, "We're going to touch each letter, we're going to say each sound, and we're going to blend them back together."

Or we might start further back and say, "Here's an Elkonin box with two boxes. We're going to slide a token in and say the sound /s/, and then move it across and say the sound /��/. /s/-/a/." And now we're going to add a letter there, we're going to write or maybe we're going to move a letter tile for S and a letter tile for A, while we're still saying those sounds. And then we can again read through those and say the sounds together.

So taking some strategic steps to get kind of that muscle growing. And then when we get up to a word, we're ready to read an individual word. Again, saying, "Okay, we can take certain steps to get through this. First we're going to say each of the sounds individually, then we're going to try to hold onto the sounds and blend them into one another."

Or maybe we need a little bit more help, "We're going to say the first sound, say the second sound, then say those two as a bundle, hold onto that bundle. And we can always generally stretch that vowel because it's continuous and we're going to stretch that medial vowel into that final sound. And that's the way that we're going to kind of accelerate our blending."

But making sure that kids know you're using the sound-spelling knowledge, these aren't going to be spontaneously different if I'm giving you a decodable word and you're using that information that we've already practiced in blending.

And if we need to, even if we're working at a word in text we can add on that sound box, those tokens. We can use those in the moment to continue that support to make sure that kids are able to get through that entire word.

Anna Geiger: That is very different, isn't it, from assuming that all this is going to develop spontaneously, like you said.

I know when I taught first and second grade, like I said, it was more of a reading workshop approach. So I did a lot of getting what I thought were the right books in their hands, and kind of embedded phonics instruction. I did teach phonics in Words Their Way, but it wasn't real explicit and it did not occur to me that I needed to do this explicit blending instruction because some kids did just kind of get it, they learned it in kindergarten and I taught them first grade.

There was at the time, for sure, this belief among a lot of teachers that you didn't want to teach anything out of context because that lacked meaning. So I would not have enjoyed doing these blending drills you could call it or blending exercises because it seemed to lack meaning. What would you say to someone who would say that?

Julia Lindsey: Yeah, so I think that that goes hand in hand with this feeling that adding a level of explicitness to this type of instruction is going to somehow decrease children's joy or their motivation to read. And so I would say a few things to that.

First, to address your question head on, we know that proficient readers can read words in context and out of context at the same speed with the same level of accuracy. In other words, proficient readers don't need context to read. And by read, I mean recognize a word. Obviously we need context to make sense of a sentence because a sentence is context, but we don't need context to recognize words. So first off, knowing that can be helpful in terms of feeling confident in doing some isolated work.

We also know from research that we do need this combination of work in isolation with these skills and work in application of these skills. Having that isolated practice is really critical for building up children's abilities and their understanding of how to actually go through each of these skills.

And then in terms of this joy and motivation piece I think that this is one of the most important things for teachers to understand.

First, we have some fascinating research on the alphabet by Theresa Roberts and colleagues that looked at, are children motivated and interested in decontextualized alphabet experiences or contextualized alphabet experiences? They actually found that kids were more motivated in those decontextualized experiences. Not only was this based on kids' self-report but it was also based on the teachers and researchers observing the kids and seeing that they were more engaged and answering questions. And of course, even better than just being more engaged, their outcomes were also better.

So I think that that's pretty powerful to remind us that this very act of learning these skills is exciting to young children who have never experienced this before, even if it feels kind of rote to us.

And then finally, I'll say that there's a new study that recently came out that's gotten a lot of buzz because it shows us that there is a potential new way of thinking about motivation. This study suggests that good skill in reading is actually what leads to long-term motivation, not that motivation leads to long-term good skill.

So when we think about these early years, we think about how can I give my students the strongest possible backbone as a reader?

There's two major ways that we want to do that. The first is by ensuring that children are all able to decode words proficiently because that's going to give them the greatest chance at proficiency. And the second is, of course, supporting them in developing a deep and wide understanding of our language and having lots and lots of background knowledge. And those, in concert, are really the best way that we know how to support kids in not only being successful but also being motivated.

Anna Geiger: Excellent. That was really, really well said. I did learn about that study recently, and we'll have to get a link to that in the show notes too.

So on the topic of practice and motivation, a lot of balanced literacy teachers, I include my former self, were reluctant to use decodable books because they just... I mean, when I first started teaching twenty-some years ago, there weren't a lot of good decodable books to choose from. That's true. They were pretty bland and the stories were stilted, and so it really did turn me off. But nowadays there really is no excuse because there's so many good books out there.

So I don't think that the concern that the books themselves are bad is a reason to avoid decodable books because there are so many good choices, but we may be tempted to feel, "Oh, they just don't really say very much. They're kind of boring because you can only use so many letters. What's so bad about using leveled books for beginners to have them get to the words in a different way because eventually they'll apply the phonics knowledge they have."

What would you say to that?

Julia Lindsey: So I would say that decodable texts are one of the most powerful tools that we currently have for supporting kids in applying decoding in context. The reason I say that is because we know that children need the chance to develop this early decoding skill, and the by far easiest way to have them develop that is to give them a lot of chances to practice.

So if you are writing a book for a kid and you are not thinking about if words decodable, the chances that you just randomly write something decodable for a beginning reader is pretty low because it's pretty hard to write books that are really just using those decodable words unless you're trying. So we can't just put any old book in front of children and expect that they'll have a lot of opportunities to actually decode those individual words. So that's kind of like the base stage for why to use decodables that I think is important to recognize. It's not just random, they have a very specific task that they're going to be good at.

