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How to handle common phonics issues in first grade: A conversation with Jessica Farmer

TRT Podcast#125: How to handle common phonics issues in first grade: A conversation with Jessica Farmer

What do you do when kids start the year not knowing all their letters and sounds? What about when you have students who know their sounds but can’t blend? And how do you teach students of all different levels in one classroom? You’ll love this advice from Jessica Farmer!

Listen to the episode here
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Hello, Anna Geiger here. Welcome to Triple R Teaching. This is part of our Summer Old And New series. Last week we listened to an old interview from Jessica Farmer, an experienced first grade teacher who also has a presence on TikTok and Instagram with loads of helpful resources for teachers.

This week I have a brand new interview with Jessica. She has recently left the classroom to serve teachers, and you'll be able to find out how you can learn from her in some webinars and other areas, and also how you can get on her email list so you can get loads of freebies. She's here to help, and I really like that in today's episode she shares some troubleshooting tips for common issues we face when teaching primary grade phonics. Here we go!

Anna Geiger: Welcome back, Jessica!

Jessica Farmer: Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited and really thrilled to be chatting with your audience again today.

Anna Geiger: Today we're going to tackle some common issues that first grade teachers have when teaching reading.

So you taught first grade for thirteen years. You have a lot of experience, shared a lot on social media and other places, and I know that you can give some really good solutions to our teachers.

One problem that some teachers have is that the year starts and their kids are all over the map, and they have some kids who actually still are struggling with letter names and sounds. What do you do as a first grade teacher when you start the year with someone who's that far behind?

Jessica Farmer: First grade is such a foundation-building grade that you really have to start back at the beginning with everybody. Even if you have kids who are solid with their letter names and sounds, reviewing all of that at the beginning is so important.

You might think, "Oh no, most of them know it. I'll skip over that and I'm going to jump into blending words right away," but really in those first couple of weeks while you're doing routines and procedures, review those alphabet concepts again. Go through A through Z again, one letter a day, and make sure kids really are solid with knowing the name, the sound, they can recognize it, and they can write it. Go through the letter formation. Everything. Because you might be surprised, even kids who maybe perform well on an assessment are not fluent even if you think they might be.

I think that constant review right at the beginning of the school year and really getting the alphabet down pat is super important.

Anna Geiger: What about when you have kids... Like you said, you're starting to teach blending, and you have some kids who are getting it right away or maybe already got it in kindergarten, and then you have some, they'll say the three sounds and then they'll come up with a completely different word.

Jessica Farmer: Yeah, I talk about this a lot on my page. It's videos that I do all the time because blending questions come up often. I always share about three different versions of blending.

You have that typical blending where you're segmenting, and then you're blending together, and some kids do great with that. They have great phonemic awareness, but other kids do not.

First of all, you can pull away the letters and just be working on phonemic awareness only, maybe with some manipulatives, and dropping back to two sounds, seeing if they can put TWO sounds together at first. If they start to get that and you're ready to start putting some letters with it, then doing that continuous blending where you're really stretching and holding, and it is easier to do those two-sound words like, "at," because you can hold the vowel sounds long, so you can go, "aaaaaaaaaaat. Say it fast, at." And just really letting them know that you can really say those sounds really long and stretch them out and then push them together. You don't have to say them separated when you're learning how to blend.

We want to segment when we're learning how to spell, but I think a lot of teachers think they have to segment before you blend and you don't have to.

Then if that doesn't work, then I always go to successive blending where you show one letter and do one sound at a time. I even created these blending pyramids that worked really well for my kids and I have them in my TPT store because I love them so much. It just really breaks it down and scaffolds it for kids that just maybe don't have that working memory that other students have, and they're struggling to hold on to all those sounds at once. So breaking it down one sound at a time can be really helpful.

So those are strategies that work, and the last step is to use a whisper phone or some kind of listening device, because maybe they're just not really paying attention to those sounds. We know there's a lot going on in the classroom, and sometimes when they're at the small group table, they want to know what their friends are doing over here at the center. So using a whisper phone and getting them to really listen into those sounds can be helpful to isolate just that sound. "Do you hear the sound you're making? Let's put those sounds together." I've seen great success with whisper phones during intervention groups.

Anna Geiger: That's really interesting. I've never thought about that as using them for helping them with blending. I just usually think about it as using it while they're reading so they're not distracted, but that's a great idea.

Jessica Farmer: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Have you ever used any physical things to help them when they're first learning to blend, like blocks or something, before you use letters? Just that visual of pushing things together. Have you found that to be useful at all?

Jessica Farmer: Oh yeah. A lot of your math manipulatives are great. Take out your math kit and use those math manipulatives, because having something physical to put together to give them that concept of what we're doing. Sometimes thinking about a sound is very abstract, so giving them something physical to move and work with is great.

Even if you don't use a manipulative, even just having a hand motion is really great. So if you're blending and you're using finger stretching to count the sounds, and then maybe close your hand to make it look like you're putting them together, or counting on your fingers, just different hand motions.

I know programs like Heggerty and Open Court, they have hand motions to go with the different sounds or the different actions, but those hand motions can be really great reminders. Even just taking their two hands and pushing them together shows that, yeah, we're going to smush these sounds together to make a word.

I always like to move my hand across fast to show we're going to say it quick. So I know that people can't see me right now, but I'm taking my hand and I'm just running it as if I'm racing it along the bottom of the word.

And also even using cars, I've seen that as a really great tool. Rush the car under the bottom so that you can see we're going to say it fast now.

Sometimes you just have to tell them, "You just need to say it fast," and that's enough to make it click, because they've heard so many people segmenting the sounds that maybe they don't realize they're supposed to put them together. So sometimes it's just saying, "Say it fast," and they're like, "Oh!" The light bulb went on and they say it fast. It can be as simple as that.

Anna Geiger: What about when you've got kids who can blend them, but every time they get to a word, they stop and segment it first? They say, "/b/-/��/-/t/, bat," instead of just, "bat." Have you found anything that helps them push to the next level? Is it just more an issue of practice? How do they get to that?

Jessica Farmer: I think the amount of practice kids need, we don't realize it as adults, but it takes SO many repetitions, especially for a beginning reader. Anytime you learn to do something new - most of us didn't hop on a bike and just ride it right away. We fell off several times.

There's this really great article by Spelfabet that talks about the sweaty sounding-out phase.

Anna Geiger: I'll have to check that out.

Jessica Farmer: Yeah, they call it the sweaty sounding-out phase, and that your brain is like a muscle and you're working that muscle and that's the really hard work that's happening, but your brain is making those connections.

We know that the reading brain has to be built. Your brain isn't set to read automatically, and so you have to build those connections. That sweaty sounding-out phase, that's what they're doing. They're working really hard, but they're building those connections and it will pay off.

So I think in the beginning, don't panic if they're sounding out words on every single page, even if they've seen them before, if they've had enough practice.

And you're also working on connecting to meaning, because that's really important for orthographic mapping as well. Do they know what the book is even about? Are you reading about baseball and they're talking about the bat, or are you reading about an animal that's a bat?

And talking about vocabulary with students. A lot of those CVC words sometimes are challenging vocabulary - words like "rod." They might not know what a rod is, and you're reading a book about fishing or something, and they have no experience with that, no background knowledge.

I think recently in a video I said, "Phonics cannot just be decoding. You have to attach meaning to it as well, or it's not going to stick." I think that's another key point. What is this story about and what is a bat? Are we talking about a baseball bat? Are we talking about an animal bat? And maybe just going through the vocabulary of the story because maybe they just don't understand what's happening, and sometimes decodable books can be a little abstract. I think definitely connecting back to meaning as often as you can will help students become more fluent.

Anna Geiger: That's wonderful. I appreciate that. Now we're going to talk a little bit about... This is our last question, but it's kind of a deep one, and that is how do you manage what every first grade classroom has, which is a huge variety of ability levels?

So I've said this many times, but when I started my first year of first grade, I had a little girl who didn't know all her letters, and I had two boys who were reading at a fourth grade level and then everything in between. I had a phonics program that year that I was expected to teach whole-class. It really didn't go very well. I didn't know how to differentiate that program, and it really turned me off to basically structured phonics in general, unfortunately.

If you could talk to us about how to manage all those different levels, in your opinion, because I know there's a lot of opinions about this, maybe not as much research, but in your opinion, what's a good balance between whole group and small group and how do you tackle that?

Jessica Farmer: Yeah. My first year teaching a very structured phonics program, luckily it started with that really strong review at the beginning, so we could try to close some of those alphabet gaps right at the beginning, right at the start.

I love a quote by Anita Archer where she says, "Everyone does everything."

Your phonics block should kind of be a noisy time in your classroom. So if it's a quiet time in your classroom, that could be why it's not working so well, because kids need to hear what's going on.

When we're all blending words on the board, even those students who don't have it yet, they're hearing other kids do it, and they're copying them and they're mimicking them.

I also find that placing them near you, giving them maybe an alphabet arc in front of them while you're doing some of the blending so that they have something in front of them to reference. Or maybe you have a sound chart that you use as part of your program or a mini sound wall or something that you can give them access to so that they have a reference to go back to. "Oh, that sound is /��/, that sound is /��/." Something that they can reference.

Going over those short vowel sounds with students. Those tend to be very tricky for students who are struggling. So making sure in small group we're teaching that to mastery. Mastering those short vowels, which is something that I learned when I got my OG training through IMSE doing the vowel intensive. That is so helpful for students and listening for that vowel sound.

I think in whole group, just making sure you're there to support those students who are still struggling, and then noticing where they need to fill in those gaps and pulling them for small groups.

Don't give up on your phonics program even if you have some students who seem to be struggling, just make sure that they are participating and trying to do the routines with the class and then scaffolding as needed.

I try in a lot of the resources that I make to show how to scaffold. So if you're doing dictation, instead of just a blank piece of paper that the other kids are using, you have a paper that has the alphabet at the top of it for those students that need to reference those letters. Instead of dictating three-sound words to those students, you're dictating two-sound words to those students.

So that's kind of where you have to think about how you're going to differentiate. Can you do that whole group or do you have to do that in your small group? It really just depends on how large those gaps are.

Again, if they don't have those basic alphabet skills like we talked about at the beginning, that is really where you need to spend your time reviewing daily, going over the alphabet daily. I know in the beginning of first grade, I would play an alphabet song and a letter sound song every single day. Even if all my students didn't need it, we did it every single day, that repetition. And by three weeks in, no one was missing a letter sound. Not a single kid.

Even those kids who came in struggling, because they know the routine, they know the drill, they know what's going to happen, and there's nothing wrong with repetition. They love the song and kids thrive on routine. You don't have to do some fancy activity every single moment of the day. Kids thrive on routine.

So if you are looking at Instagram and you're thinking, "Oh my goodness, I see all these beautiful activities and I'm not doing that every single day." Or if you ARE trying to do that every single day and you're burning yourself out from trying to do that, think simple. It can be very simple. It does not have to be complicated and simple works better.

So that's my advice. Keep it simple. Keep going because especially your first year with a detailed phonics program, you yourself are going to learn a lot and maybe struggle a little bit if you didn't have that type of training in school. A lot of us had whole language or balanced literacy when we were in school. We didn't learn that way. So give yourself some grace, but keep at it. Don't give up. Keep trying.

Anna Geiger: What about the kids who are far ahead of the phonics skill that you're teaching? How do you handle that?

Jessica Farmer: Yeah, so don't throw away all your leveled readers just because someone said leveled readers are bad. They're not bad. The letter on it doesn't really mean much. Obviously it's going to have more text on the page as you get to those higher letters, but you could sort them by topic and let those students think about what they want to learn about.

Maybe they want to learn about ocean animals, and you know that they're fluent enough to read this leveled reader, and you can pull out some vocabulary that you can work on together. Look at some of the phonics skills that are more complex in that leveled reader. Pull those words out and teach them a concept from that. Maybe you're working on suffixes with that group because they're sure to be in a level J in first grade, a lot of words with suffixes. So you can pull a phonics concept out of that leveled reader. As long as those students are pretty fluent, I'm comfortable with them reading a leveled text or even a passage.

You can look on readworks.org. It's free for teachers, and you can look up any topic. They have fiction and nonfiction. Ask them what they want to learn about, and that will also keep them more interested because they're playing a role in what they're learning about. But again, you can choose what you want to target with that text. So keep all your books and use them to your advantage.

Anna Geiger: Reviewing what you've talked about, so you said to start the year with the review of letters and sounds, even if that's songs or whatever, but just to remind everybody what those are, and you've found that that's closed the gaps pretty quickly for most kids.

Then in your whole group phonics lessons, you're teaching the same grade level skill to everybody, but you're scaffolding for the kids who are struggling in different ways. And as a reminder, scaffolds are providing support until you can take that support away. Some need a lot, some need just a little, but different things like giving them resources on their desk to refer to, having them close to you, giving them a simpler task.

Then the small groups would be flexible groups that you would form based on what kids need to know after. The kids who are really struggling, probably you meet with them quite often, I'm guessing.

Jessica Farmer: Oh yeah.

Anna Geiger: Reviewing the skills that you're teaching in the whole group or maybe going backwards a little bit and reviewing some things they don't have strong, like perhaps vowel sounds.

Then with the kids who are more advanced, am I correct that you wouldn't meet with them as often?

Jessica Farmer: Yeah, I think they are a lot more capable. When you have that small group time and you have centers set up, those students are capable of practicing the skills that they already have correctly, and you don't really have to worry too much about them practicing the skills at the center incorrectly.

The students that you are working with are the ones that need that teacher attention time. Your students that are at those centers are capable of practicing, doing that repetition, and maybe even going deeper into some of the skills that you've already taught in whole group.

I definitely think being mindful about how your centers are set up so that our students can be successful at them, and you might have to differentiate your centers for your different groups.

But yes, I would not meet with my students that are progressing as much as my students that are struggling. It doesn't mean I don't meet with them. We definitely touch base. We definitely will meet for a small group to try to extend their learning.

But yeah, you definitely want to do your best to close those gaps because time with the teacher is precious, and we know that there are only a certain number of minutes in the day.

Anna Geiger: Wonderful! Well I'm going to be sure to link to your social media accounts and also a place where people can join your email list, which just before this call, you told me was new, which is wonderful.

Jessica Farmer: Yes!

Anna Geiger: And I'll link to your TPT store and anywhere else that people can learn from you. I know you've been giving a lot of webinars and workshops for different companies and things.

Jessica Farmer: Yeah. I've been doing Top 10 Tips with the creators of Sounder & Friends. We just completed our April event, but the recording should be for sale for a little while, and it's going to be available until June 30th. We talked about the top ten tips for linking phonemic awareness to phonics instruction to really improve that automatic word recognition. That's something like we were talking about where the student is seeing the same word over and over again and having to continually blend that word, you definitely want to sign up for that webinar. The handout is over 200 pages. We always go wild and crazy with our handouts, with tons of resources, and it's great for our grades K to 2. We'll continue to do those Top 10 Tips. We have some exciting things coming up, so make sure you follow Sounder & Friends as well as my page so that you always know.

And sign up for the email list please because I'm sending exclusive freebies out to people who are just on my email list, and I'm planning some giveaways soon with some decodable readers. Really exciting things are coming up, so be sure to sign up for my email list.

Anna Geiger: Definitely. We'll be sure to share the link in the show notes. Thanks so much for joining us again, Jessica.

Jessica Farmer: You're welcome! Thanks for having me.

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode125. Talk to you next time!

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The post How to handle common phonics issues in first grade: A conversation with Jessica Farmer appeared first on The Measured Mom.

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

TRT Podcast#125: How to handle common phonics issues in first grade: A conversation with Jessica Farmer

What do you do when kids start the year not knowing all their letters and sounds? What about when you have students who know their sounds but can’t blend? And how do you teach students of all different levels in one classroom? You’ll love this advice from Jessica Farmer!

Listen to the episode here
��

Full episode transcript





Transcript




Email



Download



New Tab

Hello, Anna Geiger here. Welcome to Triple R Teaching. This is part of our Summer Old And New series. Last week we listened to an old interview from Jessica Farmer, an experienced first grade teacher who also has a presence on TikTok and Instagram with loads of helpful resources for teachers.

This week I have a brand new interview with Jessica. She has recently left the classroom to serve teachers, and you'll be able to find out how you can learn from her in some webinars and other areas, and also how you can get on her email list so you can get loads of freebies. She's here to help, and I really like that in today's episode she shares some troubleshooting tips for common issues we face when teaching primary grade phonics. Here we go!

