Anna Geiger's Blog, page 12

Getting the conversation started: With Emily Hanford

TRT Podcast #140: Getting the conversation started: With Emily Hanford

I’m so honored that Emily Hanford joined me on the podcast! It was her article “At a Loss for Words” that finally led me to rethink balanced literacy and begin learning about the science of reading. This episode will help you understand why some teachers are so resistant to learning about the science of reading – and Emily’s work will help you start the conversation.

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Hello! Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom. I'm still pinching myself that Emily Hanford agreed to do a podcast interview with me. We had a wonderful conversation.

Anyone who's been listening to this podcast is familiar with Emily Hanford, but just as a refresher for anyone who's new, Emily Hanford has shared articles and podcast episodes over the last few years that have really brought the science of reading into the national conversation. It was actually her work that finally led me away from balanced literacy to understanding that what I had been doing wasn't all backed by research, and it led me to start studying what the research really says about how reading works. I'm so thankful to her for that.

We went through a lot of things in our conversation. We talked about how she started reporting about this topic, and we also talked about the resistance that many people feel when it comes to learning about the science of reading. I hope you'll keep those things in mind as you work to share the science of reading with your colleagues.

In the show notes, I'll be sure to share links to all of Emily Hanford's work. And with that, let's get started!

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Emily!

Emily Hanford: Hi! Thank you for having me.

Anna Geiger: I have said many times on this podcast and on my website that it was your article, your 2019 article, "At a Loss for Words," that really forced my way into the science of reading. It was hard for me at first, and it didn't happen right away, but I came back to the article multiple times and that led me down a path.

I would love to know what got you started writing about education because I know that wasn't your first piece. How did this begin? What were you doing before that?

Emily Hanford: Sure. Let me just say one thing at the start and we can return to this, which is that I read and listened to podcasts that you put together and pieces that you wrote about your experience of reading "At a Loss for Words" and listening to it. I learned a lot from you, and I feel like you've been very good at articulating the experience of being a balanced literacy teacher and coming to understand some of the stuff. I've read your blog posts many times too, and I really appreciate what you've contributed to this whole conversation. So I'm really glad to be here with you on the podcast.

Anna Geiger: Well, thank you. That is an incredible compliment!

Emily Hanford: So your question was how did I get started reporting on education? I was reporting on education for a long time before I got interested in reading instruction. I started reporting on education in 2008. I realize now, as someone who's very interested in history and how things happen and where ideas come from, that I was starting education reporting at an interesting time. It was 2008, so I didn't cover the reading wars or the National Reading Panel report or the controversies around Reading First. I really started as a reporter when those things were kind of coming to an end and we were moving on to balanced literacy.

I didn't think very much about reading and how it works and how it was being taught. First of all, I think I was one of those kids who learned to read pretty easily. I have two kids who are pretty much adults now, and they were learning to read back around that time and they learned to read pretty easily. So I didn't really think about it and I should have. I was a reporter, I should have known more than I did.

It wasn't until a few years ago, back in 2016 and 2017, when I was actually reporting on college students. I was meeting a bunch of college students who were talking to me about how difficult reading and writing were for them. I met this one student in particular who really talked about how she couldn't read very well at all. She really had never learned how to read. And I thought, how did that happen?

Most of my reporting had really been on secondary and post-secondary education because I would say there are a couple of themes in my reporting overall, to get to your question of why am I interested in education more broadly.

I think I was just really interested in the question of how family income, and poverty in particular, affect people's opportunities and outcomes, and the sort of role that education plays, or not, in helping us provide opportunity to people and having a more equal society. That was a real interest of mine.

And I think I was really interested in the cognitive science of how people learn. I didn't know that much about it, but I would dabble in it and was sort of intrigued by it. So I was always interested in those things.

Then when I met all these college students who were struggling with reading, I started thinking, "Huh, what's up with that? Maybe I'll just wind this way back."

I started looking at this question first through the lens of dyslexia because what I realized is that, I think, many of these students in college who weren't good readers, many of them had dyslexia or were somewhere on that spectrum where reading was really difficult for them.

So it started with dyslexia. I didn't know anything about it. I started learning a lot about learning disabilities in general and dyslexia. It was really through that and through some of the parents that I met who had kids with dyslexia, whose kids were really struggling in school, and the parents were really battling with the schools.

Many of them really started pointing me to this vast body of research on reading, how it works, how people learn to do it, and what children need to learn.

I was just completely fascinated at an intellectual level. I was like, "Wow, this is really interesting," just at a purely intellectual level I thought, "I want to learn more about this."

But I also realized, "Oh, the implications of this are huge." There's a really big problem here in terms of quite a big divide between what is known about reading and how it works, and what a lot of teachers know or think they know or don't know about reading.

That was when I just started in on this topic, and now it's been six years and I could never have predicted that I'd be on the same topic six years later.

Anna Geiger: How did you know where to go? What to look at? Where to learn? Becuse when I first read your article, I thought, and I've said this, "Oh, she's a journalist, what does she know?" Then I started reading and studying, and then I went back to it and I thought, "Wow, she's got all the quotes of the things that I've been learning now."

So clearly you knew what you were talking about, but how did you even know how to start?

Emily Hanford: It's a good question. I think I really benefited from the maturity that the reading science, generally speaking, has gotten to at this point.

When I started getting interested in this, Mark Seidenberg had just written his book called "Language at the Speed of Sight," and that was really my entry into this. I read some books by Maryanne Wolf. It was really through Mark's book and Maryanne's book, both very, I'm going to say accessible, but Mark's book is hard, and some of Maryanne's books are hard too, actually.

Anna Geiger: I think they're pretty tough actually for an entry point, so that's pretty impressive.

Emily Hanford: I would say that it was a great entry point for a journalist because they're full of footnotes, they're full of citations to studies. I know you know this rabbit hole where you just start following the research, and I just did that. What I realized is there was lots of it at this point, and there wasn't as much twenty years ago.

I think this is part of why what's happening now is happening now. There are really just a lot of accessible - as in you can buy them for not a huge amount of money or you don't have to buy them at all, they're available on the web - books and articles and overviews and just things that put it all together in a way that I'm not going to say is easy, but is digestible.

The other big article that came out right around the time when I first started getting interested in this is on the "Sold a Story" website. I have a reading list, Mark Seidenberg's book is on there, and so is the article that's freely available by Anne Castles, Kate Nation, and Kathy Rastle. It's called "Ending the Reading Wars: From Novice to Expert," and it's like fifty pages and a lot of notes and it's dense, but it's just a super thorough overview of all this stuff, and I recommend it to people all the time.

Anna Geiger: Yes, and very readable.

Emily Hanford: Very readable, very readable. I've read that one like I've read many of your blog posts many times. I've read that one more times than I could count. I just keep rereading it because I learn something new and I'm like, "Oh, wait, wait, follow that footnote next."

Anna Geiger: Let's go back and talk about the specific, I'm not sure what you would call it, podcast or publications that you did. Was "Hard Words" first?

Emily Hanford: Actually in 2017 I did the first piece, which was called "Hard to Read." That was the one that was specifically about dyslexia, the place I had landed after meeting those college students. "Hard to Read" is basically asking, why do so many kids who have dyslexia have a hard time getting the help they need in school?

What I realized... I had a big aha. I realized one of the reasons the kids with dyslexia have such a hard time getting the help they need in school is because there are a lot of people within schools who actually don't know what they need to know about reading and how it works. They don't really know about dyslexia. But more generally, they don't know how kids learn to read, and therefore what's going wrong when a kid is struggling to read, and what they need to do about it.

Many times in your public schools in the United States, you are actually more likely, I found, to find real knowledge about the science of reading among the special educators, sometimes, not always, and among speech pathologists and others who are really working with kids with learning disabilities.

That led to "Hard Words" because that was when I was like, "Oh, there's all this research just on reading and how we all do it and what we all need to learn. What kids with dyslexia need isn't something radically different than what all kids need. They just need more repetitions, a higher dose."

"Hard Words" was next. That was the overview of the what the science says, what some of the big findings are, and the problem with teacher preparation. That's been identified as a big part of the problem for a long time.

Then I think "At a Loss for Words," which came in 2019 was my aha through doing the work on "Hard Words" in 2018 recognizing that actually this isn't about a lack of phonics instruction only. For too long, we have been thinking about this as sort of phonics or no phonics.

As you know, balanced literacy usually does include some phonics instruction. Now we can talk about what that phonics instruction looks like, whether there's enough of a scope and sequence to it, whether it's deliberate and systematic enough, direct enough, whether there's enough of it. All those are good questions about a typical balanced literacy classroom, but a lot of people have recoiled to the idea. Balanced literacy teachers would be like, "I'm not NOT doing phonics, I am doing phonics."

What I realized is there were these other ideas that the teachers were actually learning in their curriculum materials and in the intervention programs they got. It was this idea that "At a Loss for Words" looks at which is the cueing idea.

So I took a look, "What is that? What are all these strategies that kids are being taught to read? Why are they being taught all those? What's the problem with those? What's the scientific research that showed that that's not a good idea?" Let me try to explain all of that.

I would categorize all of those projects as basic explanatory journalism. This is me going to schools, talking to parents, talking to kids, talking to researchers, reading a ton of research, trying to put it together and being like, "Hey, look! Here's something everyone should know!"

Then I would say that "Sold a Story," which came out more recently, was the result of a nagging question after all of that. How and why? How and why did this really happen? Let's really wind this back and try to follow these ideas and really try to look and sort of get the receipts.

We literally did that. We filed SO many records requests to find out what are schools spending their money on? What's being invested in? Where are these ideas coming from? What are these ideas? What's the harm they're doing? That's really what "Sold a Story" was about.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. Well I don't know if you would look at it this way, but I often look at the work you've done as kind of reigniting the reading wars. It's getting the big conversation going, not in a negative way, which is-

Emily Hanford: Ah, bummer! I don't want to reignite them!

Anna Geiger: Not in a negative way, but just getting people talking about it and seeing, "We've got to examine this now."

Now you're a household name among people who've learned about the science of reading, but when did that happen and why? Which one struck the biggest chord at first?

Emily Hanford: "Hard Words" did. I think that when I did that first "Hard to Read" piece, I knew, "Oh, this is a really big topic. I could probably do some more reporting on this for a while."

"Hard Words" I think took it out of the world of dyslexia. When you're framing this stuff in terms of dyslexia, that's only SOME people, and not an insignificant number of people, but it's still kind of a minority issue. Then I think Hard Words started to resonate with many teachers who realized, "Oh, wait a minute. This is about how I'm teaching ALL the kids to read."

And it started to resonate more and more with parents. I think the continued reporting, especially with "Sold a Story," really resonated with a lot of parents who don't have kids who are struggling with reading, but are still like, "Well, wait. Why is my kid being taught to read this way?" And they saw it during COVID too.

Anna Geiger: Yes, that was a big deal.

Emily Hanford: That was a big deal. I think there are some very big pieces of the puzzle that you can identify and put together and be like, "Oh, this is why we're talking about this so much right now in 2023."

Anna Geiger: Yeah, and as I mentioned before we went on the air, for so many teachers I've talked to it was around 2020 that all of this started to be discovered. They had some different amounts of time to dig into this when they weren't actually in the classroom, and this is when they discovered a lot of your work and other things, and it started all to make sense.

Emily Hanford: I have one more thought, which is I think that "Hard Words" was the piece that started getting a lot of people interested in this topic generally, and I think "At a Loss for Words" was the one that really was challenging for a lot of teachers in particular. So I even think a lot of teachers could listen to "Hard Words" and have a few moments of reflection and pause, but it was "At a Loss for Words" that really identified those word reading strategies.

As you said in a blog, I think you said something to the effect of, balanced literacy has lots of definitions. But find me a balanced literacy teacher who does not teach kids to do things like look at the first letter, look at the picture, think of something that makes sense, and use sounding out as a last resort. Find me a balanced literacy teacher who doesn't do that because I haven't found one. I don't know if you've found one, but-

Anna Geiger: No, I don't think I have.

Emily Hanford: That's what I started to realize is that's such a core idea. It's so foundational here. And so many of the other things that are a part of balanced literacy rest on that idea or a cousin of that idea.

So in 2019, "At a Loss for Words" was the thing that I think started to freak a lot of people out.

Anna Geiger: Yes, because it was attacking the foundation. Because that's what I really feel when people become interested in the science of reading, they'll say, "I don't know where to start. I want to learn about this." What I've started to tell people is really they're afraid they have to relearn everything.

Emily Hanford: Yeah. But they don't necessarily.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, yeah. It starts with the foundation. It starts with understanding how reading works, and if you start with three-cueing, then everything else, it just falls apart. But if you understand how reading works and then you build on that, it all comes together, and it all makes sense.

We thought we knew what we were doing with balanced literacy, but so much of it is questions. There was a lot of fluff. We certainly would not have called it that, but looking back, that's what I would say.

Maybe you've heard me say this before, I've shared this. I was in a Facebook group asking for people to respond, "How would you respond to this article?" Because I was ready to write a response. What you wrote had to be wrong because that's certainly not what I learned in grad school.

I was really surprised that a bunch of people were like, "Oh yeah, I'm not doing that anymore. I've read these books, blah, blah, blah."

