Anna Geiger's Blog, page 18

Moving from balanced literacy to a more structured approach

I was a committed balanced literacy educator for 20 years.

To me, balanced literacy meant that I taught both basic skills and a love of reading.

I put a greater emphasis on the activities – shared reading, guided reading, independent reading, read aloud, and centers – than on foundational skills.

Sure, I taught phonics … but I didn’t want to overdo it. So I didn’t use a phonics program; I taught phonics on a need-to-know basis.

Instead of giving explicit instruction, I had my students read independently for long periods while I gave short one-on-one conferences.

I was passionate about balanced literacy.

It’s the approach I learned in graduate school. It’s what I used to teach my first and second graders to read.

It’s the approach I used to teach my oldest five kids to read.

It’s what I thought other teachers should use (and I told them so through multiple blog posts and workshops).

I thought it worked (it sure seemed to).

It wasn’t until I read Emily Hanford’s viral article a few times that I started to wonder if I needed to rethink my approach.

I wish I could tell you that the first time I read the article, my eyes were opened. But I was stubborn, and it was more than a year before I took it to heart.

Check out this podcast episode

My reaction to Emily Hanford’s article, “At a Loss for Words”




The first thing I questioned was three-cueing …

Once I understood how the brain learns to read, I began to realize that three-cueing (having kids “guess” words using just the first letter, pictures, or context) was actually bypassing an important process called orthographic mapping.

This episode spells it out …

What’s wrong with three-cueing?

In other words … I wasn’t helping my students remember the words for the future.

And by my lack of explicit phonics instruction, I almost guaranteed that some of my students would hit a wall in later grades when they lacked strategies for reading multi-syllable words in books without pictures or helpful context.

As I studied structured literacy, I began to see the differences between what I’d been doing and what an approach backed by research looks like.

I began to make quite a few changes …I stopped leaving phonemic awareness to chance.I started using decodable instead of leveled text.I created a systematic, sequential phonics scope and sequence … and actually used it.I integrated spelling with phonics instruction.I found a new way to teach “sight words.”I began to look at comprehension in a different way.For the first time, I saw the incredible value of explicit instruction.

Check out this popular post

The ultimate guide to decodable books

And all along the way, I was encouraged that thousands of other teachers were making the switch!

In fact, I interviewed some of them for my Balanced to Structured Literacy podcast series: Savannah Campbell from Campbell Creates Readers Christina Winter from Mrs. Winter’s Bliss Heidi Jane from Droppin’ Knowledge with Heidi Lindsay Kemeny , podcast host and classroom teacher Jessica Farmer from Farmer Loves Phonics Gina from Get Literacy Margaret Goldberg from the Right to Read Project Sarah Paul from Sarah’s Teaching Snippets Jan Burkins and Kari Yates , authors of Shifting the Balance Dr. Wendy Farone , LETRS trainer, Title 1 reading specialist (and a lot more!)

In anticipation of the fall launch of our course, Teaching Every Reader, Becky Spence and I are beginning a collaborative blog series all about making the switch from balanced literacy to a more structured approach.

Just click on each image to find the blog post!

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 Coming August 29  Coming September 5  Coming September 12  Coming September 19  Coming September 26  Coming October 3

 

The post Moving from balanced literacy to a more structured approach appeared first on The Measured Mom.

From balanced to structured literacy: A conversation with Jan Burkins and Kari Yates

TRT Podcast #88: How to be a bridge-builder: A conversation with Jan Burkins and Kari Yates

Today we have the privilege of speaking with Jan Burkins and Kari Yates, the authors of the fantastic book,��Shifting the Balance: Six Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom.�� Listen to find out how to be a bridge builder in your own teaching community!

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Way back in 2020, when I was first diving deep into the research surrounding how we teach reading. I learned that there was a new book coming called, "Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom," and you can bet that I pre-ordered that thing as quickly as I could. I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. By the time it came out in 2021, I really had come to a good understanding of the science of reading and what it meant for how I promote the teaching of reading, but I love the book and I continue to recommend it to people who are getting started in their science of reading journey. Today, we are honored to speak with the authors of "Shifting the Balance," Jan Burkins and Kari Yates, and we'll get right into it after the intro.

Intro: Welcome to Triple R Teaching, where we encourage you to think differently about education by helping you reflect, refine, and recharge. This isn't just about trying something new as you educate those entrusted to your care. We'll equip you with simple strategies and practical tips that will fill your toolbox and reignite your passion for teaching. It's time to reflect, refine, and recharge with your host, Anna Geiger.

Anna: Hello everybody, and welcome! We're so excited to have Jan Burkins and Kari Yates, who are authors of "Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom." Jan and Kari have a huge amount of experience between them, from classroom teachers to reading interventionists and literacy coaches, as well as principal. It's exciting to hear from them to learn what led them to embrace the science of reading and to support teachers as they make shifts in their teaching. Welcome Jan and Kari!

Jan: Thank you so much, Anna.

Kari: Thank you. We're really excited to be here!

Anna: I'm really glad to have you. Can one of you maybe start speaking to what it was that got your attention when it comes to the current research and led you to reevaluate some things you had been promoting in education.

Kari: I can start. For me, when the Emily Hanford article first came out, I was in a district leadership position. I can actually remember when the first teacher forwarded that to my boss, who then forwarded it to me and said, "What do you make of this?" I think I wrote a multi-page, fairly irritated response to what I thought of it, but it got some things playing in the back of my mind, I think, and that article was followed by a whole myriad of others.

There was an EdWeek series that came out when I was working with a school in the south, I think maybe about a year later. I can remember that principal basically was really thinking about this EdWeek piece and said to me something like, "Kari, it's really tough out here. My superintendent is pushing me on the practices that we and the teachers are really promoting in our school, and what will people like you do to help educators in the field?" By "people like you," I think she meant people who are doing professional development and writing and blogging and so forth. That really felt like a real call to accountability, and to dig in more deeply.

I think I actually connected with Jan at a conference, not too long after that conversation.

Jan: Yes, I was having my own kind of journey. We were close friends and I had just been watching the tension, I guess tension is almost a euphemism, it's bigger than tension, in the field.

Kari: Polarization.

Jan: Polarization, just animosity even, anger, attacks, I guess. Like Kari, I originally dismissed some things, but I had been struggling with the use of predictable text and had issues with it. I can remember being in a workshop thinking, can we even do this? Is this working, really? That was simultaneous or almost around the same time, so I don't know if I was kind of ripe for opening up to that idea.

I think at that conference that Kari mentioned, there was a session on the science of reading and what it might mean. The audience at that conference was balanced literacy educators, and so we went to that session and were just really struck by the whole tone that was about how to rebut, how to shut down, what these criticisms were.

There was some point in that meeting where I just thought, wait a minute. I mean, maybe we should take a minute and just listen and look closely. Could this many people be absolutely wrong about something before we shut it all down? I don't know why, I don't know why there was that moment.

Anytime we think about something, since we have an audience, we're always thinking about supporting them and it didn't take long to feel like, "Wow, we've got to think this through for our readership. We have some responsibility here."

You don't have to follow that chain of reaction long to feel pretty sick to your stomach, actually sick to your stomach might be euphemism too. It's like, oh gosh, and so then we started talking about writing a book.

Kari: Well, I think the first thing that happened, Jan, is you invited me to dig into the research with you to sort of be a thought partner with you. If I'm honest, I have to really admit that when you did and when I said yes, I was probably equal parts interested in strengthening my own ability to rebut a lot of what was being said. I was interested in being able to forward a strong argument in ways that I didn't feel equipped to do.

But I think what happened along the way was, I mean, we joke about this, but I think what kept happening for us, we were sort of saying in a variety of ways, "Oh, wow. There's something here to think about that we've got to look at." There are some things that really affected practices that we both embraced, used ourselves, and promoted with other educators.

Anna: That is very interesting because I know exactly what you mean. When I read that article, I would go on my walks and I would start to like think, "What can I say? I'm going to write a blog post, and I'm going to refute this article." It just kept going over and over in my head and I never got there, because I really didn't have the answers.

So then I went to a Facebook group of other people like me that have blogs or are selling resources, and I asked, "I know a lot of you are on the same page, you do three-cueing with leveled books and everything. What do you think of this article?" I was only putting that there to get people to help me know how to respond to it, to refute it. I was just so surprised that a whole bunch of people wrote there that they used to teach that way, but now they use decodable books and everything else and it just opened my eyes. I had no idea it was that big right now. They put in a whole bunch of professional books, and I bought them all and started reading.

I joined that big science of reading Facebook group at the time, and I literally did feel sick. I could only be in for ten minutes a day, because I felt a visceral reaction to all this stuff.It was so hard because it felt like it was turning everything I believed upside down.

Then you just have to work through it for a while, and then you start to realize that not everything you did was wrong, but like you said, there are some shifts you have to make.

Do you remember some of the books or resources that you were studying that really helped you see things a little differently?

Jan: Yeah, I'm sure they're the ones you studied too. Marilyn Adams book was a favorite, I think it's "Beginning to Read: Learning and Thinking About Print."

Anna: Which is not a new book, interestingly.

Jan: No, it's not a new book, and I had read it before! I read it in my doctoral program, and at the time I zoomed in around different parts of it, but for some reason, it just did not resonate with me the way it did this time around.

Kari: We did a really deep dive into books and articles, and it's interesting, because I was thinking about this idea of favorite resources, and a resource that we learned about only later, we didn't know it at the time we were writing the book, but boy, this is a beauty and it's "Making Speech Visible: Constructing Words Can Help Children Organize," by Jeannine Herron.

Jan: It's a beautiful book.

Kari: Beauty that I wish we'd have had! That's the kind of a book we found ourselves longing for in all of the reading we were doing. We kept asking ourselves, how do you bridge the research and the practice in really practical ways for teachers? I love that book.

The David Kilpatrick, "Equipped for Reading Success," which it's this spiral-bound book that has a lot of exercises for building phonemic proficiency, but boy, the front matter of that text I found to be so helpful. We're always looking for resources that are sort of helpful in synthesizing the bits and pieces. That was one that really stood out to me too.

Jan: "Know Better, Do Better" by David and Meredith Liben, and they were actually very kind to us in the writing of our book. They were very gracious and supportive in sending us resources. We really tried to find meta-analysis and work from meta-analysis as much as possible. I don't know, we were bordering on manic, I think, with just kind of immersing ourselves for fifteen hours a day for a year.

Kari: Yeah. The other experience that was happening for me kind of at the beginning of this was, I was participating in LETRS training in my home district. We wouldn't want to leave out Louisa Moats and her influence in a variety of ways.

Jan: Her book is "Speech to Print."

Kari: Quite frankly, first run through that LETRS text is also... There's a few pages that are just... I kind of almost giggle now, when I look at my angry scribblings all over them, because I was a little triggered on day one especially, as I remember.

Jan: I can remember she called me and she was like, "Oh my gosh, you won't believe what they're saying!"

Anna: This is so funny, because I actually, when I bought all those books that they recommended in that Facebook group, the first time through, I had a lot of comments on the side like, "Well, so HE says, or blah, blah, blah." Because I didn't... And I would always look and see, what do they say about three-cueing, because I was still holding onto that.

But now I read them differently and I understand, but it just takes a lot of reading the same thing over and over for it to all start to come together and start to make sense.

Kari: It's so true. There's this Willingham article that is about comprehension, and we read that article early on, but we've come back to it recently, because it has become a favorite resource to share with other educators and is such a great example for me of background knowledge and how background knowledge really affects what you take out of a text.

Jan: One of the things we were thinking about, in addition to the fact that some of the texts are pretty dense, or maybe inaccessible if you're just getting into this, was that in many, there's a lot of language that we had to really read past that was really triggering. There's some references to things that just really could make someone really, really triggered.

It began to confirm for us one of the reasons, perhaps, that balanced literacy educators were more hesitant about this, is because if they went and picked up one of these books, they might feel attacked. So it was just confirmation that there might be something we could do that would be of service to balanced literacy educators.

Kari: We've tried to approach this under the umbrella idea that, yes, this is "head" work, but this is also "heart" work. We're really calling on people to, in some cases, make smaller shifts to their practice, but in some cases make some really substantial shifts that require letting go. I mean, it's no small thing to think about what's being said about three-cueing systems, so "head" work and "heart" work.

Initially when Jan said we should write about this, it is not a lie when I say my answer was,"Absolutely not! You think I'm going to just throw myself headlong into THIS? No, not going to do that," but she's persistent in ways that if you don't know Jan, you maybe don't yet know the definition of the word persistent.

I mean, I think for me, what became appealing, what really drew me into this, was wanting to find a way to share information in such a way that supports the "heart" work side of this.

Honestly, we've been called out on this idea that we sort of mollycoddle teachers, or we act like teachers can't handle the truth. Of course, that's NOT what we think. We know teachers can handle the truth, but I think we want to do it with respect.

We challenged ourselves to really think about not just the science of learning to read, but also what's the science of human and organizational change, and what do we need to do in order to support this really important change work within organizations, because the change can only happen through adults. If adults are feeling attacked, or threatened, or defensive, they're never going to be their best with children.

We just, I think, came to believe that maybe that was a place where we could situate some work. Not that we're the experts on the science of reading, we try to be super clear that what we've written is just an entry point, maybe it starts to help you build some background knowledge that is supportive to you as you decide what else you're going to read or do to grow yourself.

Anna: Yeah, I think that's great. When I look at your book, I think of it as a bridge, as a starters guide, a beginner's guide. And I know I've read that criticism too, that this idea... I can think of someone who said, "Teachers are fine. They're not that sensitive. You can just say it like it is."

Well, if that's really what's been done for the last forty years, it hasn't worked. Teachers love what they do and they're passionate about what they do, but they're also passionate about how they do it. For someone to come in and accuse them by saying, "What you're doing is damaging kids," that's harsh language.

I tried this in that Facebook group. I said, "Can we have a gentle discussion about the difference between balanced and structured literacy?" We had a really good discussion going, because I know a lot of people leave that group when they first join, because they ask a question and someone jumps on them and it was going really well. But then someone jumped in with all caps, "I'M SO SICK OF THIS GENTLE STUFF, IT'S TIME TO..." And then she just started "yelling" at people. "Yelling," I say in quotes, but that's what it feels like when you're using all caps. And I just shut the post down, because it was not helpful, just yelling at people to change doesn't work.

Kari: Yeah, and we understand the argument that children can't wait and they've got a limited window and there is real urgency, and making one tiny little shift won't do it. But also we're real believers in the domino effect, and if you can get some momentum going, then big things can potentially follow, but taking care of ourselves and each other is an important part of the work as well.

Anna: I think some people in the balanced literacy community are very concerned about switching to, "the science of reading." I know you don't really switch to the science of reading, but what that's been called, because it's sounds very clinical, very boring, and that's not why they became teachers. They became teachers because they love literacy and reading and they want to communicate that, and they're afraid that by making this shift, that's not going to happen.

What would you say to teachers who are hesitant, because you do speak a lot to balanced literacy teachers? I guess a better question is, what have you found has been a big point of resistance for them?

Kari: I'm a believer that resistance is how fear presents itself. Information is helpful. One of the ways we decided to write the book that I think really works is to select misunderstandings and to sort of untangle misunderstandings, and I think that has worked.

I just want to say that I think at the heart of the matter is, every educator knows and thinks about students they haven't been able to help to learn to read and write in the ways that they wanted to. That's what we lean on when we need courage for this work. We all know what we've done in the past hasn't worked for ALL children, and so the good news is that there is evidence, and there are other ways of doing this that will be more effective for many of the children who have not succeeded in our current systems.

Jan: When you asked what are the points that get kind of pushback, I don't feel like we get a ton of pushback from balanced literacy educators. It's interesting, but I hadn't thought about it until you just said it. I think the way that we wrote the book was that it starts with comprehension, which is a point of agreement, and then the science builds gradually, so that by the time you get to chapter five, which is the biggest moment where you're rethinking MSV, and then chapter six decodable text, by then you understand a bit of the why. So something about building that case logically and gradually.

The other thing I think too, if we meet with hesitation or resistance, I don't know if it's from raising teenagers, or what it is, but we've learned a little bit about not just pushing back harder and taking a deep breath. Being dogmatic and categorical and absolute is the last thing that is persuasive to people. We've done some reading about how resistance manifests and in embracing curiosity and vulnerability and finding entry points as ways to go about this work.

Kari: We were really listening also for the grain of truth, because usually with resistance, there's some truth to whatever the pushback is and people need to feel heard. They need to feel honored in their concerns.

Jan: The reason we did the online class was because the book could only do so much, and the online class, it follows the same structure, but it just goes a lot deeper. It's a lot more methodical of that building, there is a landscape of those chapters, like you don't just dip into chapter three or chapter four or chapter five, the book is meant to be building and cumulative.