Anna Geiger: Welcome back, Jessica!

Jessica Farmer: Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited and really thrilled to be chatting with your audience again today.

Anna Geiger: Today we're going to tackle some common issues that first grade teachers have when teaching reading.

So you taught first grade for thirteen years. You have a lot of experience, shared a lot on social media and other places, and I know that you can give some really good solutions to our teachers.

One problem that some teachers have is that the year starts and their kids are all over the map, and they have some kids who actually still are struggling with letter names and sounds. What do you do as a first grade teacher when you start the year with someone who's that far behind?

Jessica Farmer: First grade is such a foundation-building grade that you really have to start back at the beginning with everybody. Even if you have kids who are solid with their letter names and sounds, reviewing all of that at the beginning is so important.

You might think, "Oh no, most of them know it. I'll skip over that and I'm going to jump into blending words right away," but really in those first couple of weeks while you're doing routines and procedures, review those alphabet concepts again. Go through A through Z again, one letter a day, and make sure kids really are solid with knowing the name, the sound, they can recognize it, and they can write it. Go through the letter formation. Everything. Because you might be surprised, even kids who maybe perform well on an assessment are not fluent even if you think they might be.

I think that constant review right at the beginning of the school year and really getting the alphabet down pat is super important.

Anna Geiger: What about when you have kids... Like you said, you're starting to teach blending, and you have some kids who are getting it right away or maybe already got it in kindergarten, and then you have some, they'll say the three sounds and then they'll come up with a completely different word.

Jessica Farmer: Yeah, I talk about this a lot on my page. It's videos that I do all the time because blending questions come up often. I always share about three different versions of blending.

You have that typical blending where you're segmenting, and then you're blending together, and some kids do great with that. They have great phonemic awareness, but other kids do not.

First of all, you can pull away the letters and just be working on phonemic awareness only, maybe with some manipulatives, and dropping back to two sounds, seeing if they can put TWO sounds together at first. If they start to get that and you're ready to start putting some letters with it, then doing that continuous blending where you're really stretching and holding, and it is easier to do those two-sound words like, "at," because you can hold the vowel sounds long, so you can go, "aaaaaaaaaaat. Say it fast, at." And just really letting them know that you can really say those sounds really long and stretch them out and then push them together. You don't have to say them separated when you're learning how to blend.

We want to segment when we're learning how to spell, but I think a lot of teachers think they have to segment before you blend and you don't have to.

Then if that doesn't work, then I always go to successive blending where you show one letter and do one sound at a time. I even created these blending pyramids that worked really well for my kids and I have them in my TPT store because I love them so much. It just really breaks it down and scaffolds it for kids that just maybe don't have that working memory that other students have, and they're struggling to hold on to all those sounds at once. So breaking it down one sound at a time can be really helpful.

So those are strategies that work, and the last step is to use a whisper phone or some kind of listening device, because maybe they're just not really paying attention to those sounds. We know there's a lot going on in the classroom, and sometimes when they're at the small group table, they want to know what their friends are doing over here at the center. So using a whisper phone and getting them to really listen into those sounds can be helpful to isolate just that sound. "Do you hear the sound you're making? Let's put those sounds together." I've seen great success with whisper phones during intervention groups.

Anna Geiger: That's really interesting. I've never thought about that as using them for helping them with blending. I just usually think about it as using it while they're reading so they're not distracted, but that's a great idea.

Jessica Farmer: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Have you ever used any physical things to help them when they're first learning to blend, like blocks or something, before you use letters? Just that visual of pushing things together. Have you found that to be useful at all?

Jessica Farmer: Oh yeah. A lot of your math manipulatives are great. Take out your math kit and use those math manipulatives, because having something physical to put together to give them that concept of what we're doing. Sometimes thinking about a sound is very abstract, so giving them something physical to move and work with is great.

Even if you don't use a manipulative, even just having a hand motion is really great. So if you're blending and you're using finger stretching to count the sounds, and then maybe close your hand to make it look like you're putting them together, or counting on your fingers, just different hand motions.

I know programs like Heggerty and Open Court, they have hand motions to go with the different sounds or the different actions, but those hand motions can be really great reminders. Even just taking their two hands and pushing them together shows that, yeah, we're going to smush these sounds together to make a word.

I always like to move my hand across fast to show we're going to say it quick. So I know that people can't see me right now, but I'm taking my hand and I'm just running it as if I'm racing it along the bottom of the word.

And also even using cars, I've seen that as a really great tool. Rush the car under the bottom so that you can see we're going to say it fast now.

Sometimes you just have to tell them, "You just need to say it fast," and that's enough to make it click, because they've heard so many people segmenting the sounds that maybe they don't realize they're supposed to put them together. So sometimes it's just saying, "Say it fast," and they're like, "Oh!" The light bulb went on and they say it fast. It can be as simple as that.

Anna Geiger: What about when you've got kids who can blend them, but every time they get to a word, they stop and segment it first? They say, "/b/-/��/-/t/, bat," instead of just, "bat." Have you found anything that helps them push to the next level? Is it just more an issue of practice? How do they get to that?

Jessica Farmer: I think the amount of practice kids need, we don't realize it as adults, but it takes SO many repetitions, especially for a beginning reader. Anytime you learn to do something new - most of us didn't hop on a bike and just ride it right away. We fell off several times.

There's this really great article by Spelfabet that talks about the sweaty sounding-out phase.

Anna Geiger: I'll have to check that out.

Jessica Farmer: Yeah, they call it the sweaty sounding-out phase, and that your brain is like a muscle and you're working that muscle and that's the really hard work that's happening, but your brain is making those connections.

We know that the reading brain has to be built. Your brain isn't set to read automatically, and so you have to build those connections. That sweaty sounding-out phase, that's what they're doing. They're working really hard, but they're building those connections and it will pay off.

So I think in the beginning, don't panic if they're sounding out words on every single page, even if they've seen them before, if they've had enough practice.

And you're also working on connecting to meaning, because that's really important for orthographic mapping as well. Do they know what the book is even about? Are you reading about baseball and they're talking about the bat, or are you reading about an animal that's a bat?

And talking about vocabulary with students. A lot of those CVC words sometimes are challenging vocabulary - words like "rod." They might not know what a rod is, and you're reading a book about fishing or something, and they have no experience with that, no background knowledge.

I think recently in a video I said, "Phonics cannot just be decoding. You have to attach meaning to it as well, or it's not going to stick." I think that's another key point. What is this story about and what is a bat? Are we talking about a baseball bat? Are we talking about an animal bat? And maybe just going through the vocabulary of the story because maybe they just don't understand what's happening, and sometimes decodable books can be a little abstract. I think definitely connecting back to meaning as often as you can will help students become more fluent.

Anna Geiger: That's wonderful. I appreciate that. Now we're going to talk a little bit about... This is our last question, but it's kind of a deep one, and that is how do you manage what every first grade classroom has, which is a huge variety of ability levels?

So I've said this many times, but when I started my first year of first grade, I had a little girl who didn't know all her letters, and I had two boys who were reading at a fourth grade level and then everything in between. I had a phonics program that year that I was expected to teach whole-class. It really didn't go very well. I didn't know how to differentiate that program, and it really turned me off to basically structured phonics in general, unfortunately.

If you could talk to us about how to manage all those different levels, in your opinion, because I know there's a lot of opinions about this, maybe not as much research, but in your opinion, what's a good balance between whole group and small group and how do you tackle that?

Jessica Farmer: Yeah. My first year teaching a very structured phonics program, luckily it started with that really strong review at the beginning, so we could try to close some of those alphabet gaps right at the beginning, right at the start.

I love a quote by Anita Archer where she says, "Everyone does everything."

Your phonics block should kind of be a noisy time in your classroom. So if it's a quiet time in your classroom, that could be why it's not working so well, because kids need to hear what's going on.

When we're all blending words on the board, even those students who don't have it yet, they're hearing other kids do it, and they're copying them and they're mimicking them.

I also find that placing them near you, giving them maybe an alphabet arc in front of them while you're doing some of the blending so that they have something in front of them to reference. Or maybe you have a sound chart that you use as part of your program or a mini sound wall or something that you can give them access to so that they have a reference to go back to. "Oh, that sound is /��/, that sound is /��/." Something that they can reference.

Going over those short vowel sounds with students. Those tend to be very tricky for students who are struggling. So making sure in small group we're teaching that to mastery. Mastering those short vowels, which is something that I learned when I got my OG training through IMSE doing the vowel intensive. That is so helpful for students and listening for that vowel sound.

I think in whole group, just making sure you're there to support those students who are still struggling, and then noticing where they need to fill in those gaps and pulling them for small groups.

Don't give up on your phonics program even if you have some students who seem to be struggling, just make sure that they are participating and trying to do the routines with the class and then scaffolding as needed.

I try in a lot of the resources that I make to show how to scaffold. So if you're doing dictation, instead of just a blank piece of paper that the other kids are using, you have a paper that has the alphabet at the top of it for those students that need to reference those letters. Instead of dictating three-sound words to those students, you're dictating two-sound words to those students.

So that's kind of where you have to think about how you're going to differentiate. Can you do that whole group or do you have to do that in your small group? It really just depends on how large those gaps are.

Again, if they don't have those basic alphabet skills like we talked about at the beginning, that is really where you need to spend your time reviewing daily, going over the alphabet daily. I know in the beginning of first grade, I would play an alphabet song and a letter sound song every single day. Even if all my students didn't need it, we did it every single day, that repetition. And by three weeks in, no one was missing a letter sound. Not a single kid.

Even those kids who came in struggling, because they know the routine, they know the drill, they know what's going to happen, and there's nothing wrong with repetition. They love the song and kids thrive on routine. You don't have to do some fancy activity every single moment of the day. Kids thrive on routine.

So if you are looking at Instagram and you're thinking, "Oh my goodness, I see all these beautiful activities and I'm not doing that every single day." Or if you ARE trying to do that every single day and you're burning yourself out from trying to do that, think simple. It can be very simple. It does not have to be complicated and simple works better.

So that's my advice. Keep it simple. Keep going because especially your first year with a detailed phonics program, you yourself are going to learn a lot and maybe struggle a little bit if you didn't have that type of training in school. A lot of us had whole language or balanced literacy when we were in school. We didn't learn that way. So give yourself some grace, but keep at it. Don't give up. Keep trying.

Anna Geiger: What about the kids who are far ahead of the phonics skill that you're teaching? How do you handle that?

Jessica Farmer: Yeah, so don't throw away all your leveled readers just because someone said leveled readers are bad. They're not bad. The letter on it doesn't really mean much. Obviously it's going to have more text on the page as you get to those higher letters, but you could sort them by topic and let those students think about what they want to learn about.

Maybe they want to learn about ocean animals, and you know that they're fluent enough to read this leveled reader, and you can pull out some vocabulary that you can work on together. Look at some of the phonics skills that are more complex in that leveled reader. Pull those words out and teach them a concept from that. Maybe you're working on suffixes with that group because they're sure to be in a level J in first grade, a lot of words with suffixes. So you can pull a phonics concept out of that leveled reader. As long as those students are pretty fluent, I'm comfortable with them reading a leveled text or even a passage.

You can look on readworks.org. It's free for teachers, and you can look up any topic. They have fiction and nonfiction. Ask them what they want to learn about, and that will also keep them more interested because they're playing a role in what they're learning about. But again, you can choose what you want to target with that text. So keep all your books and use them to your advantage.

Anna Geiger: Reviewing what you've talked about, so you said to start the year with the review of letters and sounds, even if that's songs or whatever, but just to remind everybody what those are, and you've found that that's closed the gaps pretty quickly for most kids.

Then in your whole group phonics lessons, you're teaching the same grade level skill to everybody, but you're scaffolding for the kids who are struggling in different ways. And as a reminder, scaffolds are providing support until you can take that support away. Some need a lot, some need just a little, but different things like giving them resources on their desk to refer to, having them close to you, giving them a simpler task.

Then the small groups would be flexible groups that you would form based on what kids need to know after. The kids who are really struggling, probably you meet with them quite often, I'm guessing.

Jessica Farmer: Oh yeah.

Anna Geiger: Reviewing the skills that you're teaching in the whole group or maybe going backwards a little bit and reviewing some things they don't have strong, like perhaps vowel sounds.

Then with the kids who are more advanced, am I correct that you wouldn't meet with them as often?

Jessica Farmer: Yeah, I think they are a lot more capable. When you have that small group time and you have centers set up, those students are capable of practicing the skills that they already have correctly, and you don't really have to worry too much about them practicing the skills at the center incorrectly.

The students that you are working with are the ones that need that teacher attention time. Your students that are at those centers are capable of practicing, doing that repetition, and maybe even going deeper into some of the skills that you've already taught in whole group.

I definitely think being mindful about how your centers are set up so that our students can be successful at them, and you might have to differentiate your centers for your different groups.

But yes, I would not meet with my students that are progressing as much as my students that are struggling. It doesn't mean I don't meet with them. We definitely touch base. We definitely will meet for a small group to try to extend their learning.

But yeah, you definitely want to do your best to close those gaps because time with the teacher is precious, and we know that there are only a certain number of minutes in the day.

Anna Geiger: Wonderful! Well I'm going to be sure to link to your social media accounts and also a place where people can join your email list, which just before this call, you told me was new, which is wonderful.

Jessica Farmer: Yes!

Anna Geiger: And I'll link to your TPT store and anywhere else that people can learn from you. I know you've been giving a lot of webinars and workshops for different companies and things.

Jessica Farmer: Yeah. I've been doing Top 10 Tips with the creators of Sounder & Friends. We just completed our April event, but the recording should be for sale for a little while, and it's going to be available until June 30th. We talked about the top ten tips for linking phonemic awareness to phonics instruction to really improve that automatic word recognition. That's something like we were talking about where the student is seeing the same word over and over again and having to continually blend that word, you definitely want to sign up for that webinar. The handout is over 200 pages. We always go wild and crazy with our handouts, with tons of resources, and it's great for our grades K to 2. We'll continue to do those Top 10 Tips. We have some exciting things coming up, so make sure you follow Sounder & Friends as well as my page so that you always know.

And sign up for the email list please because I'm sending exclusive freebies out to people who are just on my email list, and I'm planning some giveaways soon with some decodable readers. Really exciting things are coming up, so be sure to sign up for my email list.

Anna Geiger: Definitely. We'll be sure to share the link in the show notes. Thanks so much for joining us again, Jessica.

Jessica Farmer: You're welcome! Thanks for having me.

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode125. Talk to you next time!

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How to fit phonemic awareness into your phonics lessons

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TRT Podcast #124: How to fit phonemic awareness into your phonics lessons

This week I’m doing a hot topics collaboration with Melissa & Lori Love Literacy … and it’s all about phonemic awareness! Learn how to fit phonemic awareness into your phonics lessons, and then head over to Melissa & Lori’s podcast on Friday to hear an interview with Heggerty’s literacy consultant.

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Hello! Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom, and this week is the last in my series of hot topic episodes in collaboration with Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. This week we're both tackling phonemic awareness. I'm going to talk about phonemic awareness and how to fit it right into your phonics lessons, and later on this week Melissa and Lori are conducting an interview about whether or not phonemic awareness should be done in the dark. I encourage you to check out their episode later in the week.

As you know, that's been pretty spicy in the last couple of years in the science of reading community. There's been a lot of discussion, you might even call it infighting, that has unsettled some people. I think it's good to remember that as members of a scientific community, we expect that what we know will change over time, and that's okay.

We're going to talk very specifically today about how to incorporate phonemic awareness into your phonics lessons, and over at Melissa and Lori Love Literacy, they have an interview in which they're talking about whether phonemic awareness should be done orally or whether it should be done with letters. I'm excited to dive into this with you today.

Now I'm guessing if you listen to my podcast, you're very familiar with Melissa and Lori Love Literacy, but if not, you should know that it's a podcast for educators learning more about the science of reading and high quality curriculum, and they've got some incredible interviews over there, so go check it out after you listen to this one.

We're going to talk now quickly about phonemic awareness in your phonics lessons, but before we do that, let's break down again what phonemic awareness is.

Phonemic awareness is the conscious awareness of individual sounds in words. For example, the word rake has three phonemes, /r/ /��/ /k/, even though it has four letters. The word strength, which has eight letters, has only six phonemes, /s/ /t/ /r/ /��/ /ng/ /th/.