One person who was very big in the guided reading movement, a top seller on TPT, that kind of thing, she said, "Finding out that MSV (three-cueing) is bad for kids is like finding out that your only child is a serial killer."

It's so insane, but I really understood that because you hold it so close. To find out that that could be wrong, you think about all the students you've taught and what were you doing?

Emily Hanford: I had a similar thing someone sent me a message on Twitter saying, "Discovering that three-cueing isn't right is like walking into a church and realizing there's no God."

Anna Geiger: It was earth-shattering! Yeah.

So tell me about the responses that you got to the article. Obviously, there were a lot of positive, but of course, there were negative. You must have to have a really thick skin. How did all that work?

Emily Hanford: I think my skin has gotten thicker. It's true, I have had to have a thick skin, but I don't know, I guess maybe I was born to be a journalist. There's a way in which a lot of it can roll off because I can see where it's coming from, and I'm empathetic in many cases from where it's coming from.

So sometimes when people are attacking me, I get it. I understand. I've talked to enough teachers who have said the kinds of things that we were just talking about. I know how hard this is, so I have empathy and sympathy.

Maybe this doesn't really sound right, but this at this point I really have read a lot. I'm not saying I know everything. I am not a researcher. I don't know everything, and I have tons of questions.

There's lots of questions that we get to think about like, "Well how do you really do this right?" I think there's LOTS of stuff still to be figured out.

If people are thinking, "Oh, the science of reading, we got this!" No, I don't think so, at a number of levels, including just how to do things at scale.

But I guess I started to get to a point where I realized my own knowledge of this stuff was getting deep enough and wide enough that I started to feel pretty confident about it. And I say that humbly because all of us need to be continuing to question our own conclusions or assumptions or beliefs. I learned new things all the time!

I guess I just got to a point where the criticism, for the most part, didn't bother me that much, and I learn from it. I'm really interested in reading the criticism. There's a lot of criticism I read, and I try not to respond. Sometimes I do respond, we all have weaknesses, there's been occasions when I've responded and I think, "Oh darn, I shouldn't have done that." You engage and get into a sort of argument with someone on Twitter or whatever it's called now. Too bad. Anyway. So, yeah, I suppose you do have to have a thick skin. It can be a bang up, messy, dirty, very nasty world out there.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. It's been a few years now, so I don't really remember exactly what happened or how I shared it, but when I started to understand all these things I realized there were some things on my website that I couldn't share anymore, but that people really liked and that had been on there for years. I had put out an email like, "I'm taking these down, you have until this amount of time, but here's why."

I did have some angry people basically telling me that I was getting on the science of reading train like I was just doing it to make money or because that's what everybody else was doing. They said you're just jumping on the bandwagon like everybody else, or someone told me the science of reading was a conspiracy theory, or it's very disappointing to see that you've drunk the Kool-Aid too, things like that.

Probably back then, that was more upsetting to me than it would be now. But like you said, when you studied it enough to know that I feel that I understand this and I'm ready to learn what's the next thing, it's less upsetting.

Emily Hanford: Yeah. Anna, I think someone like you is among the toughest positions, right? You had a website, you had made part of your profession and your living off of some of these ideas, and that I think is the heart of it.

When people ask me why is there resistance, I think, "Well, if you're someone who didn't just do balanced literacy, but you had some skin in the game of promoting it and getting it out there, that's difficult."

So I applaud you for being willing to be like, "I've got to look at this, and I've got to take some things down from my website, and I've got to explain why. I have a responsibility to help people understand why I see some things differently, and I'm going to explain that."

You're a really good writer, and you've done a great job explaining some of that stuff. I feel like you're a really good translator of some of this for the balanced literacy teachers.

I appreciate that, and I recognize that that's one of the hardest categories of people to be in at this point, to have to say, "Whoops, I really made a mistake, and I've been selling some things and I'm not going to sell them anymore. I'm going to change." It's tough.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. Oh, it was. It was very hard.

I've told people too, that when I first learned about this and I got in the Science of Reading Facebook group, I could only be there for ten minutes a day. I felt sick because it was so much new information.

I had a course all about teaching reading that I had written with someone else. It was ten modules, like twenty hours of video, and it was all balanced literacy. It was a balanced literacy course. I closed it for a year.

I got a plaque that says, "Trust," and put it on my wall. I'm just going to trust that God is going to help me figure this out this year because I don't know how to do this yet. And then I spent a whole year studying, researching, and then I put out a new version of the course.

I feel good about that now, but it was very scary. I'm so glad I'm past that.

Emily Hanford: Well, it was scary, and it was a huge amount of work too, right?

I think one of the questions you wanted to talk about was resistance. I think that's it too. I think people resist this because it's too challenging to open yourself to it, and because it's actually a lot of work once you realize it. You had to rewrite your course, and many teachers have to rethink a lot of things about how they teach. It's hard!

Anna Geiger: Yeah, and it's fear too. I don't know if I can do this, what if I don't get it right? And then also it's just really hard to accept that something you really were sure was right, was wrong.

Also that you were getting your information from the wrong place. I used to think that if I just read these people's books, then I'll know. But I didn't realize that, I don't know where they were getting it from, but it wasn't from the research. I was just trusting them. You've talked about that too, trusting personalities versus what the research studies say.

Emily Hanford: Yeah. I don't know if you've heard this too. I'm curious about this because one of the things that I hear from a lot of teachers is a gut level feeling that maybe something wasn't quite right. Because at least for those teachers that are in the classroom, there are always a few students or maybe several students every year that weren't getting it.

So much of the time, teachers blame themselves, "Well, it's me. I'm not good enough. I'm not doing balanced literacy well enough. I just need to buy more books, spend my own money on professional development, take a week out of my summer to go to a workshop." They tried really, really hard.

What many teachers said to me was, "I was blaming myself and still it wasn't working," and so they started to blame the kids and blame the families, and they had a gut level feeling something was wrong.

I think that's actually one of the reasons that people can start to accept this so quickly, because even though it's challenging and difficult, it makes a lot of sense. A lot of things click and you can say, "Oh, right, that's why! That's why those kids were struggling. That's why that wasn't working."

It comes as a mixture. We have this sort of mixture of sadness and grief, but also relief, excitement, and opportunity. "Oh, whoa, whoa! This is maybe part of the answer. This is maybe part of something I've been looking for without knowing that it was there or not even knowing I was looking for it exactly."

Anna Geiger: Yes, that is all true. I think there were two parts to it when I would have some kids who struggled. One was, well they just need more practice with their leveled books. We've just got to do more of it.

The other thing was that I think I felt like there was this information that wasn't for me. It was for the specialist, like the person who understands dyslexia. That was beyond what I could understand. I didn't realize that any teacher could understand that; it's not that complicated. But I just didn't. I just thought, "Well, you just need to get them tested. I wouldn't know what to do."

Emily Hanford: Right. I've heard that too, it very much becomes a thing, "Well, special ed will deal with that. The interventionist will deal with that." The classroom teacher has twenty five or thirty other kids there, so it was kind of a sensible response.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, and there's just so much to understanding how to do proper assessment. There's so many things we could talk about.

Then the other thing you said about how when people talk about learning about the science of reading after being a balanced literacy teacher, it feels like you sort of go through the stages of grief. The last stage of grief is acceptance, but in this one it's excitement, because it really does get you there! It is. It's so exciting!

For years I had been thinking I'd like to go get more continuing education, but I didn't know what I should do. Then once I learned about this, I went to Mount St. Joseph and got their science of reading grad certificate because I just couldn't wait! I still feel that way. There's just so much more to learn. I just keep learning as much as I can.

So you've been a speaker all over the place, and then of course I'm sure you've had lots of emails and things from people, but what do you think it takes for a school or a district to make a shift?

Emily Hanford: It's so interesting. I get asked this question a lot. I am not an educator. I am not a school district leader. I am not a policymaker. So in some ways, my answer is, "I don't really know. That's not really what I know."

Then sometimes I answer the question because people ask it, and then I think, "Oh geez, Emily, you shouldn't have answered that one. What do YOU know?" It's sort of out of my lane.

I guess the only thing I can talk about is what I'm learning from other people along the way. What does it take? As a journalist, I'm hoping maybe there will be a season two of "Sold a Story," and I feel like a big question of season two of "Sold a Story" will be like, "Okay, so what's working? What's not and why? How do you take this stuff to scale?"

This is hard. Superintendents and principals and state senators have their jobs because... Those are different jobs, it takes different expertise. Getting this stuff to scale is hard.

One of the things that I'm thinking more and more about, and I don't know if you're thinking about this too. I do think the more and more you investigate this question of reading and how to teach it, and you get into some of the importance of explicit instruction and direct instruction, it raises lots of questions about how lots of things are taught in elementary school and older. Really getting this reading stuff right, of course, is going to take a rethinking of a lot of the other elements of education.

I mean I've really been focused on, how are little kids at the beginning of learning to read being taught how to read the words? That is a teeny, little part of what it takes to be a truly literate and educated person which requires you to have good reading skills and requires you to get those word reading skills down, but requires so much more stuff to happen in your education and in your life.

I think a lot of American schools need to look at themselves in the mirror about what they're doing in a lot of areas, what they're doing to help the struggling readers when they're older, what they're doing when they're teaching science and social studies and math, how they're teaching it, what they're teaching.

Of course, all of that gets us into potentially contentious questions. Think about the time that we live in. I think one of the reasons that in the United States of America, we have sort of taken a pass on too much saying, "Well, here's what kids need to learn. Here's the "what" of it, here's the stuff, here's the knowledge they need to know." Because that gets us right to value questions and political questions. Questions that can easily become politicized and that ARE becoming politicized.

Anna Geiger: I know, just like phonics!

Emily Hanford: Right now! All the time! So this is difficult stuff. Again, this is the job of the policymakers and the school leaders, and they have a hard job.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. And for the regular classroom teacher, I think one thing to do is to share your articles and say, "Maybe can we sit and talk about this?"

That was what did it for me. Especially when you interviewed Margaret Goldberg, that was really what cinched it for me, like "Oh, she talked to a teacher. Bummer. Now, I have to really pay attention."

That was just super interesting the way she had taught some kids to read using three-cueing and some with... Nowadays, it'd be really hard to do a study like that because we know how bad that would be, so we don't want to damage any kids. But she figured it out.

Emily Hanford: Margaret's amazing too, if people on the podcast don't know Margaret. She's continued to be someone who I learn from all the time. She's got a great website and a blog, and it's very insightful, as you are, on the journey from being a balanced literacy teacher to learning how to do it differently.

Anna Geiger: Yes, I really look up to her. In fact I put the interview I gave with her last year at the beginning of this series because she's such a good example of someone who can speak about this in a kind and loving way, which is hard to do. Once you start to feel passionate about it, it's hard to be patient with people who aren't as far as you are. I think it's good to first remember we all started somewhere.

Emily Hanford: Totally. That's an element of all this because the stakes are high, and we know that once you do know this stuff, people get passionate about it and they see the consequences when kids aren't being taught well. The consequences are high.

So when you're a teacher, and I think especially when you're a parent, oh, and ESPECIALLY if you're a teacher who's a parent of a struggling reader, you can't look away from this. When other people resist it, you feel the consequences of that, so there's an urgency. So I take that with a grain of salt too.

I see real anger from the science of reading side on social media, but I try to be empathetic about that too. I get it, I get it, but everyone also at the end of the day needs to take a big old deep breath and be like, "All right. What's the goal here?"

The goal is to help more kids be better readers, and there's a lot of work to do here. So how do we work together? Not in a how do we work together Pollyanna kind of way like, "Oh, we can just do a little bit of everything!" because I think that's how we got where we are today. I think balanced literacy was trying to be a truce, but it wasn't a truce based on the best evidence, and there were really fundamental problems with balanced literacy.

As you have said many times, a balanced literacy teacher is not doing everything wrong and comes to this with the greatest of intentions, but really needs to understand that the foundation of balanced literacy was really faulty. We've got to acknowledge that and fix it.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. Well thank you so much for all that you've done and continue to do.

Is there anything else you want to share with us, future projects or anything you're open to discussing or places you'll be speaking?

Emily Hanford: Oh, goodness gracious, I don't know, we could probably talk forever. But no, I'm assuming this is going out to an audience of a lot of teachers, and I am just so grateful to teachers for the work they do because I recognize how hard this is.

Actually, I've kind of been trying to learn something about how to help kids learn to read and then maybe am going to be tutoring some kids. And man, is it hard! Margaret's helping me and it's hard stuff.

I think this is difficult for teachers because teachers have hard jobs and they're not appreciated enough and not paid well enough, and they've got to do a lot of other things besides teaching kids how to read. And so, bless all of you for doing the hard work and staying in the profession.

Anna Geiger: Ditto. I agree 100%. Even when my kids were younger, our youngest is now seven, but even when a bunch of them were really small, I always said that I felt less tired after day with all six of them than I did after a day in the classroom.

Emily Hanford: In the classroom. Oh, gosh. Sure.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. Teaching first and second grade, they have a lot of energy and there are just a lot of decisions you have to make every day.

Emily Hanford: Think about that, people. If you're not a teacher, it's the same thing. I was so exhausted with just TWO children, and I can't even imagine how exhausting it would be to have twenty-five.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. It takes special patience and love to do that day after day.