We also see in research, which to be fair, we have only limited evidence for decodable texts, but we have emerging evidence about them that is continuing to support their use for the group of children who are developing decoders. I imagine that we will have continued research coming out in this field that will get us more and more precise about what children need in decodables to be best served.

But the research that we do have points to children potentially being more accurate and fluent in decodable texts, and I don't mean the first time they read them in terms of that fluency. This is a skill that develops over time, but that they are able to recognize words more accurately, they are able to rely less on a teacher for prompting, and they are more readily using phonics to recognize those words rather than using a guessing mechanism.

We also know that widely they seem to support early reading development better than other text types.

But for me, the most critical research finding around decodable texts for teachers is this idea that decodable texts kind of support children in spontaneously applying that phonics more. Children look at those words, and especially when you've taught them to decode words, they know, "Okay, I should be using decoding to read this word."

The reason why I think that is so important is because to me, decoding is really the golden key into becoming a word reader. We want children to be practicing decoding as much as possible because we know that it is the most likely way to lead to long-term automaticity and accuracy in individual word recognition, but also more broadly in being able to create a memory of many, many, many types of words, and for many children eventually be able to self-teach themselves words as they grow in their development. And so decoding is the route to that.

We might mistakenly think that the route to automatically recognizing a word is to memorize that word, but that is not an efficient or effective way for doing that. The best road to getting kids to be automatic word readers is actually to give them a lot of chances to decode that word and other similar words as well.

Anna Geiger: Right. Because we know that when you practice connecting the phonemes to the graphemes, the sounds to the letters, you're promoting orthographic mapping, that mental process where you can remember words for the future.

But if you're using those leveled books where most of the words cannot be sounded out yet, they're bypassing that process. And you see videos online like, I think it's called the Purple Challenge on YouTube, where the mother has her daughter practice reading this leveled book, which is actually a book that I used. The daughter can get to the words with the pictures, but take them away and she has no idea what the words say.

Whereas with decoding, if they're really learning to read the words, they can read them out of context, like you said.

That brings us into your Beyond Decodables, which have been available online for some time and they're not 100% decodable. Can you talk to us about why you created those and a little bit about why they're not 100%?

Julia Lindsey: Yes, absolutely. So my Beyond Decodables are really different than a lot of the other texts that are labeled decodable that you're going to see on the market for one major reason, and that's because these texts were not created as a product for decoding. They weren't created as something to sell. They were created instead during my work at the University of Michigan when I was trying to write a dissertation, and I looked at the research broadly and said, "What could we do in a text to best support early children's reading development?"

Instead of just focusing on decodability, I focused on a range of criteria that we know support children's reading development. In research, we call this multiple criteria texts. That is a mouthful that I don't think is going to catch on, and my dissertation was certainly not the first study to study these types of texts, but it's this idea that we need to be thinking about more than just decodability.

One of the reasons for that is you can imagine that if the only thing we thought about was decodability, imagine you're not thinking about meaning or sentence structure at all, you might end up with a text that says "Rat, pat, hat and cat." Which is obviously a meaningless sentence, but is in fact 100% decodable if you know all of those sound-spelling relationships.

So instead, multiple criteria texts attempt to take in a wider range of knowledge that we have about how we support children's reading development. Things like high frequency word support, and the percentage of high frequency words that are included in a text, word repetition, and also the patterns in words being repeated, those orthographic patterns that is, the level of understandability, I call it, of words, which means how imaginable are these words? How concrete are these words? How familiar are these words to children? As well as the broad meaningfulness of the text, the syntax of the individual sentences, and even the conceptual coherence of the text to children's other knowledge, like their science knowledge or their social studies knowledge.

So my books look pretty different because we were coming at it from saying, "Is there a way that we could support children in decoding while also trying to support some of these other aspects of reading development?"

And so they had two primary goals along with several others. The first was to support children who are using that specific phonics program in applying those concepts and texts. And the second was to support children who are using a very specific science, social studies, and read aloud program in seeing some connections with their knowledge building so that they could be supported in continual knowledge building, even in these early decodable texts.

So as a result, they can't be 100% decodable because most science and social studies vocabulary words are not decodable for this age group. So we chose to use some additional general science and social studies vocabulary words that those children would already be familiar with to try to support children across decoding, but also across knowledge building.

Anna Geiger: And just to insert, as I know you know, the research doesn't have a percent of decodability that's recommended for a decodable text to be effective. I know Wiley Blevins talks about that a lot. I think he said he'd rather have a text that's 60% decodable but makes a whole lot of sense, than one that's 90% but very confusing. I know there still are strong opinions on both sides these days, so I think we're still working through all this.

But I know in one of your early books, I think it has the word "turtle" because it's a story about turtles. Most of the words are decodable, but there's a word like "turtle" in it. So how would you recommend teachers help their students with words like that?

Julia Lindsey: Yeah, this is a tricky part because that is something that I think we still need more research on. What's the best move right there? For now, I would offer two options.

The first is, of course, the kid might know the word, and then you don't need to stop them, they can just keep going. That's fine. That doesn't necessarily mean it's telling you anything about that child's decoding abilities, but if they've learned that word in some other context, then that's okay.