Kari: And every shift, whether in the book or in the online class, starts with the why. We start with clearing up those misunderstandings and then we move to really practical shifts for the classroom. We want for every educator to read our book and come away thinking, "Wow, some of my current practices were really affirmed, I can do even more of certain things. I'm really on track with what's going to make learning to read easier. And there are also certain practices that maybe I have that I need to strengthen or that I used to use that I should bring back."

We hear from people all the time, "I used to do that, but I quit doing it. I'm going to bring that back."

And then of course, some practices that we need to say, we thought it was right at the time, but now we know better. We're going to let go of that one and move on or do it differently.

Anna: So you have your book, "Shifting the Balance," which of course we'll link to that in the show notes, as well as your online course. How often does the course open?

Jan: We run it six times a year.

Anna: Okay, so it's very accessible. You have a website I know with resources for the book. Can you talk a little bit about those?

Kari: Yeah, we have lots of free downloads on the site. If you have the book, you know that the book is laced with references to more resources to support that, but those resources are free and downloadable to anybody, whether you're reading the book or not. There's something there to support the shift in every chapter, and we do add to those downloadables all the time.

When our book came out, we had the chance to learn from many other people who read our book and who had ideas for us. It gives us a chance to, again, practice that managing of our defenses and really trying to listen for the truth in what's being said to us, even though some days, it's not that fun to open your email or look at your Facebook and see what someone has to offer you.

But we really took to heart some of the feedback we got about shifts five and six, because some of the feedback was that maybe we didn't go far enough and maybe we left it murky or unclear to teachers, in terms of what was intended there. We have a part of our website that's dedicated to really answering some questions about that for people who might have questions about it. In our online class, we took extra care to really be explicit and clear about our intentions with five and six, and we've been really careful to have that work vetted by some people who are deeply embedded in the science of reading communities.

Jan: Chapter four, which is about sight words, seems to be one of the most accessible entry points, because balanced literacy educators don't feel like they're nailing sight word instruction, for the most part. They don't love flashcards, but that's what a lot of folks are doing. So we have some resources, a mini course and some classroom materials, coming out to support high frequency word instruction.

Anna: Great. All right, well thank you so much! And thank you for all that you guys are doing to bridge the gap, because that's just so important and hard to find people who understand both sides and are open and honest about what they're learning. It was a treat to have you here and I'll definitely link to all those things in the show notes.

Jan: Yeah, we appreciate you.

Kari: We so appreciate you, and we really are appreciative of this opportunity.

Jan: We do appreciate you as a bridge builder and it seems like your work is particularly addressing the ongoing question of, among other things, what are the children doing while teachers are working with small groups? We've been impressed by the materials that you put out there! We first heard of you when we were with Marnie Ginsberg, and she was referring to bridge builders, I think she mentioned you and Margaret Goldberg. We're grateful for being able to connect with you.

Anna: Well, thank you very much. I'm always excited when someone has heard of me, and to be in the same sentence as Margaret Goldberg is a big compliment. I really have a lot of respect for her. Thank you so much.

Kari: Thank you.

Jan: Take care, Anna.

Anna: Thank you so much for listening today, and you can check out the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode88.

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Jan and Kari’s resources Shifting the Balance (book) Shifting the Balance (online course) Shifting the Balance (free downloads, including “The Six Commitments”)Jan and Kari’s recommended reading At a Loss for Words , by Emily Hanford Making Speech Visible , by Jeannine Herron Equipped for Reading Success , by David Kilpatrick Know Better, Do Better , by David and Meredith Liben The Usefulness of Brief Instruction in Reading Comprehension Strategies , by Daniel WillinghamGet on the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader.

The post From balanced to structured literacy: A conversation with Jan Burkins and Kari Yates appeared first on The Measured Mom.

From balanced to structured literacy: A conversation with Sarah Paul

TRT Podcast #87: Structured literacy is for everyone: A conversation with Sarah Paul

Today we have the privilege of hearing from Sarah Paul of Sarah’s Teaching Snippets. Sarah is a reading interventionist and full of practical, engaging ways to implement structured literacy. Listen in to find meaningful activities you can start doing tomorrow!

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Today we get to hear from Sarah Paul of Sarah's Teaching Snippets. She is an online educator as well as a reading interventionist. She shares a lot of helpful information about how structured literacy looks in the classroom AND in an intervention situation. Really, structured literacy is for everyone. We'll get right into the episode after the intro!

Intro: Welcome to Triple R Teaching where we encourage you to think differently about education by helping you reflect, refine, and recharge. This isn't just about trying something new as you educate those entrusted to your care. We'll equip you with simple strategies and practical tips that will fill your toolbox and reignite your passion for teaching. It's time to reflect, refine, and recharge with your host, Anna Geiger.

Anna Geiger: Hello everyone! Today in our Balanced to Structured Literacy series, we're very excited to welcome Sarah Paul. Sarah has been blogging at Sarah's Teaching Snippets for quite a few years. She is a reading interventionist for K-3, and, like everyone else in our series, she started as a balanced literacy teacher and now has put out quite an amazing amount of content related to structured literacy. So we're excited to talk to her today. Welcome Sarah!

Sarah Paul: Thank you! I'm so excited to be here.

Anna: Can you talk to us a little bit about what you learned about teaching reading way back when, and how that started to shift for you?

Sarah: That's such a funny question because I love to talk about how when I was in college, before I became a teacher, I didn't learn anything about reading, and then I was trained on the job my first couple years of teaching, but I was trained with the balanced literacy model. This is back in about 2003. Like most people, I loved it and just really ate it up and took pride in learning about reading.

Then it was around 2008 I want to say, when I had a student really struggling, who we later found out had dyslexia. It really sent me down this path of why what I'm doing isn't working and I want to figure this out, and also just the mystery of dyslexia, and not understanding why none of my classes talked about dyslexia. I had of course heard the word because I had a cousin, a couple of cousins actually, with dyslexia.

So I vaguely knew about it, but I didn't know anything about it really. And so I started studying it and I read Sally Shaywitz's book and I started to think, "Okay, I'm going to start trying some of these suggestions and different ways of teaching with this student."

Then that turned into, "Oh, actually, there's a whole reading group that would benefit from this type of instruction." So I started digging a little bit deeper and then I just sort of by accident heard Louisa Moats talk.

She came to Oregon where I'm from and I just happened to be able to go to this conference. Of course, at the time I didn't know who she was, but it blew my mind! Everything she had to say was like, "Whoa, I'm doing this wrong!" I hate to say doing it wrong because that sounds kind of harsh, but I really started to reflect on how I was teaching everything. But at the time, I didn't know anybody doing anything differently, and balanced literacy was the "right way" to do it so I just didn't have that confidence to change everything right away.

So I put a toe in the water and slowly did it for this group and then I noticed, "Oh, actually this is working, let me try this for this other group that's not that far behind, but maybe something else will work for them. Okay, now it's working for them." And anyway, it just slowly expanded. At the time I was teaching first grade, but then I moved to a different position, and that's when I totally changed to what we now call structured literacy, but it didn't have a name back then.

Anna: So you've been at this for a long time, it sounds like.

Sarah: Yes, but kind of on my own just sort of searching and figuring it out. The International Dyslexia Association had put out something about structured literacy and I just looked for anything I could find, and I had some classes through the Dyslexia Training Institute, and my local Decoding Dyslexia chapter in Portland also was doing some different presentations so I was learning there, and I learned a little bit through Barbara Steinberg's Reading Specialist.

So I was just looking anywhere I could to find information at the time about dyslexia. The science of reading wasn't a term, I just really was trying to figure it out and was thinking, "Gosh, I just think this works for everybody," but I wasn't brave enough to completely transform to what we now call a structured literacy classroom.

It was a little easier when I became an interventionalist, a reading specialist, because for all those kids I could justify it. I could say, "Well, these kids all need it!" So that's when I really made the bigger switch, but I really was just kind of trying to figure it out and made some mistakes along the way and probably got a lot of things wrong, but that's how I learned.

Anna: Well, I'm sure people listening are wondering, what did you change for that particular child? What were you doing that wasn't working and then what did you do that made the difference?

Sarah: Well, for one, I was using just leveled readers. It was your classic, "Why is this student stuck at level C?" Well, that's because that's as far as you can get when you can guess based on pictures and patterns and not really reading.

So the first thing that I changed was starting to explicitly teach phonics, and doing a lot more phonemic awareness activities, and then kind of really slowly just starting from ground zero.

At the time, it was like, "Okay, I guess I'll just do a little bit of phonics here and there." But then I realized, "Oh no, ALL he needs is for me to connect these sound-symbol relationships and to work on phoneme blending and phoneme segmenting, and then once he has those letters mastered, I need to... Basically what we do now for structured literacy, but at the time it just seemed so extreme and so different.

Then I started searching for decodable readers and I was writing decodable sentences because I thought, "Ooh, I know I'm supposed to be doing leveled readers, but he can't read it! He sees a picture of a tortoise, it says "tortoise," but he says turtle." I mean, that makes sense, but it's not really reading and he's just guessing! So I just totally threw those out for him and then with his whole group, and then I just started creating whatever I could find. I started looking for old basal readers that had sort of decodable stuff and that worked.

Really it was just trying to figure out, how do I make this explicit phonics? I didn't really have a word for it, but I knew what phonics was, and that's just the biggest change I made at first, that and phonemic awareness with him and really driving that home and kind of putting aside my strategy bookmark, remember those strategy bookmarks?

Anna: Yes.

Sarah: It had like, "Look at the word, look at the picture," and I was thinking, "Oh, I don't think I'm going to do that."

Anna: I remember I sent those home in reading bags. They were laminated, nice, colorful bookmarks.

Now that you're an interventionist, when you have a new student, what's your plan of attack? How do you start figuring out what they need?

Sarah: Well, I start with DIBELS because that's just a good screener and it gives me a lot of information right away. Let's say I have a new first grader, that's kind of the easiest one. DIBELS has a lot of different measures I can look at so I can see, first of all, do they know the basic letters of the alphabet? That's kind of the first and then the nonsense word fluency helps me to see a couple things.

Number one, I'm looking to see do they have the sound-symbol relationships down, and number two, are they able to blend those sounds together to read the nonsense word? Then there's also the word reading and then the oral reading fluency. So I get a lot of information from that. Often, if I see that they don't do very well on the nonsense word fluency, I might dig deeper and just do a regular CVC word and see if they can read a sentence with real words and just kind of see where I'm at there.

If they are able to do part of the nonsense words, but they're not able to do the oral reading fluency, then I'll do a phonics assessment and see, okay, so maybe they have CVC words down, but do they know vowel teams? Do they know silent E? I try to just really pick apart what the actual issue is and then I go from there.

Anna: So then let's say you find out that they're stuck at CVCE words. Then what kind of things do you do with them in your lesson?

Sarah: I start by reviewing all of those graphemes, just the regular letters of the alphabet and the short vowels. I want to make sure we have those and digraphs solid. Then, to introduce silent E, I usually start by saying reading starts with your ears, that's another big change I made.

So I would bring up a familiar word. So let's say the word is "game," we want to say "game" or "gate." I would have magnets on the board or sound boxes or something representing the sounds. Then I say, "Let's listen for the sounds in 'game,' /g/ /��/ /m/." I draw three sound boxes or have three magnets on the board to show and say, "We agree there's three sounds, right? Okay, let's match the letters to the sounds." Then we build G-A-M and I'd say, "Well, now wait a minute! We've learned that this would then say 'gam.'"

Then that's how I introduce the silent e. So then I would say this is a new spelling pattern that we're going to learn that when you see a vowel, and I point to the A, and then a consonant, and I point to the M, and then an E, that's a new pattern where we know that usually, not always, but usually that E can help that A make its long sound A and just sort of explain that way and then do a lot of examples from there. We start at the word level.

I do what I just described to you several more times, but then have them join in with me and tell me what to do. So let's say our next word is "like," I would ask them to spell it for me and then when they get to the E part, am I done yet? Do I need something else? And then again, I just reiterate, why, why does that A say /��/ and not /��/ and just sort of keep using that language and pointing out that pattern.

Then we move into doing the opposite, now let's decode. I'm going to build a word with my colored letter tiles, where they can clearly see the pattern, and let's practice our decoding. Remember this, are we going to hear the E's, is the E going to say anything? That kind of thing and then we practice at the word level.

From the word level, we move on to the sentence level. So decoding sentences and then to decodable books, and then spelling independently on their own too.

Anna: Have you found some favorite decodable books that you like to use with your students?

Sarah: I really like the company Phonic Books. I met them at a conference a few years ago. They're wonderful people, they're from England, and they have really good ones because the pictures that they use, they don't look very baby-ish and they're just really good stories and they go all the way up. They have some for younger kids, but they also have some that they call Catch-up Readers. If you have a fourth grader who needs some decodable readers, they're really interesting and they have a good storyline.

I wrote a few of my own, and I find them... Gosh, I think I just look anywhere for them. Sometimes I go on Amazon and look for old decodables from other series, just anything I can get my hands on really.

Anna: I know at the beginning you said that you had loved balanced literacy, I loved balanced literacy, and it felt like to me this is the only way to teach reading. This is the only right way. If I'd see someone down the hall doing lots of explicit phonics, I thought, "Ugh, they're working too much at the..." I forget what they used to call it, the balanced literacy books I would read, but skills in isolation, when you're reducing it to basic skills, you're taking away meaning.

Those are all things that I believed very strongly. I would've been afraid to go to the structured approach because I was sure that was just going to make it really boring and that they didn't even need me if all I had to do was just follow this curriculum.

Can you speak to that in terms of were there any concerns that you had and how would you speak to someone who has those concerns now and is afraid to try something new?

Sarah: That is such a great question. So I have two different ways of looking at this. First, I realized that so much comprehension is taught through read aloud, and you can still do a shared reading type of experience. It's so rich for those students, and the wonderful thing is your whole class can participate, it's not just the readers.

I think a big shift was when I finally started to understand that you can teach comprehension and you can have that literacy-rich classroom still, it's just two different parts of your lesson. So I'm going to do a phonics lesson or a morphology lesson, but then I'm also going to have my read aloud or whatever I'm going to do to make sure that they are also getting the comprehension, which is the point of reading. We're still connecting to meaning. So that's one thing, that the read aloud is so powerful and is equally as important as the phonics time.

As an interventionalist, I don't do the read aloud so much, but I do work with the teachers to make sure that they're doing that in the classroom. That's the stuff that teachers love to do, there are great discussions and you can model certain things. They are still teaching them from kindergarten, right? That doesn't change.

Another thing I'd say is I have found that you can take a decodable sentence and really dig deep. It sounds so silly, but we kind of determine how boring we want our phonics lesson to be, right? If I'm just reading a sentence and the sentence is, "Sam gets his red cap," and I'm just telling them to sound out that sentence out and move on, that's boring!

S-a-m, S-a-m, that's boring. But if I start to say, "Okay, 'cap,' what does cap mean?"

Let's say, they say, "Oh, cap be a hat."

"Okay, what else can cap be?"

"Cap can be something you put on your glue stick."

"Okay, so there's different meanings of cap. Well, let's find out how can we find out which cap it is? Let's look at the other words that might be on the next page," or something like that. There's vocabulary right there with the multiple meanings of cap.

I'm talking about visualization with them. "What do you picture? Not so fast! We just read that sentence, but we're not done yet! What do you picture is happening? He puts on his red cap. Okay, if it's a glue stick cap, maybe it fell off and he's in school at his desk or maybe he's at a baseball game because a cap could mean you're putting on a baseball cap, maybe it's hot out." So you can really dig deep into a decodable sentence.

One time I was tutoring a student and the word "lap" came up and I had in my head two definitions of lap, but then they thought of another one and I thought, "Wow, gosh, we could really..." There are a lot of definitions of lap and just talking about that!

So that's vocabulary right there. I know it's at a really basic level, but what we're teaching them is to pay attention to text, not just the phonics part of the text or the morphology part. We're really talking about the vocabulary and to pay attention to what's happening and visualize and discuss even if it's a five word sentence.

That's what I would say, is that we can make it as rich as we want it to be just depending on how we're teaching it.

Anna: I love that. So it's encouraging teachers to keep seeing teaching opportunities, which is something that you'll get better at the more you do structured literacy, the more you practice it.

What would you say to this? I was watching a workshop today called, "Prevention, Not Treatment, is Best for Dyslexia," or something like that. The point was that you can't prevent someone from having dyslexia because it's a brain-based issue, but you can have high quality tier one instruction that for some kids means they won't need extra intervention or at least not a lot of it.

What would you say to someone who's listening and really wants to have that kind of instruction that's going to help meet the needs of everybody? Just some general ideas for what it should look like teaching in K-2?