Well, thank you again. I can't wait to share this with teachers and give them more tools to share because all of your work is excellent for starting conversations.

Emily Hanford: Thank you. It's great to talk to you. Thanks for having me!

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode140. There I will share links to all of Emily's work, as well as many other podcasts where she's been a guest, and maybe, if I can find them, some presentations on YouTube because I know you'll want to keep learning from her.

Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you again next time!

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

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Emily Hanford’s journalism about the science of reading Hard to Read (2017) Hard Words (2018) At a Loss for Words (2019)Sold a Story (2022)Emily Hanford’s other podcast interviews Science of Reading: the Podcast Literacy Talks Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Teaching, Reading, & Learning Leading Literacy Emily Hanford’s presentations on YouTube Unpacking the science of reading so all kids can learn Solving America’s literacy crisis with the science of reading (with Kareem Weaver and Kymyona Burk) What teachers should know about the science of reading Closing keynote (Michigan Department of Education) Sold a Story (an interview, not the original podcast series) Eyes on Reading: A conversation with Emily Hanford, Creator of Sold a Story

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The post Getting the conversation started: With Emily Hanford appeared first on The Measured Mom.

3 Questions teachers should stop asking (and what to say instead)

TRT Podcast #139: 3 Questions teachers should stop asking (and what to say instead)

I learned about these three toxic questions from multilingual author and expert Elizabeth Jim��nez Salinas, and I couldn’t wait to share them with you! Learn what questions to avoid and what to say instead.

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Anna Geiger: Hello! Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom. This week I'm coming to you with a very quick, practical episode, and it's based on something I learned from Elizabeth Jim��nez Salinas. She is a multilingual author and expert that I listened to on Science of Reading: The Podcast, from Amplify.

This is part of a big project I'm working on behind the scenes to put together a really useful podcast index for you. It will have podcasts from all different podcasters, organized in a giant list, with direct links to those podcast episodes based on their topic. There will be a section about English language learners, about comprehension, about vocabulary, phonics, and so on.

That's been really fun because I've been listening to at least five episodes a day, and I'm adding the most impactful ones to that blog post, so I'll let you know when that's ready.

As I was listening to this particular episode, Elizabeth shared what she calls "toxic questions" that teachers should avoid. I thought this was really excellent, whether you're teaching English language learners or children for whom English is their first language.

I wanted to share those really quickly and, of course, I'll link to that podcast episode in my show notes.

So the first one to avoid is asking, "Who can tell me something about...?"

Instead of saying that, a better question would be, "What comes to your mind when you think of...?" That way kids don't need to be embarrassed if what they said really doesn't have to do with the topic. This gives everyone a chance to participate without feeling like there's a lot of risk involved.

The next toxic question to avoid is, "Are there any questions?"

A better thing to ask would be, "What kinds of questions do you have?" Or, "What kind of questions might someone have about this topic?" Or even, "So-and-so is absent. What kinds of questions do you think they'll have about this topic tomorrow?"

You could even have your students turn to a partner and you could say, "Formulate a question someone might have about today's lesson."

The final toxic question to avoid is, "Does everyone understand?"

Instead of asking that, you could have them SHOW you what they understand. You could say, "Show me what you understand by..." It might be writing something on their dry erase board or filling out an exit ticket. It's a way for them to show you what they understand versus sitting there silently and being confused.

I hope you found those three toxic questions helpful. I'll link to those in the show notes which you can find at themeasuredmom.com/episode139. Talk to you next time!

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

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References

Science of Reading: The Podcast – Improving dual language instruction: Elizabeth Jim��nez Salinas

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The post 3 Questions teachers should stop asking (and what to say instead) appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Making change at the state level: A conversation with Kristen Wynn

TRT Podcast #138: Making change at the state level: A conversation with Kristen Wynn

A decade ago, Mississippi was ranked 49th in reading. Not anymore! Kristen Wynn, Mississippi’s state literacy director, walks us through the steps that brought positive change.

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Welcome back to our Change Maker Series. This week we have a conversation with Kristen Wynn, Mississippi's state literacy director. This was such an interesting conversation for me. She taught me so many things about how it works to make change at such a big level. I know you're going to appreciate hearing about Mississippi's law as well as how they implemented it across the state, and how Mississippi made HUGE strides when it comes to helping every child learn to read.

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Kristen!

Kristen Wynn: Thank you, Anna! I'm glad to be here.

Anna Geiger: Kristen is a former first and second grade teacher. She also was a K-5 interventionist, literacy coach and coordinator, and is now the state literacy director for Mississippi. I invited her on the podcast to talk to us about how we can make changes at a local and then state level.

Kristen, could you talk to us a little bit about your history as a teacher and what brought you to the position you're in today?

Kristen Wynn: Absolutely. I started off my teaching career around 2005 as a first grade teacher. I really enjoyed that. I taught first grade for a couple of years, moved to second grade, and then I transferred to another district that was closer to home. When I did that, I still taught first and second grade.

Then I quickly moved into an interventionist position. With that position, I was responsible for working primarily with kindergarten through fifth grade students that struggled with how to read.

I worked with them using a lot of different programs. This particular district that I worked in, we had lots of resources, so I had different things that I could choose from based on their reading deficits.

Then I transitioned to literacy coach for the state in 2013 under our Literacy-Based Promotion Act, and I worked in a school and we moved that school from an F in our accountability system (it's an A, B, C, D, F system), and we moved that school from a failing school to a B!

I moved to regional coordinator, assistant state coordinator, and then in 2019 I took on the role as State Literacy Director in Mississippi.

I feel like all of those experiences, as a first grade teacher really understanding early literacy, as an interventionist, and then as a literacy coach, has really prepared me for the role that I'm in currently.

Anna Geiger: That is quite a background. It's so interesting.

Before I pressed record, you told me that you were a balanced literacy teacher at one time. Can you talk to us about where the transition came, how it started, and how you became aware of the science of reading?

Kristen Wynn: Absolutely. I confessed that yes, I was at one time a balanced literacy teacher because at that time when I started teaching in our state, and up until 2013 when a lot of things really changed in our state, balanced literacy really saturated our state. I was trained in the cueing system, we had Lucy Calkins writing, we did a lot of that, and we had the leveled text.

But as a teacher, and as an interventionist, I knew something was missing. It's always like this one thing, and you can't put your hand on it, but you knew something was missing.

So I started to just research. One of my colleagues was using another phonics program in her classroom, and so I said, "You know what? I'm going to use that with all of my students." I did that and saw tremendous gains in my classroom.

Then transitioning to an interventionist, I was trained in dyslexic therapy because I had students with dyslexia that I was responsible for servicing. So I was trained in that, and that method is really explicit. In my mind I'm thinking, "If this is good for our students that really struggle, why can't we use this for all of our students?"

That was my first encounter with not necessarily formally knowing there was a name for the research, that the research was aligned to the science of reading, but that was my first encounter with understanding structured literacy, which is the application of the science.

Anna Geiger: Sure.

Kristen Wynn: So when I transitioned to the State Department in 2013 as a literacy coach, I'll tell you how bad balanced literacy was in our state. Our governor at the time in 2013 wanted seventy-five literacy coaches, because we were 49th in the country when we were looking at fourth grade reading. He wanted seventy-five coaches.

Our department went through five hundred to six hundred applications, and in the fall there were only twenty-four of us that walked in that door that knew or had some background knowledge of structured literacy and the science of reading.

Anna Geiger: Interesting.

Kristen Wynn: That kind of gives you an idea of what was happening then and where we were.

When we transitioned, we procured LETRS. That is a professional development training grounded in the science and the research on how students learned to read. So we procured that, and then the first cohort of us that went through LETRS were the coaches. The twenty-four of us went through the program first and it was very intense. That was my first real, real encounter in gaining a deep knowledge, I would say, of the research that we know of as the science of reading.

Anna Geiger: Okay. So, you started at a really sad place, at 49th. What was it that really changed things for you?

Kristen Wynn: One thing that I think that really changed the landscape of literacy in Mississippi was our Literacy-Based Promotion Act, which is our state's early literacy policy. That act came into play in 2013, and it is very explicit and provides lots of details of specific things that have to be done. The goal of that law is to ensure that all of our students, kindergarten through third grade, are on the trajectory and are on track to being reading at or above grade level by third grade.

It required us as a state, by law, to do several different things.

One thing is it requires us to screen our students in kindergarten to see where they are at in the beginning of the year, and then at the end of the year, to determine readiness and growth.

It also required that all school districts screen their kindergarten through third grade students.

We have this Kindergarten Readiness Assessment that we give to show readiness and growth in kindergartners, but now also, our K-3 students have to be screened three times in the year to determine if there are any reading problems.

Then once teachers give those screeners, they are required to give a diagnostic to really drill down and determine where the areas of deficiency for students are.

So that law right there, in addition to our Kindergarten Readiness Assessment that's embedded within the law and our screeners that are embedded within the law, we also have literacy coaches. Our literacy coaches, per law, are to provide literacy coaching support to our lowest performing schools based on a formula that's in the law.

Also, our law includes our third grade reading assessment, which is an assessment that determines promotion or retention for our third grade students. There are good-cause exemptions and retesting opportunities.

I really feel like the big change that happened in moving us from a very saturated balanced literacy state and moving us into a science of reading state was that historic law that was placed and the strategies that we implemented to make sure we put that law into practice.

Then professional development was a part of that as well, because you have to create that common language around the science of reading to transition people from what we used to do with balanced literacy.

Anna Geiger: That's interesting because I think a lot of people, when they're trying to make these changes, the first question they want to know is, "What's your curriculum?" That's the one thing they think they need to know, and it's hard to get past thinking that that's the thing that's going to make all the difference.

That's very important, but what you're saying is we need to start with education for the teachers and the leaders and a system where we can find out through a screening process who's at risk for reading failure. Then we can drill down what exactly the issue is because screeners are supposed to be really fast, but when you see an issue, then you do a diagnostic maybe in phonics or something like that, so that the Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention can be given to kids who need it.

Kristen Wynn: You're exactly right. One thing that we did not do is start with identifying our curriculum. The reason why it's so important to build teacher and leader knowledge first is because if you build the teacher knowledge first, the teachers and the leaders build the programs and they're able to implement the programs. They do it not just with fidelity, but with integrity, really looking at the needs of the students versus just putting a program in front of somebody.

If you put a program in front of me, but you don't give me the why, why is this important? Then I'm not going to really use it as it is intended to be used.

But if you give me the why first, and then you put the how and the what in front of me, I'm able to really use it to make sure that I provide the students the instructional supports to meet their need.

So we started with creating this common language because if we just pushed another program in front of our teachers, lots of questions would've come up like, "How's this any better from what we were already doing?" So giving teachers the why first, building their knowledge, I think is so important.

Anna Geiger: So when you have a new teacher in Mississippi, like a brand new teacher, is there something in place where they get this particular instruction or are they not hired unless they show an understanding of the science of reading? How does all that work where you get new teachers on board?

Kristen Wynn: Like many other states, we are a local-control state. But because of this law and because of the strategies and components of it and what teachers are required to do, especially our early K-4 teachers, we offer the statewide literacy professional development that's grounded in the science at the state level for free. We have that every year. We have cohorts of teachers and leaders that go through that training.

Yes, it's very intense. It's like a college level master's course, and it's a year-long course, but we offer that to them. They can sign up in the summer and start their course in the fall, and they're typically finished the next spring, but they're able to apply some of those things as they're going through the course and learning within their classrooms.

We offer those not only to our new teachers, but veteran teachers, pre-service teachers, which are teachers-

Anna Geiger: Oh, yeah.

Kristen Wynn: ... who are in school. Because along with our Literacy-Based Promotion Act, along with our law, in Mississippi pre-service teachers are required to take a Foundations of Reading Assessment, which means you have to show based on an exam that you are ready to go in a Mississippi classroom and teach students how to read. That's a requirement.

Because of that, we've had to make some changes in the preparation area, and so we do offer the training to some of our pre-service teachers as well as our professors so that they're able to try to catch them. We want to catch them on the front end to be preventative. We offer that training across the state.

Anna Geiger: You said 2013 is the year where this all started?

Kristen Wynn: That's that change year for us.

Anna Geiger: How did that go over? When I think of myself as a teacher, I think back to when I was die-hard balanced literacy. If this would've come down to me, I don't think I would've taken it very well. How did you get everybody on board? Is that still an issue?

Kristen Wynn: It's really not an issue now. The issue now now is, "Can we host trainings in our district? I have 200 teachers that need to be trained right now." So, I mean, those are good problems to have at the moment.

But when we started, we really faced some resistance at first, because when you are trying to change something, change is hard and a lot of times people don't want to change because change requires me to learn something different and get out of my comfort zone.

So yes, at first we did, but what we did was we started ... It was required for those districts that were assigned literacy coaches. I think I mentioned this earlier, that a part of our law was our literacy coaches. We placed literacy coaches in our lowest performing school districts. So when we did that as a non-negotiable, as you may say, we required those school districts to attend the training.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Kristen Wynn: So, that was a requirement, you had to attend.

Some of the school districts that were not on our lists that were our higher performing districts were writing letters to say, "We opt out. We don't want to do it," and things of that nature. Which was fine.