The second would be if they have no ability to get through that word, and then you're going to need to make a strategic choice. In some cases, depending on what you know about that child's phonics skills and what you know about that particular word, then you might do something like... Say the word is "hotdog" and they're reading CVC words. Well you might decide, I'm just going to cover up each part of this compound word and have you read this like a CVC word and then teach you something new about how sometimes we see longer words and isn't that cool?

Or you might see a word that says "gazelle," and you think to yourself, "Hmmm, we're reading CVC words, and there's no way you're going to be able to accurately decode through that word even with a LOT of support." So you might just say, "That word is gazelle, let's keep going." And you might just support children in accessing the decoding of other words in that text, and I think that that's okay.

But like I said, I think we still really need research on this. There has, to my knowledge, not been a study done on that particular issue and I do think it would be really helpful if we could get some more research around that to be sure.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, and there's also, of course, the option of pre-teaching the word. Like saying, "There's going to be a longer word in this book that you haven't learned yet, and here it is." And you could write the word turtle and draw a turtle on the board or whatever, so that's their clue for that word.

Like you said too, so often these words that include patterns that have not been specifically taught are not very hard. So like the word "cheese," for example, you can tell them right away that EE spells /��/, and they've already learned the CH, so that one's not too hard.

I don't think we have to be afraid to teach things out of order of our scope and sequence when they're helpful and we think our kids can access those. That doesn't negate what you're doing in phonics. But, of course, unlike what many of us were doing in our balanced literacy programs, we still want to be working through that scope and sequence, and that's our main focus of instruction. But we don't have to be afraid of words that haven't been explicitly taught. We don't have to be afraid of them, and I think we want to be careful not to go too far on the other end.

Julia Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. And I completely agree. If we are working with children who are decoding or even automatically recognizing a ton of words in a decodable text that's matched to your phonics instruction, and there's a few words that are a little harder, but they only need one extra piece of sound-spelling knowledge, then absolutely you can say, "EE spells the sound /��/. Let's try reading that word again." And those children can probably quickly incorporate that information and make a new attempt at decoding. But that doesn't mean that you would then skip teaching them EE in your phonics scope and sequence.

And I completely agree that is the difference between thinking about implicit phonics, so teaching phonics when it comes up in a text, versus explicit phonics, so teaching it in that clear systematic order and making sure everybody gets that information. But just because you might have a group that is ready for a little piece of information doesn't mean that you're doing something wrong, but it also doesn't mean that you would skip that later on.

Anna Geiger: Perfect. Well, we're rounding this up now. Could you talk to us about your book, "Reading Above the Fray," and why you wrote it, and then what's next for you?

Julia Lindsey: Yes, absolutely. So "Reading Above the Fray" is really an attempt to talk about the research on early reading and specifically on foundational skills. What do we really know about decoding? Why am I so passionate about it? Why do I think it's so cool and why you should too? And then some evidence around aspects of foundational literacy instruction and some swaps that you can make in your instruction to make sure you're more aligned with the research.

So it's really an attempt to support teachers in being able to look at their instruction and say, "Okay, this is in or this is out. What tweaks can I make?" And some of them are really small. Some of them I say, "Hey, you could try this tomorrow if you just take three extra minutes and you try this thing."

Some of them are longer term, and that's okay, that's kind of how change is going to work, but it is to get you started. And for some people, it might extend your journey, but I think it's probably best for people who are earlier in their journey who are trying to think about how do I change my instruction?

I wrote it thinking about teachers who might not have a huge support system. I certainly wrote it thinking about myself. I didn't have any power to change the curriculum at my school, but I would've had the power to change aspects of my instruction and different routines and structures of my day. So thinking about even if you are not in the position to say we need a full new curriculum, you can start making these changes and you can start making a really big impact on the students in front of you. So that's my hope that you can take away from the book.

And then in terms of what's next, I'm continuing to work with districts and curriculum developers and other groups all around the country, and indeed all around the world, to try to help teachers be more research-driven in their instruction so that all children have access to the highest quality foundational literacy instruction and materials, and that we can really make sure that the research gets into the hands of teachers and other administrators, and again, curriculum creators so that it actually gets to impact kids.

Anna Geiger: Fabulous! I do recommend your book, and I will link to that in the show notes as well as your Beyond Decodables.

Is there any other place people can find you?

Julia Lindsey: You can find me on all the social medias, except for TikTok because I'm not prepared to dance for you. But you can find me on Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, whichever one you like. It's always Julia B. Lindsey, and you can find me in all those places, and you can give me a follow, give me a wave, or send me a message about your reading.

Anna Geiger: Wonderful! Well, thank you so much for joining us today.

Julia Lindsey: Thank you so much for having me!

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode127. Talk to you next time!