Sarah: I think just making sure you have a sequence in mind so that you know you're teaching all those graphemes and their spelling patterns. That way you can start the year knowing what you're going to be doing. I didn't have that for a little while and I felt like I was just grasping at things. So you want to make sure that you can get that, your roadmap, so to speak.

You also have a plan for your comprehension piece every day, and you want to make sure that you're going to be doing the actual foundational skills every day and keeping in mind that we want to have some phonemic awareness in there, we want to make sure we're explicitly teaching the phonics patterns or the graphemes, and giving PLENTY of opportunities for them to practice. I think that's what the key is.

I have the most fabulous first grade teacher at the school that I'm working at right now, and we've been working together. Obviously I take some of her students, and she's doing the same type of stuff that I'm doing, but in the classroom with the whole class. She said it's the first year she's done it this way to this extent, because she always was kind of worried that it's going to be boring for the students who are a little bit higher and maybe don't need it.

Keep in mind, you can still pull those higher students and read a book that's appropriate for them, so it's not like they're not going to get that still. But she would take some time during the day to do the lesson that was more with foundational skills, and she's found that she has produced better spellers because, as you know, often a first grader can read really well, but the spelling piece might not be there. She's finding that it's really filling in other gaps, and she said she was surprised that none of her students seem bored by this instruction.

Anna: That's so interesting.

Sarah: It really surprised her! And I think just giving those opportunities. She's teaching the lesson, and then she's differentiating it. Maybe there's already kids who are readers and they don't need a decodable reader. Great, they're going to go do that. Some other kids are just right on track and they need a decodable reader. Then there's some kids who maybe need a little more support and so they might come with me or she'll work with them a little bit more, but giving them opportunities to practice is key, I think.

The spelling piece is key too. The decodable readers, with making sure that you're doing spelling just as much. That was a piece I was missing and didn't get until a little bit later. I was so focused on decoding that I didn't do that, what we now talk about with the orthographic mapping. I didn't do that spelling piece as much and that is so important.

Anna: Can you tell me a little bit about specific types of things she's doing with her kids, that you're also doing, that build in that review and that practice to help teachers get a picture of the types of things they can be doing.

Sarah: Word sorts I think are really helpful, and you can do the whole group or a small group. Lots of opportunities, even if it is just a worksheet, but sometimes you can turn a worksheet into something that's kind of a little bit more fun, like maybe they're spinning two spinners, or even if it's just spelling words on paper.

I have kind of a whole routine that I do where I start with reviewing the graphemes, and then usually I teach the skill. Depending on the day, if it's a new skill, I'll spend more time, but if it's a review skill, I'll just quickly review. Then I'm a pocket chart fan, I don't know if you've seen me on Instagram, I love pocket charts.

Anna: I have seen that.

Sarah: I do a lot of word and picture sorts on my pocket chart. So here's a picture sort I might do. Let's say I'm teaching long A, AI versus AY, I'll have the letters, AI and AY and each of them has a column, and then I'll show a picture. If you're doing a whole class, you can show it under a document camera, or you can just say what the word is, you don't actually need the picture.

So let's say the word is "paid." I would talk about where we hear the sound /��/ in the middle, and we've learned that AI is the one that would represent the /��/ sound. So where would it go on the pocket chart? We'd do this whole sort where then we'd put it under the AI, and then at their desks, they would have their whiteboards and they would spell the word "paid." It's just a little, slightly more interactive way to do spelling.

That would be one. You could do that with short vowels too, where let's say I've just taught E and I, and they sound so similar, the /��/ and the /��/. You can do that also with sorting. You don't even have to have picture cards, you can just write the word. Have them write it on their whiteboards first.

If I say the word "set" and of course use it in a sentence, so they don't think it's "sit," then they would write it on their whiteboards and I'd say, "Okay, where do I put it?"

They would say, "Under the E." Then I would write it on the board. So that's just a more interactive way. That's an activity that we do a lot. I also have word cards where we would read the word together and sort them.

Anna: All the things you're talking about are making me think about the art of teaching. I think for people that are concerned that structured literacy is going to be boring and is only for the kids who really need it, they should check out Anita Archer's book, "Explicit Instruction," or Anita Archer on YouTube, because she has... She's just a really dynamic teacher, and you just find out that there are little tricks on how to keep students engaged, how to keep them constantly participating, and she shows you things you can do besides just calling on individual kids to keep the lesson moving.

Sarah: Right.

Anna: It can just liven up anything. I think once people start learning about structured literacy and phonics and how the language works, it does get kind of addicting. It's very interesting.

Sarah: It does. Well, and I do these things called sentence scramblers that I think a lot of people do, it's not unique or anything, but I make decodable sentence scramblers and those are a favorite.

Anna: Oh, sure.

Sarah: Because what it does is it makes it so they're decoding the word, but they're also having to put it in order. So it's syntax and you can connect to meaning, you can work on fluency, like how would I read that sentence? I do those almost every day.

Anna: Well, we're going to definitely send people to your website. One thing about your website that stands out to me compared to some other TPT sellers is that you really work to educate people, and you obviously spend a lot of time on your blog posts. They're extremely informative, and I've linked them a few times on my website because they're just so thorough. You have a nice balance of text and visuals, which I really appreciate. They're just easy to read and understand.

Sarah: Oh, thank you.

Anna: Yeah, I know you do a fantastic job, so we'll definitely encourage people to check you out there and also your Instagram.

Can you talk to us a little bit about how you got started on selling or blogging, and maybe about some of your most popular resources or what you're most proud of?

Sarah: 2010 is when I started noticing there were teacher blogs in general, and I thought, "Oh, that's kind of fun. Maybe I'll do it." I had been teaching first grade for a little while, and I just wanted to kind of do something different. So then I started blogging, just whatever. I would just post whatever I did that day, or I don't know.

Then when I was on maternity leave, I just missed teaching and I needed something, so I started doing it a little bit more. Then when I started diving into dyslexia, that's when I really kind of shifted from sharing this is what I'm doing in class, to wanting to share what I was learning.

Part of it is I am a slow learner and I would read these books, like in particular, Sally Shaywitz's book, which is what taught me all about dyslexia, and it took me forever to wrap my head around it. So my blog became my place where I would almost just take notes and try to organize it all, I go back and read my own blog posts! It would take me, honestly, months to write some of those blog posts. It was a way for me to organize all of these thoughts swirling around in my brain that I wanted to understand. I have to read it over and over and over again and draw it out and scribble it and do it again and again. I thought I might not be the only person like this, maybe somebody else could benefit from my cliff notes version, so to speak.

Anna: You do a nice job of breaking down some hard things like syllable types, that was new to me a couple years ago, then syllable division and there's so many other things too that are new to a lot of us from balanced literacy, but they're pretty foundational concepts that you really need to figure out.

What types of resources do you like to share the most? Is it mostly phonics that you're sharing?

Sarah: Yeah, I think the phonics stuff, and I'm really getting into morphology and learning about it, that's a really big piece that I wish I would've talked a little more about. Now that I integrate morphology starting in kindergarten, it makes such a difference starting with the suffixes S, ED, and ING using hand motions and just orally doing it and helping them understand the concept of the suffix. Then when they hear a word, even being able to be like, "Oh, wait, there's a suffix there, that's past tense" or, "I hear, ING," that kind of a thing.

That has been a really big game changer that I do in my classroom and that the teachers at my school now do. It helps with the spelling, but also, like you were saying, the structure of our language, and it sets them up for when they get to be in third and fourth grade and beyond when morphology really becomes more important than phonics actually. It starts to take over and it sets the stage for just understanding the concept of structure of a word. It's not just sounds basically.

Anna: Yeah, that's really good. I'm just starting to learn more about that myself. It's a whole other world.

It's funny because I used to do a lot of literacy and a lot of math and now I'm just like, "I'm just going to do one thing. It's just going to be structured literacy from here on out." I packed up all my professional math books that I don't have time to work with anyway and I said to my husband, "I don't need these because I definitely have enough material for at least twenty years on structured literacy. There's just so much."

And it's very exciting that you'll never stop learning, they just keep coming out with more things for us to understand and to apply to our classrooms. So maybe sometime I'll have you back to talk about morphology because I bet we could talk for a whole half an hour just about this.

Sarah: We could, and I'll keep studying because I am always learning more.

Anna: Yeah, and well, as you talk about all the learning you've done, I know you mentioned Sally Shaywitz's book. For someone who's just getting started or maybe they're a little bit along, but they want to learn more, are there particular resources you would mention whether those are books or podcasts or blogs?

Sarah: Anything by Louisa Moats in the LETRS training, if you can get access toward that. You mentioned Anita Archer, definitely anything by her, Kilpatrick's book is out there now, people know about that. Another, I think his name is Richard Gentry, he's got some spelling stuff. I'm really bad with remembering names.

Anna: That's his name, yep.

Sarah: Thank you, and if you're interested in dyslexia, there's a couple of books. There's "The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan" by Ben Foss. That was one that I read quite a while ago, and "The Dyslexic Advantage," which I really liked. I like that book because it gets into more than just dyslexia as the disability, and it starts to talk about some potential. It's a disadvantage in school in many ways, but in life there can be advantages and there's certain gifts that often we see go along with it.

Anna: Sometimes things develop because of all that they go through to learn to read, right? Like all the discipline and things that they have to develop to keep up or to learn to read successfully.

Sarah: The place where I learned a lot of Orton-Gillingham stuff and a lot of structured literacy stuff was with the Dyslexia Training Institute, that was way back many, many years ago. They do a lot of online classes, and that one was really good. If you're interested in dyslexia too, there's the local Decoding Dyslexia chapters.

Anna: Awesome! Well thank you so much, Sarah! I think listening to you talk will hopefully help people see that structured literacy is for everybody, not just for the kids who struggle. There's so much potential in terms of making it exciting and meaningful for all your students. We'll be sure to link to all the recommendations that you shared, as well as your website and your Instagram and your TPT store. Thanks so much for joining us today!

Sarah: Thank you. It was fun!

Anna: Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you'll check out the show notes where you can get links to all the things we mentioned, as well as Sarah's amazing website and her TPT store as well as her Instagram. Head to the show notes at themeasuredmom.com/episode87. Talk to you next week!

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Find Sarah hereSarah’s Teaching Snippets websiteSarah’s TPT storeFollow Sarah on InstagramSarah’s book recommendations Overcoming Dyslexia , by Sally Shawytiz The Dyslexic Advantage , Brock L. Eide & Fernette F. Eide The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan , by Ben FossOther authors that Sarah recommendsAnita ArcherDavid KilpatrickLouisa MoatsDavid GentryWebsites and resources mentioned in the episodeFind your local Decoding DyslexiaInternational Dyslexia AssociationLETRS trainingDIBELS assessmentsPhonicBooks (decodable books for all ages)Get on the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader.

The post From balanced to structured literacy: A conversation with Sarah Paul appeared first on The Measured Mom.

From Balanced to Structured Literacy: A conversation with Margaret Goldberg

TRT Podcast #86: A Powerful, Respective Voice for Change: A conversation with Margaret Goldberg

As a former balanced literacy teacher, Margaret Goldberg is a leader in the movement to help ALL students become successful readers. Her kind and respectful manner open the door wide open. I’m sure you’ll love hearing from her as much I enjoyed this interview!

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Today is a very special interview with Margaret Goldberg. If you've read Emily Hanford's article, "At A Loss For Words," you might remember that Margaret Goldberg is the teacher that speaks with Emily Hanford about coming to understand that balanced literacy was not working for many of her students, and then switching to a more structured approach. I owe Margaret a lot because it was her quotes in that article that led me to give more thought to the problems with three-cueing, because she was actually an experienced teacher sharing what was working and not working for her.

Margaret, to me, is one of the most powerful voices in the move from balanced to structured literacy, because she has such a kind, gentle way of sharing information. And yet, she doesn't shy away from all this important knowledge we need to have. If you ever get a chance to read her blog posts or watch her on a webinar, I highly recommend it. She's one of my favorite people to learn from. We'll get right into the interview after this intro.

Intro: Welcome to Triple R Teaching, where we encourage you to think differently about education by helping you reflect, refine, and recharge. This isn't just about trying something new as you educate those entrusted to your care. We'll equip you with simple strategies and practical tips that will fill your toolbox and reignite your passion for teaching. It's time to reflect, refine, and recharge with your host, Anna Geiger.

Anna Geiger: Hello and welcome! Today, I'm very excited to welcome Margaret Goldberg to the podcast. For those of you that have been following along with me on my science of reading journey, you may remember that the article by Emily Hanford, "At A Loss For Words," is what really caused me to reconsider my balanced literacy approach, and, in particular, the quotes in that article from Margaret Goldberg, who is a teacher in California.

Most of the people I've talked to in this series really began to change their perspective about how to teach reading around the years 2019-2020. However, Margaret was there before us, because she was quoted in the article that was published in 2019. So she's here today to share her journey with us and share some insights. Welcome Margaret, we're so glad you're here!

Margaret Goldberg: Good to be with you!

Anna: I know you have quite a background in terms of teaching, you've been teaching for a long time, you've supported teachers, and you've taught different grades. Can you talk to us about what you remember about when you started to shift your understanding from balanced to a different approach?

Margaret: I was a balanced literacy teacher for six or seven years as a fourth grade teacher in a high performing school. All of my kids basically came to me reading, unless there were a couple of kids here and there who would go down the hall for reading intervention. So I didn't know how to teach kids to read from scratch, but I wasn't really confronted with that on a daily basis until I took a job as a literacy coach in one of Oakland Unified's lowest performing schools.

I went to go focus on literacy instruction in a school where just between 2% and 3% of students were proficient on state tests. I came in thinking, "Well, I was a good teacher. I was told that by multiple people. I had high test scores. I'm going to take on coaching other teachers to do the same things that I found to be successful." The district was rolling out their balanced literacy initiative that had programs like Units of Study and LLI, and so I was getting a whole lot of training in how to do those programs. My job was to teach other teachers to do that.

I want to say it was maybe no more than two months into the school year, and I was like, "This is NOT working." What worked so well for kids who could already read - long periods of time for independent reading, talking about books, seeing themselves as readers, talking about what good readers do with enthusiasm - all of that was falling totally flat at my school.

I was noticing independent reading time in classrooms that involved kids being really angry. Angry at being left there for long periods of time to read books that they didn't know how to read or being given low leveled texts that were really boring. They would do anything they could to avoid having to read during that time.

I was trying to cajole the teachers, saying, "Let's focus on the program we were designed to implement."

I realized as I was talking with kids, that the struggle for them was the words on the page. I remember sitting with a kiddo and being like, "Your teacher tells me that you're a great reader. I'm going to do this reading record on you right now. I'm looking forward to hearing you read."

She was like, "I can't read."

And I was like, "Okay, well, what makes reading hard for you?"

And she said, "The words."

That was the moment when I realized that was true for so many kids at my school. I ended up doing assessments on all of the kids, K through 5th, and I realized that basically none of them knew their short vowels and didn't know how to tackle other more complicated spelling patterns.

That's when I realized that we weren't going to get them what they needed doing this approach that basically has a prerequisite, kids seeing themselves as readers and kind of faking it until they could make it. These kids were not down to fake it anymore. They had been let down by school for long enough.

I think one of the things that really stuck out to me was that I realized I wasn't the only person who didn't know what to do about it. I realized that as I was asking questions in these balanced literacy trainings, what I was being told was not to focus on the words too much, because that's just one part of reading, it's the visual part of reading, and it's really important to focus on meaning and focus on structure. You don't want kids to go too slowly sounding out words because then they'll become word callers.

I thought, "Okay," but I had that worry in my mind, and I realized, "But I think we actually do need to teach them how to read the words."

That's where I started my journey into reading scientific articles about how the brain reads words and how do you teach children to be able to make sense of English spelling?

Anna: So you saw the problem and you went on your own to do your own research to figure it out.

Margaret: Yes.

Anna: Which is very different from what teachers are able to do now because there's so much out there about it. So tell me, how did you know what to study? What really resonated with you, and what kind of light bulbs went off?

Margaret: I didn't, and I think that's the thing that was so interesting. I would type into Google the questions that I had like, "How do kids learn sight words?" I would get a whole bunch of strategies back, like flashcards and bingo and play this and play that with them, all of the strategies that were familiar to me from balanced literacy trainings.

But it wasn't until I started typing into Google the right terminology to find out the information that I needed, that I was actually able to start finding scientific articles that were describing what happens as the brain is processing the letters on the page. I had to get out of teacher publications and into publications that were designed for other fields. It meant reading a lot of stuff that was over my head.