This conscious awareness of sounds is something that we need to teach. The question is how do we teach it? That's where a lot of the controversy has come about.

For many years, we were taught phonemic awareness activities can and should be done in the dark because phonemic awareness is an oral skill. However, we've known from research, for quite a few years actually, that phonemic awareness activities are more powerful when combined with letters. Some people have thought, oh, if you add letters, then it turns into phonics, but that's actually not true. We can combine the two.

So I recommend starting your phonics lessons with a brief phonemic awareness activity connected to the sound of the grapheme you're going to teach. If you're teaching your students that C-H spells /ch/, I would start with an oral-only activity just to get students' ears listening to that phoneme, becoming aware of it. This would be an example of a time where I think an oral phonemic awareness activity makes sense.

If I'm teaching that C-H spells /ch/, I could start like this, "Okay, students repeat these words after me. Chip, chill, Chad, chart, chin. What sound did you say at the beginning of each of these words? That's right, /ch/."

Now you might have little mirrors. Some teachers do this where they have kids pull out little mirrors so they can look at what their mouth is doing when they make a particular sound. I could say, "Take out your mirror. What's your mouth doing when you say /ch/? What are your teeth doing? Put your hand in front of your mouth. Do you feel any air coming out?" or "Put your hand on your neck. Do you feel a buzz when you say /ch/?" And you wouldn't because /ch/ is an unvoiced sound.

Then I could move on. We could do some phoneme blending activities. I could say, "I'm going to say some sounds and put them together to make words. My sounds are /ch/ /��/ /k/. The word is chick. Now, it's your turn. I'll say the sounds, and when I put my hand in front of me like this, say the word together." Just imagine I've got my hand outstretched to the left, my palm facing me, and I move my hand away from myself for each phoneme, and then I place my hand palm up as a signal for the students to say the actual word. I would go, /ch/ /��/ /p/. I wait a second or so, and then when I put my hand palm up, the students could join together and say, "chop". I would do that with a few other words like such, rich, and chug. That would be enough. That's only a couple of minutes, but that's a really good introduction to my phonics lesson.

Then I could say, "The /ch/ sound is spelled with the letters C-H," and then I could connect it to my sound wall, if I use a sound wall, by revealing the C-H spelling. Then I can move into the rest of my phonics lesson, having them read words with ch, having them read blending lines, reading connected text, doing dictation, and so on.

Another way, a very important way, to include phonemic awareness in your phonics lesson is by doing phoneme grapheme mapping and also word building.

You're probably aware of phoneme grapheme mapping, that's been very popular for a while now, but it's this idea of using sound boxes, and then putting the spelling in each box. What you could do is you could have a piece of paper in front of your students with four or five boxes in a row. They're probably only going to need three boxes, but you know it's good for them to have to think about how many they need.

For example you could say, "We're going to segment the word chop, take the chips that you have and move a chip into a box for each sound. Ready? /ch/ /��/ /p/. How many sounds? Three, correct. Now, let's spell each sound."

Then you could have them move those little counters out of the way, and they could write with pencil. You could be doing this on a dry erase board, or they could be using letter tiles. If you have letter tiles, of course, you only want a single sound represented on each tile. They would use a tile that says CH, not the C and the H, the CH tile. Then they would spell each sound using those tiles or writing the letters.

After that, you'll have them put their finger under the word and move it to the right as they blend the sounds to read the word. "Let's say the sounds of that word, /ch/ /��/ /p/. Now, let's blend them together, chop."

So right there we've done phoneme segmenting and blending, right in our phonics lesson. Of course, we wouldn't stop with one word. We'd do a number of words.

As we're doing this, we could also be working on phoneme manipulation. I could say, "Okay, we've done the word chop. What would you have to do to change the word chop to chip?" And then some of them would tell you to move the O out and put in the I, or they would say, change the /��/ to /��/, or you could just tell them what to do. After you've got the word chip, you can say, "Okay, change the /p/ to /n/. Now, read the word." Right there, they've done phoneme manipulation and blending.

As you can see, including phoneme grapheme mapping and word building activities in your phonics lesson is a fabulous way to build phonemic awareness, because phonemic awareness should not be an end in itself.

We don't want to do scads of oral activities in the hopes that that's going to bring our kids to a certain level. Dr. Jeannine Herron has said that phonemic awareness is best learned by pronouncing spoken words and segmenting them in order to spell them, which is exactly what you're doing with the activities that we talked about today.

Thanks so much for listening! You can find the show notes for this episode, which includes a link to Melissa and Lori's episode about phonemic awareness, at themeasuredmom.com/episode124. Talk to you next time!

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How to add speech to print elements to your phonics instruction

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TRT Podcast #123: How to add speech to print elements to your phonics instruction

Curious about speech to print but not ready to take the plunge? These are simple ways to add speech to print elements to traditional phonics instruction.

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Hello! Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom, and this week we're going to talk again about print to speech versus speech to print.

Last week I teamed up with Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. They had an interview about speech to print, and I had a quick episode comparing print to speech versus speech to print. Remember that I said that a better way to refer to these approaches is traditional phonics instruction, such as Orton-Gillingham which is print to speech, versus structured linguistic literacy, which includes programs you may be familiar with like Reading Simplified, EBLI, Phono-Graphix, and SPELL-Links.

Today I want to talk to you about what you might do if you're intrigued by structured linguistic literacy, but you're not ready to go all in. It is quite a commitment because it really changes your scope and sequence big time, and it changes your pacing. It's really very different from a traditional phonics approach.

So what can you do if you're not ready to do that or aren't sure you want to, but you want to incorporate some of the really good things in the structured linguistic literacy approach? That's what we're going to talk about today.

One easy change you can make is to say this to your students when they are listening for phonemes and repeating words that have particular phonemes. Instead of saying, "What sound did you hear in each of these words," say, "What sound did you SAY in each of these words?" This helps them associate the sound with something they did with their mouth.

Something else to remember is that you can start having kids build words from a very early age, even in preschool. I just finished reading a book called Making Speech Visible, by Dr. Jeannine Herron, and she talks about having that be the way to reading - by spelling! Actually starting with spelling, giving kids letter tiles and having them build words.

Another thing to think about as you are maybe incorporating elements of structured linguistic literacy is to focus more on the sounds than the letter names. I'm not saying you shouldn't teach letter names when you teach sounds, I personally think that that's a good idea, but when you're doing the building with words, think about referring to the tiles as their sound versus the letter. So if a child has three tiles, M, A, T, instead of saying move the M, you could say, move the /m/, find the /��/, find the /t/, and that can help them really focus on what those letters represent.

Another thing to remember is that you want to start very early with teaching vowels and consonants that can be combined to form words. You don't want to have to wait halfway through kindergarten before kids can start to blend and spell. You want to be doing that very early, and you can. You can start that the second week of school if you are teaching consonants and vowels that can be combined to make words.

Another thing to think about is to use letter tiles versus blank tiles as soon as possible. So as soon as you teach those initial consonants and vowels, the first ones that you teach, put those letter names on the tiles versus doing this without. Because as we know, phonemic awareness instruction is much more effective if we have letters versus just blank tiles.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we should spend very little time on bigger speech sounds, such as syllables. We want to focus on phonemes right from the start, and we learned about that in our episode with Dr. Susan Brady.

So even if you're teaching preschoolers, phonemes are your main focus. I personally don't have a problem with doing syllables and rhyming in moderation in preschool. However, and this is very interesting, The National Reading Panel found the greatest effect size for phonemic awareness instruction when it was taught to preschoolers. So we don't have to wait until kids can count syllables or rhyme words, we can do phonemic awareness very early on. And again, phonemic awareness develops really well when you are spelling words using just a few letters and then blending those sounds, reading the words back.

You want to do a lot of word building and word chaining from the beginning. So not only are you having kids build words, like building the word mat with /m/ /��/ /t/, you're also going to have them switch out letters and replace them with other letters.

You could say, "Let's switch out a sound. You've got the word 'mat,' let's change that word to 'sat.' Which sound do we need to switch?" And then show them that they're going to move the /m/ out and put the /s/ in.

So those are just a few things to think about.

One more thing is to consider the pace of your phonics program. Remember that in structured linguistic literacy, they actually teach quite a few spellings at once. Now, they repeat them over the year, so just because they teach multiple spellings for long O in kindergarten doesn't mean they're not going to review in first grade. Knowing that this works for so many children, I think we don't have to be afraid of introducing multiple spellings at once.

For example, if I'm teaching /��/, maybe I would rather teach just O by itself, an O constant E. But when I'm teaching vowel teams, it probably makes sense to teach a bunch at a time, because some of them are very rare anyway. So maybe I'll teach OA as in soap, OW as in snow, and OE as in toe. I might do all three at once.

So think about that. Think about if you can improve your pacing, because the sooner you get through all the phonics skills, the sooner kids are going to be able to read authentic text.

There's probably a lot more we can say, but I think that's a good starting point.

I hope you'll check out Melissa and Lori's episode from last week so you can learn more about structured linguistic literacy from the experts. And don't forget to head to the show notes, because there I'm going to link to some YouTube videos that will really help you dive deep to see if structured linguistic literacy is something that you want to try. You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode123. Talk to you next time!

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Melissa & Lori Love Literacy podcast
Talking phonemic awareness with Dr. Susan Brady
Making Speech Visible , by Dr. Jeannine Herron
Teaching Reading with a Speech to Print Approach: YouTube video with Dr. Jan Wasowicz
Speech to Print: Is There a Third Way? YouTube video with Dr. Marnie Ginsberg
Answering Your Questions about Speech to Print: YouTube video with Nora Chahbazi

The post How to add speech to print elements to your phonics instruction appeared first on The Measured Mom.

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Print to speech vs Speech to print: What’s the difference?

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TRT Podcast #122: Print to speech vs. Speech to print: What’s the difference?��

This week I’m doing a hot topics collaboration with Melissa & Lori Love Literacy … and we’re starting with two different approaches to teaching phonics: print to speech and speech to print. What’s the difference?��

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Hello, Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom, here for the first time in a long time with a solo episode. For the next couple of weeks, I'm teaming up with Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. We're going to be looking at some hot topics in the science of reading world.

This week we're tackling speech to print. At the end of this week, you will get a conversation between Marnie Ginsburg and Tami Frankfort with Melissa and Lori, and you'll find that on their podcast.

I'm sure if you're listening to my podcast, you know who Melissa and Lori are. But just in case, they have a fabulous podcast for educators interested in learning more about the science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum, and they just have so many fantastic interviews. Be sure to check that out and subscribe if you haven't already. They're conducting the interview later this week.

I'm going to compare the difference between traditional phonics instruction and speech to print approaches. That's what we're going to be looking at today.

We're going to start by defining some things. Print to speech and speech to print are two different ways of teaching phonics. Now they encompass more things, but we're just going to focus on the phonics part today.

The problem with those labels is that they also mean other things, right? Print to speech also means decoding, and speech to print also means encoding. Of course every phonics lesson, whether you're print to speech or speech to print, is going to include reading and spelling.

I think that calling it print to speech versus speech to print is very confusing, and it leads some people to just not even listen because they're like, "Well, of course. I do print to speech and speech to print in my phonics program, so what's the difference? Why are we even talking about this?"

Maybe let's phrase it a little bit differently. Let's talk about structured literacy. Structured literacy was coined by the International Dyslexia Association a few years ago, and it emphasizes highly explicit and systematic teaching of all important components of literacy. It's not just phonics, but often when we refer to that, when we say structured literacy, we're often referring to how we teach phonics.

Technically, the print to speech approach and the speech to print approach are both structured literacy. They both fall under that. They both fall under the principles that we know from research. The thing, though, is that structured literacy was coined by the IDA, and the IDA is really more in support of Orton-Gillingham-type approaches. Even here, it gets a little bit muddy.

Instead of calling it structured literacy versus something else, or print to speech versus speech to print, this is how I'm going to distinguish between the two. We're going to call them traditional phonics instruction, which includes Orton-Gillingham, versus structured linguistic literacy, which is what programs you may have heard of follow.

For traditional phonics instruction, including Orton-Gillingham, we may have things like the Barton System and Fundations. Many common phonics programs that you may have used have roots in Orton-Gillingham.

Whereas structured linguistic literacy would be programs like EBLI, Reading Simplified, SPELL-Links, and Phono-Graphix. Those are the two things that we're comparing today.

In traditional phonics instruction, including OG, we begin with print and move to sound. We might start with a card. "This is a G. G says /g/, or G spells /g/."

Whereas with structured linguistic literacy, you're going to start with a sound and then move to print.

With traditional phonics instruction, we teach letters and sounds in isolation first. You may be familiar with a sound deck where you're reviewing all the sounds, there's flashcards, things like that.

Whereas with structured linguistic literacy, they actually teach letters with their sounds in context of words, in word building for example. They might be introducing the letters M, A, T in an actual word with letter tiles. They're actually not teaching the letter names initially. They will focus on those later, but their focus is on sounds. They might say, "Move the /m/ /��/ /t/" instead of saying the names of the letters.

In traditional phonics instruction, we might say something like, "What does the letter say?"

Whereas with structured linguistic literacy, you might say, "What sound do you say for this spelling?"

Traditional phonics instruction may focus on larger units of speech like the syllable and onset-rime, whereas structured linguistic literacy gets right to the phoneme.

Traditional approaches may teach phonics rules, exceptions, syllable types, and syllable division. There's a lot of that in the training that I took for Orton-Gillingham.

Whereas structured linguistic literacy focuses on patterns, no rules. They don't teach things like syllable types and fancy syllable division.

Traditional phonics instruction includes teaching one spelling at a time to mastery. You might be teaching the vowel consonant E pattern, and you really work on that for a while until kids really know it.

Whereas with structured linguistic literacy, you actually teach many spellings at a time and constantly review them and apply them. I guess eventually you would master them, but that's not an initial focus.

For example, if you're teaching spellings for the /��/ sound in structured linguistic literacy, then you would teach multiple spellings right away, even in kindergarten. So if you're teaching /��/, you might teach the letter O, O consonant E, OA, and OW. You might teach all of those at once, and then you just keep reviewing them.

OG is about mastery before moving on, but structured linguistic literacy is about mastery over time, which allows a faster pace.

Then, interestingly, because you are taking more time to master the spellings in OG, you're going to be using decodable text for a longer time.

But with structured linguistic literacy, because many patterns have been introduced sooner, they might call it the complex or advanced code, students can get into traditional text more quickly.

Those are some of the big differences.

A couple of other things we can talk about might be the idea of blends. In traditional phonics instruction, including OG, you teach blends as units. Not that they make one sound, but you teach them together so kids recognize them and say them quickly together.

Whereas with structured linguistic literacy, they don't think of blends as a thing. It's more just... I mean, they do teach CCVC words and CVCC words, but they don't teach blends as a unit.

Another thing is that in many OG programs, red words (as in irregular high frequency words) are taught by things like arm tapping and saying the letter names. So for the word "they", I might tap my shoulder and move all the way down; T-H-E-Y, they.

Whereas with structured linguistic literacy, you teach all words by sounds, think phoneme grapheme mapping.

Perhaps what's getting the most attention and interest from people is that according to structured linguistic literacy advocates, it's much faster than a traditional OG approach and more efficient.

I hope that this was helpful. I think if you listen to Melissa and Lori's episode at the end of the week, you're really going to find out more about the difference, and you can see if it's something you want to look into.

Next week I'm going to talk about how you can incorporate elements of structured linguistic literacy into your teaching, even if that's not the route you decide to go. I personally think there's good to be said for both sides, so next week we're going to talk about how to marry the two a little bit.

You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode122. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you again next time!

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Rethinking reading comprehension with Brent Conway

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TRT Podcast #121: Rethinking reading comprehension with Brent Conway

I had quite a few misunderstandings about reading comprehension when I was a balanced literacy teacher. Today I talk with Brent Conway, a former principal and current superintendent, about how to rethink reading comprehension.

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Hello, Anna Geiger here from the Measured Mom!

Today we're speaking with Brent Conway, who is currently serving as superintendent at a school district in Massachusetts, and he is passionate about improving literacy outcomes for all students.

Today we had a really interesting conversation about reading comprehension, what we had wrong in our balanced literacy classrooms, and how we need to rethink how we approach reading comprehension. We talk about things like reading comprehension strategies, choosing texts, and assessing comprehension. I know you're going to get a lot out of today's episode, so let's get started.

Anna Geiger:

Welcome, Brent!

Brent Conway: Thank you! Thanks for having me.