We started where we knew we needed to start. And so we called districts, we got them to partner with other districts to roll this out. We rolled it out with our literacy coaches first and our literacy support schools.

Then our Kindergarten Readiness Assessment was in place. Once that got in place and once we got the training rolling, we saw growth in just kindergarten in some of our lowest performing schools. They were starting to outperform our higher performing schools and districts.

Then it was, "Oh, let me see what this training is that you all are doing. Let me see what's happening." Because this district, who hadn't been necessarily performing very well, was outperforming this district that was considered in our state a higher performing district, just in their kindergarten when their kindergarten teachers were being trained in the research.

So we started to get traction, we started to get buy-in. We coupled our training with coaches. Our coaches really got into schools and helped teachers navigate the content for the professional development. They did additional PLCs on how. We started to see things shift and change even with screener data and kindergarten assessment data.

Once that started happening, and fast-forward to 2019, when we saw we were number one in growth for fourth grade reading on the NAEP, then it really was like, "Oh, what are y'all doing? What happened? How did you go from being the lowest performing state and states surrounding us saying, 'Thank God for Mississippi.'" Which was the running joke in 2013.

Anna Geiger: Yes. Yes. I remember that.

Kristen Wynn: Yeah, and now folks are like, "Okay, so what are y'all doing over there? What's happening?"

We took a real sense of urgency type stance and took a really bold stance to say, "We are making these changes. This is going to happen. We have to do this for our communities, for our state, for our students." And so, that's it in a nutshell.

Anna Geiger: So, really it was the data-

Kristen Wynn: It was.

Anna Geiger: ... the data that really made the difference.

Kristen Wynn: Mm-hmm.

Anna Geiger: If someone would just want to know really quickly, we're talking very high level today, but just to get into the weeds a little bit, what would you see that was different in these kindergarten classrooms after the teacher had the instruction? What was looking different than compared to previously?

Kristen Wynn: Yeah. What I saw in a lot of these, and kindergarten was the example with the data that we had, but what I saw in a lot of these classrooms K-3 was initially we had been using the leveled text, and then you started to see more structure, you saw more explicit instruction.

We created lots of resources at the state level. As coaches we created a 90-120 minute literacy block for our schools. That was one of the non-negotiables. We had a list of non-negotiables that we gave schools, and that was one of them to have this uninterrupted literacy block.

Now you see there's an uninterrupted time for reading to be taught. That uninterrupted time included instruction that was really explicit for teachers within the five components of reading. You saw students and teachers moving from using leveled text to decodable texts in kindergarten.

Then you saw the kindergartners, based on our Kindergarten Readiness Assessment, entering kindergarten not necessarily ready, but leaving kindergarten as emergent readers. They were beyond ready, to the point where first grade teachers, you've got to beef it up a little bit now because you're getting these cohorts of kindergartners that are leaving ready.

One thing I do want to point out that was coupled with our Literacy-Based Promotion Act was our Early Learning Collaborative Act, which also put pre-K classrooms in some parts of our state. It added additional pre-Ks to our state.

We started off with only a few collaboratives, and then we moved to having more. So we really started this in pre-K, but kindergarten was a part of our Literacy-Based Promotion Act.

To see the transition from going in and looking at leveled texts and the Shared Reading, to now seeing very explicit instruction during an uninterrupted block of time, it made a big difference, coupled with coaches right there side-by-side with teachers helping them.

Anna Geiger: Okay. So, for people who are looking for more specifics, can you lay out for us what that literacy block might look like in the kindergarten and the primary grades?

Kristen Wynn: Sure. We actually developed the literacy block based on our professional development training at the time, which was LETRS, our science of reading professional development. We based this on the recommended times from that.

We have a kindergarten block because we have kindergarten guidelines, but our 1st-5th grade block has time alotted within it for foundational skills instruction, which means the phonological awareness is in there, the phonics is in there, the fluency instruction is embedded within that block.

Then you have the block of time within that literacy block where we're talking about language comprehension, building the knowledge, using high-quality instructional materials during that language comprehension block of time. So you have your foundational skills block and you have your language comprehension block.

We started off with 90 as the recommended non-negotiable uninterrupted block, but there was so much that needed to be done within that, and we wanted to make sure we had small group instruction. Now you have a block that has whole group, and you need time for small group instruction to really remediate and do some small group things with students that are not performing where they need to be.

Then we added writing instruction because reading and writing should be parallel and go together. As a part of our state assessment, there is a writing assessment. We had to get kids and teachers out of their comfort zone with writing every single day, and that writing needed to be connected to the texts they were reading.

So that block includes a foundational block, a language comprehension piece, building the background knowledge through read-alouds and really high-quality complex texts, and then you have your writing portion, and small groups. That's the layout that we have within our literacy block.

Anna Geiger: Thank you for sharing that, and I'll definitely link to any resources that you give me that will help people learn more about that.

We've talked about the big picture of how this got started, about how it trickled down to the schools, and about what some of the day-to-day things look like.

Now if you're willing to share any curriculum recommendations that you might have, I know that that's not where we want to start, but everybody wants to know. What do you like?

Kristen Wynn: Haha! I'm going to say it this way because I have to be politically correct for a lot of it.

Anna Geiger: Sure. Sure.

Kristen Wynn: We have a High-Quality Instructional Materials initiative happening in our state, and I can send you the link to our Mississippi Materials Matter website. As a state, we have adopted five ELA curricula that we deemed high quality based on our rubrics. Our rubrics are really closely connected to the EdReports rubrics. We worked with them to develop our rubrics.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Kristen Wynn: But one thing that we really did differently, like I told you before, we started with building teacher leader knowledge. In Mississippi, really focusing on those foundational skills was so important to us. The curricula that's on our list could not make our list, I would say, if they didn't pass Gateway 1, which we added a very strong criteria on foundational skills in that gateway, because that's extremely important for us.

We only have five on the list. That's not to say that there are not others, but we define our high-quality instructional materials as being aligned to our standards, comprehensive, externally validated, and includes engaging and complex texts for all of our students.

Within the five, I have to say the districts that have used them started off using them with fidelity, which means learning the program and moving to integrity really fast. They've seen lots of growth just on their screeners from beginning of year to end of year.

So I'm really happy with what we have on our list. We will have another adoption cycle coming up, which we can add the others that EdReports deem as high quality on there, but if they didn't submit, we could not review them. There are some that are not on there, that didn't submit, but we only can review what was submitted. There were some that did not make our list because the criteria and the expectations are high.

Anna Geiger: Is there a link that I can send people to so they can see what you guys have approved?

Kristen Wynn: Absolutely.

Anna Geiger: Okay. I will send people to that.

Kristen Wynn: They can also see not only what we approve K-12, they can also see the rubrics and the evidence that we captured as we were looking at these curricula.

Anna Geiger: Yes. What's interesting too is that so many people just want you to give them the curriculum, "What's the best one?" I understand that question. I understand the urgency there, but like you said, if you don't have something to compare it to, like a rubric that says what you really need, and you don't understand the point of all those things, you're not going to know it's a good program.

Kristen Wynn: No. And Anna, I'll tell you this too. If you don't understand the science, even the theoretical models, if you don't understand the rope and how reading comprehension is acquired, then you're not going to be able to navigate some of the things within these curricula because I have to say this, the vendors are trying to appease both sides.

Anna Geiger: Oh, yes. Yes.

Kristen Wynn: The vendors will dump it all in, and I'm going to tell you something about our Mississippi leaders, teachers, and coaches, we challenge vendors. If there's something once we get in there that goes against what we stand for and what we're trying to do in our state, we call them out. We call them and say, "Remove it, take it out, or you're off the list. You won't be on the list again."

You can't be afraid to have those types of conversations. But again, you have to understand the rope and how reading comprehension is acquired to really understand what should and should not be within these curricula.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. So if there's someone out there who's listening to this and thinks, "Boy, that'd be great. My state's nowhere close to doing this, but I want to start making change in my little space, beyond my classroom." What would be some tips you'd give to a teacher who wants to start spreading the word in a way that's hopefully going to bring other people on board?

Kristen Wynn: That's a great question. As a teacher trying to get the discussion going in a school building, I would say start with your colleagues that are willing. Start with that. I would say, start with those who you can go to and say, "Hey, I know we've been doing it this way for a long time. There is something missing. I'm willing to shift my practices in my classroom, and then you come along with me. Let's do it together and collect some data, and then move forward from there." That may be the first step.

If you have a supportive administrator, for me the conversation would be going to your administrators afterwards. I'm a "bring all the data" type of girl. It would be great for a teacher to be able to take some data and say, "Hey, I know we had these gaps, so I went and tried this, and this is a strategy or an instructional practice that is aligned to the science, and it worked for my classroom. Could we see about implementing it school wide?"

So you may have to just start with the little small parts or small things, but I would say most definitely start with the data, the articles, and find schools that have done it. There's so much information out there right now of schools that have done it well, and they start with just maybe the foundational skills component and that. They started there and they saw the growth there. Take those articles, take the data from your class on what you changed, what you went in and decided to change, and how it impacted your students.

I would say for a teacher that's really trying to spark that conversation, I would say start there. Those would be my two things.

Anna Geiger: So the two words to remember are that data talks?

Kristen Wynn: Data talks!

Anna Geiger: And for teachers who aren't sure where to even start with that ... Because I know many schools are using a balanced literacy assessment like Fountas and Pinnell's or DRA, which I believe is balanced literacy too.

Kristen Wynn: Mm-hmm.

Anna Geiger: What they might want to do is check into Acadience or DIBELS 8. I like Acadience, I think it's really easy to use. It's free for you. If you want to have the part where it actually puts all the data on a chart, I believe you pay for that part of it, but you wouldn't need to do that. It's very easy to administer once you understand how it works and it doesn't take long.

Kristen Wynn: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: If you had a volunteer come in and read to the rest of your class while you're doing that in a separate room, I mean, you can get all the kids done in a few days. Do that multiple times in the year, and that will give you data and you'll see how it's working.

Kristen Wynn: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: That would definitely be the place to start, I think, because people can't argue with that.

Kristen Wynn: They cannot. They cannot.

I mean, if you're trying to go for school-wide change, start with your administrator and start with looking at, what does your school look like? What is the proficiency rate of students within your building? How does that look? If you're dealing with a significant amount of students not being proficient, then talk to your administrator about forming a committee and creating a school literacy action plan.

We do those action plans in our literacy support schools, and they're really powerful because the first step of the action plan is really looking at the landscape of literacy within the school. What is the data telling us? Like you said, they can use their DIBELS data. If they wanted to use their DRA data, they can use that and triangulate that data with something else, because that data may tell you that your kid is reading on grade level, but then you get something like DIBELS and they have all of these gaps.

Anna Geiger: Yes. That's another really good point because there's the work of Matt Burns, I think it was Matt Burns. He's done some work on this where he's compared kids' results on the Fountas and Pinnell assessment compared to the state assessment, and it just showed that the Fountas and Pinnell assessment was about as useful as flipping a coin would be for finding out whether kids were going to be successful as readers or had problems.

So that's a really good point. You want to compare it and say, "Hey, this assessment rating says this kid's a good reader, but look at the beginning of the year, I mean, look at all the holes they had." Then you can show the growth. For sure, that's excellent.

So it's been ten years since Mississippi has started the change, right? Where's Mississippi now and what's next?

Kristen Wynn: Oh, wow. We are so excited to say that in 2013 we were 49th, and in 2022 we're now 21st!

Anna Geiger: Wow. That's amazing!

Kristen Wynn: I always say this, we still have our foot on the gas because all of our students are not proficient yet, and until we get to that point, we haven't arrived. We're still refining different things.

Like you said, we have this system in place, but we're just refining things with our High-Quality Instructional Materials initiative. That's something we've brought on, and that's fairly new.

We will be offering layers of our science of reading course.

Our leaders go through layer one. It's just the foundational layer of the course where you just really unpack the science, you really understand the theoretical models, what does that mean in your role as a leader, and really create that school literacy action plan. As a teacher, it's the same thing, that PD is provided for you.

But the second layer that we're working on for the upcoming year is a structured literacy course. We'll have that for teachers as an option if they've gone through the first one. It will be a structured literacy course and a writing course for teachers and leaders.

So we are trying to be really innovative in our approach to moving things forward. We're always looking at the data and the gaps and where we need additional supports.

We've created a coaching academy to get more coaches on the ground because our PD model is our statewide PD, our regional trainings that are created by our coaches and literacy leaders, but then also coaching. It's like our model is triangulated. We can't leave off coaching. We know that's so essential to the gains that we've seen.

We are just trying to move and continue the work and trying to fill in the gaps where we see things need to be tweaked a little bit.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. Well, congratulations. That's really amazing. I did not know that final number, so that's very exciting!

Kristen Wynn: Thank you.

Anna Geiger: Thanks for helping us get a big picture overview of how this looks at a state level and how a state can make big changes.

Kristen Wynn: You are so welcome! Anytime.

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode138, including a link to Mississippi's approved curricula.

I hope you'll join me for the rest of our Change Maker Series, as well as our short Wednesday episodes, which are intended to be practical ways where you can apply the science of reading right away. Talk to you next time!