I remember there was this one time I was reading this Seidenberg and McClelland article. I was like, "I can't even pronounce some of the words in here," like saccade, what is that? And so, yeah, it was a lot of long nights reading a lot of stuff and feeling dumb. Also feeling like I was just in awe of the amount of information that I didn't know that was known by other people.

I really needed to learn quickly how to read a study, how to understand basic terminology that they were using, how to use ... I can't even think of all of the questions that I ended up asking as a result of realizing I was in over my head, but it was a lot.

Anna: Was there a specific book or something that helped turn the page for you a little bit?

Margaret: The moment that stands out most clearly to me was that I had been starting to make sense of the infighting amongst the authors that I was reading. I made myself a Venn diagram and I was like, "Here are some people in this camp. Here are some people in this camp. Some people are liked by both of them. What's going on here?"

I started to realize, "Oh, this is seeming like a reading war that's happening. I've heard about the reading wars. They were settled many, many decades ago. Why is it that history is repeating itself in this way?"

I remember reading the article "Whole-Language High Jinks" by Dr. Mills, and she had a chart in there that was preparing the scientifically-based reading research approach, SBRR, with whole language derivatives. When I saw that, I think that was the first moment that I realized that balanced literacy was actually rooted in whole language. I had thought if it's got phonics in it, there's no way it can be whole language.

Anna: I know.

Margaret: But to see it there, I was looking at it and I was like, "Everything I know is in this one category that is a derivative from whole language, and there's this other approach that I really need to learn a lot about really fast."

Anna: That's really interesting that you say that, because I know for a long time I just dismissed criticisms, because like, "I'm not whole language. I don't do memorizing whole words."

Margaret: Exactly! You said word study!

Anna: Yeah, exactly! I've got "Words Their Way," so I can't be whole language.

Margaret: Exactly.

Anna: For me, I think reading Emily Hanford's article and the three-cueing thing was when I literally felt sick when I read it, because I finally realized that, "I think she's got something here." The first time I read it, I just was like, what does she know? But then I read it again and I really felt sick because it was turning everything up on its head.

Did you have any moments where you didn't quite want to go farther and learn, or were you just very excited to keep discovering things?

Margaret: I personally was really excited and I loved that the teachers at my school were so interested in it. I was a literacy coach and a reading interventionist and I was pulling first graders into my little tiny office space to do lessons with them. I was supposed to be teaching LLI and then when I realized that wasn't going to work, I was also teaching SIPPS at the same time, which is a more systematic approach.

The teachers that I was taking kids from realized that the kids that I was pulling for a more systematic approach to learning foundational skills were the only kids in the school who were learning how to read.

Anna: Wow.

Margaret: And so they started asking me questions like, "What are you doing? What are you using? Oh yeah, we have that in the supply room, it's covered in dust on the shelves. We haven't touched it since we got a grant for it, but we never got any training. Let's actually all get together to try to figure out how to make sure that every kid gets this kind of instruction." So we went into it together, asking each other tons of questions, trying to figure things out.

I was lucky enough to have a mentor who I could email thinks like, "I don't understand how you pronounce this sound," or like, "Can you explain to me why you use CK sometimes and K or C the other times," just little questions like that. I felt like I was getting some support and I started to notice that there actually was an answer for everything in a way that I hadn't gotten from the balanced literacy community. I felt really good about it.

I think what was surprising to me was that as I was starting to try to talk with other people in my district and other people who were doing balanced literacy trainings for us, for this cohort of coaches I was a part of, I was surprised that not everybody wanted to learn.

I think that was the thing that was hardest for me. I assumed that the enthusiasm that my school felt for this learning was going to be matched by everybody else because who doesn't want kids to learn how to read? But I think what ended up happening is that sometimes when you're really thoroughly invested in an approach and your name has been stamped onto this initiative that you are so proud of rolling out, and you have reason to believe that it's the right thing to do, it's really challenging to face the stuff you don't know.

Anna: It is, and I'm going to have to definitely link to your article. What is the name of the article you have, "Teachers won't embrace ...

Margaret: "Teachers Won���t Embrace Research Until It Embraces Them."

Anna: Yeah. Can you maybe summarize that article a little bit?

Margaret: So I wrote it after I went to a conference where I was sitting in the back of the room, and the person was bashing teachers and how teachers "just don't know what they don't know."

I was sitting there and I thought, well that's true, I've confronted this. I realized that I didn't know a lot and I had a lot to learn, but there was something about the way it was said. There was something about the attitude towards it, towards US, that I felt like I couldn't bring my colleagues with me to this.

There was a lot to learn in this session, there was a lot to learn in other sessions at this conference, but I can't invite anybody here because of the tone. It made me feel really alone in doing this work.

Then I was thinking, "Why is it all these people are annoyed with teachers for just not getting reading right?" I started thinking about all of the parent advocacy groups that are really upset about how their kids are or are not being taught to read. I empathize with them so much, but I felt like it would be helpful for them to know what they were up against. Helpful for them to know what it's like to be part of this warm, inviting community that is balanced literacy and what it's going to take to pull teachers away from that.

Anna: Excellent. Yeah, we'll definitely link to that, there's a lot of good stuff in there.

If someone came to you and said, "What's the problem with balanced literacy anyway?" what would be some main points that you'd give?

Margaret: Well, one thing is that no one really knows what we're balancing. Are we balancing phonics with a love of the meaning of text? Well, not really, because if you look at the instructional day, there's fifteen to twenty minutes for word work and then twenty minutes for independent reading and then a little bit of time for direct instruction. It's very out of whack if you look at it in terms of minutes.

It's also not very balanced if you look at it in terms of why would we do the same thing for lower grades as we do for upper grades? That doesn't seem to make sense with child development. So part of it is how we're using our time.

Part of it is, are we talking about instruction versus independent practice? Is that what we're balancing? Are we balancing phonics with these whole language strategies that have alternatives to phonics to be able to recognize words? Anyway, my point is just that balanced literacy is unclear.

I think one of the other things that was really enlightening to me is that with balanced literacy, one of the problems is that the words are seen as an imposition to the reader. They're supposed to be solving words like there's a problem on the page. They're supposed to have a wide variety of word strategies that they're supposed to use to be able to try to figure out what the tricky words are.

It's this attitude that doesn't really make sense because if you're thinking we need to get our readers excited about the words on the page, their precision really matters. It's not okay to think ... the one that they always reference is, is it okay to say "pony" instead of "horse?" No, it's not! Those are two different things, and it's really important that if we care about the author's message, the author's intent, if we care about writers and their word choice, if we care about that, then we actually really need to think about giving our readers a different attitude to the words on the page.

Anna: What would you say to people who have the same attitude that I had way back, not that long ago, to be honest, but that it's painful to have them sound out word by word and it's so slow, and then there's no comprehension. Those are the things that I said. I know how I would respond to that, but what would you say?

Margaret: I was really scared of that. I remember when I was teaching two programs. One group of kiddos, they were getting the balanced literacy approach and they were reciting their books and they sounded fluent. They appeared to be readers and it was so much more pleasant working with them. I loved to just pass out a book and do a quick picture walk and talk about it. They're going to read the book effortlessly and then we're going to do a little bit of writing about it.

And then had another set of students who were sounding out everything. So they were sounding out, "M...a...n o...n the m...a...t," and it was just mind-blowingly boring. I was really scared. I was like, "Is this what making word callers is? Am I doing that horrible thing?" But I was promised, by a mentor, that after that slow, laborious sounding out practice, that every reader would emerge automatic and be able to recognize the words effortlessly.

Anna: Was that John Shefelbine who said that to you?

Margaret: Yeah, and so listening to him talk about the grunting and groaning state and being told that there was promise ahead, I was like, "I will stick this out and see how it goes." What ended up happening is that it was totally true. They came out on the other side. They could read effortlessly, automatically, and made the brain space for comprehension for them. They could start talking about the things that they were reading and I could give them books and they would just sit down and start trying to read them. Instead of with the other kiddos, where I'd give them a book and they're like, "I don't know how to read this book," because they needed so much from me in order to be able to get into it.

I think the other thing I started to see with those kids who were being given leveled books is that they just wanted to read the books they already knew. They didn't have that enthusiasm for getting new texts and really sticking it out. I think that's when I started to realize that both of them require texts that no one's super excited about. Those boring predictable books, no one genuinely likes those, and those decodeable books, yeah, you can try to make some cute ones, but really they're not great literature.

It's that one is a more reliable path to get all kids to become fluent. The other is this path where kids, some kids, will start figuring it out themselves. They will start to attend to the words on the page, realizing that's their path forward. But other kids just get stuck and they get stuck in those little leveled texts for years and are unhappy about it.

Anna: And then as a teacher, who's a balanced literacy teacher with kids who are stuck in B, C, D, you don't know what else to do besides have them keep working at it. But like Emily Hanford points out in her article, they're just practicing bad habits. They're just practicing guessing.

I remember I was working with a group of kids at my kid's school, before school, a couple of years ago, just to help them with their reading. This was when I was still balanced literacy and I was giving them level C books to work on and they'd be stuck on the word "machine" because that shouldn't be in the book, things like that. This was before I really understood all these other things, but I finally started doing short vowel work with them because I realized they didn't know their short vowels. Then we kind of switched to doing that more and just let go of the leveled books, not really thinking too much about it, except that it wasn't really helping. If I would've thought about it more deeply, I would've understood and I wish I would've known to get some decodeable books in their hands.

But the point you make about how they're both inauthentic is really good for people to realize, because I know as a balanced literacy teacher, you just love those leveled books and your school spends thousands of dollars on them!

Margaret: And you label your book bins and you label the books, absolutely!

I think the thing that happened for me is that I was in some ways fortunate to be teaching a scripted balanced literacy program because I was able to see that they were purposely giving me lessons with particular books. When I started realizing there's supposedly this promise that if a kid reads a level C book at an instructional level, that it will eventually become an independent level for that kid and that will move up this stair step of reading levels.

I remember laying the books out in levels, maybe it was A through E or something, and I was looking at them and I was realizing like, "Huh." So in one series of books, all about a dog, the kids are taught that when they see the picture of the bowl, they're supposed to say "bowl." But then a couple books later, in the same series about the dog, there's a picture of a bowl and now they're supposed to say "dish," but I haven't taught them the /sh/ sound to be able to do "dish." So, why did we just change from bowl to dish?

I was like, "Oh, because the intention isn't for them to really pay attention to the letters that are in the word. They're supposed to look at the picture, look at the first letter and guess what the word might be. I'm actually supposed to be trying to help them realize that D and B are tricky."

I just started realizing, "Oh, these are purpose-written texts that are designed to teach kids not to attend to the words too much because I'm trying to convince kids that English is unreliable and that they need to balance their memory of repeated pattern with the use of the pictures, with a little bit of sampling of the letters on the page." That, I think, is when I started realizing that I had been reading work by Ken Goodman and others who talked about how the goal is to get kids to not pay that much attention to the letters on the page. I realized, "Oh, this is grounded in whole language. I see it now."

Anna: Yeah, and then once you start understanding why it's so important for kids to actually decode the words, because that's how reading works obviously, then you see how inefficient three-queuing is. Because like you were saying, I always use that word too, "solving," because they weren't really reading it, they were solving it. It just took so much time and all these questions versus giving them words they can actually read based on what you've taught them.

Can you talk a little bit about the things that balanced literacy teachers hold so close, like the joy of reading and the love of reading. We know that it's not the goal of reading instruction (we'd like them to love reading, but we can't guarantee it), but the goal is to teach them to read. But can you speak to people who are concerned that this kind of teaching is going to be very lockstep and boring and then kids aren't going to like to read after all?

Margaret: Well, I think when we have this idea that what teaching foundational skills in a systematic way looks like - a teacher in front of a class where all the kids are sitting in rows. There's thirty-five of them, they might be wearing uniforms. The teacher has a ruler in hand and is hitting a chalkboard or something. We have this idea of what that instruction looks like and of course we don't want it. We wouldn't probably have wanted to be a teacher if that's what we thought instruction was going to be. So instead we have this idea of the teacher, who's kneeling down next to some kids on the rug and you're whispering with them about their texts and there's this beautiful hushed reading that's all over the class. You know, we have this warm and fuzzy thought about what it's supposed to be like.

But I think if we instead think about it from the kids' perspective and think about what's really engaging to them, it's different. Kids who don't know how to read don't want to sit there for twenty minutes with books. Five year olds don't want to do it and eleven year olds don't want to do it. That's a long time to be faced with something that you know you actually don't know how to do. We can't really speak things into existence by being like, "You're good readers. You're good readers. Do what good readers do." It doesn't work like that. We actually need to teach kids. When we teach kids and then give them the opportunity to practice the thing that we've taught them, they get so excited about their developing skill and there's some energy and enthusiasm about the instruction.

So I think the best way for us to think about it is that if you're working with the balanced literacy model in mind, you are remaking your guided reading instruction. You're still doing foundational skills in a differentiated manner. You still have groups of kids who are with you getting the opportunity to get your instruction, but then the practice that they're doing, it's not just random books that they're picking from the library. It's carefully selected texts that you are giving to them because you want them to practice the thing that you taught them.

Anna: Yeah, for sure. I could talk to you all night long, but I know you're going to teach tomorrow.

If you could talk to somebody who's just getting started now and maybe doesn't have the capacity or interest in doing what you did, which was what we would all love to do, to sit down and really study those articles. What would be a good starting place for someone who wants to learn, but feels a little challenged by everything that's out there.

Margaret: I think if you can find other people that you like, teachers down the hall, friends from another school, from your teacher preparation program, wherever it is, connect with other educators. Make a list of questions that you have. So for me, I wanted to know, "How do kids learn to read words? How irregular is English spelling? What do I do for a kid who is at a particular grade level, say third grade, and isn't making progress on reading assessments? What am I supposed to do next? What's the diagnosis process for a kid who is struggling with reading?" Whatever the questions are that you've had in the back of your mind and you really wanted an answer to, but you haven't really been able to face the fact that it's a question that's been looming.

I think brainstorming those questions and then actually starting to get excited about finding the answers to them. You start realizing one question leads to another question, leads to another question, in a way that makes you want to talk about it. The more you can talk to other people about what you're discovering, the more you can start pulling in people who actually have the answers to your questions. So not just keep doing more of same, but somebody who says something and you're like, "I have never thought about that before. That's a really interesting thing that prompts a whole lot of questions for me."

That's when you know that you're getting out of your echo chamber. I think that's the first thing that we have to do, is to start being willing to ask questions of people who aren't directly within our own community, to be able to get access to some of the information that hadn't infiltrated balanced literacy.

Anna: Now you are part of the Big Dippers course, correct?

Margaret: Yes.

Anna: Can you talk to us a little bit about that and what that can do for people? I've taken it, but I'd like to hear about that.

Margaret: So the history of that is actually that it was designed by people from a group of different organizations. So the Reading League and Hill Learning Center and Barksdale Reading Institute and Teachers Top 10 Tools, and then us, from the Right To Read Project. We pulled together to create a short course that was intentionally for TFA, people who were getting their credentials.

The idea was, let's give them access to the information that we hadn't gotten when we were becoming credentialed teachers. Then we realized that there was a lot of content in the course that we were excited about, like infographics and stuff that we had wanted to share and so it turned into its own course. The idea is really just an easy entrance point for people who are willing to spend a few hours, but don't want to have to sign up for months-long instruction on how to teach reading. I think one of the things that mattered to me in the design of that course was to really confront head-on, what are the differences?

Like I was saying, I saw in Louisa Moats article the differences between balanced literacy and scientifically-based reading. I really wanted to make sure that nobody had the haziness that I had, which was not really realizing the differences in those two approaches.

Anna: Awesome. Well, we'll be sure to link to that in the show notes so people can check that out.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the Right To Read Project and your website?

Margaret: Yeah, so that started because I was in a balanced literacy district doing a lot of work that was not on message. I needed to be able to figure out where is the advocate me who is trying to expose teachers to information about evidence-based reading practices, and where is the part of me that's a district leader who is working in a balanced literacy district. So I really needed to be able to differentiate between me, Margaret Goldberg, and my private life and advocacy life, and when I'm an employee in a balanced literacy district.

What I started to realize is that teachers, advocates, researchers, all sorts of people, wanted to be able to collaborate together, to be able to give reliable information to teachers about how skilled reading develops. And so it became, I don't know what the best way to explain it is, but it became the opportunity for me to do for other people what I had wished had been done for me. It is teacher to teacher, respectful communication, in short, small chunks that don't make you feel stupid when you're trying to get some questions answered.

Anna: I always send people to your website for that reason, because you have such a kind way of talking. Even in your open letters to Lucy Calkins, you're a lot more respectful than most people who write those. I just find that very refreshing and encouraging because for so many people getting into the big Facebook groups, while that can be extremely helpful, it also turns a lot of people away when they first get started, because there's always someone in there who's shaming them for not knowing something. You don't do that and I really appreciate that.