Anna Geiger: Can you give us a little background about how you got into education and what you've been doing in the past few years?

Brent Conway: I had started as a teacher, fifth and sixth grade into middle school, and then ended up working as an assistant principal in an elementary school and as a special ed coordinator, and then became a principal at the ripe old age of thirty. I was a principal in Melrose, Massachusetts for a number of years at one of the elementary schools, Lincoln Elementary, and then they had me move to the middle school. Now, over the last five years I've been the assistant superintendent at Pentucket Regional School District in Massachusetts, all north of Boston.

Anna Geiger: Can you help me understand the difference between what a principal is responsible for and a superintendent?

Brent Conway: Well, I mean, the principal's main responsibility is the building itself, the physical building, and the people inside. Principals' jobs, from a pace perspective, are a lot more rapid; everything's in thirty-second intervals throughout the day.

Whereas someone who works in central office, so an assistant superintendent or superintendent, I think has some broader responsibilities that lean into budgeting, program evaluation, and support. Mainly as a central office person, I really only work with adults, for the most part. Although I certainly do make time to work with kids in a variety of ways, because I think that keeps me grounded, for sure.

Anna Geiger: I've heard some talks you've given, and I sort of got the impression that you had maybe a little bit of background in balanced literacy. Can you talk to that a little bit?

Brent Conway: I don't know that I personally had balanced literacy background, maybe a little without really realizing that's what it was. But for the most part, my experience really started as a principal realizing we had a school that was about 50% high needs with declining student performance. And this was in 2007. I was the fifth principal in, I don't know, about seven years or something to that effect. The literacy performance of the students was really poor for a community that should certainly be doing better.

I realized very quickly that no one really had any consistent way of how literacy should be taught. Some data was being used, not much. I don't even think we used the phrase "balanced literacy" or "science of reading" then. We just called it teaching kids to read, and we did it together. As a principal, I did it with teachers together, learning more around what was evidence-based literacy instruction and how to consistently do it.

Then I moved on to a middle school and wasn't engaged in the early literacy process as much, and just assumed all these other school districts were doing what we were doing in the elementary school, which was the science of reading essentially, based on the science of reading.

Then coming to a new school district about five years ago, I realized, oh, no, lots of other people have been using a balanced approach, which was not really effective. They had moved away from a lot of the evidence-based approaches that I had had success with.

Anna Geiger: How does a typical balanced literacy teacher approach comprehension?

Brent Conway: You hear the phrase a lot, "Well, my goal is to make everyone love reading." And I think it's admirable, for sure. I would love for people to love reading too. That would be our goal for kids to love reading. But that's really hard to have as a goal as a teacher or a school district, because number one, you'll never know whether you achieved it or not, and whether a student loves something or not should not really be our objective as a school. Our school, and as teachers, our objective should be, can they? And then, when they need to, be able to.

I was not a kid who loved reading. That was not something I enjoyed. I could, but I just didn't enjoy it. I had other things that I did. I read far more now as an adult than I did. I do enjoy reading, but I'm also particular about what it is that I read, and I don't know that I would say I love reading. And I think that's okay, because I can read and I can read to gain the information that I need, or I can choose to read for pleasure if I have time.

I think that's what we want. We want people to have the ability to make those choices, and you can't push upon your love of something onto someone else. That is up to them to make that choice.

So you hear that a lot, that love of reading, which again, it's hard to say, "No, you shouldn't do that."

But also I think people hear reading comprehension as that's what we're working on, "comprehension." And I think most people in the balanced literacy world, when you think about balance, it's, "Oh, yeah. No, no, phonics is important. We need kids to be able to decode and read, but then we have to work on comprehension," as if comprehension was totally separate from the ability to decode and read fluently. As if comprehension was a thing itself that you do.

So I think most people's view of comprehension was to give kids books that they find interesting so that they can love it, have them practice reading it, and you give them feedback and ask them questions about it. Give them books potentially that they can read that aren't too hard for them, because if it's too hard, they won't love it, and they won't get anything from it. I think that was what you saw a lot from balanced literacy.

You saw kids in different types of books. You saw different levels of books. And they really lacked this direct and systematic and explicit way of helping kids, all kids, actually engage with and learn to read a complex text, and that's really what we needed kids to do. And if you're using levels and you're focusing on comprehension as a single thing, you're not teaching the specific skills and components of that language that kids need. That's what's lacking a lot of times, and people don't necessarily realize that.

Anna Geiger: I think that's a very good description, and I remember when I taught with the balanced literacy way, I did a reading workshop where I did talk to a lot of kids about their books. We would try to do some literature circles and they would talk about the books more. I really didn't know any kind of scaffolds to help kids read more complex texts. I hadn't heard of them myself, the things I've learned about now.

Could you talk to us a little bit about what it even means to access a complex text?

Brent Conway: When we say complex texts, I'm not saying we're going to take War and Peace and have a first grader dive into that and just have them go read and then ask them to tell us about it. That's not what we're talking about. I mean, grade level texts and maybe a little beyond in some spots.

One thing that happened when the common core standards came out, they addressed three major shifts that needed to occur. To me, I always saw that as the three major shifts were the things that gave more definition and description to what was meant by comprehension. Because when you look at Scarborough's rope, and you think about the Simple View of Reading or Scarborough's rope, the language strands and all of those little components, those are the things we need to be directly and explicitly teaching and structuring for students to engage with.

Text complexity was one of those big shifts. Evidence, so acing student response in speaking, reading, and writing in evidence was the second. And knowledge building across all domains. Those were the three really big shifts.

So when you begin to think about that, what does that mean for comprehension? For text complexity, texts can range in complexity for a variety of reasons. Most people automatically go to vocabulary, texts with more advanced vocabulary, words that are content-specific or just Tier 2 words that maybe provide a little bit more specificity to meaning and context. People think of that, and vocabulary certainly is an element that makes texts complex.

Because we've always known a vocabulary as another component, that's not typically the piece that gets missed or tripped up on. It's more around sentence structure, syntax, and having kids understand coherence. When you start getting into texts and they use really unique uses of clauses and so forth, even in early grades, that type of information and complexity can really confuse kids. It's not that they don't actually know what the words are, it's the manner in which they were sequenced or used in a clause or a phrase that prevents it.

I actually have an example. We use Wit & Wisdom here in Pentucket, and I think second grade's a perfect example because we still have kids trying to master that decoding and be really fluent. Yet at the same time we have kids engaged with knowledge-building and complex texts. Some of it is teacher-read, but some of it the students are reading.

So in module two for second grade, it's about folk tales, and Johnny Appleseed is one of the folk tales they end up studying. They read multiple texts around Johnny Appleseed, and in particular, Aliki has this text on Johnny Appleseed, The Story of Johnny Appleseed. I don't know if you've ever seen this one before.

Anna Geiger: I don't think I have.

Brent Conway: So this is the one of the ones. Every kid has this book. It's not a read aloud. Every kid's engaged in this book, and it's very interesting. And this goes to the phrase of placing text at the center or planning from the text.

There is a sentence in here, well, a couple sentences, but on this page right here, this is what it reads, "Johnny did not like people to fight. He tried to make peace between the settlers and the Indians for he believed that all men should live together as brothers."

Now, there is no vocabulary in those sentences on that page that is confusing to second graders. For the most part, kids can decode almost all those words and read it fluently. There's nothing overly tricky except the use of the word "for," F-O-R. And who would've thought that that word would be the word that trips them up?

The phrase was, "For he believed that all men," da, da, da, da, da. Really, use of the word "for" there is just a fancy way of saying "because," and that's not vocabulary. It's a clause. It's a sentence structure. It's syntax. And it's grammar, and really, helping kids to break that down. But if you didn't plan from that text, you would never know why kids are confused after reading that.

That's the type of scaffold that we can do, just pointing out that phrase and that the use of "for" means "because," so these specific things. Then hopefully, kids can end up actually maybe even writing something like that, using that.

Anna Geiger: Something you said that was really useful, something about how we're planning from the text, not the other way around. I think that's a difference, at least in how I used to approach it, where we have this big list of comprehension strategies and so, "Okay, this week we're teaching predicting, so now I need to find five books that will help us practice predicting," versus starting from the knowledge.

That's a little bit easier when you're thinking, "Okay, we're going to start from knowledge. I'm going to read this book, and I want them to know this information, so I'm going to use these strategies to help them figure it out."

How would you approach that with a fiction text?

Brent Conway: So I think you look at what are the knowledge and skills. For instance, our fifth grade, the module they're in, they're reading A Phantom Tollbooth, and that's the core text. It's a pretty complex text, but the knowledge we're looking for, it's not about time travel. That's not necessarily the knowledge we want them to learn. The knowledge is actually about wordplay, and puns, and uses of how an author uses words. That's the knowledge we want them to learn, but we also want them to learn about a narrative text structure and character development. That's the knowledge they're working on.

So if that's what we're working on, I plan from the text about those components, knowing full well that when the book is over, what we're going to ask kids to do is write using evidence from the text, but what we're going to ask them to do is write from a perspective of one of the characters about how something would've been done differently.

So we want them to understand character, because character structure is important, setting, all of those components along with the wordplay because that author chooses those and that wordplay plays into the character's personalities and the interaction of all the characters.

Anna Geiger: So I've recently been hearing a lot about how we can't actually teach comprehension. We teach other things that lead to development of comprehension. Have you heard that? And can you speak to that?

Brent Conway: Yeah, so we have a phrase, Jen Hogan and I, Jen's our literacy specialist. We have a phrase, we call it the "balanced literacy hangover," and it is this lingering effect of all these years of thinking about a strategies-first approach to teaching reading comprehension. That if we practice making inferences every opportunity we get, then kids will just get really good at making inferences, and then they'll be able to make them. If we practice main idea and key details, if we practice these with all sorts of random texts, it's the strategy that gets better.

That's not necessarily true. It doesn't transfer that way. In the baseball study, which people have read about in Natalie Wexler's book, all that sort of makes that apparent. I could read a newspaper article about a cricket match, but I know nothing about cricket. I don't have the background knowledge. I can make inferences. I can summarize the main idea, but I'm going to struggle to use all those strategies effectively to show that I know what this means. It's not that I don't know how to do those strategies. I do. I lack all the other components of language comprehension.

So the "balanced literacy hangover" is when we sort of get focused on that strategies-first approach and we forget what is the purpose of reading? The purpose is either I'm reading to gain knowledge or understand something, whether it's fiction or non-fiction.

I'm glad you asked that example because we're talking about building knowledge around folk tales. It could be building knowledge around civil rights heroes and so forth, and the intent of that is different than the intent of reading a narrative book that's fiction, for instance, where I'm trying to learn about characters and settings and so forth.

So I think that's where that plays in a little bit, and it's different. Reading comprehension is the outcome. It's the outcome of being able to read the words, decode fluently, but then also use your language strands, all of the components, to make sense of what you're reading. And then you have reading comprehension.

That hangover, we saw even as we made these changes with teachers who were used to it. It was a lesson that was supposed to be five minutes on main idea, but it was at the beginning of this whole sequence of days and days of lessons. They were thirty minutes into the lesson, and that teacher was still doing main idea because she said, "The kids didn't understand the main idea."

That's when we realized, "Oh, this is going to be hard for people to step back."

Well, they're not going to know the main idea until you're done with the text. You've got to keep going, and they'll continue to use those strategies.

If you think about inferencing, inferencing really isn't a reading strategy. It's a cognitive skill. We make inferences at birth. Babies start making inferences, for instance. We just apply it to text. So it's not like we have to really teach people how to make inferences. We can help people learn when they have made an inference so they're more conscious of it, more purposeful.

Those are the types of things that we did with that strategies-based approach through a balanced literacy approach. Really, it should be about the content, and the knowledge, and the skills we're trying to achieve.

When you think about writing, you can't write anything you can't say. So when we think about writing, we want students to be able to say, and this goes back to that evidence from the text. We want them to be able to answer it out loud, and then have it transfer to writing.

But if you don't have the language, and the knowledge, and the vocabulary, you're not going to be able to say it either. So all of that is very much related, and it does take a different approach.

Anna Geiger: So I think it can feel maybe a little bit scary, because it's much easier to just check off a list. I taught this strategy, this strategy, this strategy versus the idea of building knowledge and vocabulary that's humongous, and that goes on, of course, forever and ever.

Is there anything you could say to a balanced literacy teacher who thinks, "Well, I want to do this, but this just sounds too much, how do I even get started?"

Brent Conway: Achieve the Core has a great document out, I think it's actually called Placing Text at the Center. It's sort of like a do-this-not-that approach that I think can be really helpful, and it does sort of talk about that moving away from a strategies-first approach.

I think you can begin to do it. I mean, I think ideally, having high-quality curriculum programs that are built for that purpose make it a lot easier. I know there are a lot of folks who are trying to do this on their own in a classroom without that curriculum. They're using the materials they had.

That is actually something from in the beginning when I came here, we were not ready to go buy a new curriculum and we began to just outline, "Well, what does the science say about how we should be teaching, and what we should be teaching?" And I think people tried to do all that work and it was hard work. They were looking for things, trying to put things together. Then we were in a position to make a change and give them the right tools that made it a lot easier.

Even at that, even these curriculum programs that are high quality are not perfect. People have to learn how to skillfully implement. So we do a lot of PD, for instance, Nancy Hennessy's book, The Reading Comprehension Blueprint, if you've ever seen that, is really helping people know how to use the tools like that. Tim Shanahan's work has been great as well.

We basically take that and use examples from Wit & Wisdom to show them how to do this, because some of it we need to scaffold up for some of the teachers too about how do you make this happen? It's curriculum-driven professional development based on evidence-based practices, right?

Anna Geiger: Yeah. So when your teachers are doing it this way versus some of the old ways, what are some changes that teachers can expect to see as they start doing this in the more research-based way?

Brent Conway: I guess it speaks to what screening and assessment datas you are using as well. There are districts who are saying, "We're moving towards a science of reading approach. We're going to teach in this approach, but we still want to use a leveled assessment to ensure students are comprehending text." Those assessments are not reliable in everything. They're not valid and reliable anyways, because they're so reliant upon things that you can't control for, like students' knowledge or understanding of the topic of what they're reading. There's a lot of variability.

To help people understand how to shift, for instance, we did a correlational exercise between the leveled assessments they had and the student's outcome on MCAS, which is our state assessment.

Anna Geiger: Was that the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment? Yes?

Brent Conway: That's the one! So it only correlated 20% of the time. It was wrong on four out of five students. I think that was a little eye-opening.

Anna Geiger: Can you explain for people what that means? How it was wrong?

Brent Conway: Yep. So we started by saying, "Well, what is the percentage of students at the end of third grade who are proficient, at grade level or above, on the BAS?" It was like 80%.

Okay, so how come on our state assessment we're 50%? So we knew right away there was a disconnect.

People might say, "Well, it's a different assessment that has different rankings..."

Okay, it's a different assessment, but that's the tool you're using to know whether or not what you're doing is effective and to help you make decisions about how to help kids. And it's not matching up!

I said, "I'll tell you what, I'll correlate it kid by kid." So that's what we did. And I said, "What do you think it correlates as?"

Now the teachers see where sort of the movie's going and it's like, "Oh, probably 60% or something."

I said, "No. Lower." I said, "It's 20%."

They said, "Well, what does that mean?"

It's wrong on four out of five kids! It means that if you identified a student at level whatever the letter is that's at grade level, that is likely to be incorrect as far as a predictor of how they will score on the state reading assessment. In fact, it's only correct on 20% of the kids. One out of five kids have a correct prediction of where their reading outcome is. And it takes an incredible amount of time! Even if you think you have it right, it still doesn't tell you why or what to do to help a kid who isn't on grade level.

So we use an oral reading fluency assessment, we use DIBELS, for instance, K to 6, and I said, "That correlates for us 79% of the time." Nationally, it's about 80% of the time. It's a very strong predictor.

People say, "That's just speed reading."

And I said, "Well, there's more to it than that." However, we know that when students are fluent readers, they are far more likely to be able to comprehend the text that they did.

So these are the things where you get this false sense that students are reading pretty well. So when you ask, "What can you expect to see?" Well, it depends upon what you're using.

Initially, I'm not sure you could measure your results in a leveled assessment and feel like you're actually knowing or seeing anything. In fact, we see a lot of folks who focus early on in K-1 and even into grade 2 to ensure students are reading fluently and building the knowledge that way and they don't see the movement in their Fountas and Pinnell levels.