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Resources mentioned in this episode LETRS training Mississippi’s Department of Education website Mississippi’s science of reading resources Mississippi’s free professional development Leading in Literacy guide Mississippi’s approved curricula

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The post Making change at the state level: A conversation with Kristen Wynn appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Is Shared Reading aligned with the science of reading?

TRT Podcast #137: Is Shared Reading aligned with the science of reading?

Shared Reading has its origins in whole language and balanced literacy. Does it belong in a structured literacy classroom?

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Does Shared Reading have a place in a structured literacy classroom? Does it align with the science of reading?

When I talk about Shared Reading, I'm talking about capital "Shared Reading," which had its origins in whole language and balanced literacy. I'm not talking about lowercase "shared reading," which to some people is just reading aloud to our students. Let's talk about capital "Shared Reading," which is when you share an enlarged text with your students, and you read it together.

Before we get into whether or not Shared Reading aligns with the science of reading, we should just come right out and say that Shared Reading originated with Don Holdaway, who was a fierce advocate of whole language. Whole language is this idea that we can teach reading by surrounding kids with good literature, and they're going to just pick it up and we don't need a lot of explicit instruction.

Holdaway believed that Shared Reading of predictable text would lead children to easily recognize whole sentences and provide cues for reading individual words. He found it preferable to what he called "word by word processing" because it sounded like fluent language. He believed that explicit teaching of phonics out of context served no useful purpose, and that what he called "the Shared Reading experience" was much more effective than direct instruction.

We know from research that children benefit from explicit direct instruction in learning to read, and that is systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics. So right away we know that Holdaway had some things wrong.

Interestingly, he saw Shared Reading as a way to replicate the experience of a parent reading with a child on their lap. That's a great goal trying to replicate that in the classroom, but we do not want to have this false understanding that sharing a text with students is going to teach them to read.

Capital "Shared Reading" holds a very important place in the balanced literacy model. According to Fountas and Pinnell, Shared Reading is a bridge with the potential to "move children from one place on their reading journey to the next." And if you're not sure what that means, I'm right there with you.

Here's the thing. There's a lot wrong with the capital "Shared Reading" method. You've heard teachers say, "Hang on a second, let's not throw away everything from balanced literacy. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater." But in the case of capital "Shared Reading," we probably just need a fresh tub.

Shared Reading should not be used as a bridge between read aloud and independent reading. It should not be used to teach children to lift words from the page.

However, we CAN use Shared Reading to teach concepts of print and support letter learning through print referencing. So print referencing is when you point out things; it's using cues to direct children's attention to features of written language. Research shows that print referencing is effective.

We can teach concepts of print, which is an awareness of how print works. We can use those large texts as we read aloud and point to the words to show our students that print holds meaning, that we read from left to right, from top to bottom on the page. Concepts of print are easy and fun to teach, and it's easy to point out those features when you have an enlarged text to share with your class.

That enlarged text also makes it easy to draw attention to letters and letter sounds that you've taught.

You can also use Shared Reading to build oral language.

Think of it this way, Shared Reading is a way of giving your students access to beautiful vocabulary, advanced language structures, and best of all, knowledge.

You can do this with read alouds, but students can't follow along because the text is just there for you to see. Shared Reading lets your students see the words and read as many of them as they can.

So here are some principles I think you should follow when using Shared Reading in a structured literacy classroom.

Number one, choose an engaging text that will challenge your students, but is still within their reach.

When I think of traditional Shared Reading lessons, it's usually a very predictable text. Like in the book I Went Walking, "I went walking. What did you see?" There's repetition there. That's fine if the goal of your lesson is to teach concepts of print, that every word we say matches a word on the page. You certainly can do that.

However, if you're using the text to build oral language, you want to find something that's a little more challenging.

Now I'm not saying that you expect your students to be able to read the text with you, especially if they're still learning to decode. It's within their reach if it's something they can understand, and if there may be a few words here and there they can chime in on, maybe there's a refrain, maybe it's a poem about something.

So after you've chosen an interesting text that will challenge your students, introduce it, and then read it aloud, always tracking the print as you read.

You can use this shared reading text to call attention to previously taught sound-spellings or high frequency words that you've already taught your students.

You can draw attention to vocabulary. Take a word out of the poem or the passage or the book and teach it to your students.

You can also build knowledge. For example, if I'm reading a poem about the narwhal, I could say, "In the first stanza, I read about five different narwhal predators. Follow along as I reread that stanza. When I'm done, you'll turn to your partner and see if the two of you can list all five predators."

This is why you want to choose a challenging text, something that's going to teach them something, not something full of information they already know.

Next, you can read the text again, inviting your students to join in as they're able.

Then if your students are ready, which may not be true in kindergarten or first grade, you could provide copies of the text for them to read in pairs throughout the week, and then you could revisit the text on later days.

If this sounds intriguing to you, and you're wondering where to find shared reading texts like poems that you could enlarge and pass out a copy to everybody, you should definitely check out my membership, the Measured Mom Plus, because we have, at last count, I think we're close to one hundred fluency poems in there, and we add five new ones every month. They're of different levels, many of them are nonfiction, and they'll definitely give your students a chance to broaden their knowledge and increase concepts of print, as well as teach new vocabulary.

You can learn more about our membership at themeasuredmom.com/join, and to get the show notes for today's episode, you can go to themeasuredmom.com/episode137. Talk to you next time!

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References

*The first two articles are quoted in the episode; I do not consider them to be useful information.

Park, Barbara. (1982). The Big Book trend ��� a discussion with Don Holdaway. Language Arts. 59 (8), 815-821.Fountas & Pinnell Literacy. (n.d.) The benefits of shared reading for primary readers: A bridge to independence. https://fpblog.fountasandpinnell.com/the-benefits-of-shared-reading-for-primary-readers-a-bridge-to-independenceJustice, L. M., Skibbe, L., Canning, A. & Lankford, C. (2005). Pre-schoolers, print, and storybooks: An observational study using eye movement analysis. Journal of Research in Reading. 28(3), 229-243.Levy, B.A., Gong, Z., Hessels, S., Evans, M. & Jared, D. (2006). Understanding print: Early reading development and the contributions of home literacy experiences. J. Experimental Psychology. 93, 63-93.Snow, C., Burns, M.S., & Griffin, P., Eds. (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. National Academy Press.

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Our membership has hundreds of printables for teaching phonics – not to mention decodable passages, complex texts, poems, plays, and more!

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The post Is Shared Reading aligned with the science of reading? appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Making change at the district level: A conversation with Cliff Jones

TRT Podcast #136: Making change at the district level: A conversation with Cliff Jones

Cliff Jones walks us through how his district shifted from balanced literacy to teaching based on the science of reading. Listen in to find out how all teachers were educated and supported!

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Hello, Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom, and we're continuing our Change Maker series. This week I'm speaking with Cliff Jones, who is the Chief of Staff of Fulton County Schools. Today he's going to talk to us about how their district moved to a science of reading based approach. He'll share how the teachers became educated, and how they switched out their old materials for materials that are based on the science of reading. I know you're going to get a lot out of today's conversation.

Anna: Welcome, Cliff!

Cliff Jones: Thanks, Anna. Thanks for having me!

Anna: Can you tell us about your current position and what in your history of education has brought you here?

Cliff Jones: Sure. I'm the Chief of Staff of Fulton County Schools. What got me here, I think I just kept raising my hand, Anna. I was a teacher of world history in 2001, then an administrator, high school principal, here in the Atlanta area, and then I was the Chief Academic Officer here in Fulton County Schools from 2018 until July of this year.

Anna: Okay. And then you switched, so now what are you doing?

Cliff Jones: So as the Chief of Staff, I support the superintendent not only with community needs, but I also am over all the zone superintendents. We have 108 schools in Fulton County, and so we have different zones, we have seven zone superintendents. It's a big organization, but we really try to make it feel small.

Anna: Yeah. So before we started recording, you mentioned that around 2019 or so you had a new superintendent, is that right?

Cliff Jones: That's correct. In 2019, Dr. Mike Looney came from Williamson, Tennessee to here in Fulton County, and he brought a love of teaching literacy. I remember one of our first visits to a school was him doing the carpet time, and as a former high school guy, Anna, that was new to me, and we've been learning together ever since.

Anna: So he brought, we could say, the science of reading into your district and started by sharing some information with you. Can you walk us through the process?

Cliff Jones: Sure. We had this early discussion and he asked me really direct questions like, "Cliff, what do you know about the science of reading?"

I said, "Dr. Looney, I'm a balanced literacy guy. I know a lot about certain literacy experts and different workshop models, and I try to make sure that my teachers have time and resources to do that, to create a really rich love of reading in their classrooms in this environment that's holistic."

He said, "Cliff, I need you to read the research and work from the literacy panel, the National Reading Panel," and we talked about that one afternoon.

The next morning I came in and he had this huge document that he had printed out and waiting for me. That really is what got me started on my learning around the science of reading and I've really been on fire for it ever since, Anna.

Anna: Those words you said could have come from my mouth too, those exact words. For me it was Emily Hanford's article that talked about three-queuing as being an issue. I'm not sure what else would've spoken to me that quickly, although it took me a little while to accept her words.

What was it in the document that really got your attention? Because shifting from balanced literacy is a switch that can be hard to make.

Cliff Jones: I had to learn not only that there were five pillars of reading, but that one was insufficient, even four were insufficient! You needed all five.

When I thought about literacy instruction before I learned that, I knew about phonics, I didn't really know what phonemic awareness was, I knew what vocabulary comprehension was, and I kind of knew what fluency was, but I really thought about maybe three out of five. That's good in baseball, but not really good when you're trying to teach reading.

So it was the understanding of creating systems and structures related to all five pillars, plus writing, that I really dove into as I've been learning. I completed LETRS training, Anna, and I'm glad they didn't post my grade, but it was a certificate of completion for me. I learned so much, so much through that.

Anna: One thing you mentioned was the five pillars. We know those are called the five pillars because they're the big areas that the National Reading Panel summarized in their report.

When I think of balanced literacy, I think of activities, which you kind of mentioned before. Like we structure our classroom around read aloud, shared reading, guided reading, and independent reading, without really understanding exactly what skills are part of all those and not really being able to nail it down.

I think sometimes when you start diving into the actual step-by-step, it starts to come together and make more sense. It fills in the gaps quite a bit so that can be very exciting.

But I know that asking teachers to make a big shift is not always easy. Can you walk us through how you guys did that?

Cliff Jones: Yeah. This was probably the biggest emotional piece of the journey that I had as a leader. I really look towards my teachers as experts. They look at themselves through their heart and their passions to be able to bring literacy to life for their students.

As we started our LETRS journey, we quickly started to understand that we didn't know everything, that our teachers had not been set up through their college prep programs to know everything. As a matter of fact, as we started to listen to the podcast that you mentioned and some other experts, we realized we were misled.

This realization that we had poured into the workshop model in our own balanced literacy journey here in Fulton County schools was emotional, because we had to start to realize that what we had been doing was wrong. When I say that, it's not lost on me, the emotional piece to that, because I've seen teachers go through the stages of grief related to that new learning.

There's no teacher that I've met out there that says, "Hey, I want to teach a kid to read incorrectly." No, they're doing the best they can with what they know.

So we started down our LETRS journey, and we started to really look at high quality resources related to the five pillars. That's how we went, and we started to realize early on that we were going to have to do an inventory of what was out there. We are a site-based management district, we have over 108 schools. I probably had 40 different types of reading resources there. Who could even guess how many experts had come to our district and left their wares.

So we started to think about how best to make that transition and the most painful realization, Anna, was that we were going to have to take away those resources to replace them with science of reading literature and science of reading curriculum.

We started doing that, and I did receive some nasty grams, but I also made a commitment to everybody who reached out to me that I was going to respond to them.

Really what I started to do was we had this collective time of grief where we thought we were supposed to do it one way, and then we realized through our own learning that we really needed to do it in another.

Collectively, I'm happy to say at this point, we have a really strong culture of literacy in Fulton County Schools. As a matter of fact, if you go on to Twitter, or whatever it's called now, search #EveryChildReads and you can follow our journey. You can see it progress from a couple of years ago to people now posting what they're seeing from their students, their phonemic awareness activities, to their phonics activities, to vocabulary.

I was in a middle school the other day and we were breaking down words into their different parts. It was a reading class, and these are students who needed that part of the process to be able to understand the words in front of them, and it was just amazing.

I feel like we've come such a long way, but I'm not going to underestimate to you, or whoever's listening, the emotional journey that we've been on.

Anna: So you started by giving all the teachers the LETRS training, is that correct?

Cliff Jones: That's correct. So our early teachers, our K-5 teachers received LETRS training. As a matter of fact, they finish up their 80 hours, and I always say that, 80 hours of training this December. Their principals, all of their principals, went before them, and all district staff went before them. So they're the third cohort to go through LETRS training here in Fulton County Schools, and we have five cohorts.

Anna: I love that, that their leaders went first. That's fabulous. I don't know how often that's happening.

Cliff Jones: I haven't heard of it either. I don't know if we just fell into it or if it's from the science of implementation, change management from Kotter, creating that collaborative group coalition of the willing. But if the leaders aren't engaged, they're not going to know how to create the structures. I certainly didn't know how to listen empathetically until I went through LETRS.

Anna: So the leaders went through it first, and then were you not really doing much of anything with everybody else at that time? You were just doing your own learning and waiting?