Scroll back to top




Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.

powered by






��
Research articles

Ehri, L.C. (2003, March 17). Systematic phonics instruction: Findings of the National Reading Panel. [Paper presentation]. Seminar organized by the Standards and Effectiveness Unit, Department for Education and Skills, British Government, London, England, p. 16.
Levy, B.A., Abello, B., & Lysynchuk, L. (1997). Transfer from word training to reading in context: Gains in reading fluency and comprehension. Learning Disability Quarterly, 20(3), 173-188.
Brady, S. (2020). A 2020 perspective on research findings on alphabetics (phoneme awareness and phonics): Implications for instruction. The Reading League Journal. September/October, 20-28.
Bond, G. L., & Dykstra, R. (1967). The cooperative research program in first-grade reading instruction.��Reading Research Quarterly, 2(4), 5���142.
O���Connor, R.E. & Padeliadu, S. (2000). Blending versus whole word approaches in first grade remedial reading: Short-term and delayed effects on reading and spelling words. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 13, 149-182.
Hiebert, E. H., & Fisher, C. W. (2007). Critical word factor in texts for beginning readers.��The Journal of Educational Research,��101(1), 3-11.
Jenkins, J. R., Peyton, J. A., Sanders, E. A., & Vadasy, P. F. (2004). Effects of reading decodable texts in supplemental first-grade tutoring.��Scientific Studies of Reading,��8(1), 53-85.
Roberts, T.A., Vadasy, P.F., & Sanders, E.A. (2020). Preschool instruction in letter names and sounds: Does contextualized or decontextualized instruction matter? Reading Research Quarterly, 55(4), 573-600.

Related Links




Reading Above the Fray, by Julia Lindsay
Beyond Decodables website
Julia Lindsay on Instagram
Julia Lindsay on Twitter

The post Teaching decoding: A conversation with Dr. Julia Lindsey appeared first on The Measured Mom.

How to spot quality research – with Nate Hansford

TRT Podcast#126: From balanced literacy to The Reading League: A conversation with Dr. Heidi Beverine-Curry

You’ll love this entertaining episode with Dr. Heidi Beverine-Curry! Once she was a balanced literacy teacher. Now she’s chief academic officer of The Reading League.

Listen to the episode here
 

Full episode transcript





Transcript




Email



Download



New Tab

Hello, Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom. Welcome back!

Last week I shared an older episode, an episode about my reaction to Emily Hanford's article, "At a Loss for Words." For me, it was what finally helped me see that some things I had been doing with balanced literacy were not the right way to teach reading. I began to learn more about the research, and that's brought me to where I am today.

Well today we get to hear from Dr. Heidi Beverine-Curry, and we learn what it was for her that helped her see that what she was doing wasn't quite right. For her, it was actually in her doctoral program when she realized that balanced literacy and three-cueing were not backed by research. She's very entertaining and fun to listen to. I think you're really going to enjoy this week's episode. You'll also learn how The Reading League can help you make a difference in your classroom and school.

Anna Geiger: Today we welcome Dr. Heidi Beverine-Curry to the podcast. Welcome!

Heidi Beverine-Curry: Thank you so much, Anna! It's really great to be here with you today.

Anna Geiger: So I found Heidi through a YouTube video from September 2019 where she was sharing a presentation about the three-cueing systems and related myths. It was very interesting and also very funny. So I knew that you would love to hear from her to hear how she got into education, the misunderstandings that she had that many of us have had, and what brought her to where she is today.

Can you start by talking to us about how you got into education?

Heidi Beverine-Curry: I started out in TV, radio, and film.

Anna Geiger: Wow.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: That was my first choice of career, but once I started studying TV, radio, and film, I wasn't really satisfied with it, and I felt kind of a calling toward education. I wanted to do elementary education. When I came out of it I realized, as I was teaching, that I didn't really know how to teach a child to read from the ground up. Did I really have the knowledge and skills I needed to take a little one and turn them into a reader? And no, no, I didn't.

Anna Geiger: That's so interesting because when I graduated from college, I think we're in a pretty similar era, I graduated in the late '90s, and my first position was actually a multi-grade classroom of middle grades, so third, fourth, and fifth grade. I was really, at that time, not interested at all in primary grades because I said, "I just really don't know how to teach kids to read. That's a huge responsibility."

Heidi Beverine-Curry: I remember one assignment that we had where we had to read fifty pieces of children's literature and get a little recipe card box and fill out index cards about the major themes in the book, about what grade level we thought it would be appropriate for, and some activities that might go along with it. Any sort of response activity or an art project or something. But really it was nothing about, "Okay, here's how kids learn to read. Here's what the brain does when it reads." It was a lot about children's literature and a lot about running records.

I have taught children's literature courses at the graduate level many times, and I enjoy it. I love it! But being an expert in children's literature does not prepare you to prepare teachers to teach children to read. These are two very different things. There's a split between the faculty who work in schools of ed who prepare teachers and the disciplines, the multiple scientific disciplines that study reading in an empirical way.

So when you look at cognitive psychology, neuroscience, communication sciences, even linguistics, you can find really rich findings and bodies of knowledge that can inform the teaching of reading. And historically, there has been a gap.

At The Reading League, we used to say that we wanted to clear the pipeline between the scientific research and practice, but the more we got in there, the more we realized there was never a pipeline. It's not like there was one that was all gunked up. It just hadn't been built. So that's really what we're aiming to do.

Anna Geiger: And a lot of people talk about them as silos, like they're all individual. I think that a lot of the rhetoric around balanced literacy contributed to this because I know in your presentation you talked about Regie Routman's books, "Invitations" and "Transitions." I loved those, I had them all marked up. They were actually my undergrad colleges' bookstore at the time.

She talks a lot about how YOU'RE the expert, YOU'RE the teacher, YOU know what's best. When you really get that hammered in enough times, it's hard to consider that someone in this seemingly completely unrelated field who is not a classroom teacher really could tell you something particularly useful. So for me, that was a barrier for a long time.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: I've seen active sort of boundaries. You study your brains over here. I work with children.

Anna Geiger: Did you teach then before you started getting your master's degree?