At the end of the day, what would you expect to see? I think you'll see a lot of student talk. That's what you want to see in your classroom. You want students to be talking about the text, and you want them to be using language and examples from the text.

That goes to when we talk about those three shifts, the complexity. Kids have to talk through some of that and you have to work through it. You want kids to use the vocabulary that's involved with that. You have these richer conversations around the knowledge and the things that they're actually reading about, the topics, and you really experience it that way. That's what we've heard.

When I hear parents come and talk to me and say, "The kids come home and they're talking about this thing they learned about the ocean and this and that." And the parents have to ask, "Is that in social studies class or is that in science class?"

And I say, "Well, no, it's in reading and we're doing ELA!" It's just these rich, rich conversations and the knowledge and the connections that kids make, that volume of reading, and that's the phrase.

When we think about people who become doctors, we ask you to write a dissertation. The first portion of that dissertation is your review of literature. You do this lengthy review of literature to make you an expert in the existing literature on the topic. You become an expert. You gain expertise about reading a volume of information about that topic.

A knowledge-building curriculum that focuses on building that aspect with complex text has kids engaged with topical, volume-of-reading learning.

I think the biggest thing we see too is a move away from things in silos. You mentioned the checklist. I taught grammar today. I had a station for grammar. I had a station for silent reading. I had a station for word work. I had a station for this. It's like you have these things in silos, but things are not connected. That's the piece that's really different. Things really connect more.

I think teachers in a balanced literacy environment were master organizers, fantastic organizers. They had things organized so well. They had this group here, and this station here, and everything is perfectly organized. It's the planning, the purposeful planning, the backwards-by-design planning that was often missing so that things were more connected and purposeful from the text, and that has more connection and authenticity to kids.

Anna Geiger: Well, thank you. That has given me a lot to think about. I know you recommended the Nancy Hennessy book. I've written about that on my website. It's a little tough to get started with, but it's very practical.

Is there anything else that you want to share or things that I should recommend to people who are listening? I know you mentioned that article that I'll link to as well.

Brent Conway: Yeah, the article. Achieve the Core has some fantastic things both on the three shifts themselves, complexity, evidence, and knowledge, those three big shifts. I think when that came out, that really provided more context to what is meant by comprehension. But then also, Placing Text at the Center, that is Sue Pimentel and Meredith Liben, who wrote a fantastic piece on that too. So that is an excellent resource to share.

And a lot of the things that Tim Shanahan has too. He's very generous with his slide decks and availability to sort of get anything he puts up there is a good tool, a good resource.

There's one more, I think, from a writing perspective. It's called, SMARTER Intervention. It's how to teach sentence writing using a research-based approach. I think that is very helpful. There's a blog, and it gives some really good examples, because I think what it does is it connects the idea that writing and reading are a reciprocal process, and we need to teach kids to write at the sentence level, and it connects the grammar. If you're writing about a text, again, all of these things are interconnected.

So I don't teach that nouns are a person, place, or thing. That's a definition. A noun is the who or the what. We don't teach that a verb is the action. What we do is we say the verb is what the noun did or is doing. So you give the meaning, it's the purpose and the function. When you do that in relation to a text as well, it's that reciprocal process. It's how you can break down a complex sentence, and it's how you can get kids to write complex sentences. So those are great tools, because it really is, it's all interconnected. And the more you make it interconnected, the more meaningful, purposeful, and likely to transfer to students it will be.

Anna Geiger: Perfect. Well, thank you. I'll link to that as well. And thank you again for taking time out of your day to talk to me.

Brent Conway: My pleasure.

Anna Geiger: Thank you so much for listening. You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode121. Talk to you next time!

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Resources mentioned in this episode

Wit & Wisdom knowledge building curriculum
The Reading Comprehension Blueprint , by Nancy Hennessy
The Knowledge Gap , by Natalie Wexler
The baseball experiment
The Three Shifts (Achieve the Core)
Reading as Liberation: An Examination of the Research Base , by lead writers Sue Pimentel & Meredith Liben
Tim Shanahan on Literacy
SMARTER Intervention

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The post Rethinking reading comprehension with Brent Conway appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Teaching word recognition with Dr. Katie Pace Miles

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TRT Podcast #120: Teaching word recognition with Dr. Katie Pace Miles

120: In today’s episode we discuss exactly what’s happening when children learn to recognize words – teaching tips included!

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Hello, Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom, and today we're continuing our expert interview series!

Today I'm speaking with Dr. Katie Pace Miles, associate professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Her research interests include orthographic mapping, high frequency word learning, reading interventions, and literacy instruction that is grounded in the science of reading. I know you'll enjoy learning how she got into education, about how she did work with Dr. Linnea Ehri, then our conversation about how word-learning works, including how to teach those tricky high frequency words, and finally some programs that she's developed. Let's get started!

Anna Geiger: Hello and welcome to the podcast! Today we have the privilege of speaking with Dr. Katie Pace Miles, who is associate professor at Brooklyn College. If you've seen any of her presentations, she's done a lot of talking and presenting about the concept of sight words, what we have been traditionally getting wrong, and how we can change how we teach sight words. So welcome, Dr. Miles!

Katie Pace Miles: Thank you for having me.

Anna Geiger: Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into education, how balanced literacy was introduced to you, and then how you switched gears very quickly and the education that you got?

Katie Pace Miles: Sure. So I started teaching right after college. I was an elementary major. The school I was at was balanced literacy, and the crazy thing when I look back on it is that there was no curriculum. I was at one of those schools where every teacher made their own literacy curriculum, and so you were pulling from all different resources and things were being handed down and each classroom was doing it in a slightly different way.

For my master's, I went into educational psychology, but it had a really strong teacher training track to it. What was interesting is I came upon this dichotomy where I was learning about cognitive science and educational psychology, but the teacher training part of my master's was training me in balanced literacy.

We had to read The Art of Teaching Reading, and it just never sat well with me. I just rejected it. I remember scanning the book and I didn't know that this was what I would be doing now happen years later. Just in the moment, it just never sat well with me.

I felt like my students really needed more what we now call explicit systematic instruction. I became a reading specialist thereafter. I think I was always drawn to the striving readers and because of that, I just knew for those students, this was not going to work for them.

Anna Geiger: I'm going to insert a little bit there. For those of you not familiar with that book, The Art of Teaching Reading is by Lucy Calkins. It is very fat. It's probably about six hundred pages, and I'll just have to be honest and say that back in the day, I loved that book. I highlighted it up and down. I thought it was so inspirational. I just pictured this perfect class and how I was going to apply everything. I think I was sitting on the beach once reading that book and I loved it.

It's great to hear that you saw through it right away. Looking at the book now, I don't know if I still kept it, sometimes I keep those old books for reference, but I believe out of six hundred pages, there's about six pages that even mention phonics and there's no discussion about explicit teaching. I should go back and see what she talks about for the rest of the book.

But you could see right away there was something wrong with that. Can you talk a little bit more about this disconnect between your master's work and what you were learning in college?

Katie Pace Miles: Sure. So in my undergrad, I had gone to a really strong education program for my undergrad, but the thing that always, always bothered me is these moments of what EXACTLY do I do? What am I exactly supposed to do? I think that might be who I am just as a pragmatic person in these delicious courses.

At the end every time, I'd be like, "What does that mean when you go into the classroom tomorrow?" So that urgency that teachers feel when they hear me talk or anyone else talk, that's exactly who I was sitting in classes.

So I actually decided I wasn't going to do an education master's. I don't want to be extreme, but it just didn't sit well. I kind of wanted to reject a little bit of this, "Let's just talk about theory in education."

Now I was going to college in the early 2000s, and so there was none of this, "Let's do explicit, systematic, and all of that." The science of reading was not a part of my undergrad training in elementary education, and I just felt like I couldn't take it anymore.

I sought out this educational psychology program, and I fell in love with it because it was explaining what happens developmentally, what is happening cognitively when students are learning all different sorts of things. It was not specifically for reading, but I had this passion for teaching reading, so I was able to apply what I was learning in that master's to the children that I was teaching, and it just made so much more sense.

You have very basic things like previewing, reviewing, and then this whole idea of being systematic. This whole idea of developmental windows. That got me right away. Oh, yes, that makes perfect sense.

Having worked with kindergartners through third grade, there are certainly these developmental windows and you can see the bands. Not everyone's at the same point. They're not supposed to be.

I went on to do my PhD in educational psychology as well with Dr. Linnea Ehri. That was the best because obviously Ehri combines educational psychology and cognitive psychology with, very specifically, the development of reading.

Anna Geiger: And just for my listeners, Dr. Linnea Ehri is a huge name in the science of reading community and has contributed some major things including phases of reading and also the concept of orthographic mapping.

So it was a huge and amazing opportunity you had. Can you tell us more about how that worked?

Katie Pace Miles: Oh, it was like a dream come true. So while I was finishing up my master's in educational psychology, I was serving as a learning specialist actually for students in grades 3-5. I was dealing with a lot of students who it seemed to me they weren't getting the instruction they needed in K, 1, 2. Whereas you would hope there wouldn't be as many students needing reading support in 3-5, my caseload was huge. It was overwhelming.

Because I was in an educational psychology program, I came upon Dr. Ehri's research and just glommed onto it right away. It was experimental psychology work. She was manipulating variables with young students in determining whether it worked better this way or that way. Right away I was like, "That's what I need. That is what I've been waiting for."

I was able to translate it. The translation piece I felt was right there. It was like, "Okay, I'm going to try this tomorrow in my classroom." So I started communicating with her and applied and was very honored to receive a fellowship to work with her for five years.

Anna Geiger: Wow. Wow.

Katie Pace Miles: It's amazing.

Anna Geiger: So what did you do during that work?

Katie Pace Miles: So I served as her research assistant, and then I was also her student taking all of her classes. In this fellowship role, they set me up to start teaching at one of the City University of New York campuses. I wound up at Brooklyn College teaching developmental literacy. So as I was learning about all of the research from Dr. Ehri, I was then going to teach in an undergrad situation where these were all pre-service teachers. So it was my duty to translate what I was learning from Ehri to these students. It was just my job simply.

It's not what it is today, like, "Oh, we have to figure out the translation and whatnot." I was just forced to do it. There was no way that I could turn a blind eye to what I was learning in Ehri's classes and then show up on Wednesday to teach and talk about something other than what she was demonstrating that so clearly had mounds, years, piles of evidence behind it.

Anna Geiger: Amazing. Amazing.

I know one of the big things you like to talk about these days, one of the many things, is about sight words and what those really are and how we should approach them. Could you start us off with a proper definition of sight words? I know many people consider those words you can't sound out; you just have to memorize them. There's plenty of websites that still define them that way. How would you define it?

Katie Pace Miles: Well, I don't even use the term sight words. As you learn about the theory of orthographic mapping, you'll understand that the goal is that all words are going to be able to be read by sight because you would've mapped the letter-sound correspondences over time. You would've mapped that and stored that in memory.

That term, sight words, it came from a good place to use it with this subset of words, but it actually is inaccurate. So the words that I think we're all referring to when we say sight words are actually high frequency words.

Then I often like to say those are just words that are used a lot, and this idea that they're all irregular is inaccurate, but you have to look at your list. You have to scrutinize. You have to consider what phonics concepts you've taught so far and then look back at your list and say, "Actually, yeah, this word is now decodable."

So to go back to it, I would say high frequency words are words that are used most often in print, in text.

Anna Geiger: I've had an episode, quite some time ago, about orthographic mapping, but can you again define that for us and tell us how that relates to establishing a sight word vocabulary?

Katie Pace Miles: Ehri's theory of orthographic mapping proposes that there is a glue that is formed between the spelling of a word and its pronunciation, and also the meaning supports that. So it's the spelling, the pronunciation, and the meaning of a word that comes together to be mapped in memory.

Now the glue, as I mentioned at the beginning, and I always go like this because her diagram literally goes like this, this part of orthographic mapping is what most securely stores it in memory. The meaning supports that, but it is critical that when you are learning to read a new word, especially as an emergent reader, you are having a moment where you're analyzing what does the spelling of this word look like? And how does that spelling break out into the phonemes that I need to produce and then blend back together to say the word? Then over time, that glue will be strengthened.

It's not that you're going to do this where you analyze the spelling, map it to the pronunciation, and the next thing you know... Well, for some students that does happen. It's stored. For other students, the students that I'm working with, striving readers, it takes numerous exposures to that word to map it and securely store it in memory so that it can be read automatically by sight. Right? That's the goal.

So all words are going to go through this process and all words, again, the goal would be that you can read it automatically by sight at some point. Maybe it's after the first exposure, maybe it's after the fourth. Maybe for some students it's after the tenth or more exposure.

Anna Geiger: So let's say a teacher is doing the right things, they're teaching phonemic awareness and phonics, they've analyzed the high frequency word, but maybe the two words are "what" and "when" or "what" and "why." And they have a student who just cannot remember them. What tips would you have?

Katie Pace Miles: Definitely taking, as everyone who's listening to this knows, a multimodal approach to this. Sometimes we have the instructional approaches that we do consistently in our classrooms, and we know that for some students, we're going to have to really shake it up.

You can go through different protocols for high frequency words. I would crack out those magnetic letters. I would be counting the phonemes. I would be mapping those letters to those phonemes. You could do that without magnetic letters. You do it with magnetic letters. You bring other resources that you have around the classroom to do that.

Then it would be also your spelling brain. Can you work with students to say, "Hmm, I am seeing that this word is spelled W-H-A-T. How do you think that would be pronounced? /w/-/��/-/t/. Oh, well actually, we have to adjust our brain and say /w/-/��/-/t/ and why does it do that?" And then you would compare, are there other words where the A is making that sound? Just to give it more of a network around that letter making that different sound too. It's very likely that that will help that student to be like, "Oh yeah, it's like in the word..." whatever it is, and then they are creating those connections.

Anna Geiger: So you talked earlier about how meaning is so important to help those glue, and just as a reference to everybody who's not watching this, but listening, Dr. Miles had her fingers laced together when she was talking about gluing the pronunciation onto the letters.

How would you recommend approaching that when it comes to those abstract function words like "of" and "was"?

Katie Pace Miles: Anna, I actually have a research study that I conducted with Ehri a few years ago where we focus solely on function words. Well, I guess not solely. We had one where we were doing function and content words, and what we found really focuses on multilingual students. In the study it was non-native speakers of English, and what we found was that they needed examples of how to use those function words in sentences. They needed multiple examples over time in order to then be able to use that word appropriately.

Then we know from the theory of orthographic mapping that that's just part of the amalgam, as Ehri says. So if you know how to spell it and pronounce it or decode it, and you have that meeting, you're just going to have more clarity. You're going to have a clearer representation of that word in memory.

While we did focus on multilingual learners, I think there's also a lot of students for whom having opportunities to use the function words "of, the, what, why." All of those ones that are all over those high frequency word lists. Having opportunities to use them both verbally and in sentence writing, it's only going to strengthen the representation in memory.

Anna Geiger: So multiple exposures, sentence work, and maybe oral language work with those words.

Katie Pace Miles: Oral language work. Yep.

Anna Geiger: Now there's a lot of kindergarten teachers, maybe first grade teachers, who have a long list of sight words they're expected to teach. Then there's also the idea, which I used to espouse of, starting preschoolers with sight words because it felt easier, right? Because it kind of was to a point. You could memorize twenty words, whereas they might not quite be ready to sound out because they don't have the phonemic awareness skills or whatever.

And yet, this is really counterproductive. Can you talk a little bit about why it's really not a good use of time to memorize these long lists of words?

Katie Pace Miles: It really takes me back to these developmental psychology classes too. It's like time is limited in early childhood. There's only so much instructional time that you have. If we know through the research that the best way to securely store words in memory is through this decoding process, it doesn't make sense to spend so much time on memorization.

That time would be much better spent on letter-sound knowledge in preschool to make sure that you really have strong letter-sound knowledge going into kindergarten. Or there are many preschoolers who are ready for CVC word reading and it's completely appropriate. People are always like, "Oh, it's inappropriate." No, no, totally appropriate to go there.

Once they have that letter's sound, you start, in a really fun way, putting those words together. You can do it actually just with VC words at first, right? At, it. I just think it's really about time and the long-term outcome.

One of the things that I'll add on to that too is about habits. So if children start learning the habit of memorizing words in preschool, and then that's the focus of kindergarten, then all of a sudden we start telling them, "Oh no. Now you need to decode this word." And decoding is effortful. It's hard.