Cliff Jones: So EVERYBODY knew we were doing this, so we had this sort of... We use Microsoft and we have these little Teams channels, and people would invite me in to their Teams channels and it would be a PLC (professional learning community). They would just call me in and say, "Hey Cliff, can you talk about what you learned in this volume?" And it would be a third grade PLC at a particular elementary, and they knew that we were doing this as a leadership group and they were curious. They were curious from almost a critical lens, "Well, how is this going to impact us?"

Anna: Yeah, worried maybe a little bit.

Cliff Jones: Yeah.

Anna: So I know I've seen some teachers complain that our school, our district, whatever, expects us all to do LETRS, but we don't have time. How did you manage that piece of it?

Cliff Jones: First of all, that is a very legitimate concern. Having gone through it, LETRS is very time-consuming. What we did is we associated all of our professional learning days in our district to LETRS training. We actually asked for more this last year just so that we could do this and teachers could do this on the clock, and then do the bridge to practice throughout the month between the professional learning days. That has been huge.

The other thing for us is we provided stipends. So for the first four volumes, when you complete that, you get $1,250 in our district. You can make $2,250 just by completing LETRS in two years.

We found the balance of professional learning days, stipends, and then creating a lot of positive energy about what we were learning has really been beneficial, and people are buying in.

Anna: So during that training, were there many voices that didn't like the training or felt like... What kind of things did you hear and how did you handle that?

Cliff Jones: Yeah, so I think there were probably, at the minimum, three different groups.

You have the folks who are on fire that say, "I've heard about this, I want this!" They're really pushing us, "How can we go faster?" You have that group. Really their complaint to us was, "Why can't I just go ahead and knock this out? Why do I have to wait on my peers?"

We told them, "No, no, we need to do this collectively."

Then we had this other group that was, I would say, just neutral. "Okay. I'm not really seeing... I did this already in my class. It might not have been the right time, but sure, I taught a little phonics here. I did a little fluency there. I'm not sure why I have to understand why the kids' brains work the way they do," and they were really just waiting it out."

And then I did have some folks who were resistant. Usually it went like this, Anna, "My classroom of students at my school all read at or above grade level." MY classroom. MY school.

A lot of times I just had to answer, "You're very lucky. I'm not disagreeing with you. Maybe there are pockets where balanced literacy had its place and was working. But when we think about the totality, I've got 55,000 kids K-5, and I know that the science says 95% of them can read at or above grade level, that's what LETRS teaches, but as Fulton County, we're only at 70%. I know that we can do better, and I know that we need this training, and I know to get to that 95%, we've got to do something related to the research and what works."

Anna: So at what point during the LETRS training did you start culling the material that some teachers maybe wanted to hold onto?

Cliff Jones: Yeah, so that was at the end of '22, the end of 2022 school year, and everybody knew it was coming. We had done this huge inventory. It wasn't something that surprised anyone.

The reason that we gave was that we have new materials coming in the summer that are associated. We had schedules, Anna, that this is when you're going to teach phonemic awareness, this is when you're going to teach phonics, this is when you're going to use your basil, this is when you'll do Vocabulary Surge, whatever. We had all different types of times.

So all those were coming, but what we did is we started to be able to sell some of our workshop materials and then allow teachers in schools to utilize some of those funds locally. We tried to incentivize it that way. That didn't make it a lot easier, trust me, but at least it was a strategy.

I will tell you, that was probably one of the hardest leadership moments I've had because it was seeing how passionate teachers were, not just about the curriculum, this is not just about the curriculum. People undermine the argument, they just think it's curriculum. It's not, it's how they impact kids. This is the avenue, the street. This is how they do their craft, their magic. That's what I was taking away, and I got that, and now I think we've replaced it with better things and better learning, and I feel like we've really created a lot of positive learning.

Anna: Have you seen teachers that were very resistant come around?

Cliff Jones: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I've seen leaders and teachers resistant to it.

We had model schools for certain workshop models. Their whole staffs, in five years, had gone off to a northern city and come back from on high and had learned how to do all these things. The resistance there was, number one, related to the new learning around the science of reading through LETRS, and number two, related to the materials.

Here's where I'm starting to see it coming around. I don't hear about that workshop model anymore. I don't hear about, or see travel requests, or get requisition requests to go to different places. Everybody loves, is it Tim Shanahan's Saturday email that comes out? There's talk about, what is the research going to say this week? That's when I know, when I feel like we've really tipped the scales for the science of reading. When teachers are looking forward to knowing, what does the research say?

Anna: Yeah, that is a huge shift. Huge.

What is your continuing plan for keeping this in front of all the teachers? Does every new teacher go through LETRS? How does all that work?

Cliff Jones: Yeah, so we have a new cohort of leaders and teachers every year. Again, I'm a big district, so things are at scale, and those kinds of systems are in place. Our board is really looking at, how do we make a sustainable effort to keep the culture of literacy in the forefront? They're looking at redoing their strategic plan with some different aspirational goals related to children at or above grade level in certain grades. The biggest sustainability piece, to me, is really celebrating our students.

We also have other programs for our special needs students. Lindamood-Bell is a huge effort here in Fulton County Schools. Our teacher of the year this year is a sixth grade resource special ed teacher who can just crush some Lindamood-Bell. She understands the importance of her LETRS training, and then with the Lindamood-Bell strategies as well, she can just light a fire and is showing people the impact of what it does with your students, for all students.

That's really the key, it's the buy-in to ALL. There are some students who we get as a district who know how to read when they enter in our schools. That does happen. But when we think about what ALL means and getting to that 95%, and then celebrating that light coming on, that's the difference between what we do every day and what everybody else does for work.

Anna: Yeah. So have you had anybody say, "This is going to bore my more advanced kids. They don't need this." Has anything like that come up, and then where they've seen that there's actually a benefit for everyone?

Cliff Jones: I have. When you're teaching a kid how to break down a word and break it into its parts, and if they're a third-grader, then we can translate those parts into upper level vocabulary. That's where I lean in with that argument. Aren't you just doing an SAT skill? As we learn our vocabulary, isn't that what the high school teachers are doing to break down really complex SAT words?

Here's a fun fact for you, Anna, related to that. In our buses. Okay, I want you to put yourself in one of those bus seats, and then on the top of the roof, we have magnetized prefixes and different word parts so the kids can create different words in the bus.

Anna: Oh, that's amazing.

Cliff Jones: What we've done with the bus drivers is given them a little packet, a little Ziploc bag, of different words that they can then say over the intercom to see who can make that word when it's safe to do that and everything.

I love that piece of our story because it shows just how comprehensive literacy has become in our district.

Anna: That is very cool. Very cool.

So in closing here, I get a lot of emails from people that say, "Nobody in my school's really on board. I'm kind of a lone wolf. Nobody's interested." Some people even say, "My scores are going up and nobody cares," because they're maybe measuring with a different tool like a benchmark assessment from Fountas and Pinnell or something that doesn't even measure what this person's measuring and they just feel lost, and they're not in the position that you are to make big changes. Do you have any suggestions for the regular teacher who just feels like no one's listening?

Cliff Jones: First, I just want to reach out to them and hug them. This is a big change. This is a very big change, and I can't imagine it doing this in isolation. Here are a couple of things that I would do in that scenario.

Number one, there's a huge community now around the science of reading, and if you're isolated within a building, reaching out to other professionals outside of that. Listen to podcasts. I get on to different blogs, and I write different people.

But I would also say, invite your leadership in. If you've learned a new skill related to the science of reading and you want to put that on display, the way to change things outside your classroom is to convince that building leader/district leader of what you're doing. The only way really a lot of times to do that, Anna, is to have them see it, have them see you just ignite those kids' passions right there in front of you.

This is a wave of what's going on nationally, and really to me, it's how soon are we all going to adopt this and how long are we going to sustain this? Because we've known this since 2000. We've known the science of reading and its five pillars. It's really been the lack of courage with a lot of leaders, me included, to truly unpack this, to do it with fidelity, to get the future results that I know that will take place.

So I share that with a teacher because we've all been isolated at one point, but this is the wave that's here. Showing off what you've learned to different people, being part of a community of learners, and knowing that you're doing what's right for kids. When the research says this is what's right for kids, it's hard to be on the other side of that.

Anna: It also helps to know that in your district, it was just one person who got the ball rolling, and look what's happening now. It just takes one person to talk to the right person to get things started, so that's an encouraging thing too.

Cliff Jones: That is.

Anna: Well, thank you so much for sharing! I know that a lot of people are going to get a lot out of what you had to share today.

Cliff Jones: Thanks, Anna, and I'll leave you with again, the hashtag, #EveryChildReads. It's Fulton's journey related to the science of reading, and I just really encourage people to have a look through it. I'm really proud of where we started and where we are now.

Anna: Thank you.

You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode136. I'll make sure to include the National Reading Panel's report that Cliff talked about that was dropped off at his desk, as well as other resources that I think will help you on your journey.

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Resources related to this episode National Reading Panel report Science of Reading Symposium with Cliff Jones Fulton County School’s science of reading journey on Twitter #EveryChildReads LETRS training

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How to get more students to answer your questions

TRT Podcast #136: How to get more students to answer your questions

Are you tried of asking a question and seeing only a few hands go up? Here are ways to get everyone to respond!

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Let's talk about how to elicit more responses from our students. How can we get them to answer our questions more frequently? When students respond more frequently, they're more attentive and they're on task. They're also practicing the information. They're practicing retrieving it and pulling out of their long-term memory, and that increases the likelihood that they're going to remember it.

In order to do this, the number one thing is we have to kind of break a habit that many of us have had for years, possibly decades, and something we remember from our own school days. That habit is asking a question, waiting for a student to raise their hand, and then calling on that student.

Believe me, I understand what a HARD habit this is to break, but the problem with this is you're just calling on people who know the answer, who are the fastest, who like to participate, and we're not giving everyone a chance.

We can instead take advantage of choral responses. Research shows that asking for unison responses actually increases on-task behavior and academic learning.

To ask for a unison response, what you'll want to do is teach your students a cue that lets them know that you want everyone to answer. You could say something like, "Everyone?" and then you hold out your hand, and your hand held out means you're waiting for that answer.

For example, "How do we spell the sound /ch/ after a long vowel or a consonant? Everyone?"

Then I hold out my hand and they say, "C-H."

"How do we spell the sound /ch/ after a short vowel? Everyone?"

I put my hand out, and they say, "T-C-H."

If you have a problem with someone not participating, you could say, "Let's say that again. Everyone?" and just keep insisting that everyone participate, especially when you know that everyone knows the answer.

Something else you can do is have your students write the answer on an individual dry erase board and then flip it when you want to see the answer. In this way, you can very quickly see who knows the answer and who doesn't.

If getting together a class set of dry erase boards is a hardship for you, you could make homemade dry erase boards by putting a piece of white card stock inside of a clear page protector. Kids can write on those with dry erase markers, and they can erase with an old sock or a rag.

When the answer will be one of several options, or maybe just two options like true or false, you could have your students write the answers on index cards and then hold up the correct answer.

Recently, I gave a four hour presentation on the science of reading to an organization. What I did was go through what the research says, and doesn't say, about different elements of teaching reading. I had the teachers cut apart an index card and write a T on one side and an F on the other. When I read a statement, they had to hold up the T card if they thought it was true and F if they thought it was false.

This worked really well with adults too, and it certainly kept them engaged and required them to think a little bit about what we were doing. And then I could look at them quickly and see where misunderstandings were.

Something else you could do if you're doing yes or no, or true and false, is just have kids put their thumb up by their chest. That way it's not really obvious to all their classmates whether or not they know the answer. If it's true, they put a thumbs up. If it's false, they put a thumb down.

Another way to increase the amount of responses is to have your students work in pairs, and a lot of teachers give each person in the pair a name, like One and Two, Milk and Cookies, or Chips and Salsa. I tend to go with Ones and Twos.

What you would do is they would have a partner that they know is their partner, someone that sits near them probably. After you ask a question, you would say, "Ones, turn to your partner."

When they're working in pairs, you'll want to do a lot of practice with this. You'll want to teach them how to be effective listeners, like looking at their partner, leaning in, whispering the answer.

You can also give them sentence starters. If I've just finished reading a chapter in Charlotte's Web, I could say, "Twos, lean to your partner and finish this sentence. Wilbur was brave when he..." And of course, always require them to start with the sentence starter, "Wilbur was brave when he..." and then they finish it.

You can also use something called think-pair-share, which has been around for a long time. That's when you ask a question, let students think for a minute, and then talk to a partner.

Now this isn't to say that you should never call on individuals, because there are some questions that have multiple answers, or the answer depends on everyone's experience, so it's not going to work to do a choral response, but you can still hold everyone accountable.

One way to do this is to have students get in pairs, have them share their answer with their partner, and then randomly call on a student to tell you what his partner had to say.

I hope you'll start trying choral responses to get your students more actively involved and to answer more questions. It'll take a little bit of practice for you and your students to get used to this new way of answering questions, but I think you'll find that it gets everyone more involved.

You can find today's show notes at themeasuredmom.com/episode135. There I'll share a link to my favorite book about explicit instruction by Anita Archer and Charles Hughes where I learned more about using choral responses. I'll also send you to some videos on the Explicit Instruction website where you can see Dr. Anita Archer in action. She really does a great job of eliciting more responses from students.