I also appreciate that you're very open about your experience with balanced literacy, because that makes people feel like they're not alone, that they weren't the only person who didn't have any clue. A lot of us, the people I talk to in this series, we're all like, "How did I not know this before?"

For me, when someone questioned me about three-queuing way back in 2014, which was just a year after I started my website, they said, "You know, this is not backed by research."

I was like, "What?" I had just gotten my masters a few years before. She couldn't be right. I was just sure she was wrong. So I didn't really ... I tried to talk to her about it in the comments a little bit, but finally I was just like, "I can't do this anymore. I've got four little kids," and just respectfully tried to disagree with her.

It was years later that I found all this stuff. Not because I wanted to, but because people were pressing me on it and asked me, "Hey, I read this article. What do you think?"

Margaret: I think it's that same thing where it's like, if someone confronts you in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable, it's very difficult to engage with them and nearly impossible sometimes to learn from them. But if we can talk to teachers respectfully, understanding that they have, in many cases, years and years worth of experience that tell them that something works, right? No one is teaching in a balanced literacy classroom and feeling like a failure. We stick with it because we see it works for a percentage of kids. I think what's important is to be able to validate the experience teachers are having and then to help us understand, and there is a way where you could reach all of them.

I think one of the things that doesn't happen enough is that we don't acknowledge the expertise of teachers. We don't acknowledge the evidence that they have in front of them that is telling them that something seems to be working. And what we really have to do is to be able to say "Yes, and let's share some other strategies that you'll start realizing are working better for those kids that were always out of reach before." Then you start realizing, "Well, why don't I just use that for everybody?" And then everything starts getting a little bit clearer in your mind.

Anna: That was true for me when I was joining the big science of reading Facebook group called, "What I Should Have Learned in College." I will say that when I first joined it, I could only be in it for ten minutes a day because I literally felt sick to my stomach reading all that stuff that scared me. It really calls to question how I taught. But what really helped was a day when one person mentioned balanced literacy does seem to work for some kids. It may work, but then sometimes they get to third grade and they hit a wall. I just needed someone to say that because I taught my own kids to read with balanced literacy, and they're fine readers. I mean, they could be better, if they knew all the structured literacy stuff, but they're good readers. Then many of my students learned to read using balanced literacy. So that acknowledgement, I think, is really important.

Margaret: Absolutely, and maybe it worked. I was a whole language kid. I didn't learn how to genuinely spell until just a few years ago teaching phonics to kids. I always thought, "Oh, I'm a good reader, but I'm not such a great speller," and I didn't realize how interconnected those were.

I also, like I told you, I felt so stupid when I was reading those scientific articles. Part of it is because I didn't have strong word attack skills. So I was realizing that I was missing a good portion of words on the page because I actually didn't have the strategies that I needed to break apart words with Latin and Greek suffixes and roots and all of that stuff.

I think one of the things that can be helpful is for us to realize that what we're trying to do for our students, in a lot of cases, it's doing better by them than what was done for us. We don't want our students to have to say, "Oh, I'm not that good of a speller."

Anna: Yeah. Interestingly, I learned to read the old fashioned way.

Margaret: Did you?

Anna: Yeah, that's why I'm so against it all the time. I learned to read in the eighties and my teachers, that was in Virginia, were whole language. I don't know what it was for you, you were in California? Did you grow up in California?

Margaret: I did.

Anna: That was the home of whole language, big time.

Margaret: I had whole language.

Anna: So I think for me, I just thought reading class was boring because I was an advanced reader and I was very bored by just reading through the basal and everything. But yeah, it's curious to me that I was against that structure when obviously that worked for me learning to read and spell.

Margaret: It did, but if you think about the boredom that you're talking about, that reminds me of what we were speaking about earlier, of why teachers would be afraid of giving up balanced literacy. They wouldn't want to bore a child like you. I think that's why I really emphasize the importance of teaching foundational skills in differentiated groups so that no one does have that experience of being bored.

Anna: Agreed, agreed.

Margaret: Instead they're actually being given the instruction that they need at a time that they need it.

Anna: Agreed. Yeah, I beat that drum a lot. I think that we could talk a whole other episode about that sometime. I know that there are some people who say, "Well it's okay if some kids are bored for thirty minutes." Yeah, but there's so much we could teach them now that would be better for them and then they're not taking over the lesson for the kids over here that really need more focus. But yeah, that's for another day.

Thank you so much for talking with us. I'm going to link to all of the free webinars and things that I've heard you speak at in the show notes. I definitely recommend that people go check those out and to listen to you whenever they see that you're giving a talk because I always learn something new.

Margaret: That's lovely. Thank you so much. It was good to talk with you.

Anna: I'm sure we can all agree, there is so much to learn from Margaret Goldberg! I encourage you to check out the show notes where you can find links to some of my favorite blog posts that she's written, as well as links to online videos and other workshops that she's done. You can head to the measuredmom.com/episode86.

I'll talk to you next week!

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Read Margaret’s blog posts hereWhat should we do when a reader stumbles on a word?We can’t teach love, but we can teach readingThe drudgery (and beauty) of decodable textsTeachers won’t embrace research until it embraces themVideos with Margaret GoldbergWhat skilled reading really isHow this reading interventionist shifted to evidence-based reading instructionEarly literacy with Margaret GoldbergWhat to do when a reader stumbles on a word

Related resourcesThe Big Dippers courseWhole-Language High Jinks, by Louisa MoatsAt a Loss for Words, by Emily HanfordGet on the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader.

 

The post From Balanced to Structured Literacy: A conversation with Margaret Goldberg appeared first on The Measured Mom.

From Balanced to Structured Literacy: A conversation with Gina from Get Literacy

TRT Podcast#85: Getting help for dyslexia: A conversation with Gina from Get Literacy

Today you’ll hear from Gina, who shares both knowledge and laughs on her Instagram account, get_literacy. Not only will you hear how Gina is implementing the science of reading in her first grade classroom, you’ll discover how she found help for her daughter with dyslexia. So much goodness in this episode!

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Well, I have a treat for you today. In today's episode, you're going to hear from Gina of get_literacy on Instagram. Not only are you going to hear how she has implemented the science of reading in her first grade classroom, you're also going to learn how she got help for her daughter with dyslexia. We'll get right into it after the intro.

Intro: Welcome to Triple R Teaching, where we encourage you to think differently about education by helping you reflect, refine and recharge. This isn't just about trying something new as you educate those entrusted to your care. We'll equip you with simple strategies and practical tips that will fill your toolbox and reignite your passion for teaching. It's time to reflect, refine, and recharge with your host, Anna Geiger.

Anna: Hello, everybody. I'm very excited to be talking to Gina from get_literacy on Instagram. She has some hilarious reels out there that you really need to check out when you're learning to move from balanced to structured literacy. She is a classroom teacher, and she also has a daughter with dyslexia and just has a really unique perspective for us. I'm excited to have her here. Welcome, Gina!

Gina: Oh, thank you so much, Anna. I'm so excited to be here!

Anna: So before we went live here, you told me that you're kind of a late comer to teaching, that you had gone back to school. Can you tell us about your education and how you got into teaching?

Gina: Yes, absolutely. So out of high school, I wanted to be a teacher, and it just didn't fall into the cards. Once my son was full-time in kindergarten, my husband was like, "This is the time. If you want to go back to school, do it." So I went back to school full-time and got my graduate degree in education. So now I have been a teacher for three years.

Anna: Okay, awesome. You're teaching first grade, right?

Gina: I'm teaching first grade currently, yes.

Anna: Tell me about your move from balanced literacy to more of a structured approach in the science of reading.

Gina: In school, I was taught balanced literacy, and the first district I worked at was a balanced literacy district - lots of running records. I had my finger on the pulse of their reading, I had their instructional level, their hard level, and their independent level three times a year, lots of MSV.

Then with my daughter, we were noticing problems with her reading, and writing, and having trouble in school. I knew something was wrong, though I never was educated in dyslexia, but I could feel it in my mom heart that something was wrong here.

Now I'm a teacher, and I'm seeing what my third grader is doing, and I'm seeing what my students are doing, and now I have a sixth grader - she was in sixth grade at the time. Something wasn't right.

So we went through the whole process. We took her to a neuropsychologist, and she got diagnosed with dyslexia. In that timeframe it was COVID, and I started the Instagram page to read stories to my students and my friends' kids live. I just thought I love picture books so I wanted to share that.

But at that time I was trying to look into dyslexia and teach myself as much as I could. I fell down the science of reading rabbit hole, and as soon as I went down that road, there was no looking back. I did change districts, I am currently in my home district, and I am allowed to implement what I feel is right. It isn't such a strict, balanced literacy district.

Anna: What would you say has been your biggest shift, even if you haven't been teaching very long, but just in these few years, what was your biggest shift once you began to understand the current research?

Gina: I definitely got rid of leveled books. They were gone immediately. We used decodables. I put a sound wall up. I orthographically map words with my students in small groups, and we do a lot of syllable work. So I feel like it was really just going into a very explicit and systematic approach to how I was teaching them.

Our school already uses Heggerty, so we had that phonological piece in daily, so I didn't have to do too much to supplement there. But it was really just going back to the phonics skill we're working on. I'm not going to overload you with doing the three-cueing system, and we're not doing that here anymore. We're done looking at the picture to help us. We're done looking at the first letter. We are going to learn the skill. We're going to learn the sound. We're going to talk about it.

Anna: So for someone who is in balanced literacy and nervous about shifting over... I'll just tell you all the things that I thought. Decodable books are boring and there's really no room for comprehension there, and they're not going to learn to read fluently because those books are so stodgy and they don't make sense. As for phonics, I don't want to do drill and kill. I want it to be meaningful. How would you respond based on your experience right now with how things are going with your students?

Gina: I would say my goal, too, is for comprehension with my students. But how can they comprehend if they can't read? I've read some leveled readers that are some snoozers, too, so don't come at me with that. That's what I would say. But no, seriously, the decodable reader is not the end game. They're not going to be reading decodable readers forever. These are to give our students the confidence. My students are SO excited when they can read this book, because it's the words they know! It's the skills I taught them. Then their confidence builds, and then their fluency gets better.

It's going through our systematic, we're doing our phonics skills and THEN they can read a leveled reader or any book they want. I do have people that have said that. There are teachers that still go by the level saying, "Well, we need to know our students' level." I feel if that's something you still have to do in your district, which I do understand, coming from a very strict district, I still think you can supplement in your small groups. Find a decodable that they can read, there's so many online.

Anna: Have you had your kids kind of transition out of decodables once they're at a certain level? Or has that not really been the case yet for you? I know that after COVID it's been hard.

Gina: Yeah. I definitely don't feel that. Especially with first grade, I feel like there is plenty to work on. I do have some readers that don't need the decodables so we're doing more syllabic work and morphology. They're at the point where I can do that kind of stuff with them. I'm still finding decodables or texts that support what they need without labeling them a letter.

Anna: So how do you approach whole group versus small group? Do you do on-level whole group and then differentiate in small groups? Or do you just use small groups for your phonics instruction?

Gina: I do both, because we do have a phonics skill that we have to work on, according to my first grade team in the district. This week is long U. So I introduce it whole group, and we do some orthographic mapping, whole group, of some irregular words or high frequency words. Then I differentiate when we get into our small group. Then I work on the phonics skill that those groups need, plus the skill that we're working on the week for first grade.

Anna: Switching gears now, can you talk to us a little bit about your daughter? Tell us about how early you noticed that things were wrong and your experience in finding help for her.

Gina: She was always in Reading Support since first grade, so we did know that she was a lower reader, a struggling reader. She graduated from Reading Support somewhere in the fourth grade, I think, and she was doing good. I was always told, "She's such a sweet girl."

It was sixth grade when it really hit home, and I think it was because I was teaching. I had the education fresh out of school. My son was in third grade, and I was teaching third grade, and I'm looking and I'm like, "Something's wrong here." She's in sixth grade and I'm comparing what we're doing, and I go, "This is not right. This is not okay. What's going on?"

I emailed the teacher and she said, "Oh, she's so nice. She's doing well. She's trying her best."

I finally kind of lost it and was just like, "I know, she's awesome! But she can't read. I'm done being told how awesome my daughter is. I see it every single day. She's amazing, but we need to know what's going on." And then COVID happens.

It was during that time when I finally took her to a neuropsychologist. I'm like, "We have to take it outside. We have to figure out what's going on."

Anna: So where do you find a neuropsychologist? Where do you even start, for people who are in this situation?

Gina: I Googled, and I asked a lot of friends that either know therapists or are in the therapy industry. A friend of mine is a therapist, and she said, "This lady is great. Call her." I just was asking anybody who would listen.

We finally got in with her, and that testing is amazing. I wish they did that for everyone. I mean, if it wasn't so expensive, it would be so good to have that information on every child. So we got it done, we found out everything, she's dyslexic. It was very classic. Her IQ is high, but all the testing showed she was dyslexic.

Then I went to my friends that were reading specialists and I'm thinking, "Okay, now what do I do? What do we do from here? The school knows, and they can give her as much support as they can, but this needs to go further."

A friend of my said that Orton-Gillingham is the best method for dyslexia. So then I started looking for tutors, and that was very difficult in my area, but I did find one. Ironically, it was my mom's neighbor, but she didn't even know that's what she did. She was outside talking to her neighbors one day, and they're like, "Well, that's what SHE does. She's an Orton-Gillingham tutor!" It really was very serendipitous.

So my daughter started working with her, and I was also working with the school, but I'm like, "I'm just struggling. What are we supposed to do at the school? I'm so emotional about this. I know I'm a teacher, but I wasn't taught about dyslexia. I wasn't taught how to support someone in this situation. Plus she's in sixth grade, and I'm lower in early education."

The tutor goes, "Well, I'm an advocate, too." That was, again, the best money I ever spent to have her at those meetings. She was able to tell us what to get in her 504. Just so people know, she does have a 504, because of another health issue.

That actually really helped with making sure what was in her plan was what she needed health-wise, plus spelling isn't used against her, for testing she can be pulled, all the things. I started researching dyslexia to help my daughter and all these Instagram pages started coming up. I went down the science of reading rabbit hole, and I never looked back. And here I am!

Anna: That's so funny, because most of the people I've interviewed so far, it's the same timeline, around when the pandemic started. For me, it was 2019, 2020, it also just happened to be at that same time. Can you point to any specific thing you read or saw that just turned the light on for you or really got your attention?

Gina: Yes. It was when I learned that we are born to speak, not to read. It really resonated with me when I started learning about how the brain reads. I thought, "Wait, this makes sense. If our brain isn't wired to read, we have to teach our brain to read." Then when I learned about orthographic mapping and the fact that yes, we're visually inputting information - reading, but that's not how we're processing it.

Then it made sense for dyslexia and the different parts of the brain that are working and how we can support our students. Teach so everyone can learn to read. So that is really what hit home for me.

Once I started understanding that and just having that sound wall up in my classroom for a month and teaching kids using mirrors and orthographically mapping words, I was seeing my first graders do things that were just shocking. Their parents are emailing me saying, "We were working on this and she ran to the mirror to make sure her mouth was making the right position, and she told me that sound is the TH sound, because my tongue is between my teeth."

And it's like, "Yes! They're getting it." It was so cool.

Anna: Do you have a sound wall lesson every day? Or how do you fit that into your instruction and how does it look?

Gina: I took the Tools for Reading Sound Wall Class, so I have their sound wall. They have a book with a lesson, and they have cards with all of it on the back. So at the beginning of the year, my sound wall is up. I have the vowel valley and I have the consonants in the articulation order, and I put post-its over all of them that we haven't used yet.

As we introduce one, everybody gets a mirror. I show the sound, we talk about what our mouth is doing, we talk about the sound. We do some phonological awareness, like where in this word do you hear the sound? The whole thing.

This year I used Tools for Reading's scope and sequence, but I think it kind of got off from what we were doing in the classroom. So, I'm learning, and next year I will follow what I'm doing in the classroom, instead of trying to do it that way.

The kids love it. I had a little boy today who got up out of his seat and went over to the sound wall. And I go, "Where are you going?" Because, you know, I was teaching.

And he goes, "Well, I'm checking the sound!" He was trying to read the word "wait," and he goes, "I don't know AI." But then he looks and he goes, "Yes, I do!" over at the board.

I'm like, "Oh, okay. I'm sorry." It was just so cute. It was so cute.

Anna: Do they use it a lot for spelling, too?

Gina: Yeah!

Anna: That is just awesome. You said your daughter's doing Orton-Gillingham. We were just talking about this before we started recording, that some people in the science of reading community criticize Orton-Gillingham, which I can't quite follow exactly why. I think because there's not as much specific research that says Orton-Gillingham is superior, and there's a lot of reasons for that.