Heidi Beverine-Curry: I did, yeah. So my first job was a self-contained special education class, which was a really interesting job to take after coming out of a dual major inclusive ed program. The descriptor was "profound disabilities." I had 12-year-old boys, I had four boys, and they were all non-verbal and had lots of personal care issues. I was completely unprepared for that job. I loved the children very much, but I did not feel particularly prepared to teach them.

Fortunately, I had a ton of teaching assistants, occupational therapists, speech therapists, and physical therapists that taught me how to do the job over the course of the year. But again, that was just something else that I was not prepared for. I knew how to write an IEP, and I knew how to play cooperative games, and I knew how to build a circle of friends, and invite gen ed in, and build relationships, and all of this, but I didn't know how to... Well, there was a LOT that I didn't know how to do, but I learned a lot of that on the job.

Then I taught for another eight years in a different school district. In that school district, I worked exclusively with fourth graders, but I worked in different capacities. It was always in an inclusive environment. So sometimes I started out as the gen ed teacher, sometimes I was positioned as the special ed teacher, sometimes I was positioned as a reading specialist. But, in general, I worked with fourth graders for eight years.

Every year it seemed to me that kids just weren't where I would expect fourth graders to be when they show up at the beginning of the year in terms of their ability to read. I would ask around to the... they weren't called instructional coaches, they were called curriculum consultants at the time, but they were like instructional coaches. I would ask them, "Hey, what can I do about this? What can I do about that?"

Again, it's not their fault, it's just the system is broken. We do the best with what we have, and I would get things from them like, "Well, if they haven't learned how to get the words off the page by now, if they can't decode, then you're going to need to teach them compensatory strategies." Or "Do you have them at their instructional level?"

And I'd be thinking, "Well if we stick at their instructional level, how do they get better? And what even does that really mean?"

I think a lot of teaching at that point, before the science of reading, before that term got thrown into the zeitgeist, and now it's kind of a no-shame zone. And you see all these teachers going, "Yes, I want to learn!" Blah, blah, blah.

At that time in the mid '90s, the term "science of reading" wasn't out there, and I think you had a lot of people kind of trying to fake it till they make it. It's not a great idea to be a new, young, untenured teacher in a building and stand on top of your desk and say, "Hey, everybody! I don't know how to teach reading! Anybody got this figured out? Can you help me?"

You just kind of pretended that you knew, and as you can tell that kind of behavior is hard for me. I'm a little more direct than that.

So I did do a lot of asking, and I think it annoyed people. I'd hear, "Well, just give it to them on tape. They just need access."

I heard all sorts of things that were not, "HERE'S how we make them better readers." It was, "Here's how we get them around not reading so well."

Over the years, it really started to frustrate me. I thought, I'll get my master's in reading education because I feel like that's what I need, but I just got a lot more of the same. That's when we really dug in heavy to the three-cueing systems, guided reading, a lot of Fountas and Pinnell. They were really becoming super popular at that time. A lot of the A to Z text gradient stuff. A lot more running records, a lot more miscue analysis.

So I came out of there with a third New York State teaching certificate that said I was a reading specialist K through 12, and I still really didn't know the technical knowledge that I felt like I needed to make a kid into a reader.

Anna Geiger: That's so interesting, because I know it was the same thing for me when I got my master's degree. So I finished it in 2005, it took me a lot of years because I was doing it while I was teaching. When I graduated with a focus on reading, I was certified to be a reading specialist. I didn't end up using that, but I was supposedly ready to do that. At the time, I probably thought that I could, but I just didn't know what I didn't know, which was SO many things!

I was very connected to three-cueing. When I ended up teaching first and second grade, they had leveled books. I definitely did not want to use many decodables at all. I felt like that was stifling fluency and comprehension, and we needed to teach them all these ways to arrive at a word so that we would put comprehension first. I was very confident that this was the right thing to do.

Then years later when I had my own children, I started teaching them to read. I did do some phonics with them, of course, because I did believe phonics was important, but mostly it was leveled books. Because they come from a background with strong literacy and language and just naturally they were able to learn that way, but I know they could have learned better if I'd been more explicit in some things.

I remember my oldest, so she's 16 now, but when she was first learning to read, she would read the Calvin and Hobbes comic books. Do you know those? She was a good reader. I mean, she knew what she was reading, but she called them Calvin and Hoobs, which is not phonetic at all, but it's just because I hadn't given her enough instruction.

And then I wrote a blog post about three-cueing. I had the whole graphic, like you had in your presentation, about how the three areas worked together. And way back in 2014, so just a year after I started my business, someone commented, "You know that this is not supported by research."

And I was like, "What? I just graduated from grad school a few years ago, and we were all into this." Honestly, I didn't really know what to say.

At the time I had four little kids and it wasn't something I wanted to dive into, but I was just sure she was wrong. I was sure she had to be wrong. So unfortunately, it took me a number of years after that before I finally started looking into it.

Can you talk to us about your moment that you talked about in the webinar, which was so funny, where you talked about three-cueing and realized you were missing something big time?

Heidi Beverine-Curry: Yeah. Not my best moment. I mean, to give a little context to it, I did everything I could with this Fountas and Pinnell stuff. I went and saw them talk. If I was in my office right now, I'd pull them out, I have books behind my desk that are autographed. I would go see them speak. The covers are falling off. There's notes all over. Things are highlighted. There's sticky notes hanging out of everywhere, because I just thought I wasn't doing it right.