Anna Geiger: Yep. It's hard.

Katie Pace Miles: It's hard work. So it's best to start with that, get that on the ground, and then that's just the way you read words.

Anna Geiger: I was just reading something the other day, and I can't remember what it was, but it was something about how with a class they had teaching "sight words," but once the kids got to a certain number, they were forgetting the first ones.

Katie Pace Miles: Of course.

Anna Geiger: Which makes perfect sense, because if you're just learning it by memorizing it, your brain can only hold so much. Whereas actually, if you've mapped it into your brain by sounding it out, that makes more sense.

What could you say to teachers who are using a decodable book and naturally, of course, there's going to be a word or two sometimes that is not yet decodable for the child or maybe never will be technically fully decodable. How would you recommend they approach that word so the children can actually read the decodable?

Katie Pace Miles: I would hope that the decodable books you're using have limited high frequency words that you haven't taught yet. If that's the case, it's totally fine, right? I think it's okay when you come upon that word to say, "This is the word 'is,' or 'you'."

Anna Geiger: Or "have" or "does." Maybe "does" would be good one. Yeah.

Katie Pace Miles: There you go. And then it's up to the teacher. Does she want to take the teachable moment and break down the word into the sounds and map the letters real quick? Totally, that would be great. You could do it at the end. You could do it before. You could do it before the reading, after the reading. I think that it's a teachable moment where you don't need to require the child to then memorize the word.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. Right. That makes sense.

Katie Pace Miles: So I think there's this concept that if it's a high frequency word, then it has to be memorized, and then we have to make sure that that word has been memorized before we go on to the next. I don't look at it at all, especially if there are forty CVC decodable words in that book. That's your focus! If students can do that, that is such a victory! That's such excellent teaching. The teachers should feel so accomplished with that. Then just do as much mapping for those high frequency words as you can and move on.

Anna Geiger: Exactly, and not stress about it. Because the focus of the book is practicing those sound-spelling patterns that you've taught.

Katie Pace Miles: Absolutely.

Anna Geiger: You have done a lot of other things, including a program called Reading Ready. Can you talk to us about some of the projects that you have and the things that you share with people? I think a lot of them for free?

Katie Pace Miles: Yes, sure! I could talk to you about CUNY Reading Corps and I could talk to you about Reading Ready. Maybe I'll start with Reading Ready.

So I have two children, and my older child was an emergent reader in the midst of the pandemic, and I could not get over the fact that schools were closed and there's this developmental window for children to learn how to read, and my child was entering into it and I just couldn't get over it.

I was thinking about all these caregivers at home and what were they going to do? Also with young children, the remote instruction was not landing with them. They're young children and they're not going to learn how to read in a Zoom room of twenty five other students.

I had been a part of an intervention program called Reading Rescue. It's first and second grade reading intervention. At the same time that this was happening with my own child in the midst of the pandemic, I also saw that more and more students were entering into this. It's supposed to be an emergent intervention, but students were entering it without the prerequisite skills that they needed, and it made a lot of sense.

So I wrote Reading Ready based on what I was doing with my own daughter at home. Reading Ready is a simple to execute program. It has ten lessons. Each lesson has its own explicit systematic phonics instruction. Each lesson, though, so it's not that you just have ten sessions, those ten lessons break out into thirty to sixty sessions. It's a controlled, I call it an intervention, but it's also preventative. You could use this with young children before they need intervention just to make sure they're getting good word analysis work. Or if you have a first or second grader who didn't get this in kindergarten, you may want to use this program.

Each session starts with letter-sound review, and then you do phonemic awareness work using those sounds. There's a few compound words in there that don't relate to those, but I keep it really controlled. Those sounds then are used in the word analysis part of the lesson, and you're doing sound-letter mapping using words, and the words only have those combinations. Then you go into sentence reading. The sentences overwhelmingly only have those words. In fact, over the thirty to sixty sessions, the students are only ever going to see six irregular high frequency words and up to lesson five, which would be a minimum of fifteen sessions, if not more, they're only ever going to see, I think it's three high frequency words.

Anna Geiger: Okay. Wow.

Katie Pace Miles: I'm really obsessed with keeping those high frequency words at bay for these emergent word readers, because it's all about, as I mentioned before, this habit forming of we have to do the hard work to read these words. It is difficult, but the students catch on very swiftly when they're in this environment where they can be successful.

Anna Geiger: I'd like to talk a little bit about what you said, the hard work. So this is kind of funny, but when I first learned about the science of reading three or four years ago, I was starting to read all these books that people recommended, and I put comments on the side, and I was very resistant, so I was kind of writing snarky comments on the side. When people would say, "Learning to read is hard." I'm like, "Oh, well that doesn't sound like fun," because I was used to the leveled books and it just seemed so magical and to think that you'd have to struggle through these words sounded awful to me. How would you convince a five-year-old that this hard work is worth it?

I have a different perspective now, but I'd like to hear from you how you would address someone who felt that way.

Katie Pace Miles: I think that's so honest. I really appreciate your honesty. I've worked with young children, and I've only ever really done it this way where I've been doing the letter sounds. While I do see it being hard, when they get it, they are so rewarded by having figured it out. It's like when they solve a puzzle, or they build something with their Tinker Toys, or Legos, or something like that, they feel so accomplished. I think they have this security, it's maybe subconscious, but they know what to do.

They have skills that they bring to the table the next time they're presented with words. They don't have this insecurity of like, "Either I have it or I don't. Either it's been memorized or it hasn't. So good luck to me."

Anna Geiger: Yeah. I really appreciate hearing that. Just as a quick aside, I learned about structured literacy and all that with my youngest, and I taught all my kids to read before they went to school because I thought I should get to be the one to do that. He was almost five. He wasn't in school yet. I started teaching with decodables, which was very unlike all my other kids.

The very first day I pulled out a decodable and a leveled book, and I thought I just didn't want to get rid of the leveled books. That very first day I saw how confusing it was. First I did the decodable, but then I pulled out the leveled book and said, "Oh, you can't sound out those words." It just made no sense, and I thought, "Okay, I get it now. I won't use them."

But at the very, very beginning, it was very slow. My husband who had heard me teach all the other kids to read with leveled books said to me later, "I felt kind of sad listening to him read like that. It sounded so hard." He caught on very fast, but it was just very interesting.

I remember with some of my other boys, we have six kids and four are boys, and with a couple of them, the learning to read thing with the leveled books was very annoying. I remember I just thought, "We just have to push through it." It wasn't like that was perfect either.

But he would take these decodables and he would just go sit on the couch and just read them all by himself without me telling him to. Because like you said, like Anita Archer says too, success breeds motivation. I just want to reiterate that for people who might be feeling a little bit like I used to feel.

Katie Pace Miles: I'm so glad you're really emphasizing the decodables here. That contrast, Anna, that you just mentioned is, again, so honest and really important for people to hear. The contrast of starting young children with leveled books. They have to rely on the pictures because these big words are in there and they're full of irregular high frequency words. So you're guessing at those, and you started that bad habit. You're looking at the picture. You're using partial decoding skills all the way through it versus you put in a little bit of that hard work and you get up and going, and then it really starts building upon itself.

One of the things with Reading Ready is that I intentionally wrote these sentences that are disconnected from pictures. So the students, they just have a sentence to read, and you can write it on a whiteboard. In the book, it's not that big, but you can write it on a whiteboard. If you have a student who's starting in level one or lesson one, they really struggle to read one sentence, whereas they might have whipped through a leveled book. But when they actually have to attend to those letter sounds, everything is brought cognitively to that activity.

I remember with my daughter, it was just getting that one sentence and then a few less sessions later, she was able to read two sentences and it was still laborious, but I knew what we were working towards. And then just like your son, then she was off.

Anna Geiger: Yeah.

Katie Pace Miles: I didn't even have to finish Reading Ready with her. I was like, "Okay, you don't need this anymore."

Anna Geiger: It's interesting how that works out a lot sometimes.

I was reading, I think it was Margaret Goldberg, and she said something about how it feels like they're not going to get there, like they're not going to be able to do it, but then they do. And that's the "magic" of orthographic mapping, once they map those CVC words, all of a sudden they're automatic and then they can just breeze through books and it's very exciting. There's a quote from, I think, John Shefelbine, that's something about how you have to just struggle through and grunt through it at first, and then the reward is going to come.

But just as a reminder for people too, I think I read this in another Facebook group, you've got to start slow to grow. With the decodable words, it is going to feel like you're not making as much progress as the teacher in the next classroom who's using leveled books because their kids seem like they're reading much more fluently than yours. But we could go off on a whole tangent about the simple view of reading and all that.

Katie Pace Miles: It's so hard. When I give talks on high frequency words, I always bring it back to orthographic mapping. I have these airplanes that'll be going up, and I'm like, you have to go through this nail-biter when the plane is taking off. I'm a nervous flyer. And it's like, are we going to get there? Every word is a nail-biter.

Anna Geiger: Yep. Interesting.

Katie Pace Miles: It's so worth it. It's so worth it, and if you know the theory of orthographic mapping, you're just thinking, "Okay, one of those glue strands just connected." "Oh, maybe I got two glue strands this time." That's great. And you're like, "Okay, I can keep coming back to this."

Anna Geiger: And also, I think it was in the Proust and the Squid, I was reading that one yesterday, and she was talking about how all the work you're doing is just rewiring the brain. You can know that every session you're doing is doing important work. I think that's good for teachers to remember that it might feel like we're not making any progress, but we're building those pathways. For some kids it takes a lot more practice, but all that practice is going to get you somewhere. You've just got to keep at it.

Katie Pace Miles: That's right. That's right. It really goes back to what you had said before that the bottom is going to fall out of the memorization at some point. The fourth grade reading slump is emblematic of this. Students all along in K, 1, 2, they were strong, they were a strong reader. Then they get to the end of second or third, and then all of a sudden it's like, what happened? What happened?

Anna Geiger: Yeah. Can you talk to us a little bit about the other program you mentioned?

Katie Pace Miles: Oh, sure. So CUNY Reading Corps I started in the midst of the pandemic. It's now called CUNY Reading Corps, it wasn't called that when I started it. What I did in the midst of the pandemic, this is fall of 2020, and I was going back to teach at the university. Everything was online, and my literacy courses have thirty hours of field work. My students could not observe in Zoom rooms of the DOE, and my students, because I'm a part of a general early childhood program, which my focus is K-2nd grade, my students only get one literacy course. I'm like, "Oh my gosh!"

I'm so entwined with the New York City Department of Education. I'm such a supporter of them. I'm like, "I have to make sure that this fleet of students every year knows how to teach a child how to read."

So what I did in fall of 2020 was I wrote a grant and received funding to train all of the students that were either in the undergrad or grad version of my course, and they were trained in Reading Rescue, and we trained them up and then sent them via Zoom into the homes of young children who were from underserved communities.

These were the children who were on my mind so much of like, "Oh my gosh, this is the moment when they have to learn how to read and there may not be the support, the resources at home, and there may not be the ability to hire private tutors like what was happening with other privileged families."

I did this in fall of 2020 and continued into the spring. Eventually, this turns into CUNY Reading Corps. What we've turned this into is now the classes at Brooklyn College still are trained in Reading Rescue, and now we hire pre-service teachers from all over CUNY to be trained in either Reading Ready or Reading Rescue, and we deploy them out into the New York City Department of Education and partner with seventy schools across New York to provide this type of tutoring.

The tutoring is either done remotely or now it's in-person, and it has just brought such needed capacity and support to schools, and these pre-service teachers need the experience. They need to be trained in a program that prioritizes systematic and explicit phonics. They need to execute on this over multiple sessions. Our tutors do twenty to forty sessions with the same student. What an experience that is!

We were also able to demonstrate... I'm a researcher, so I'm constantly looking at the students' progression, their growth, and we're seeing that we're making an impact, which is wonderful. So I'm really, really proud of that work.

I'll just give one more plug. Professors from around CUNY, more professors now are going to embed this in their courses. So I have my courses at Brooklyn College. It's now up to three courses at Brooklyn College. And then I believe at four or five other City University of New York campuses, we have professors who are going to embed this in their courses, and now there are universities across the country.

Anna Geiger: That's amazing!

Katie Pace Miles: I've worked with one of the foundations that has supported this, and they are also going to do Reading Ready in their coursework. I'm so just delighted with it. It seems to be really meeting the moment of what schools need, what children need, and what pre-service teachers need going out into the field.

Anna Geiger: That is amazing and really great to hear. I will for sure link to your Reading Ready program, which I've seen it. It's excellent. It's very easy to use.

Katie Pace Miles: Very easy to use.

Anna Geiger: You said you're a researcher. What are you working on now?

Katie Pace-Miles: I'm still working on high frequency words. There's a paper I actually just submitted yesterday with two colleagues, and we were, again, analyzing the Dolch high frequency word list.

It's been a little difficult to run experiments in... Well, it was impossible for me to run experiments during covid in New York. Now we're coming into the post-pandemic, and so I have some research with children on the docket, but in the meantime, I worked with two colleagues to analyze the Dolch list and to really look at what percentage of those words are irregular, have exceptions? And it's very low.

Anna Geiger: It's so interesting.

Katie Pace Miles: Very low. Like 1%.

Teachers should know that these words collectively are not even remotely overwhelmingly irregular. To have that in your mind really guides your instruction, and it helps you think about, okay, what phonetic elements am I teaching, let's say in kindergarten. That's what I'm going to tackle.

But maybe with short A, I should also mention that at times, yes, there's the long A, yes, there's the short A, but there's also this other sound that A makes, /��/. Maybe I should just go there because it unlocks a whole trove of words from these high frequency word lists.

Or maybe that's up to the first grade teacher to do. I also respect that completely, but at some point in instruction, who's going to hit that part of this more advanced phonetic element knowledge?

Anna Geiger: Well, it is a lot to think about. I think it's really nice to hear from you, especially because I think personally, in my experience back in the day, not that many years ago, I would've thought of researchers as just very disconnected from classroom work, and it's just really helpful to hear that. I know that we've talked to others as well, but it's good to know that many researchers are in classrooms, even former teachers themselves.

Thanks for all the work that you're doing, especially to translate it. I know I've really enjoyed the webinars and things you've given, which I'll be sure to link to in the show notes because they're really easy to learn from.

Katie Pace Miles: Thank you so much! I really appreciate the opportunity to be a part of your podcast.

Anna Geiger: Thank you so much for joining us!

You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode120. Talk to you next time!

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Presentations by Dr. Pace Miles

High Frequency Words: What, Why, and How It Pertains to the Science of Reading
Glean Education podcast interview with Dr. Pace Miles
Transitioning from Word Walls to Sound Walls

Curricula / Programs

Reading Ready
Reading Rescue
CUNY Reading Corps

Papers by Dr. Pace Miles

Rethinking sight words
How does seeing spellings support vocabulary learning?��
Reading Rescue: A follow up on an effectiveness of an intervention for struggling readers

Get on the waitlist for my course, Teaching Every Reader

Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader

The post Teaching word recognition with Dr. Katie Pace Miles appeared first on The Measured Mom.

What we know about phoneme awareness with Dr. Susan Brady

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TRT Podcast #118: What we know about phoneme awareness – with Dr. Susan Brady

Phoneme awareness has gotten a lot of attention in the last few years. Dr. Susan Brady helps us sort out the research and make practical applications for teaching.

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Welcome to Triple R Teaching! This is Anna Geiger here, from The Measured Mom. As we count down to the opening again of my course, Teaching Every Reader, in May, we are welcoming a series of experts when it comes to the science of reading.

Last week, we got to hear from Dr. Shayne Piasta about learning the alphabet. Today, we're going to hear from Dr. Susan Brady, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Rhode Island. She has been a researcher for decades, particularly in the areas of phonemic awareness and phonological awareness, and now she is working on translating that for teachers. So not only will we get to hear the research today, but we'll also learn how to apply it to our teaching. We'll get right into the interview.

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Dr. Brady!

Susan Brady: Thank you! I'm pleased to be here.

Anna Geiger: So you have quite a career in research. Could you talk to us about how you got into education research and what's brought you to where you are today?

Susan Brady: As an undergrad, I was intrigued with human language abilities and the brain. I was accepted at the University of Connecticut Cognitive Psychology Program for grad work and totally lucked out because there were excellent faculty asking the kinds of things I was interested in and beyond.