One is that Orton-Gillingham, for those who are listening, is not a program. It's an approach. There are a lot of different approaches for Orton-Gillingham - there's Barton, there's IMSE, there's a whole bunch. So it's hard to test, because there's just so many factors.

So there are a lot of people who are critical about it, but I always find in those discussions that the people who chime in to talk about it are not the tutors. It's the parents. The parents chime in and say, "This is what finally got my dyslexic son or daughter to read."

I just find that interesting. Not that we should necessarily base what we do on testimonials, but it's just, to me, that says something.

Gina: It does. I've seen it work. I mean, my daughter is reading! She's on grade level, she got into honors math next year for high school, she's doing fantastic! She needed that OG just to, I don't know, give her a little push, like, "Okay, we got it. We're going."

Anna: For those who are listening, I did have an episode about Orton-Gillingham a few weeks ago. It's episode 69, and I talked a bit about Orton-Gillingham and what that means and what it's all about.

Can you talk to us about how your daughter feels about herself now, her confidence? What have you noticed? And has she articulated, "Now I get it"? What's that been like?

Gina: Absolutely. That sixth grade year, again, it was just such a terrible time for her. She was also taking, I forget what world history class she was taking, but they were learning these crazy big Greek words and stuff.

Anna: Yes, my son is doing that right now, it's crazy. All the stuff they're learning about world history, I wonder, will he remember any of this?

Gina: Exactly! But on top of that, imagine not being able to read. I mean, she could read, but she was not reading at the level she should have been for this kind of thin, and she couldn't write. So she would sit at the computer, because they were making a slide or something, and it was so odd to watch. She could verbally tell me absolutely everything, but she could not even start to type. It was as if somebody was holding her, physically. And the tears! It would take an hour just for her to get a sentence. It was heart wrenching. I was just like, "This is not right. Something's not right. What is going on?" Then, like I said, we could read her a book and she could verbally tell me everything.

We travel to the national parks, that's kind of our family thing, and we do the Junior Ranger Programs. If anybody's not familiar with them, they're the programs the national parks do. There's so much history in those programs, and they have so many cool lessons, and they learn so much! She could tell me about some rock we saw at Yellowstone and the history of it, because she was told it. She has a great memory. She just couldn't get it on paper. And she couldn't take it off the paper.

So now, I mean, she just comes in, goes upstairs, does her homework, and doesn't need it checked. I used to have to sit with her to do her homework. Now I don't even see her, she's got all the confidence an eighth grader should have.

Anna: That's awesome and amazing and really, I'm sure, encouraging for people who are listening who are in the hard part right now. So what would you say to a parent who came to you and said, "I think my child has dyslexia. What do I do?" What would be their first step?

Gina: The best thing we did was take her to the neuropsychologist and get a full evaluation. If you can do it, it was so incredibly helpful. I loved the information we got from it. It was very nit-picky on how her brain works and really helped us to be able to help her. I'm an OG advocate, because I've seen it work. I would find possibly an OG tutor or at least a dyslexia specialist or advocate that you can talk to and that can support you by going to the school and making sure your child has the supports they need at school.

As parents, we can get really emotional, even if we're teachers and we're supposed to know. When it comes to your kid, that all goes out the window when you sit in a meeting with people telling you what's wrong with your child. So the greatest thing was having somebody next to me who was speaking, knew the laws, knew what the school had to do, and knew what we needed to do for her. I would really suggest that.

The "Overcoming Dyslexia" book is great. I honestly haven't gotten all the way through it, but the parts that I read were amazing.

But really just finding, I would say, an advocate as somebody who can support you, who knows, and that can speak for you and your child when you're starting to get the supports that are needed.

Anna: Right, and I'll just plug the book, "Dyslexia Advocate." Did you ever read that one?

Gina: You posted it, and I have not read it, but I put it in my Amazon cart immediately when you posted it.

Anna: That's a really good book, because it's by a dyslexia advocate. I think her name is Kelli Sandman-Hurley. She walks you through all of that, like what to do at an IEP meeting. It's a lot of step-by-step, and I think it would be really good for parents that are just trying to get a starting place. I think hearing from you about the success your daughter's had is just super encouraging for parents whose kids are really struggling. Thank you so much for sharing that.

Gina: Oh, I hope so.

Anna: What would you say to someone who is a classroom teacher and they're starting to hear about the science of reading and they want to make some changes? Are there any specific resources you would recommend, first of all? And then what would be a first step in making a change?

Gina: Yes, I've thought about this, because I thought about how I dove into this deep and never looked back. And I'm thinking, "We're busy," but I was lucky my kids are older so I can sit and read a book at night. I don't have little ones anymore.

I've read a lot of books. "Equipped for Reading Success" has a lot of phonological awareness exercises in it, and I really think "Shifting the Balance" by Burkins and Yates was good because it was an easy read. It has six ways to bring the science of literacy into your classroom. I think they take it with an approach that yes, some of us still have to be in a balanced literacy district, but these are ways you can implement it.

If you don't want to read anything, there are plenty of blog posts out there that you could look at. But I do believe that there's a lot of people out there now, and the science of reading is getting to the point where you have to be careful. You have to make sure you're reading somebody, I don't want to say an expert, because I'm not an expert, but somebody who... I don't know how to say it.

Anna: Right. Yeah, we were just talking about this. The science of reading is something that people are glomming onto, as with anything that's popular, so you do have to be careful.

But Burkins and Yates have a really great book for people moving out. In fact, they're actually going to be in this podcast series, they'll be coming up a week or two, probably, after this episode airs. So we'll get to hear directly from them.

Any other books or resources you'd recommend?

Gina: I am currently almost done with "Reading for Life" by Lyn Stone. That is fantastic, it's a great read. And the three books that come to school with me every day and come home every day are "Uncovering the Logic of English," "The ABC's and All Their Tricks," and "Speech to Print." I am constantly resourcing those for word lists, for making sure that I'm teaching the phonics skills right, and for the rules. They're not just things that I've read, but I regularly flip through them, and teachers come in and ask me a question, and I can directly flip to that rule.

Anna: We'll put all those in the notes for everybody.

Any last tips or a starting point when you're just trying to start to move to structured literacy, any recommendations?

Gina: Yes. Any small improvement you're going to make is going to be a huge benefit to your students or your child. Don't feel like you need to go in and jump right in. If right now, this year, or next year, all you can tackle is that you are going to connect speech to print for your students by orthographically mapping then just focus on that. Or you're just going to do phonological awareness and make sure you get that into your small groups, or maybe your one thing this year is going to be decodable readers. Don't overwhelm yourself.

My principal tells me all the time, "If you're thinking of doing better, you're already doing better, because you're concerned. You want to do it."

Your kids are going to benefit from any little thing that you decide to do, even if it's once a month, once a school year, you're going to implement something. There are people on social media that want to help. People ask me questions all the time. I try to answer as much as I can. So feel free to ask. We're all learning. And be open minded, that's huge.

Anna: Yeah. Right. It is hard. You were only in it for a little while, so that was good for you. I should just say this. Savannah Campbell and I talked about this a few weeks ago, but the "Reading for Life" book by Lyn Stone is excellent, but not for someone who's just getting started, because she's pretty snarky about balanced literacy.

Gina: I like her humor. Her humor is like mine.

Anna: Yeah, and speaking of that, that would be a good transition now to talk about your Instagram. Tell us what you're doing with your Instagram account, Get Literacy. It's get_literacy.

Gina: Yeah, I wanted it to be Get Lit, but that was taken for some reason already. So get_literacy, like I said, started as just a place where I shared my love of picture books. That's another thing that I just love. There's so much we can learn from picture books at any age. I was just doing it as a space to say, "This is a great book I found, and I'm going to do a live read aloud so my students can join in," because it was COVID, we were virtual, and my friends' kids could join. But as I went down the science of reading rabbit hole, I was like, "Listen to this, what I just learned. They're saying this." So I started posting what I was learning.

I definitely feel like learning and unlearning is hard, and it's scary, but let's have some fun. I want to help anybody I can. I want to encourage parents that have struggling readers because I've been at that end of it. Now I'm at the teaching end. I feel your pain, I've been there, and if I can just reach a couple people by helping them with their child, or their students, or their classroom, that's all I need.

Anna: Well, in the show notes, we'll link to your Instagram account so everybody can follow you there and also all your recommendations, and people may reach out to you on your Instagram to talk to you about some of the things you shared today. But thank you so much, Gina. It was really nice to have you with us.

Gina: Thank you so much for having me. This was so much fun.

Anna: Thank you so much for listening today. You can find everything that Gina and I shared, all of our links, at themeasuredmom.com/episode85. See you next week!

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Find Gina hereget_literacy  on  InstagramRecommended resources Dyslexia Advocate! by Kelli Sandman-Hurley Overcoming Dyslexia , by Sally Shaywitz Reading for Life , by Lyn Stone Shifting the Balance , by Jan Burkins & Kari Yates Uncovering the Logic of English , by Denise Eide The ABC’s and All Their Tricks , by Margaret M. Bishop Speech to Print , by Louisa MoatsGet on the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader.

The post From Balanced to Structured Literacy: A conversation with Gina from Get Literacy appeared first on The Measured Mom.

From Balanced to Structured Literacy: A conversation with Jessica Farmer

TRT Podcast#84: A look at small group phonics lessons: A conversation with Jessica Farmer

084: Learn about Jessica’s powerful small group phonics lessons – a central piece of her of science of reading-based instruction!

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We have a special treat today on our Balanced to Structured Literacy podcast series. You get to hear from Jessica Farmer of Farmer Loves Phonics. She's active on TikTok and Instagram, and there she shares lots of helpful resources, links to freebies, examples of her lessons, and so much wonderful information about her experience teaching first grade. I know you're going to love the insights that she shares today, so we'll get right into it after the intro.

Intro: Welcome to Triple R Teaching, where we encourage you to think differently about education by helping you reflect, refine, and recharge. This isn't just about trying something new as you educate those entrusted to your care. We'll equip you with simple strategies and practical tips that will fill your toolbox and reignite your passion for teaching. It's time to reflect, refine, and recharge with your host, Anna Geiger.

Anna: Hello everybody! Today I'm very excited to be talking with Jessica Farmer from Farmer Loves Phonics, you may have seen her on TikTok and Instagram. She is an exciting first grade teacher who has been sharing on social media about the science of reading for the past couple of years. Like everyone else we've been interviewing, she was in balanced literacy for quite some time, and she's open and honest about that. She's a great person to learn from. So welcome, Jessica!

Jessica: Thank you! I'm really excited to be here.

Anna: We're really glad to have you. Can you tell us a little bit about the way you taught reading before you understood the science of reading?

Jessica: Before I learned about the science of reading, I did a lot of looking at the picture to figure out that unknown word. I had those posters on the wall, "Eagle Eye, Skippy Frog, Flippy Dolphin," and I taught a lot of those strategies. I used a lot of leveled readers.

Funny enough, over time, I learned that phonics was kind of helping my kids, and so I started to kind of slowly do more, but that was just on my own accord of what I saw happening. I feel like my brain kind of realized, "Oh, something's going on here, this is making more of an impact." I started to use some decodables, but I didn't really know the why, I just knew this was helping my kids.

I was fully trained in guided reading, and I still have a book in my classroom that I'm not allowed to get rid of, but I don't use it anymore. I very much followed those guided reading practices and taught those guessing strategies that I now know are not good strategies to teach kids.

Anna: So I know you did that for about ten years, and you said before we started recording that Emily Hanford's article, which I've mentioned to people many times, was kind of your eye-opener. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you came upon that article and what your reaction was?

Jessica: Yeah, so I was in a first grade Facebook group and someone suggested, "Join this Facebook group, it's called 'The Science of Reading - What I Should Have Learned in College.' It's an excellent group and you can learn more about reading." So I joined this group and I just start reading everything that was posted, and I'm like, "Oh my goodness, let me read more, and more, and more."

The first thing I read was Emily Hanford's "At a Loss for Words," and I start reading this article and my heart was just beating so fast because I'm like, "Oh my goodness, I'm doing all of these things that it's saying I should not be doing, and these are things that poor readers do, not good readers."

So I started inviting all my teacher friends into this Facebook group, where you got to read these articles, and you got to learn this information because our district was very much balanced literacy, and in college I had learned balanced literacy. I didn't know in college that it was called that, but I took four reading courses in college and not a single one touched on anything I learned from that science of reading Facebook group. So that's what started it all.

Anna: Well, I totally know what you mean by having a visceral reaction to that article because I know it made me actually feel sick. When I first joined that big science of reading Facebook group (which is awesome, but you do need to have a little bit of a thick skin because some people are pretty opinionated), I would literally have a tightness in my chest, and I could only go in for about ten minutes a day until later on. Like you said, there's just so much. Now, I go in there often and I sign up for all the free webinars and put them in a folder and I watch all the recordings when I can. It's a great source of free PD, and some of it you pay for, but it's pretty inexpensive.

Was this during the pandemic, when you were doing your big learning of all of this?

Jessica: Yes, around January of 2020 is when I found the Facebook group.

Anna: Does that mean that you started changing how you were teaching virtually, or when did this start to impact your instruction?

Jessica: I think as soon as I started reading about strategies that might be harmful, I kind of slowly started to make that shift. I was already kind of delving into decodable readers and more at the phonics, but I didn't know much about phonemic awareness and those foundational skills that come beforehand. I had maybe heard phonological awareness a few times in college, some of the guided reading books touch on that, but it's more of just to do a couple activities here and there. It wasn't that explicit, systematic teaching that builds upon each other, it was just kind of sporadic and random. You can count syllables or you can rhyme, but there was nothing systematic about it at all.

So then by March of 2020, we were going on spring break. I went to the teacher of the year banquet because I had gotten teacher of the year that year, and then we went on spring break and they said, "You're not coming back for... we don't know yet, maybe two weeks." So we took a week and we learned how to do some things online. We learned how to post assignments and things. We weren't doing full virtual teaching because there just wasn't enough time to train us on that, and public schools had never really done that before, it was completely new. We were using Microsoft Teams, which was originally made for businesses, not for schools, so it really wasn't super user-friendly.

During that time is when I started my TikTok, and I started making phonics TikToks for my students because we weren't finishing out the year and there was so much more to learn, and I was learning all these new things. So that's kind of where my social media presence began, it was in March of 2020.

Anna: That is awesome. I'm sure they just loved that.

I've seen on your Instagram, you get really practical, which I'm sure people love, the way you walk through how you do your small group lessons. Can you talk us through a little bit about what it looks like teaching reading in your classroom and also do your students transition out of decodable books during the year, or what's your perspective on when to let go of the training wheels?

Jessica: So this year has been very different of all years because a lot of our students were virtual last year. They might have been virtual the whole year, or might have been virtual half the year, meaning they were at home learning via computer, and so the instruction was maybe not the same. Internet issues, logging on in time, attendance problems with the virtual learning, it just was a very disrupted year. So a lot of our students right now are lacking a lot of those foundational skills, and they also missed that fourth-quarter of whatever the previous year was. So for my students, it would've been pre-K that they missed, the end of pre-K, for anybody who attended that. So we're just seeing a lot of gaps in learning this year.

So this year I have not let go of decodables at all because I just don't have anybody there yet. But in other years I have had students who would be ready to let go. I do have to level my students, it's a requirement, it's not my favorite assessment, but we do give a leveled A through J assessment for first grade. So I would say anybody who is maybe H and above, who has learned most of those forty-four phonemes, they're probably ready to start digging into some other books.

I am totally for free choice at the library, I don't dictate what my kids get. When we go to the library, you pick a book that interests you, you take that home and share it with your parents. In the classroom, my library's also free choice, pick what you want, but at my small group table, it's the text that has the patterns that they've learned, so they can really dig into those skills that we've been working on.

Anna: Could you talk to us a little bit about how many groups you have, how often you meet with them, just all the logistics that people would love to know?

Jessica: Yeah, so I'm lucky to have a nice small group. I have seventeen students this year. Florida's cap is 18, which I know some states have no cap on their class size, but we're lucky to have that class size. Although they can go over the class size, but primary grades are maxed at 18 students. We do have high English language learner population in Florida, so we have a lot of speakers of other languages. I think that the small class size is really important in our state.

My groups are between three to five students, it depends on where they're at. They kind of are fluid, I will shift kids frequently. If I see someone gaining some traction, oh, I'm going to bump you up to this group that's working on magic E because you're really grasping that from whole group already, so let me move you up. While this group's still working on consonant blends at the beginning and the end.

I have about five groups right now. It was four, sometimes it might only have been three groups, sometimes it might be six groups, it really just depends on how they're fitting at the moment.