So I just kept pouring over it, pouring over it, trying to do it better. And finally I was like, "I just don't think this works. I don't know. I don't know. I must be doing something wrong."

But I didn't question the three-cueing systems. I was questioning Fountas and Pinnell. I was questioning guided reading. I was questioning the A to Z text gradient. My thinking wasn't so sophisticated where I was thinking of the big picture. And also I wasn't thinking, "Oh, I really need the science of reading," because I didn't know what that was either.

I just knew there had to be something better than giving up on kids when they were nine or ten and saying, "Well, just give it to them on tape."

Anna Geiger: Yeah.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: So I had my son, and I taught one more year, and I thought, "I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave the classroom. I'm going to get a PhD. That's probably my best bet in getting some of these answers that I know must be out there."

Fortunately, I did find those answers, even though I didn't really know what I was looking for. But the only reason that I found those answers, the only reason that I stumbled upon the science of reading, is because I had to choose an elective that fit with my childcare schedule.

Anna Geiger: Oh, interesting.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: ...because there was no science of reading coursework required in my doc program. That elective was The Cognitive Psychology of Reading with Dr. Benita Blackman.

So the first night of class I walk in, I don't know what the cognitive psychology of reading is, I have no idea what I'm getting myself into. This is my first doc seminar. We sat around a U-shaped table, I think. Do I tell this story in the video?

The person next to me was Maria Murray, the first time I met her. (She's the founder and CEO of the Reading League.) And that was 2006. And on and on, there were maybe a dozen people around this U-shaped table that had already had some coursework with Benita, and knew a little bit about the science of reading. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Benita went around the horn and wanted to know our understandings of how reading works, she said, "Tell us how reading works."

She started with me, which I thought was really mean! I'm the new kid, and all I knew was the three-cueing systems and I felt pretty confident. Like you said, I felt pretty confident.

I looked her dead in the eye... And I've come to start talking about this with a Harry Potter sort of bend. Are you a Harry Potter person, Anna?

Anna Geiger: I've read all the books.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: Okay, so when Benita asked me what my understanding of reading was, I ended up having this Dolores Umbridge moment. So Harry Potter folks will know, and if you don't, ask somebody, but Benita smiled and said, "Heidi, how do you understand reading to work?"

I looked her dead in the eye and gave her a lecture on the three-cueing systems. "You see, there's the semantic, the syntactic, the graphophonic. You can't over rely on one or the other. You do this one as a last resort. Reading is about making meaning. Then you can give these tests called running records and do miscue analysis and find out where kids are relying. And then, I don't know, teach them to rely on something else."

Anna Geiger: Nobody really knows what to do afterwards.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: Right. And I think I outlined that in the video as well, but to me, she was Dolores Umbridge. I mean, she's looking at me, and she's going, "Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes. Oh. Really?" in just did this drippy, sticky, sweet, smiley way, but I could tell there were evil thoughts going on behind those eyes.

I'm like, "I know I'm saying all the right things, but I am clearly not saying any of the right things." It was a very uncomfortable experience for me, and then I kind of scuttled out.

She's like, "Oh, okay, thanks," and then went to Maria and said, "Maria, can you..."

Now, Maria had been her research assistant for a number of years at this point.

Anna Geiger: Oh, wow.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: "So Maria, how do you understand reading to work?"

And Maria says, "Well, the connectionist model tells us blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

I did not have the reaction I should have had, which was, "Wow! That's fascinating! I could really learn from her!" Because that's not what we do when we're feeling insecure, right?

Anna Geiger: Mm-hmm.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: So I was just kind of just like, "Note to self, don't sit next to Maria next time."

So the next person was Kris Munger, who went on to become the associate dean, and she was like, "Well, dual-route theory posits blah, blah, blah..."

And I'm like, "Ach!"

So at that point I realized the problem is me, and I must have turned a million shades of red and wanted to just hide under the table.

I don't know that I really heard or processed much of what happened in the rest of that class that night. I just know that I kept it together long enough to get home and walk in the door. I made eye contact with my husband and I was just instantly ugly crying. And I'm like, "I want a do over! I'm not smart enough! I don't know what I've gotten myself into! I'm over my head here!"

He was great. He was like, "I see you. I hear you. I feel you. But it sure would be great because we really made a lot of sacrifices for you to do this thing that you said you needed to do. So how about you just buck on up and get back in there?"

I was like, "Okay, okay!"

But that 12 weeks, 16 weeks, however long a semester is, was world changing for me. Life changing for me.

I will say that Benita went from being my Dolores Umbridge to my Professor Dumbledore. That was just my impression the first time. But I realized that by signing up for that course, I had inadvertently stumbled through platform nine and three quarters, and that this whole world of reading research was like Hogwarts. It was this whole academy, this whole parallel universe, this whole body of knowledge that had always been there, had always existed, but I just didn't have access.

Somewhere deep inside, I knew I was missing something. Something else had to be out there. I was lucky enough to find it.

But that semester was brutal. I mean, I went through serious emotional roller coasters. There was a whole grieving process of having to throw out everything that I thought I knew, plus the idea of having had to pay thousands of dollars to learn this stuff, and then nine years of teaching kids with this as my centerpiece, it didn't feel good. It didn't feel good. I still see, there are two particular names and faces that I see, that those kids are going to be in their thirties now, and I hope somebody taught them to read because I sure didn't.