We'll talk to you next time!

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Making change at the school level: A conversation with Reena Mathew

TRT Podcast #134: Making change at the school level: A conversation with Reena Mathew

Reena Mathew was the reading interventionist at a balanced literacy school. Learn how she helped her school make the switch to the UFLI phonics program. They’ve had so much success that the program will be implemented across the district!

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Welcome back to our Change Maker Series! We're talking with a bunch of people who have helped bring about change when it comes to implementing the science of reading at different levels.

This week we are looking at the school level. We're talking with Reena Mathew, she's a literacy specialist, and she's going to talk to us about how she helped her school transition from a balanced literacy program to a more structured phonics program, as well as knowledge building in the comprehension area. She is going to talk to us about how they use UFLI, what the lessons look like, and how she helped her teachers become comfortable with this new program.

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Reena!

Reena Mathew: Hi Anna! Thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

Anna Geiger: I am really excited to talk to you today about how some changes have been made in your school and your district, and how you've switched from Lucy Calkin's curriculum and phonics to UFLI.

Can you start out by talking to us about how you got into education, how you became part of the school that you're at, and the position that you have currently?

Reena Mathew: Sure. I've been a reading specialist at my elementary school for the past sixteen years. Prior to that, I worked as a second grade teacher in the Bronx, New York. In my current position, I work with kindergarten through second grade students.

I come from a family of educators. Both my mom and dad were in education. My sister studied biology and has aspirations to be a high school biology teacher, and it was very natural to me as well.

I did a really solid master's program for my reading specialist studies. I will always appreciate the stellar professors and practicum experiences that I've had that prepared me for the job that I do and love today.

When I'm thinking about reading instruction, I'm always inclined to look at things from a K-3 perspective, and also from the point of view of an interventionist for students where reading doesn't come so easily.

When I began working in my district sixteen years ago, my students looked very different and came from very different backgrounds than the kids that I've been working with primarily for the last five or six years. Our population has changed with an increasing number of English learners and students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, so that presents its own challenges.

With that being said, though, our students' reading needs remained fairly consistent. I go back and look at my RTI notes from back then and look at my MTSS notes from today, and I see the same recurring reading difficulties coming up. "Student has trouble decoding words, they have trouble remembering high frequency words from page to page. They can't blend sounds together. They have poor fluency."

These needs are irrespective of the color of their skin, their socioeconomic status, their parents' education level, or the predominant language spoken at home.

The remedy for all these students is systematic and explicit phonics instruction and spelling instruction, with a heavy dose of cumulative review to develop mastery.

Earlier on in my career, my misunderstanding was thinking that only students with reading difficulties or reading disabilities would benefit from this type of instruction. Now I realize ALL students can benefit from this type of explicit systematic instruction because it allows for the prevention of future reading delays, so the kids who coasted through kindergarten, first, and second grade don't fall apart when they get to third grade and beyond, because now they have texts without strong picture support and sentence patterns and they need to decode multisyllable words.

That's why it's so important our Tier 1 reading instruction be so dynamite that it prevents reading failure for the vast majority of students, and we need to be using a reading curriculum that allows for this.

Anna Geiger: Now, previously, your school wasn't using a very strong curriculum. Can you talk to us about what you were using and the challenges you had with that?

Reena Mathew: Yeah. So we have been, and still are somewhat, a balanced literacy school district. About ten years ago we adopted Units of Study, Lucy Calkins' curriculum for reading and writing, and when the phonics curriculum came out, it made perfect sense for our district to use that at the time.

When we first adopted Lucy, we had TC staff developers and literacy coaches, and we were asked to implement the program with as much fidelity as possible. We were to really delve into it, learn as much about it as we could, and help our students with it. We received a lot of coaching from our staff developers and our coaches.

As with anything else, when you start using a program and you really get into the nitty-gritty, you realize what works and what is lacking. Our teachers found that the curriculum makes a lot of assumptions about the skills that our students are coming in with, and it tends to move through the phonics concepts too quickly. There isn't enough of a review and repetition cycle.

We felt that we were teaching a mile wide and an inch deep, and our students were not really mastering the skills that they needed to, and it was not reflecting in their writing. Many of our students were struggling, and COVID just amplified this.

So in order to be responsive to our students, our teachers had been supplementing with multiple resources over the years, and it became very time-consuming and labor-intensive. We were having a difficult time and we were all ready for a change.

Anna Geiger: So with Lucy's phonics program, I've not actually been able to get my eyes on that. Do they have practice material with decodable text or is it more leveled books after you do the phonics lesson?

Reena Mathew: So initially we purchased their leveled libraries. They were all predictable and leveled readers that range the span of the grade levels. More recently they did introduce decodable text, so they have ones that you can print out from the Heinemann website. And now Lucy has her Jump Rope Readers as well, which are decodable readers that conform to the scope and sequence for their phonics lessons, but we did not have that at the time when we initially started using it.

Anna Geiger: Right. It's just so interesting to me that they had a reading program for so many years without a phonics component! It's just very, very interesting for the primary grades.

I talked recently to someone about Lucy Calkin's book "The Art of Teaching Reading," which I used to love when I was a balanced literacy teacher. That book is about 600 pages, and literally six pages have any mention of phonics at all. And it's nothing about explicit teaching of phonics; it's just very implicit. Yeah, very interesting.

So you told me before we went live that during COVID you had some time off of teaching and some time to really dive into the science of reading. Can you talk to us about that?

Reena Mathew: Yes. So when our school shut down for COVID, it happened to coincide with my maternity leave, so I was home probably from mid-March until the end of August, and that's when I really started to delve deeper into the science of reading.

I first listened to Emily Hanford's audio documentary "At a Loss for Words," and I was shocked! I was shocked at all these strategies that we were teaching our students, both me as an interventionist and our classroom teachers as part of balanced literacy and as part of Lucy Calkin's reading and phonics, and I didn't realize how wrong it was.

But then I realized, "Of course. This can't be right!" I was also invited to the "Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College" Facebook page. Once I joined that, I was completely hooked. I would literally be up in the wee hours of the morning nursing my newborn daughter and watching webinars or listening to podcasts. I just couldn't get enough.

So when I returned to school in September, I was so pumped to share the information that I had been learning with my K-2 colleagues and move towards positive changes in reading instruction. But little did I realize that we were in the midst of a pandemic still, and hybrid and remote instruction, and our teachers were just struggling to keep their heads above water. It was such a challenging time for teachers and students alike, and I myself was just getting the hang of what remote and hybrid instruction looked like.

So a few months later when spring rolled around, I thought this is a good time to start sharing some of this information with teachers and changing their perspective. So while in my own small groups I was learning things and kind of implementing changes to my reading instruction, come maybe March and April 2021, I started sharing an article here, a podcast here, some kind of webinar.

Our teachers started taking part in this information and they were becoming very curious and very interested and kind of going through all those emotions that I had, the surprise, the shock, the guilt, the grief, all that mixed bag of emotions.

I was able to do some training for my teachers. We had trained them in a sound wall and the importance of using a sound wall in the classroom. Also we were going over methods of using the Heart Word instruction to teach high frequency words and irregular high frequency words through phonics.

We also made some additional purchases of decodable books. Prior to this, we didn't have a lot of great decodable books, nothing that kids were really interested in reading anyway. So we did some research, and we purchased some high quality decodable readers that were engaging and had a storyline.

We were starting to move in the right direction and it felt good, these positive changes, but it still felt a little bit piecemeal. We had teachers doing ten minutes of Heggerty instruction, and the Lucy phonics, and introducing sounds on a sound wall, and doing the Heart Word method and it felt disjointed, like it wasn't coming together. That was still a struggle for us. We were trying to think what else could we do to help improve this and make our instruction more integrated.

Anna Geiger: Before we get into that about how you went to UFLI and how that worked for you, can you talk to me a little bit about what it was like sharing this information with teachers? It sounds to me like you've had a mostly positive experience, and you can share whatever you're comfortable sharing, but sometimes in schools there's a lot of discomfort. Certainly a lot of teachers don't want to hear that what they've been doing may have some problems, or they may be very committed to balanced literacy. How did you foster this environment of learning and curiosity versus resistance?

Reena Mathew: I think one of the ways I did this was modeling myself as a learner and someone who had misunderstood things in the past, and I personally was going through some of these experiences as well and learning new things that are so different from what I had believed in and what I had been practicing as a teacher. Sharing my own personal experiences was very helpful to the colleagues that I had been working with.

And our teachers were not all convinced at the very beginning. It did take some time, but with every article, with every podcast, with every conversation we had, there were more light bulbs going off. Teachers were beginning to realize and understand, "Hey, you know what? We did the best that we could with the knowledge that we had at the time, but there are better ways to teach our students to read and there are better ways to reach more students."

And so having that open communication, having a safe space to really speak about our learning and speak about things that we did in the past that were probably not the most efficient use of our time or our students' time, and then learning from each other and learning from our mistakes, I think that's what really fostered that change.

That combined with the fact that we have a principal who has always been open and receptive and supportive and has always given us that leeway and latitude to try new things and has trusted us and trusted our work ethic and our commitment to our students. That was also very helpful as well to help us go about making these changes.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, there's just so much that goes into that, and I can see the way you're talking about it that you did this step-by-step. It wasn't just like all of a sudden we're throwing everything out. You introduced small things and it's been a period of transition, but at some point it sounds like most of you were ready to just find something that will basically encompass all these foundational skills pieces that we need. Can you talk to us about how you got into UFLI and how that's been working for you?

Reena Mathew: During the pandemic for our hybrid instruction, the UFLI, University of Florida Literacy Institute Virtual Learning Hub had put out some reading applications and blending boards and a whole bunch of other cool resources for teachers at that time to support their reading instruction. I had been using that for some time and it was such a game changer for my reading instruction.

At one point I learned that UFLI Foundations was coming out with a new foundational skills resource for K-2, and I was very interested. After watching a webinar and taking a look at some of the resources, we shared this information with teachers and there was definitely a curiosity and an interest.

Aside from how cost-effective and user-friendly it seemed, UFLI seemed to integrate all these smart teaching moves in such a thoughtful and intentional way, and it really streamlined our teaching and was helping us to incorporate the best practices in early instruction. I can go into the details of what are the steps in UFLI if you'd like to know.

Anna Geiger: Before you go on, just for those who are listening who are not familiar with UFLI, you can look it up. It's just a spiral-bound curriculum that's actually for K-2, all combined in one spiral-bound resource, and it's very affordable. I think as of this recording, it's less than a hundred dollars for that resource. Then a lot of the supplementary resources are online that you can just download.

Maybe now could you walk us through a UFLI lesson and how it even includes phonemic awareness?

Reena Mathew: Absolutely. So as you said, UFLI Foundations is an explicit and systematic program that builds foundational reading skills. It's designed for core reading instruction in kindergarten through second grade, but can be used for intervention up to any grade. It has easy-to-follow lesson plans that follow an eight-step routine.

In that teacher manual, it houses all the lesson plans and it has steps one through eight. Step one is phonemic awareness. It has step two, which is a visual drill. Step three is an auditory drill. Step four is a blending drill. Step five is new concepts. Step six is the word work. Step seven is teaching irregular words, and it ends with step eight, which is the connected text.

So steps one through four serve as a warmup and review of previously taught concepts, and step five is an explicit introduction to a new concept with guided practice of reading and spelling words. Steps six through eight are opportunities to apply concepts through reading and writing activities at the word and text level.

So step one, which is the phonemic awareness portion, contains phoneme blending and segmentation practice, and it always is a introduction to the phonics concept that's being taught in the lesson. It serves as a nice warmup, it's very connected. The later parts of the lesson focus on accuracy and automaticity of grapheme-phoneme correspondence and decoding automaticity of words with previously learned concepts, as well as explicit introduction and practice in decoding and encoding words with the new concept.

What we really like is that the program also has a built-in gradual release. So, I do, we do, you do. There's a lot of teacher modeling, there's a lot of guided practice for kids where they're doing it with the support of the teacher, and then they get to go and do independent practice as well. Those ample opportunities to respond have been so beneficial for our students, not to mention our teachers as well.

UFLI considers itself to be an educative curriculum, so using the material in the lesson sequence adds to teacher professional knowledge of reading acquisition, linguistic elements, and evidence-based instructional methods. So it's been really helpful for our own personal PD as well.

In addition, UFLI provides PD in the form of webinars and also video lessons of components, which are really helpful to watch and guide you through what the lesson steps look like.

Anna Geiger: It's very interesting that you say that UFLI is intended to be education for teachers. Mostly when I think about reading curriculum, it's this huge manual with so much. It's sensory overload, right? The teachers don't even know, "What exactly should I do? There's no way I can do all of this, so I have to decide. What should I do?" They do that on purpose. They add just everything so that there's all these choices for you, but that can be limiting in many ways.

I like to recommend UFLI because it's just so clear, and like you said, it really includes the elements of explicit instruction. I do, we do, you do. Then there's that constant review built in. The phonemic awareness portion is very connected. It eliminates the need for a ten minute separate phonemic awareness program. It's all included.