They were connected with a place called Haskins Laboratories that has done just wonderful research. Donald Shankweiler and Isabelle Liberman were the two researchers who started pointing out the importance of phonological awareness, and in particular phoneme awareness. What they appreciated was that learning to speak is an innate ability, but learning to read is not something we've evolved to do. So in order to understand a writing system, we have to know what the symbols stand for. In an alphabet, we have to know that they stand for those little phonemes that make up words. That turns out to be a little bit challenging to accomplish.

With that introduction from them and with my interests in language and the brain, I started out studying phonological processes in the brain: speech perception, verbal memory, and short term memory.

That then dovetailed with me asking about underlying phonological skills to see how they're related to individual differences in learning to read. Do they differentiate good readers from poor readers? Do they predict how easy it will be for you to learn how to read? And pretty soon, I was looking at phoneme awareness in that set of variables that I was exploring.

As time progressed, I also became involved in applied research. So I was seeing the strong implications of what was being learned about reading development for reading instruction and for reading intervention. I did some school-based research, but also had a number of professional development projects trying to transmit, and succeeding, in getting this information to educators. That was very rewarding.

I can connect a little bit later to how, over that time, my view of what was important in phonological awareness evolved.

Anna Geiger: Well we can get right into that! I watched a workshop that you gave, some time ago, in the last year or so, and you talked about the difference between phonological sensitivity skills and phonemic awareness, which we all know are under that same umbrella. Could you explain the difference and maybe how your understanding of their role has changed?

Susan Brady: Certainly. Phonological awareness is the broad category of being aware of the sound structures in spoken language. At the word level, that's the word: the syllable, onsets, rimes, phonemes. Which of those are important for learning to read?

Initially, when Shankweiler and Liberman were doing research on this, they observed that four year olds didn't do well on a phoneme awareness task. Maybe almost half of them could do a syllable awareness task. They looked at another cohort of children, who were five and then six, and they didn't see phoneme awareness emerging until sometime in first grade.

At that time, there was no instruction in phonological awareness, and kindergarten was viewed as a socialization process, not targeting literacy skills.

So that progression has come to be viewed as the sequence of phonological awareness development. Phonological sensitivity refers to all of those larger chunks above the phoneme, and phoneme awareness specifically to the individual phonemes.

As I said, when I began, I subscribed to this view that there's a continuum, and that it goes from larger to smaller, and I taught a lot of grad students that. I now would not do that.

The research started piling up, fairly early on, that went against that argument, and also went against the argument that you need to teach syllable awareness in order to achieve phoneme awareness and the other components as well.

I'm very concerned, partly because of things I said in the past and what the community has been saying, that the applied world is really stuck in this earlier perspective. The good thing is they're appreciating the importance of phoneme awareness, but we can really improve what's happening by zeroing in on phoneme awareness, right at the beginning of kindergarten, and importantly, connecting it with letter knowledge right away.

Anna Geiger: So I know I heard you talk in your presentation about how we used to teach that there was this ladder of skills that went from easy to hard, and that was, therefore, the order we were to teach the skills. It was, like you said, large to small, so it might be like words, rhyming, syllables, onset and rime, and then phonemic awareness, which I taught the same thing, which is why your presentation kind of rocked my world a little bit, in a negative way at first. Because I thought, "Oh goodness, I have to take that graphic down!"

So would you agree that the skills go from simple to complex, but that does not mean we have to teach them that way? Also, that does not mean that we need mastery at an earlier level to teach a later skill? Correct?

Susan Brady: We definitely don't need mastery at the earlier level, particularly in these times when we know things have been set back by COVID in schools. It seems to me it's a bonus to be able to say, "Okay, you can take rhyme off the table, syllables off the table, onset and rime, and just get right down to the phoneme."

Now, at the phoneme level, we also need to know how does phoneme awareness develop? It's not just this eureka, where one day, you understand words are made up of phonemes and you're aware of all of them. That is tied strongly to the position of the phoneme in the word. Certain positions are easier for beginners or older struggling readers to be aware of.

That sequence of phoneme awareness development starts from the first phoneme in a word. For the initial phoneme, let's stay away from words that have blends or consonant clusters.

Next is the final phoneme in a word. For that I would say CVC words would be handy, but for initial phonemes, it doesn't matter if you pick a word like "dinosaur." The /d/ is still very salient to kids. But initial to final, again with no consonant clusters, that's my old term from linguistics. I know we use the term "blends" more now.

Then the last of beginning phoneme awareness is the medial vowel in a CVC word. It's not just the medial phoneme. You could have a word like "ask," that has a consonant in the middle, but I'm talking consonant vowel consonant constructions.

There's now lots of evidence, a lot of it from study of spelling errors, that shows that children might first spell the word "butterfly" just with a B. They then might spell the word "bat" B-T, and eventually they get a vowel in there as well. Their knowledge of word structures and awareness of those phonemes is growing.

Now that's what I would call beginning phoneme awareness. The later stage, the more sophisticated stage, what I like to call advanced phoneme awareness, is awareness of the internal consonants in those blends.

I am confident that every third, fourth, and fifth grade teacher out there has seen their struggling readers, at least on occasion, spell words without the internal consonant. They might spell "plan," P-A-N, and they're not able to take apart the /p/ and /l/ in the onset and haven't appreciated that separate phoneme there.

Anna Geiger: So backing up, talking about syllables and rhyming, do you see a place for teaching those before kids get to kindergarten, when we're not focused on learning to read so much?

Susan Brady: No. Mind you, I think it's terrific to read lots of nursery rhymes to children and just enjoy them, and the repeated elements in them can foster memory for little kids learning a particular rhyme, but it's not related to developing phoneme awareness. It doesn't foster it. So if that's your purpose, you don't need to do it.

In terms of syllables, syllables are a very important linguistic unit, after you have some beginning phoneme awareness and phonics. Even at the beginning, I would say, you can say that every syllable has to have a vowel, and it can have some consonants. But then, the more advanced part I was thinking of was syllable types. To help children think about and understand what's happening in a silent E syllable or in an r-controlled syllable, et cetera, then we need to have more focus on what syllables are.

Later on, if kids want to write rhymes or poetry, then thinking about rhyme is helpful.

Anna Geiger: So could you respond to this quote from the Teaching Phoneme Awareness in 2022: A Guide for Educators? It's written by quite a few people that we're both familiar with, including David Kilpatrick. There's a quote from that guide which says, "In preschool and early kindergarten, syllable counting, word play, and rhyming activities have a role in preparing young students to attend to and speak about spoken language." How would you respond to that?

Susan Brady: It's outdated.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Susan Brady: It's incorrect. There was a big review of rhyme written in 2002, by someone named MacMillan, and she reviewed tons of studies that had targeted rhyme and concluded that there was not evidence that it helped, that sometimes people weren't controlling for other variables, like did the children already know their letters? Did they have any reading skills? Which obviously would up their performance on tasks like that.

Now you have a study, this particular one was done by Cary and Verhaege. If we take a group of kids and we randomly assign them to group A or group B, and the two groups are matched now in the end. Then we teach group A syllable awareness first and then move into phoneme awareness, do they do better at getting phoneme awareness because they've had the syllable awareness? Or the other group, which jumped right into the phoneme awareness level, with the same amount of time spent on phoneme awareness in the two groups, do they do fine or are they lagging?

Well, the answer is they did fine. In fact, the kids who get syllable awareness first get a little confused when you switch to phoneme. It's "What are we doing now?" But it doesn't facilitate.

If we go back to how does phoneme awareness develop? There are early activities that one could do, such as alliteration which is great for pointing out the first phoneme in the word. So if I go, "/t/ /t/ /t/ /t/ Tommy, what's that first sound? /t/ And now, what letter stands for that? The T." It seems to be beneficial to start with discovering a phoneme and then linking it to the letter, and then, after that, you're going back and forth. So "What's the letter? What's the sound?" That's very beneficial.

There are other kinds of studies we could point to. Early on, Pat Lindamood had the LiPS program, where she was taking more of an articulatory approach. "Let's think about what your mouth is doing when you make the /t/." Kids did well just starting at that level. They weren't getting the larger units first.

Years back she came to my university, the University of Rhode Island, where I worked for 35 years. We were walking across campus and talking about reading, of course, and she said, "I hate rhyme activities."

I said, "Well, do tell. Why?"

She said, "Because once kids learn how to rhyme, if they're at all challenged by the phoneme level, they just default to rhyming, and it just gets in the way."

So there's a contrary argument that it's actually counterproductive, rather than just neutral.

There also was a study, Nancollis, Lawrie, and Dodd, in 2005, that wanted to give low socioeconomic status kids a little boost, knowing that they often were lagging behind their peers in reading development. They gave them a syllable and rhyme set of lessons, and they worked on helping the kids learn those concepts before they started. Then they followed up two years later to see how this boost had worked out. Those kids were doing worse in reading development than the matched children who hadn't gotten that program.

I would say in preschool, let's do alliteration. Let's focus on building awareness of a set of first sounds and gradually expand it and link them with some letters. Children are starting to foster that alphabetic principle. That's how our writing system works. We have symbols that stand for the sounds, the individual speech sounds.

Whereas with rhyming and syllables, there's not a neat coordination with letter knowledge. What we're finding now, with very impressive meta-analysis coming out that are reviewing lots of studies, is that connecting with letters is key and really boosts learning about phoneme awareness.

You need some phoneme awareness to get started. Then, as you learn more letters, the two are reciprocally related and boost each other.

Anna Geiger: What would you say to people who say they're just not developmentally ready for a skill like that, let's say, in preschool or whatever? How do you answer? I hear a lot about developmentally ready. It's hard to know exactly what that means sometimes. What's your response to that?

Susan Brady: Oh, it brings back scary memories of my son starting first grade. The teacher decided he wasn't developmentally ready to learn how to read because when she gave him the choice of building blocks or working on reading, he chose to build blocks because he was a perfectionist and didn't want to do it unless he could do it well.

Anna Geiger: Oh yes, I have some of those.

Susan Brady: But I knew he had great phoneme awareness and knew almost all his letter-sound correspondences, and that was an erroneous statement.

Remember what I said about it being easier to identify initial and final phonemes than to do rhymes? For a variety of reasons, I don't think we have to worry about developmental readiness. People have successfully taught three and four year olds phoneme awareness. Now I don't think we need to get carried away with three and four year olds, but likewise, I think the assumption that we need to do rhyme and syllables to help them get ready for literacy tasks is unfortunately based on a misunderstanding about that early work that showed that more kids were aware of syllables and not aware of phonemes. That wasn't an instructional activity.

The kids who are good at the syllable task are probably going to be good at the subsequent tasks. Maybe they have better phonological memory, maybe they have better speech perception, or maybe they have larger vocabularies that have driven a more phoneme level representation in the brain.

So you see that, yes, they did better on learning phonemes later on, but if you took kids with those abilities and didn't give them the syllables, they also would do better at the phoneme task. So there still are individual differences, but it doesn't mean we have to teach the larger units.

Anna Geiger: So what would you say to...? Let's start with preschool teachers. You talked already about doing alliteration, and they can work on those beginning sounds and then progress to final and middle. Is there anything else you'd say to preschool teachers?

And then let's move into kindergarten, what would you recommend for building phonemic awareness?

Susan Brady: Well we want to work on language development in general, so we want to build vocabularies in enjoyable ways. We want to read exciting stories and talk about characters and who's doing what and how do you think this is going to work out? And just have fun. I totally love all this stuff.

You can also work on retelling. What happened? Where was it? Who was involved? Was there a challenge or a problem? How did they overcome it? So all of those things are going to be foundations for subsequent reading, writing, and comprehension tasks.

Anna Geiger: What would you say...? There's been a lot of discussion in the last year or so about advanced phonemic awareness where there are a lot of oral exercises. For example, "Say the word 'snap.' Now take out the /n/ and put in an /l/." Is there any value to that sort of thing? And why or why not?

Susan Brady: That approach is based on a misunderstanding. I believe where David Kilpatrick got this impression was from looking at studies that, maybe in the eighties, were asking the question, "What phoneme awareness tasks differentiate good and poor readers? Will that tell us about what poor readers need to acquire in order to do better?" In those studies, it was found that the better readers could do these manipulation sorts of tasks of "What is 'smile' without the /s/," and particularly if they involve consonant clusters. But poor readers couldn't.

The unfortunate assumption was that that is the skill that enables good readers to be good readers, and that's backwards. It's being good readers that enables those kids to do those tasks so effortlessly. So we now know from brain research that if you're presented with a word that you, as a skilled reader, have in your brain then that activates the spelling, the orthographic representation of that word as well.

The logic was backwards. Also, the recommendation to continue phoneme awareness activities into the third and fourth grades, I think, is an unfortunate use of time for most children. And again, in third and fourth grades, the children who can do those activities easily are the better readers. Neuroscience research and cognitive research shows that when you do that kind of a task, you are tapping orthographic knowledge.

So instead I would say, it's not that no older children need phoneme awareness instruction, but only those who are lagging in development. That sequence of initial, final, medial, usually in the older readers you're seeing they're pretty good at those levels, but have difficulties with the internal consonants, in consonant blends or consonant clusters. And so, if there are any indications, and spelling is often the way you spot these problems initially, if internal consonants are being left out of the spelling, then you want to go directly to targeting those skills for those students with letters and integrating it.

I also note that if we go online to try to find information, there is such a mix of stuff out there, and a lot of it is based on the older, earlier claims and beliefs that were so widespread. I think it's unfortunate, and some of them come from organizations that are trying to do the right thing and trying to help teachers know what is important, but we need to have a culling of outdated information from those organizations and from individuals who are trying to improve things. Now, we pardon people for having a misunderstanding, but we really need to move on to what's important.

Anne Castles, who's an Australian researcher, tested adults and older school kids on phoneme awareness tasks where you're just listening. So if I say "What's 'bats' without the /s/?" then people are quick, "bat." If we're measuring their reaction time, we can say, whoa, that was easy.

Now if we give them a word that has the same number of phonemes, but it isn't orthographically as transparent, like "box," so the X represents /k/ /s/. So now, what's box without the /s/ is Bach, like the musician. She said this error pattern is revealing the reliance on the orthography and the use of it to do those tasks.

I wish we'd get rid of that use of the term "advanced phoneme awareness" because it's a falsehood, and it's time for us to stop telling teachers that this is what they should be doing, that this is the key. Instead, to realize that it's those internal consonants that are the more advanced stage, the harder part of phoneme awareness.

Anna Geiger: So we would want to work on phoneme isolation, blending, and segmenting.

Susan Brady: Yes.

Anna Geiger: But we could do the manipulating with letters and spelling. It's just the oral drills?

Susan Brady: Yeah, and you already know that linking with letters is incredibly valuable, and doing manipulations, when you have letters in front of you. So now we want to change "pan" to "plan," and we see, oh, okay, we're going to slide a letter down, or we're going to write a letter in between the P and the A, and now we're going to read it out, and now we can do substitution. That is very useful, but that is, again, integrating with the spelling pattern.

Anna Geiger: We can kind of finish this off by having you share why you feel it's so important that we get this right. What's the urgency in getting to phonemic awareness and getting that mastered early on?

Susan Brady: It's the starting point to literacy. It's critical to literacy. If we can teach it quickly and successfully, and we're not wasting kids' and teachers' time on other tasks that unfortunately aren't relevant, then I think we can have that result that I was mentioning in New Zealand that made me happy.

We have a lot of inner city kids and kids in disadvantaged areas whose reading scores are lagging. In Rhode Island, I've learned recently, one city has 13% of its kids at grade level in the mid-elementary grades. That's just tragic, absolutely tragic.

There also is research pointing to how kids evaluate their own reading ability. And a person named Morgan did some research studying kids' self-assessment and found that within about six months of starting school, children have decided if they're going to be one of the good readers or not. If they're not, then they'd rather kick the kid next to them when it's reading time or go do anything else. It's just kind of painful, and the attitudes are self-defeating.

We foster success early on and give them a nice structured task. So when they've learned some phonemes, they've discovered some phonemes, they've linked them with some letters, and now they're making some words with that, and now they're reading a little decodable that builds on those words, and they're pretty proud of themselves. They don't care if this decodable is fine literature or not. They can go home and read it to mom and dad and the dog and their sister and go, "Look, I'm reading!"

Doing that in kindergarten is much more efficient and effective than delaying and having a student in first or second grade who's at that reading level, but now a little embarrassed because this is baby stuff. I think we want instruction that is efficient and effective.