Anna Geiger: I know we all have those. I definitely have kids like that, both when I taught the middle grades and then when I taught primary. They were really sweet, bright kids, but obviously what I was doing was not helping. I just encouraged them to practice more or for their parents to read to them more. It did not occur to me that I need to be giving a specific kind of assessment and nailing down where the holes were. I did not understand the value of phonemic awareness or systematic explicit phonics.

It's hard. It's hard. And the grieving is real. It is REAL. And that's why I think when some people join the big Facebook groups, they're a great place to be, but when you first join, it can be very overwhelming. I literally felt sick to my stomach the first month or two just because, like you said, to realize that so much of what I thought was true was actually not. It was very alarming.

What year about was this when you were taking that course?

Heidi Beverine-Curry: It was 2006. It was the fall of 2006.

Anna Geiger: Which is very interesting because that's a long time ago. Many of us are just finding out about the science of reading right now, and it's obviously been around for decades, for as long as research has been done. But a lot of the modern understandings are not brand new.

What was next for you after you learned the science of reading?

Heidi Beverine-Curry: I spent a year collecting data for my dissertation. I studied how one school took the RTI legislation and made it into a thing that happened. It was a qualitative study about how schools made use of quantitative research evidence.

But then it took me years to write the dissertation while I still had to work full-time, and I decided to go back into public schools as a literacy coach and be the person that I wish I had when I was looking for support and answers. So I did that for another nine years.

My colleague, Stephanie Finn, and I, through a perfect storm of resources and lovely people and supportive administrators, were very supported in our attempt to turn a very whole language balanced literacy district into one that follows the science of reading. It took us a while. I mean, it took us a good four years to really see a full change in the achievement data that resembled what's possible when you use the science as your guide versus something else as your guide.

A number of folks that I went through the doc program with, Maria in particular, we kept in touch, but we were all working in our own little places trying to get traction. It's hard to be that one person that's trying to make change. It's hard if you're even one of three or four or five people trying to make change in a huge system. We could make change in one little system, but it didn't really get anywhere.

Maria has her story too. She became despondent and was ready to quit education entirely and become an alpaca farmer.

Anna Geiger: Oh, I have heard her say that.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: That is true! But Maria was different than most of us because she never learned...

Anna Geiger: Balanced literacy.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: Balanced literacy, whole language, Marie Clay, Fountas and Pinnell, Calkins, the Goodmans. She didn't learn that stuff. She only knew the science. And then when she finished her doc work and went to be a professor at a university, she encountered things that were really disheartening to her. I mean, she spent years working on these multimillion dollar National Institutes of Health funded research. She knew what worked and didn't realize how few people didn't know what worked. She hadn't been part of that culture.

She would assign tasks to her students like do this phonological awareness assessment, and then write a reflection about it. She would get feedback from her students and sometimes from the cooperating teachers and sometimes even from the administrators saying, "We really don't do this phonemic awareness stuff. You need to teach them how to do a running record and find instructional levels and do miscue analysis. We don't really teach phonics here. You really need to teach them how to do guided reading groups."

She was like, "What even is this? What is going on?" And then that prompted her to look into it and was like, "Hey, there's no research base here." It was depressing. There were a lot of us who had been banging that drum and being very frustrated for a long time trying to make change.

Maria, one day in the midst of her depression and alpaca fantasies had this idea. We can't all just be spread out trying to do this. We need to work together. We're not going to change it from in these structures. We're not going to be able to change it from the inside of school districts. We're not going to be able to change it from inside higher ed. We need to be our own thing and then partner with organizations to help transform and restructure and reeducate. So that's how The Reading League was born.

Anna Geiger: I would guess that many people listening to this are familiar with The Reading League. I've talked about them before and about how I highly recommend their journal. But maybe you could talk to us a little bit more about how it got started, where it's based, it's conferences, how it's spreading into states, and how it can help just the everyday classroom teacher.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: Sure. Great. Thanks for asking! We are in Syracuse, New York, right in the middle of the state, upstate New York. When The Reading League started, we were strictly a volunteer organization. It was 2015-ish when the idea was conceived. It was 2016 when our 501(c)(3) became official and we were a nonprofit organization.

How we started out was the only service we provided was having a free professional development session on the second Thursday of every other month. So it was kind of like putting on a wedding every month. Maria's 90-year-old Italian mother would make cookies so people would have a snack. That's just kind of how we rolled.

Our first few sessions were at a fire hall, bingo hall, and then another one was in a public library. It was standing room only. People were seated, people were lined up along the walls in the back, we had folks sitting on the floor. We were exceeding fire code capacity. So that was a problem.

Simply because of space we would have a school district say, "Yes, you can use our auditorium as long as all our teachers can come."

And we said, "Yes, of course all your teachers can come, but also anybody else can come too."

We would travel around. Different schools would invite us in, but with the understanding that all local teachers were welcome.

There were usually around 200-300 people at each session, and we were like, "Holy cow. We've really tapped into something."

But these teachers were working all day on a Thursday and then maybe going home real quick to their families and making some dinner or something. And then 6:00 to 8:30 PM hanging out for two and a half hours of really intensive professional development.

Anna Geiger: Just to learn. Not to get credit, but just to learn.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: Yeah. They got no credit. They got no money. They just wanted to learn.