I rotate through two groups in the morning. I was only doing one group in the morning and then we have special intervention time in the afternoon, where we kind of shift kids around and group those kids based on needs, but we can switch classrooms at that point. So if there's a child in this classroom, in that classroom, and in this classroom that all kind of fit together, then let's shift those kids for intervention and put them together, so we can really dig in to what those kids need.

So since you're working with other teachers, kids can be seen more often, is that what you're saying?

Jessica: Yeah. We kind of share the wealth, and we're lucky to have support staff as well.

Anna: Can you tell us what are some of the biggest bang-for-your-buck activities that you do in your small groups that you would feel like you've seen the biggest difference while using?

Jessica: Yeah. I love word chaining! That is the big activity, and my kids love it too, but it's excellent because you are building that phonemic awareness. At the start, you say the word, they repeat the word, they can tap out the word or stretch the word, and then they're spelling the word. So then you're working on the decoding as well, and then the encoding - the spelling - of it. I love word chaining.

There's different ways you can do it, you can do it with letters or you can do it without letters, depending on the group of students that you're working with. I tend to do it with letters for all my kids that know at least their basic letter sounds. You definitely could start with letters. You might not want to use letters for kids that don't have a solid foundation in that sound-symbol correspondence. You might want to just use chips to begin with before they're ready to include those letters, but that definitely is an activity that I use almost daily.

It doesn't take a ton of planning, as long as you have that list of words that you're going to chain, and you've got your paper that you're going to word chain on (which I have in my TPT store and I have a free one), then word chaining is excellent because you're hitting so many components. You can really see who is able to manipulate those sounds, and who's struggling to change that one sound each time you're changing the word.

Anna: I know in your Instagram you're always sharing things like places to get lessons and places to get decodables, where do you go first? Are you just on a bunch of mailing lists? How do you stay on top of where to find things?

Jessica: So that science of reading Facebook group really is what started my compilation of all these free resources because as a teacher our budget is very limited and sometimes we spend all our money at the beginning of the school year. I know in Florida, we're given a little stipend of money and we get that at the beginning of the school year, but once you spend that then it's all your own money, and teachers spend so much of their own money on supplies.

So I thought, you know what, all these people are sharing these great resources that are free, let me compile them. So I started my first link tree, and I was just linking every single thing that I could find and searching that group for free resources. Then over time, anytime something would pop up, I would add it to the link tree. I kind of became the freebie finder. I know some people have called me the freebie queen on Instagram because I'm always finding freebies and sharing them because I just know that teachers, they need that, especially towards the end of the school year.

Anna: Is the link tree something that there's just a URL for that someone can go to and see all your recommendations?

Jessica: It's always linked in my bio on my TikTok or Instagram.

Anna: Awesome. So when I link to your Instagram account in the show notes, people will be able to find all the resources and that's great because we can trust you. We know that they're vetted by somebody who understands.

Jessica: Yes, and I've used them all!

Anna: Yeah, that's also good, they're kid-tested.

Can you tell us, if someone was new to the science of reading, besides joining the Facebook group, which I think is something good to do, but is a little overwhelming for someone who's brand new, are there any particular books that you would recommend people getting started with?

Jessica: I love recommending "Uncovering the Logic of English." It's not a difficult read. It could be overwhelming because of all the rules if you never learned those when you were in school. I did not learn the spelling rules in school and I was a terrible speller because of that. It could be overwhelming because of that, but it's actually a really easy read, and it's a good one because it teaches you all the spelling rules as you're reading. But it has also some of that basic science of reading information at the beginning of the book. It's a good reference to have, just to have those thirty-one spelling rules right there, so that's usually a go-to.

Anything by Kilpatrick, Moats, Anita Archer, they're all excellent people to look for when you are looking for a science of reading book.

I do have an Amazon favorites page, and I have a section called PD books. So if you click there, I have tons of books. I have not read them all, because I can't afford to buy them all at once, but I'm slowly chipping away. I have read "Speech to Print," I've read "Uncovering the Logic of English," and I've read some Kilpatrick books. I'm just kind of chipping away and finding the time to read as well.

Podcasts are great, too. Amplify has free podcasts, Voyager has free podcasts, and I love that you're doing these podcasts with all these science of reading influencers, so that's exciting.

Anna: So tell us about starting to create things for Teachers Pay Teachers, and what inspires you to decide what to create?

Jessica: For years, I wanted to start a Teachers Pay Teachers store, but I just didn't really know where to begin. I was always creating my own things for my classroom, but I just never thought anybody would want them. I thought, why am I going to spend time opening the store, when no one's going to look at them and no one's going to buy them, and I didn't have a social media presence.

Then once I started making videos and showing things I was doing in my classroom and people were like, "Can I buy that? Where do I get that?" I was like, "Oh, I just made that myself. You would buy that? Really?" And so as people started asking me that more and more and more and more, I talked to my husband, and I'm like, "Do you think I should start a store? People keep asking me if I sell this stuff and I don't sell it. Do you think I should sell it?"

And he was like, "Sure, why not?"

I just dove in and I thought, what do I personally need? The first thing I needed was things for my small group table because I was pulling all these resources and it was just taking me a lot of time, so why don't I just make something that I can use and maybe people will like to use it too. Small groups is always the thing I was being asked about - what do you do in small groups? How do you structure your small groups? If we're not supposed to do guided reading, what are we supposed to do?

So I thought, "Well, I think I can make a really nice lesson plan to follow and then maybe some activities to go with it." So that was kind of my first idea, let me make some small group resources for people because that's what they need.

Anna: Well, like I said, it's really great that you're in the trenches. People know that you've tried it and you know that it works.

In the show notes, we will definitely link the books that Jessica recommended, her Instagram account so you can check out her link tree, and also her small group resources on TPT and then you can also explore the rest of her store.

Thanks so much for joining us, Jessica! We appreciate hearing about your experience with balanced literacy and I'm sure we'll have a lot more people finding you on Instagram and TikTok.

Jessica: I'm so excited. I can't wait to meet new people who are on this journey as well and want to learn more because my page is about always learning. We are always learning together, no one ever knows it all, I definitely don't know it all. So my page is always open for discussion. I answer every DM that gets sent to me, I'm very open and very down to earth, so don't be afraid to reach out to me because I will chat with anybody.

Anna: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.

Thank you so much for joining us today. You can find all of Jessica's recommendations as well as links to her content in the show notes, which you'll find at themeasuredmom.com/episode84. See you next time!

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Find Jessica here Farmer Loves Phonics on Instagram Resources for teaching small groups Small group lesson plan template and activities on TPTJessica’s recommended resources Equipped for Reading Success , by David Kilpatrick Uncovering the Logic of English , by Denise Eide Explicit Instruction , by Anita Archer Speech to Print , by Louisa MoatsGet on the waitlist for Teaching Every ReaderJoin the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader.

The post From Balanced to Structured Literacy: A conversation with Jessica Farmer appeared first on The Measured Mom.

From balanced to structured literacy: A conversation with Lindsay Kemeny

TRT Podcast #83: It’s all about taking gradual steps

Lindsay was a fierce balanced literacy advocate … until everything she knew didn’t help her son learn to read. You’ll love hearing how Lindsay educated herself and began tutoring her son, who has severe dyslexia. He’s now a successful, avid reader!��

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Welcome back to our Balanced to Structured Literacy podcast series. In today's episode, you're going to get to listen in to my conversation with Lindsay Kemeny, who is a podcast host, a blogger, a teacher, and a mother of a son with severe dyslexia. She has a wonderful story to share with us today. You'll love to hear about his learning journey and how today he's an avid reader. We'll get started right after the intro.

Intro: Welcome to Triple R Teaching, where we encourage you to think differently about education by helping you reflect, refine, and recharge. This isn't just about trying something new as you educate those and trusted to your care. We'll equip you with simple strategies and practical tips that will fill your toolbox and reignite your passion for teaching. It's time to reflect, refine, and recharge with your host, Anna Geiger.

Anna Geiger: Hello everyone, and welcome! Today I'm excited to interview Lindsay Kemeny as part of our Balanced to Structured Literacy Series. I first found Lindsay on her blog, The Learning Spark, and she is now doing a podcast with some other educators called Literacy Talks. Welcome, Lindsay.

Lindsay Kemeny: Thank you. I'm excited to be here!

Anna: I know that I first heard you speak on the Amplify podcast and you talked about how you were a balanced literacy teacher, and then when one of your children really struggled to learn to read and eventually you found out it was dyslexia, it really changed your viewpoint. Can you talk to us a little bit about your early experience in teaching reading and balanced literacy, and then how that moved into something different?

Lindsay: Absolutely. I was heavily trained in balanced literacy in my early years of teaching and then in college as well. Teaching reading was always my favorite thing, so I used to confidently just say, "Oh, balanced literacy is the BEST way to teach reading!" Really, it's the only way that I knew.

When I think back to those early years of teaching, I feel like it was really kind of foggy. It was just this hazy landscape where somehow I didn't really fully understand what it took for the students to learn how to read, but we just kept plodding through our leveled readers and then somehow, we're done with all these readers, so we'll go to the next level, and we'll go through those.

There were always these students that struggled. I don't feel like I really had a lot of clarity for what they needed and how I could help them, but I still loved teaching reading. I loved the whole idea of just being surrounded with literature and reading to children and by children and with children. But there were a lot of students that I didn't realize that I wasn't helping, and I didn't really realize it until later.

So I taught second grade for five years, and then I stopped teaching to stay home with my children and then I returned to teaching about five or six years ago. It was that first year back that I was teaching kindergarten. My son was in second grade at this time, so I guess it was five years ago. There were a couple things happening that same year that started to make me question the ways that I had been taught.

The first thing is that it was my first year teaching kindergarten and I was so excited to bring these kids back to my small group table and say, "Now that we've learned these letters, let me show you how you can read," but the books I had to give them were those predictable, repetitive texts, so I found myself having to say, "Oh, wait, you can't sound this one out. Look at the picture. Does it give you a clue?"

That's the first time it really didn't sit well with me because I thought, "Wait a minute. I'm giving them the wrong impression of what reading is." I had used all those strategies before and I never thought anything of it.

I remember when I taught second grade, a parent coming to me, kind of concerned, saying, "Well, they're just looking at the picture and they're figuring out the words by looking at the picture," and I remember saying, "Yes, that's what good readers do, they look at the picture to figure out the words," you know?

Anna: Yes, I know.

Lindsay: Because that's just, yeah, that was just ingrained in me. That's what I was taught so many times and I was just parroting that back. Then when I was teaching those kindergartners is when I was kind of starting to say, "Wait. They're not reading, they're guessing."

Then my son was diagnosed with dyslexia that year and that was... I just couldn't figure out why I couldn't help him. I knew he was struggling to read from the time he was little, and he had a really hard time learning the letters. I had so many concerns and I did all the things I was taught with balanced literacy, and none of it was working.

Really, once I started diving into dyslexia and, what do dyslexics need to read, what does the brain do when it's learning to read, that brought me to what EVERYONE needs when learning to read. That's when I came to what we now call the science of reading, this knowledge.

Anna: How did that work in terms of shifting what you're doing in your classroom? Was this a very slow process, or did that cause friction among other people who were used to you doing it a certain way?

Lindsay: It was definitely a gradual process. Even at first, even though I had those things happening my first kindergarten year where I was kind of questioning some of these practices, I didn't really connect it with balanced literacy at first. I was learning about dyslexia and I was in this dyslexia parent group that summer after my son was in second grade, and someone was asking about a certain program and another parent said, "Well, that's balanced literacy, which is basically the worst thing for our kids."

I was like, "What?" I've always thought that balanced literacy was the best way, and so it was kind of this gradual "aha" where I was piecing together the frustrations I had that year teaching kindergarten with the things I had been taught and understanding. Really, I guess, the definition of balanced literacy.

Then it was gradual changes. Even now, I feel like I'm every year doing things a little bit differently and applying new things. I think one of the first changes I made was getting rid of the repetitive, predictable texts for those kindergartners, just no more, none of those, and we're going to use decodable texts. I really want them to practice those sound-symbol correspondences and really develop automaticity with that. That was probably the first change and then making sure I'm teaching phonics in an explicit, systematic manner. I think those two things were the top because those were the biggest weaknesses, I think, with balanced literacy. Then it was just improving and refining things along the way.

Anna: I know that for me, hearing that there could be something wrong with balanced literacy concerned me because, like you said, I loved reading aloud to kids, I loved surrounding them with good books, and so I think for a lot of balanced literacy teachers, that is their concern. They wonder, "If I switch over to whatever this thing is called 'structured literacy,' it's not going to be fun anymore for the kids or for me."

Can you speak to that and your experience in terms of maybe concerns you might have had and how it played out?

Lindsay: Well, I think it's kind of a misconception where a lot of people think, "Oh, now, it's just the structured literacy and we're just going to do phonics all the time. What about everything else?" That's the biggest difference, I would say, between balanced literacy and maybe structured literacy is the phonics piece, but there are others.

When we are talking about the science of reading, we're not just talking about phonics, there's a lot of other things that we're talking about, and so, yes, we still want those rich, read-aloud experiences, and we want to introduce and expose our students to other texts, not just to decodable texts, they need to be exposed to all different things.

I think there's just kind of this misconception, and I think really, phonics doesn't have to be boring, so you can do a lot of things to make it exciting and you can show your enthusiasm for it, which is kind of infectious. My students know that I love phonics time and I get really excited and I call myself a word nerd and they love that, too. Then, like I said, that's not the only thing we're going to do. We're going to address vocabulary and comprehension and we're going to work on fluency, and of course, phonemic awareness is in there, too, so there's just lots of different components to consider.

Anna: I think sometimes I'm thinking that people that switch from leveled to decodable, especially in kindergarten, it's a little hard at first because with leveled, it just seems like they're reading so fluently so quickly because they're using the patterns to finish the sentences, whereas with decodable, they have to really work hard. Can you speak to that in your experience and what that's like for you? When do you tend to see them get over that hump of it just being really hard through every word?

Lindsay: Yeah, it's so true. As a kindergarten teacher, it's so much easier to listen to them read a repetitive, predictable text where you're just like, "Yes, you got it. Turn the page. Yes," and they're not really reading, you know?

Anna: Yes.

Lindsay: But they've memorized it and it's so great. But you give them a decodable and sometimes the language is just off enough where they can't guess, so they're just struggling through sounding out and you're like, "Oh, my goodness, we sounded this word out three times already in the book and they're sounding it out again." It's definitely different, but that is what has to happen and that is allowing the brain to map those sound-letter sequences so they can learn and so they can retrieve those later. They'll map it and they'll be able to remember those words later. It's a process.

I love when I'm reading with the students, and I'll give them a lot of opportunities to read those words over and over. I like to do a strategy I learned from Nora Chahbazi, who's the founder of EBLI (Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction). I don't know if you've ever heard of that.

Anna: Yes.

Lindsay: She has this strategy called teacher read, student read, teacher read back. I will do this in small groups with my students where the little kindergartners will read a couple of sentences and I'm like, "Great. Now, listen to me," and they put their finger under the words and they listen while I read the same couple of sentences. Then they go back and do it, those same ones again by themselves. This kind of helps them. Well, it definitely allows more exposure to those words. Then the second time, they can read a little smoother because it's a repeat of what they just read.

I'm teaching second grade now, and I do that with my second graders as well, except it's maybe a paragraph or a couple of paragraphs, so they read it, they do that productive struggle, I model it, and then they read it again. I think that's something that helps that process when they're just kind of reading sound by sound.

I even had a student this year in second grade starting the year, she could only read three correct words in a minute, and every word was slowly sounding out each sound. So we just had lots of practice for her to read aloud, and of course, our phonics, and working on that phonemic awareness, too, and now, she's almost to grade level.

Anna: Wow!

Lindsay: I mean, it's no more sound by sound. It's so exciting!

Anna: That's awesome.

Lindsay: I just thought, she started at three, and I think she's at like seventy words correct per minute right now, which is awesome! We've got to be at eighty-seven at the end of the year, so we're trying, it's my final push. It's the end of March right now to try to get her there, but it's awesome to see that growth.

Anna: That is incredible.

What would you say to somebody, because I've received these emails, who say, "Well, there's no way I'm having my kids read decodable books. They're so boring, they don't make any sense, and they're not going to like it. They're not going to like it so they're not going to want to read them"?

Lindsay: Well, first, I'll say there's a difference in decodable books. Yes, there are some that are just awful, but there are also some that are wonderful and they're engaging and they have beautiful pictures and storylines and they're just high quality. So I would say maybe you need to look at a different brand, a different type of decodable, because there are some really great ones out there.