Anna Geiger: Well, thank you so much for taking time to talk to me and share all of this. I know I'll be very busy trying to find all that research. I may send you an email asking for some of those because I'm going to link as much as I can in the show notes for everyone who's listening.

Is there anything else that you would like me to link to or share related to your work?

Susan Brady: Thanks for asking. The International Dyslexia Association this last fall, maybe November-ish, released a fact sheet on phoneme awareness. Note that choice of the word "phoneme awareness" rather than "phonological." It provides a lot of discussion that might be helpful to people who are trying to sort this out and learn more about the terminology and what we know.

Anna Geiger: Excellent. I will definitely link to that.

Susan Brady: Now I know that there is some criticism out there about the so-called science of reading, and it's claimed that it's only about phonics. I want to just state that that's not true, that the science of reading is a very broad field that investigates all components of reading development and reading expertise.

The Reading League has produced a helpful downloadable e-book that's called The Science of Reading: Defining Guide, and it goes through what are the real science requirements of the science of reading? So it's not anecdotes, it's not casual observational work. It has important science criteria for the methodologies that have to be used. It's based on those kinds of studies that I'm making the statements I am about phoneme awareness.

Anna Geiger: Well thank you again. It was very nice to meet you!

Susan Brady: Very nice to meet you! Thank you for your good work.

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode118. Talk to you next time!

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Articles and other resources mentioned in the episode

Rhyme and analogy in beginning reading: Conceptual and methodological issues , by Goswami & East (2000)
Explicit syllable phoneme segmentation in the young child , by Liberman & Shankweiler (1974)��
Teaching phoneme awareness in 2022: A guide for educators , by Ashby, McBride, Naftel, Paulson, Kilpatrick & Moats (2022)
Promoting phonemic analysis ability among kindergartners , by Cary & Verhaeghe (1994)
Phonological awareness intervention and the acquisition of literacy skills in children from deprived social backgrounds , by Nancollis, Lawrie & Dodd (2005)
How does orthographic knowledge influence performance on phonological awareness tasks? , by Castles (2003)
IDA Phonemic awareness fact sheet
The Reading League’s defining guide ebook

Dr. Brady’s work

Dr. Brady is so accomplished and published so much that it would be difficult to list all of her credentials and writing here. This document lists her education, honors, experience, publications, and more.��

 

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Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader

The post What we know about phoneme awareness with Dr. Susan Brady appeared first on The Measured Mom.

What does the research say about alphabet instruction? with Dr. Shayne Piasta

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TRT Podcast #117: What does research say about alphabet instruction? with Dr. Shayne Piasta

Teachers have a lot opinions about how to teach the alphabet – but what does the research��really say? Find out in this conversation with Dr. Shayne Piasta!��

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Hello, this is Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom! I'm excited to let you know that my online course about teaching reading in K-2 is opening on Monday, May 8th. As we look forward to that, I'm going to be releasing a series of expert interviews here on the podcast.

We're starting today with Dr. Shayne Piasta. She's a professor of reading and literacy in early and middle childhood in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Ohio State University. She's also a researcher. Today, she's going to talk to us about what the research says and doesn't say about teaching the alphabet.

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Dr. Piasta!

Shayne Piasta: Hi, it's so nice to be here!

Anna Geiger: Can you introduce yourself to us? Tell us how you got into education and now what you're doing.

Shayne Piasta: Sure. So I began this journey, I think, even before I really was in higher education. My mom was a teacher, and so I was always really interested in what was going on in her classroom and what she was learning about at her professional development, and what she was doing. I spent a lot of time with her in her classroom.

I also saw a lot of new practices and new materials come down the road and her being asked to use those, and I always wondered, "Well, are these going to be helpful or not? Is there any data behind these practices to suggest that they might be helpful for children?"

And so when I went to my undergraduate institution, I was a psychology major but also took as many education courses as I possibly could, and I did a senior research project that was looking at teachers' knowledge about reading and what their reported practices were.

Then I moved into getting my PhD as an IES fellow at Florida State University in the Florida Center for Reading Research, where I really learned a lot about how we can and can't generate evidence to determine whether certain practices are effective. That's been really one of the trajectories of my career is really trying to generate evidence that education stakeholders, teachers, principals, and policymakers, can use to inform their decisions when they're making instructional decisions and decisions about curriculum and intervention and other aspects of practice. So that's really the crux of my research program, identifying and then validating these different types of practices to support young readers.

Anna Geiger: I think that's really interesting that, even as a young person, you were already thinking about data. That's so interesting because I always wanted to be a teacher, and I never once thought about that at all. I was just excited about getting in a classroom and doing all the fun things.

I think it's also good to hear from your perspective a little bit because before I really embraced the science of reading and structured literacy, I really thought of researchers as just being these far-out people that I could not connect with. I did not picture someone like yourself. I pictured people who were very separate from the classroom.

Can you talk to me a little bit about how you're connected to what's happening in classrooms these days?

Shayne Piasta: Much of my work, my research, takes place in classrooms. I'm not in a classroom as much as I was when I was hanging out in my mom's classroom, especially during nap time with the quiet music in the background - that was a really great destresser for me.

My research team is constantly out in schools, either providing intervention or instruction or collecting data with kids. We also try to stay in as much contact as we possibly can with both education policymakers as well as the teachers and principals and others who have bearing on instructional decisions.

So I may not be in the classroom, but I try to stay in touch with these stakeholders because ultimately, that's who I am serving along with the children.

Anna Geiger: Is there anything that you would say for alphabet instruction that we know for sure research backs it up?

Shayne Piasta: I think there are some things we know. For one, children show individual differences in their early alphabet, not only in their knowledge at its time point, but also individual differences in how their trajectory of learning about the alphabet is going, so how quickly they're picking up on this.

Those individual differences we also know can be linked with background factors as well as societal factors. Often the children who are starting off their school years with lower letter knowledge are tending to come from disadvantaged backgrounds. That would be one reason why it's so important to be attending to providing effective alphabet instruction.

Just as children vary, we also know that letters vary, and they can vary on a lot of different factors.

I gave the example of the acrophonic principle: some letters have their sound at the beginning of the name, some have it at the end of the name, some don't have it at all. The letters that children tend to be more familiar with, or at least the letter sounds children tend to be more familiar with, tend to be those letters like B in boy, where you're actually hearing the sound at the beginning.

In the US, children also tend to be more familiar with letters that are at the beginning of the alphabet than those at the end of the alphabet. They tend to be more familiar with letters that have a more visually distinct form. There are lots of other factors like this to the point where some folks, myself and others, have been able to rate the difficulty of particular letters, the likelihood that children would know a given letter, and you can see that it's really a continuum.

So that has implications, and now these implications have not necessarily been tested, but they have implications in terms of the instructional intensity that we want to devote to letters.

So a letter like W that tends to be one that's difficult for children for a variety of reasons, maybe we want to provide more intense instruction on that as opposed to the letter B, which children tend to often know even coming into kindergarten. So that's the second place where I think we have solid evidence.

The third place that I think we have converging evidence, or at least evidence that I'm convinced by, is that there is value in explicitly teaching letter names and letter sounds. There are numbers of studies that show engaging and explicit teaching of these leads to better learning than other types of instruction, implicit or explicit, that children might be receiving typically in their classroom. So it's certainly something that can be taught and can be taught explicitly.

Along with that, there's also a good deal of evidence suggesting that the most important component for kids learning names and sounds is the opportunity to see the letter and hear it paired with its name and sound. So again, that aligns with this idea of explicit instruction. It also aligns with this idea of paired associate learning.

So those are the top three, I would say. There are a couple other areas that we have converging evidence as well.

There's converging evidence from Roberts et al., as well as from my work, that teaching names and sounds simultaneously, so not necessarily doing one first and then the other, is most beneficial for young kids who are learning the alphabet. Those are rigorous experimental designs that are supporting that. I's this idea of converging evidence, but again, it's only a few studies.

Another area where, again, it's converging evidence, we don't have enough for it to be that rock-solid evidence that you're asking about, but I think we are on our way there is this idea that letters can be taught at a quicker pacing than what is typically done in many early childhood classrooms.

So a lot of classrooms do a letter of the week approach or something like that. One particular experimental study showed that teaching two to four letters per week led to better alphabet knowledge development than teaching only one to three.

Then there's a really interesting study that came out of Norway showing that teachers who introduced their students to letters more quickly, so they were getting through all the letters by the wintertime, their children did tend to have more positive alphabet knowledge and also reading outcomes later on. That's correlational, so we can't accept that as causal. But again, it's kind of converging with the other research suggesting that we could be teaching more than a letter a week to students, and that's actually beneficial for them.

Anna Geiger: Now would you say this is true in both preschool and kindergarten?

Shayne Piasta: Most of the studies have only been conducted in preschool or kindergarten.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Shayne Piasta: I cannot think of a lot of different premises that have been tested in both grade levels, so what I would do there is think about would there be reason to expect that a slightly older or slightly younger child would react differently to a particular practice? I think in many cases we might say no. We'd expect a four-year-old and a five-year-old to benefit similarly from a particular practice if that practice is effective.

Anna Geiger: So you've already touched on things that we think we know, and things we do know. Is there anything that has not been studied that you think would be worth looking at?

Shayne Piasta: There's SO much that hasn't been studied. I think we know more than we actually know we know. I get questions a lot from teachers and other practitioners about this idea of letter sounds and letter names.

I get similar questions about uppercase versus lowercase. Is it better to teach children just the uppercase form and then move to lowercase, or to do those simultaneously? That's a study I would love to run.

There are lots and lots of questions about instructional sequence, and this is something too that I think a lot of scholars and teachers have a very strong view on, and they have a strong theoretical rationale for why they choose the instructional sequence that they do. But to my knowledge, this has not been tested, and it could be that the instructional sequences, some of them are equally effective. So that's an area that I think needs more attention.

Another area that needs to be studied is this idea of differentiation. We have evidence in other areas that differentiating instruction is important for maximizing children's learning. That hasn't really been directly studied here. So if we're asking practitioners to do something other than letter of the week, we need to know what it is that we might recommend based on evidence. And so one thing we might recommend is differentiating based on the letters kids know and the letters that they have yet to learn. And possibly, as I referred to earlier, differentiating based on the letter itself as well, so that the letter W is getting greater attention and supports than the letter B.

Anna Geiger: Sure.

Shayne Piasta: And so I think that's really important work that we need to be doing moving forward.

There's also a bit of controversy over teaching children to write the letters. There have been syntheses in which pairing alphabet instruction with letter writing or other writing opportunities seems to be associated with better outcomes. But there's also a direct test of this that Roberts et al. did, where they added a letter writing component to paired associate learning, and they did not see an added benefit of integrating the writing piece in there. I think, especially with the attention right now to reading and writing connections and things like that, it would be really important to continue following up on that research to understand whether or not we should be incorporating writing into our alphabet instruction.

Anna Geiger: Can you tell us about any current research that you're involved with or that you're hoping to do?

Shayne Piasta: I have lots of ideas. It's always a matter of finding the funding and the folks who want to do a project with me.

One thing that I'm continuing to work on is this idea of identifying best practices in alphabet instruction. We began this work a couple years ago, and the first thing that we wanted to do was to develop a set of lessons that were kind of modular in nature. So if we wanted to test it with uppercase letters versus lowercase letters or teaching them simultaneously, or if we wanted to test providing more intensity in a certain letter rather than another letter, we could use these lessons and tweak them so that the basic lesson was the same, but then you could make these tweaks to be able to test these differences in instructional practices.

So we finished up that work and we did a pilot study because we'd want to know do these lessons lead to improved learning before we start doing these little tweaks? We did indeed find that that was the case on both letter naming outcomes and letter sound outcomes and letter writing.

I am at the beginning stages now of taking that to the next step to answer some of these questions that we really, really want to answer, and I'm trying to figure out what the best way of doing that might be. I'm actually starting to put together a study where we could invite teachers from across the country to be partners in this work. We would recruit teachers who want to test a question, so we'll use the uppercase, lowercase as an easy example, who would want to then work with a student or two in their classroom following research protocols in order to contribute data to this larger project, so that we could then start answering some of these questions from the field. So that's one line that I've been working on in which I hope to continue.

The second thing that I am addressing in my work right now is the extent to which the timing of alphabet knowledge and development matters, the extent to which a trajectory matters. There's some prior work out of, I believe it was Finland, showing that children who had higher trajectories of alphabet knowledge tended to have better literacy outcomes as opposed to those who were kind of slow to acquire this knowledge.

So we followed up on that, that was specific to letter names. We followed up on that with a sample here in the US, where we both looked at letter names and letter sounds, and we found a similar pattern. We found that children could be characterized as one of three profiles.

There was a high profile, these were kids who already knew most of their names and sounds, and so there's actually very little room for growth, right? There's only 26 letters. So they were like this high, straight line if you would think about development in terms of how you would graphically represent it.

Then we had children who were growing in their alphabet knowledge, and so they were actually starting off much, much, much lower, but they had this really nice positive trajectory over time, where, at the end of our assessment points, they were very similar to the levels of knowledge of the kids in the high profile.

Then we had a delayed profile as well, where they started similar to the growing profile, so with lower levels of knowledge, but they were not making nearly as much progress. Why this is important is because these profiles continued to differentiate children on their kindergarten literacy assessments.

So even though the growing and high were now very similar, those students still had substantial differences in their kindergarten readiness scores, which was specific to literacy here in Ohio at the time. The kids in that delayed group, even though they started off the same as the growing, they had very different kindergarten literacy scores, and this makes me wonder about the extent to which the trajectory matters.

Some people say, why are we spending time researching or teaching alphabet knowledge when almost every kid masters this by first grade? Well, one, not every kid does master it by first grade. And two, it may be that the timing of when children are developing this knowledge, it may matter. When we think about things like consolidation coming from Ari��s' theories and others, and this idea that they're putting together all this knowledge and all this learning, and they're using everything in order to propel their further literacy development and then that has often these reciprocal benefits for different skills.

So that's a study that we did, and we're now in the process of trying to replicate that in a different sample that includes children who are considered typically developing with respect to literacy, but also who have been identified as at risk for reading difficulties. For this sample, we actually have long-term outcomes, so we have followed them and have grade one reading and spelling outcomes.

We want to see, one, do we replicate these same patterns of development, and do these patterns actually matter when predicting kids' literacy skills? And if so, that should direct us as to whether yes, we need to be targeting this at a certain point in development, or no, all that matters is that you eventually understand the letter names and sounds and other aspects of alphabet knowledge.

Anna Geiger: You've given us a lot of really good information here about what we know, what we don't know, and what we're learning.

I believe, and I'll link to them in the show notes, that you have some free alphabet lessons posted. Is that correct?

Shayne Piasta: I do. Those are actually those lessons that we designed and pilot tested, so they do have evidence of being effective, and that's what we would be modifying to move further into identifying best practices for alphabet instruction.

We also have some free quick assessments that have been psychometrically tested as well, a short form for letter name knowledge and then also a short form for letter sounds. Those are also posted on the website and are free to use as well.

As we develop more materials, I'll continue posting to that website to try to get more information out to practitioners.

Anna Geiger: Wonderful. Well, in the show notes, I'll definitely link to all of that, and we'll just wrap up really quickly.

If you could tell us, what specific things did you have in mind about best practice when you created those lessons? What were you sure to include?

Shayne Piasta: So I will say most of that was an educated guess in terms of leaning on theory where we didn't yet have evidence, but some of the things we made sure to include were many, many opportunities for paired associate learning.

We included originally multisensory activities for children. That is a recommended practice, although actually, one of my former students did her dissertation on that and did not find an added benefit for the multisensory components. But I do think that they're helpful in terms of engagement and building rapport with kids as well.

We also made sure that we simultaneously taught both names and sounds for each of the letters. Then, based on the syntheses that had been done, we did include letter writing as a component in order for children to experience that, because at the time that we developed them, including writing with the lessons was, to the best of our knowledge, a best practice at the time.

Anna Geiger: Is there anything else you'd like to share before we end our conversation?

Shayne Piasta: Remembering that we may know less than we actually think we know and thinking about how we can constantly improve our instruction to better support kids. I really think keeping that in mind will help us as we're able to use research to inform what we do in classrooms.

Anna Geiger: Well thank you so much for all the research work you've done and continue to do. I know that many, many teachers are benefiting from that.

Thanks so much for listening today! You can find the show notes at themeasuredmom.com/episode117. Talk to you next time!

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The post What does the research say about alphabet instruction? with Dr. Shayne Piasta appeared first on The Measured Mom.