We had some investors in the nonprofit world that really wanted to help us achieve our mission. In 2018, we were able to really begin our expansion plan. And then in January of 2019, I left my full-time job to be full-time with The Reading league.

Anna Geiger: So what does your daily work look like now?

Heidi Beverine-Curry: I'm the chief academic officer, so mostly what I oversee is the professional development department. So we have different things. It's The Reading League: we have the journal, we have a TV show that you can watch on YouTube called Reading Buddies, we have an annual conference. We just had our first West Coast summit in Las Vegas for emergent English learners, emergent bilinguals. And then we also have a really robust professional development department.

So in the professional development department, we have basically two pathways. So if you are a lone wolf and you're in Vermont and you're in a school... (And I'm not picking on Vermont, I'm just picking Vermont.) Say you're in Vermont and you are a teacher in your school and you're the only one who's really interested in the science of reading, then our online academy is for you. You can sign up, and then when you show up for online academy, we cap it at 25 so that we can keep it more intimate.

But we also have our school-based professional development partnerships. What happens is the first step is to schedule an administrator introduction day, and we spend a full five-hour day with the administrative team in a school district, and we talk about what the science of reading is, and what it isn't. We look at some data from some schools that we've worked with to show what's possible when we build our knowledge and then act upon it. We also talk about how important a role the administration plays.

So when we work with school districts, we're different in three major ways than most PD. The first is that we have those admins for a full day before we work with teachers. We let the admins know that we expect them to be at the PD and be present and not be in the back on their computers and not take phone calls, and to put themselves front and center and say, "I've got stuff to learn too. Let's do this together." That seems to yield the best results.

Another way that we're different is that we're not training folks on a product that they've bought. A lot of PD is you buy a thing and then they send somebody to show you how to use it. We're not doing that. What we're doing is building knowledge, and yes, some practical skills, of course, but what we're doing is building a teacher and an administrator's internal store of knowledge. So when they make those hundreds of decisions that they make every day about language and literacy instruction, they're making it from a store of knowledge versus what they think might be more fun or what they find on teachers pay teachers, or what the school down the street is doing, or who has the flashiest ad campaign that month in their teacher magazine.

Anna Geiger: So you're teaching them to be wise consumers?

Heidi Beverine-Curry: Yes. We're helping them to make better decisions. I get phone calls, text messages, direct messages on Twitter all the time. Can you just give us a list of programs that are aligned...

Anna Geiger: Oh, I know, everybody wants that.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: Everybody wants that.

Anna Geiger: Everybody does.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: And we say, we could, but it wouldn't really be helpful. It wouldn't be helpful because A: there's no such thing as a perfect program. And even if there was, if you put it in the hands of teachers who don't have a strong knowledge base about evidence-aligned practice, and it's supervised by administrators who don't have a strong knowledge base of evidence-aligned practice, that perfect program, that phantom perfect program is not going to be implemented in ways that get you the results that you should expect.

Then the third thing is we have a data manager at The Reading League, and we want to make sure that the work that we are doing in these partnerships is yielding achievement results.

Anna Geiger: Well, that is super interesting. I did not know about that last part about how you guys work with schools to do all of this. That's incredible. I don't know of anybody else that's doing something like that because it's always about... Like you said, it's always about a particular program.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: Right now we support 68 school districts. 67 of them are in the US and one is in Hong Kong.

Anna Geiger: Oh, wow! That's very cool.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: Isn't that kind of neat? Yeah.

Anna Geiger: So do you know how many states off the top of your head have a Reading League chapter now?

Heidi Beverine-Curry: I believe 26. I think we just pulled in number 26, give or take, but I'm pretty sure it's 26.

Anna Geiger: So if a teacher is listening to this and their state doesn't have a Reading League chapter yet, what could they do?

Heidi Beverine-Curry: Well, they could email Andrea Setmeyer. It's Andrea, andrea@thereadingleague.org. She is our chapter director, and she will give you all things necessary for setting up a state chapter of The Reading League.

Anna Geiger: Awesome. Well, that's incredible. Thank you so much for taking time to tell your story and share all of this. We could probably talk a lot longer, but I try not to keep my episodes too long. Thank you for all the work you continue to do.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: Thank you so much for having me, Anna! I appreciate it.

And thank you so much for being that teacher that wants to learn more and that has opened your mind and your heart to new ways of thinking about reading. Because even though it can hurt us, and it's a painful process to grieve all of those things that we believe to be true, we come out of it on the other side feeling better about our teaching.

Anna Geiger: Yes.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: We're seeing those results and our kids deserve it. So we can go through a little pain for that, I think.

Anna Geiger: That's right. It's all worth it.

Heidi Beverine-Curry: Yep.

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/126. Talk to you next time!

Scroll back to top




Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.

powered by






Nate’s books and other resources


The Scientific Principles of Reading Instruction
The Scientific Principles of Teaching
Nate’s blog, Pedagogy Non Grata
Nate’s podcast, Pedagogy Non Grata
Nate on Twitter

Nate’s recommended resources

Shanahan on Literacy blog
Mark Seidenberg blog
Parker Phonics
Reading Rockets
Iowa Reading Research Center
Neena Saha’s Reading Research Recap Newsletter

Also recommended

Holly Lane’s workshop: Science or Snake Oil? 





Get your free sound wall lessons!
CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

The post How to spot quality research – with Nate Hansford appeared first on The Measured Mom.