Can you maybe ... I'm not sure how much you remember about it because you didn't use it in your intervention, but can you compare it a little bit to the Lucy Calkin's Phonics program? I'm just curious how they're different.

Reena Mathew: With Lucy Phonics, there wasn't such explicit systematic introduction of new concepts. It was more almost as a story. One phonics lesson would be like a ten to twelve page novel that you'd have to read to kind of get to the crux of what we're trying to teach, as opposed to UFLI where you have two pages. In two pages, it has everything that you need laid out very clearly, very, very sequentially.

There was never that connection, I would have to say, between introducing a skill, practicing it, and that interleaving practice, which UFLI has. UFLI concepts, they introduce it in one lesson, but you keep on reviewing those concepts for the next maybe ten or fifteen lessons. You get such sufficient practice, and that's what really helps you to develop that mastery and confidence to be able to apply it to your reading and writing.

Anna Geiger: So are your teachers pretty much exclusively doing this as whole group lessons or are they separating their students based on what they know in phonics and doing these in small groups?

Reena Mathew: So right now our teachers are using this as their Tier 1 phonics curriculum and they're teaching it whole class. Some of our teachers are now dabbling using their small group differentiated time to provide additional support with their students as well with the UFLI.

Anna Geiger: Do they have challenges of students who are far ahead of everyone else and are bored during the lessons, or how does this meet the needs of everybody?

Reena Mathew: So it's interesting you said that! The assessment that we use in our school at the beginning of the year is actually your assessment and the decoding survey that you provided, so we were really able to see what skills our students were at. So even though we were following the UFLI scope and sequence for that particular grade level, our differentiation was based on those assessments results. For our students who were either far ahead or had greater needs, we would then move to the concept that we needed and provide that additional support, whether it's an extension or remediation within the small groups.

Anna Geiger: So everybody has the same core skill and then the teachers do their small groups after depending on needs of their students.

Reena Mathew: Exactly.

Anna Geiger: Before we started recording, you shared how you supported the teachers in learning to use this program. Can you talk about the in-classroom support that you provided to get them comfortable?

Reena Mathew: Sure. So in the beginning of the year, we had met during our grade level meetings, and I shared information about the program, and we watched some of the implementation videos. We took a look at the UFLI toolbox that houses all the lesson slides, decodable texts, roll and read games, and the blending apps and word work apps that we needed. We became familiarized with the elements of the UFLI program and what we need for each lesson.

Then a lot of the support that I provided in the beginning of the year, especially in kindergarten and first grade, was pushing in and modeling the lessons with the teachers. So I would model what a day one lesson looked like, what a day two lesson looked like. Some classes I spent more time in modeling than others, depending on the teacher's comfort level. Then after this modeling, our teachers would teach.

After our teachers taught each of these lesson steps, then they would ask any kind of questions or any clarifying questions. I would provide them with some more feedback and then refer back to those implementation videos that do such a good job of explaining the rationale for each lesson step: what the objective is, what we really want our goal for our students to be able to do. That was really part of the process of coaching our teachers and helping them to implement this program with success.

Anna Geiger: That is wonderful. I have to say that the program itself is very simple and laid out. I am Orton-Gillingham trained, and other things, so looking at it, for me, it looks very basic, but for a teacher who has not been doing explicit instruction, it could be a little overwhelming. So that's amazing, and a good example for others to hear of how you supported your teachers in getting started.

I know that this has gotten the attention of your district. Can you talk to us about that a little bit?

Reena Mathew: Yes. So similarly to our school, the other schools in our district were also feeling the need for moving to something a little bit more systematic and structured in terms of their phonics, and it had gained the attention of our district superintendent and assistant superintendent that our school was using a different phonics program other than Lucy.

Back in the fall, we had some of our district administrators come in and observe a kindergarten, first, and second grade class teaching the UFLI program, and they were really impressed with student engagement, the wonderful routines that the teachers had established, and the overall excitement about phonics that our students demonstrated. If teachers don't get to phonics one day, our students are bummed! They are so excited about it. As soon as I walk into the room, it's like, "Are we doing phonics today, Ms. Mathew?"

So it's one of those things. Our teachers love the simplicity and the routine. Our students love it as well because they feel successful, they know what to expect, and that's been so important.

So when our district administrators came in, they were able to witness the same thing, and recently at our last extended day, we were asked to present UFLI Foundations to the district-wide kindergarten through second grade teachers and talk about the successes that we had.

And now, beginning next year, we're going to be implementing UFLI Foundations district wide in our kindergarten through second grade classrooms.

Anna Geiger: That is wonderful and very exciting!

Maybe we could talk really briefly about, as people would say, the other side of the rope. So you're building your foundational skills, phonemic awareness and phonics, with UFLI. What do you feel your school's doing well with or is working towards when it comes to building comprehension in the primary grades and vocabulary?

Reena Mathew: So one of the things that our school is doing really well with is our read-alouds. Our teachers in kindergarten, first, and second grade do take the time to provide really engaging read-alouds, teaching the vocabulary, allowing for that time for turn and talk, building those oral language skills, and building those opportunities to share information. That's something that's been going really well.

We also do have science and social studies that we try to integrate into our reading and writing whenever possible.

For example, in second grade, our teachers are doing their insect unit right now, which is always very exciting for our students. They incorporate a lot of rich read-alouds, and fictional read-alouds, when it comes to insects, and they spend a lot of time and they stay on topic for a while when they're discussing this science theme.

So that's something that our teachers are doing well with. However, there's always room for improvement, and that's something that we are thinking about. How we can make our language comprehension side a little bit more robust in the same way that we are striving to make our phonics portion robust?

Anna Geiger: Yeah. Well that is definitely the first step is having really quality read-alouds, and like you said, planning in times for students to turn and talk to each other. Also building that knowledge connected to your social studies and science is really wonderful because what we're learning now is that teaching comprehension itself is a little tricky. What you really need to do is build things like inference-making and knowledge itself and background knowledge so that students can comprehend all kinds of text.

Before we wrap up, could you share any particular resources or books or webinars or researchers that you've found really helpful for someone who's maybe just getting started?

Reena Mathew: I think the first thing to do is listen to Emily Hanford's audio documentaries. I believe she has three of them, "At a Loss for Words," "Hard Words," and "Sold a Story." I think that's a really good way to kind of get into all of this to begin with.

Anna, I really loved your webinar that you had presented on the science of reading, an intro to the science of reading. I believe last year I listened to that, that was very helpful.

In terms of researchers, I really love Wiley Blevins. He does some really great work with phonics and decodable texts. I have listened to a number of his webinars and have found him to be really helpful. It's really easy to understand and take actual changes that we can go and implement in the classroom right away.

I love listening to Margaret Goldberg speak. She's a literacy coach and a first grade teacher. She also speaks a lot from experience and talks about the way that she moved from a balanced literacy mindset to more science of reading and some of the practical changes that she's made, both in working with students, but also leading change among schools with the teachers as well.

Those are definitely some key people that I recommend to start with.

Anna Geiger: Thank you. I will definitely add all these things to the show notes.

Thanks so much for sharing your experience with us! Your school is very blessed to have you.

Reena Mathew: Thank you so much, Anna! It was wonderful speaking to you. I appreciate everything that you do as well. I have been using your resources for years on end and I've watched your webinars and listened to your podcast, and I'm always learning something new from you, so I appreciate you and everything that you do. Thank you.

Anna Geiger: Thank you so much!

You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode134. Join us next week for another Change Maker episode, but also come back and see us on Wednesday. I'm going to be sharing a series of short solo episodes during this period so that you can get the big picture on Mondays and more specific ways to apply the science of reading on Wednesdays. Talk to you then!

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Resources mentioned in this episode UFLI phonics program Facebook group: The Science of Reading – What I Should Have Learned in College Author Wiley Blevins Videos with Margaret Goldberg: How Do We (Confidently) Talk the Talk, How Children Learn to Read, Early Literacy Margaret Goldberg’s blog, The Right to Read Project

Looking for structured literacy resources?

Our membership has hundreds of printables for teaching phonics – not to mention decodable passages, complex texts, poems, plays, and more!

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The post Making change at the school level: A conversation with Reena Mathew appeared first on The Measured Mom.

What is cognitive load, and why does it matter?

TRT Podcast #133: What is cognitive load, and why does it matter?

Learn what cognitive load has to do with teaching reading, and discover specific things you can do to avoid overwhelming your students’ working memories.

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Let's talk cognitive load. What's that all about? We hear a lot about it in the science of reading circles, but what is it, why does it matter, and what does it have to do with teaching reading?

John Sweller published his cognitive load theory in 1988, and according to his theory, teachers should be aware of the limits of working memory because if we overwhelm it, our teaching will be less effective.

So what is working memory? Well, there's long-term memory and there's working memory.

Long-term memory holds the information you've learned and stored. It's really interesting to note that there are no limits to long-term memory. There's a lot in there that you can pull out. You know when somebody asks you a question and you say, "Well, hang on. Let me think about it for a minute"? You're working to get it out of your long-term memory.

Working memory is very different. It's a temporary holding place. It's the small amount of information that you can hold in your mind while you're working through a problem. The authors of a book called "Uncommon Sense Teaching" compare working memory to an octopus juggling a set of balls, and the average person can only juggle about four thoughts at a time before the ideas begin to slip.

It makes me think about when I go to the grocery store and have my list of items I'm going to get, and I'm walking into the store and suddenly I remember an extra item. I wanted to get that taco seasoning. Okay, don't forget, taco seasoning, taco seasoning, taco seasoning. Oh, look, there's something on sale that I want to buy. Oh, now I have to decide between these different types of bread rolls for lunch, and then all of a sudden the thought of taco seasoning falls out of my working memory. And often I don't remember it again until I'm walking out of the store with a full cart of groceries headed to my car.

Your students use working memory when they follow a multi-step problem or multi-step directions, when they remember the sounds in a word as they sound it out, or remember what they just read as they make sense of a paragraph.

Just like us, students have limited working memory, and that's why they'll forget what you've asked them to do if you give them too many steps at once. Just like adults, students have different amounts of working memory, so some can hold maybe just three items. Others could maybe hold six or more.

The reason why this is important for teaching reading is there are some things that we teach our students that may be unnecessary, and they may increase cognitive load by filling up their working memory, and then that makes it difficult for them to focus on what really matters.

Some people do not appreciate the very specific step-by-step method that many Orton-Gillingham programs share for dividing words into syllables. There's a lot to keep in mind.

First, you have to find and label the vowels. Then you look between the vowels and you find and label the consonants. Then you remember your syllable division strategies and divide the word appropriately. Then you look at a part of the word and decide what syllable type it is. Some children can do this, some children are successful with this, but for others, it's a lot to keep in their working memory.

So the question is, is this really worth all that effort? Are there different ways that we could teach kids to divide words into syllables that don't require such a strain on the working memory?

I've also heard concerns from people related to teaching all the words connected to a sound wall.

Some teachers might want to teach the words "fricative" or "affricate" or "liquid," all those words that have to do with the types of phonemes, but others will say that's really putting a strain on your students' working memory. That it's increasing their cognitive load, and that's just not necessary.

There are two kinds of cognitive load. There's intrinsic, which refers to the difficulty of the task when compared to the background knowledge of the learner, and then there's extrinsic cognitive load, and that's anything that makes it harder to learn.

Our goal is to decrease that extrinsic cognitive load as much as possible. If we give too many steps at once or we overcomplicate our lessons, then we increase the extrinsic cognitive load and we make it harder for our students to learn.

A really good way to decrease that extrinsic cognitive load is to teach with explicit instruction. Explicit instruction refers to how lessons are designed and how teachers deliver those lessons. It's being very straightforward and leaving nothing to chance. Using routines is a really great part of explicit instruction that can reduce cognitive load because when the students know that every time we do this a certain way, then that routine is something they know, and their working memory can be used to learn the new skill or the new concept.

When you have blending routines, that can decrease extrinsic cognitive load. When you have routines for phoneme grapheme mapping, that can decrease extrinsic cognitive load.

It's also important to note that information in students' long-term memory can help them process new information.

Maybe you've heard of that baseball study by Recht and Leslie. In that study, they had a group of middle schoolers read an article about a baseball game. After reading it, they had them each reenact the baseball game using figures and talking about what happened. The kids who were strong readers but had a weak understanding of baseball did not do as well as the kids who would typically not be classified as strong readers, but did understand baseball.

You see, the kids who had this understanding of baseball didn't have to use up their working memory to keep track of how baseball works. They knew that. They were using that from their long-term memory. In their working memory, they could just keep track of the events of this particular game.

So building background knowledge as well as explicit instruction are both ways to decrease extrinsic load and really help kids learn the new information and move it into their long-term memory.

In today's show notes, I'll link to some books about cognitive load theory, as well as some articles you might find useful. You can find that at themeasuredmom.com/episode133. Talk to you next time!

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Cognitive load theory resources Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory in Action , by Oliver Lovell Cognitive Load Theory: A Handbook for Teachers , by Steve Garnett Cognitive Load Theory and Reading Instruction (blog post by Phonics Hero) Cognitive Load Theory: Research That Teachers Really Need to Understand (from the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation) Cognitive Load Theory in Practice (from the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation)

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The post What is cognitive load, and why does it matter? appeared first on The Measured Mom.

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

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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.