Second, it is so exciting to see how students get so proud of themselves when they're reading those, when they can actually read the text. I remember this little boy in my kindergarten class a few years ago that I gave a little decodable book. It's one of the first times at the beginning of the year, one of the first times he's actually reading, and he read the first page and he looked up and was like, "Mrs. Kemeny, I'm actually reading the words!"

Anna: That's so fun.

Lindsay: He just said it so loud and so excited. I mean, I could still remember how he said that, and it was just the most amazing moment. I think you don't want to deny them that experience, right?

I've seen there's some students that even with those repetitive texts, it's not going to matter, they can pick up how to read, but there's a large majority that will not get proficient without really having that explicit practice with the sound-symbol correspondences that you're teaching.

So getting some high-quality decodable text, and also realizing that it's not the only thing the students have to be exposed to. In kindergarten, I'm still reading them great literature and we're having discussions and talking about it. I'm teaching second grade now and we're definitely transitioning out of decodables because they're like training wheels and you want to get rid of them as soon as you can, so I have about two students right now who still need decodable texts, but everyone else is fine without it.

Anna: Can you talk to us a little bit about your experience with your son, how you figured out it was dyslexia, if you even knew much about dyslexia, and then what you've been doing to help him learn to read?

Lindsay: Yeah, so I just had no idea what dyslexia was. We had decided to do some outside testing because we couldn't figure out why he was struggling to learn to read so much. I just remember when that doctor told me, "It looks like dyslexia," I was just completely shocked.

I was thinking, "Dyslexia, what's that? Isn't that just where you see backwards? That's not what he has," which is NOT what dyslexia is, that's a huge myth that they see backwards because that's not true. I just remember going to tell his second grade teacher and saying, "They think he has dyslexia," and she's like, "Oh, I guess we need to change some things in his IEP," and I'm like, "Yeah."

It just kind of hit me, why don't I know anything about this? Then I started searching and researching. When I found out it's the most commonly diagnosed learning disability, I got really upset and I was really angry because I thought, if it's really common, why haven't I been taught about this? Why didn't I learn about it in college? Why don't I have professional development on this? How come no other teachers at my school know anything about it? It was frustrating.

Right away, at the end of second grade, we got a tutor, someone who was familiar with dyslexia and used a program that was supposed to be good for kids with dyslexia. Probably that is my biggest regret is that we only did it twice a week for that first year, but it was really expensive! That's what I could afford.

It took me a year before I felt comfortable and ready enough to work with him myself. I had done a lot of reading and then I also had gone to trainings, I had an Orton-Gillingham training and some others. After that year, the end of third grade, I took over his tutoring and I worked with him every day and over the summer every day and that's really when we started to see progress. I wish we had started it earlier.

Anna: What would you point to as being the game changer? What made it click?

Lindsay: Well, it was pretty gradual. I think it was just the intensity. I was doing a combination of explicit phonics, which I never think he got, or at least I just think he needed a lot more exposure to phonics, and practice, and really a lot of practice applying it. So not just phonics in isolation, but applying it in texts.

He had practiced early on with decodables, but then we got to more complex text, and we would practice that, every night we would read together. He'd read a sentence, I'd read a sentence, he'd read a sentence, I'd read a sentence until he could do more and more. Gosh, like the last three years, we've been reading Harry Potter together and he reads a page, I read a page, but it was great! Having that complex text was really good practice! I don't know, it gives me chills when I hear him decode the word "unceremoniously." It's just exciting!

Anna: How does he feel about reading now?

Lindsay: He loves it. He loves it! I remember way back, I guess maybe third grade, or maybe that summer, the first time I saw him reading a book independently, and it was a little graphic novel, "Dog Man." I don't know if you've heard of those.

Anna: Oh, yes. My kids love those.

Lindsay: The first time I ever saw him pick up a book and read for fun, I snapped a picture. I was just so excited, I couldn't believe it!

Then I remember we went to this family reunion event the end of the summer, I guess it was right before he went into fourth grade, and that's the summer I had really started working with him. At that event, he introduced himself, said his name, and said, "I have dyslexia, but I can read fourth grade books." He was just so proud!

Anna: That's so cool.

Lindsay: It was really neat. He actually loves to read. We still read together every night and then he also does a lot of audiobooks.

Anna: Does he need accommodations in school to help him keep up?

Lindsay: Absolutely.

Anna: Do they give him longer for tests and things like that?

Lindsay: Absolutely. Yes, he's on a IEP, and he has a lot of accommodations. His dyslexia is very severe, you know, it's a spectrum, and along with dyslexia, he has dysgraphia, which is the writing disability, and dyscalculia, which is the math disability. Then he has a very low processing speed and very low working memory along with attention struggles, so I feel like it's just all of these things.

Anna: Oh, he's got it all. Wow.

Lindsay: Yeah.

Anna: To have all of that and for him to love reading is a big testament to the work you've done with him. That's really exciting, really exciting.

Lindsay: It's been great and it's been quite a process with him because the same time he was diagnosed with dyslexia, he was diagnosed with depression as well, and that got really bad the end of third grade year. I've written a little bit about that, but he made lots of suicidal comments. He said some of the worst things that you never want to hear as a mother and to see where he is now is just so amazing because I feel like his ability to read has improved his self-esteem and it's just gradually healed his little heart.

Anna: Yes, I remember you sharing that, that's what really stuck with me on the Amplify podcast interview that you gave. It really helps you think about it because I know when I was balanced literacy and I didn't know much about dyslexia, I would've heard, "Well, this way won't work with dyslexia, but that's just a few kids. It's okay. It works for most kids," and I probably would've just dismissed it. But when you actually connect with somebody who has a child with dyslexia and you realize this is very personal and real, and, like you said, the longer you wait to take care of it, the more effect it has on their self-worth and all kinds of things. It just compounds itself and it's so important that we do something about it early.

What would you say to a parent who suspects dyslexia in maybe a kindergartener or first grader? What should be their first step?

Lindsay: I think the first thing I would tell a parent is to get outside tutoring because I wouldn't wait for the school to figure it out. I wouldn't get just any tutor, but I would make sure to get someone who is familiar with dyslexia and what we coin the science of reading, who understands structured literacy, so that would be my first thing.

Anna: Yeah, that's a good tip because that's something that may be a little bit more in their control because working with the school can take a long time, right?

Lindsay: Yes, exactly.

Anna: What would you say to somebody who is just getting started? Do you have any special books or podcasts or things that you recommend to get them going?

Lindsay: Sure. One of my favorite books that I think is really great for beginners that just came out like a year ago is called "The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading" by Christopher Such. I think that's a great one. I also, for my master's program, created a PD based on the science of reading and it's just meant to be a very beginner step, but I have modules for each of the five main components, and it's free, so I can send you that link if you want.

Anna: For sure, yeah. That'd be great.

Lindsay: I think that's a nice way to get started, but like I said, it's not everything, there's so much to learn. I also just started a podcast with two of my friends where we're all big literacy nerds, so we love to talk all things reading. If you want to listen to that, it's called Literacy Talks, and it's sponsored by Reading Horizons. That's on all your podcast platforms.

Anna: I'll be sure to link to all those things in the show notes. Is there anything else you want people to know before we sign off?

Lindsay: Well, I'll just say to think in baby steps. When you're getting started, it can be a little overwhelming to think of making all these changes, so I would just say baby steps. Start learning and add in one thing at a time. I have a specific blog post I've written with some first steps that I would recommend if you're just getting started with the science of reading, I can send you that as well.

Anna: For sure, I will definitely link to that.

Well, thanks so much. I'm sure a lot of people got a lot out of this, especially if they have a child they think may have dyslexia, learning from you and that there's the light end at the end of the tunnel is very exciting. Once the right help is given, success can occur, so thanks so much for sharing that. That's really encouraging. It was really nice to talk with you, Lindsay.

Lindsay: Yeah, it was great to be on, thanks for inviting me.

Anna: Thank you so much for joining me for this interview with Lindsay. You can find access to her free PD, her blog posts, and her podcast in the show notes, which you can find at themeasuredmom.com/episode83. We're taking a week off next week for July 4th, but we'll see you after that.

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Find Lindsay here The Science of Reading: First Steps (blog post) Free PD for the Science of Reading Literacy Talks podcast Lindsay’s recommends:The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading, by Chris SuchGet on the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader.

The post From balanced to structured literacy: A conversation with Lindsay Kemeny appeared first on The Measured Mom.

From balanced to structured literacy: A conversation with Heidi Jane

TRT Podcast #82: You’re not alone: A conversation with Heidi Jane

In this episode I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Heidi Jane, who has blown up Instagram and TikTok with her incredible science of reading content. Listen in to learn about Heidi’s journey and the safe space she’s created for teachers to keep learning about this important subject.

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We're moving along in our Balanced to Structured Literacy Series, and this week I had the true delight of speaking with Heidi Jane, who is very active on TikTok and Instagram spreading the news about the science of reading. When she first started learning, she felt like she was all alone, but now she's found a whole community of teachers who are anxious to learn more. We'll get started right after the intro.

Intro: Welcome to Triple R Teaching, where we encourage you to think differently about education by helping you reflect, refine, and recharge. This isn't just about trying something new as you educate those entrusted to your care. We'll equip you with simple strategies and practical tips that will fill your toolbox and reignite your passion for teaching. It's time to reflect, refine, and recharge with your host, Anna Geiger.

Anna Geiger: Hello and welcome everyone! Today, I'm excited to interview Heidi Jane. If you follow the science of reading on TikTok or Instagram, you definitely know Heidi. She's @learningwithheidi on TikTok and @droppinknowledgewithheidi on Instagram. She is always there sharing lots of relevant information about the science of reading, and what's most exciting about Heidi is that she started out as a balanced literacy teacher, and she's very open about her journey and that's why we're thrilled to welcome her to our Balanced to Structured Literacy Podcast Series.

Welcome, Heidi. We're so glad you're here!

Heidi Jane: Thank you so much. I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Anna: Can you tell us a little bit about your teaching background? Can you start with how you learned to teach reading, how you did that, and how it looked in your classroom?

Heidi: Sure. You know what? Cut me off if this goes too long because I have a lot to say about this. I completely 100% come from a balanced literacy, very much balanced literacy background. I was taught to teach kids to memorize words. I was a first grade teacher for eleven years, and I taught kids to memorize words, had my word wall, and used leveled readers. I had two leveled libraries in my classroom, one for my guided reading, and the second for their book shopping. We used leveled assessments.That's how I always assessed my kids.

We didn't even get a phonics program until later, but that was kind of like thrown at us as, "Here, supplement a little bit with this," but we were still teaching whole language strategies such as guessing words. I literally had a lesson in our curriculum called Guess the Covered Word where we cover the word and the kids have to guess based on pictures. Those were the strategies that I knew.

My second year of teaching, my school that I was working at actually was identified as what's called a priority school. Are you familiar with that at all?

Anna: No, I'm not.

Heidi: A lot of people are not and I never was until this happened, but it basically means that we were identified as failing by the state and the federal government. We had a lot of federal mandates that came in to us such as we had to go to school for eight and a half hours a day with the kids. My day actually went from like 7:15 to 2:05 to 7:15 to 3:35. We added an hour and a half onto our school day, and we all knew that wasn't really a good thing. Let's work smarter maybe, not harder, right?

We had these people come in that we paid millions of dollars to that were called Turnaround Partners, and they were consultants who were coming in to turn the school around. Because if we didn't turn the school around in four years, we would get shut down.

Anna: Wow!

Heidi: Yeah, I've only told this story one other time in a different conference, but I refer back to that because when these Turnaround Partners came in, really what we did was we got pulled from our classrooms and a sub was put in our classrooms. We got pulled. I remember sitting in the library and they had us writing curriculum based on the common core standards. I guess this was their strategy to turn our school around.

I think back on it now because the thing is, why didn't they teach us about the science of reading?

Anna: What was their strategy in getting you to do that?

Heidi: I don't know. I think back on that time too and I'm like, "Can I pinpoint what their plan was to turn our school around?" I was one of the classrooms, one of the model classrooms, that was working really closely with them and I can't pinpoint it. They were great people and everything, but I cannot pinpoint what their strategy was on how we're going to turn this school around.

I'm a first grade teacher, right? And when I think back on it they never mentioned phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, or orthographic mapping. I didn't hear any of those terms ever until about two years ago. I didn't know what those were.

Anna: How did this turn out, and then what was the next step?

Heidi: So my third year in of teaching those long extended days, I was having a baby, my son, and so I decided I'm not going to work those long hours anymore. I ended up leaving and going and teaching in the elementary school where actually I went to school.

The school ended up getting shut down. It got shut down a year later, and it's now being used as a Montessori school. It did get shut down.

I went to work in my elementary school, which was wonderful! My kindergarten teacher was still there! It was nostalgia. Every day I walked in and smelled, I don't know, but if you've ever been back to your old schools, there's like a smell in the school that just is the same. It was great, but we were still not teaching our kids to read. I found out later that my district is very low. If you look at like all the districts in my state, we're kind of at the bottom. We are struggling in how to teach kids to read.

In 2020, and I might be jumping ahead here, but in 2020, I was trained in Reading Recovery, which is the program that my school used, my district used, for struggling readers. That's what our Title teachers used. This is what our kids got, tier two and tier three, and then tier one, we were using units of study. We were essentially failing our kids. I was too and I just didn't know.

Even through this Reading Recovery training, I never learned about phonemic awareness. I had never heard that term before. I went through my materials. I actually found my materials recently, and it's funny because there was an article in there, there was a Kilpatrick article and there was an article on orthographic mapping, but most of our time was spent on running records in MSV. We were watching videos of kids reading and we were marking the running records. We were doing that MSV training and learning more about that. That was what the majority of our training was on.

Anna: Did you ever have a chance to apply it, or did you just learn about it?

Heidi: No, because it was a year-long program and we were finishing in 2020. That's when the pandemic happened, so we had to actually finish our last two or three months or whatever that was virtually. But it was really basically the same stuff that I actually felt like I had been doing, because I had been doing running records. I had been using leveled readers.

Anna: In my experience, when I remember teaching with balanced literacy, I really felt like this was THE way to teach reading. The other ways weren't appropriate. I believed in phonics, of course, I mean, that's how I learned to read, but I felt like it was going to make reading not fun, and that decodable books were terrible. I thought that leveled books really promoted comprehension.

It took a lot for me to listen. What was it that got your attention?

Heidi: Yeah, I am the same way. I was a Jan Richardson fanatic, and I went to see her. I loved guided reading, and I was taught, I feel like you probably can relate to this, that there's this stigma around phonics and around decodable readers when you're in the balanced literacy world. You're kind of taught those are bad because they're boring and they're not fun.

Anna: I was a big fan of Regie Routman too and Lucy Calkins, and I had all their books, I actually still have their books because I want to be able to refer to them. I just loved them, and they're all marked up, because they really inspired you to be excited about teaching and reading, which I think is a positive thing.

Unfortunately, I think in Lucy Calkins' book, "The Art of Teaching Reading," there's like six pages about phonics. The book is six hundred pages long and there's like six pages about phonics. That's a real problem. But like you said, in many of the books I read, they told me to use sound it out as a last resort because that was focusing on a discreet skill, which was a problem because it wasn't focusing on the big picture.

So what happened?

Heidi: I completely found out about the science of reading on accident. We had talked a little bit earlier that my husband is also a teacher. Well, I was working with my son, who was four at the time and had not started preschool. As my husband and I are both teachers, we saw a lot of students struggle, and we didn't want him to struggle. I have an older daughter and she struggled. So we were thinking that we're going to make sure he doesn't struggle!

He had already known his letters and sounds. For me, my next step was to start reading some CVC words. I was putting CVC words in a book and we were saying the sounds and reading the words together. Well, my husband, and if anybody's heard this story before, I literally just remember him walking down the stairs. I can picture the very day he walks downs the stairs, and I'm working with my son and he goes, "What are you doing?" It was kind of rude.

I'm like, "What do you mean? I'm working with him. We're learning how to read."

And he goes, "He's not ready for that."

I was like, "What are you talking about?"

Well, my husband was in the military, and when he got out he went back to school for teaching. He went to school after me. Well, after I had already graduated, they implemented something called the Foundations of Reading test, which touches a little bit on phonological and phonemic awareness. That's how he had exposure to it. He wasn't as familiar as we both are now, but he at least had heard of it and knew what it was.

He tells me that our son needed phonological and phonemic awareness. I'm telling you, I literally had no idea what he was talking about. I'm like, "What are you talking about? First of all, you're probably wrong because I've been teaching longer. And if this is true, why hasn't somebody told me about this? Somebody would've told me! You're wrong because do you know how long I have been teaching?" I had been teaching then for probably nine years, and I'd been to a million PDs and no one told me about this, and they would've told me! I was sure! I had faith that somebody would've told me.

Actually I started researching those terms to prove him wrong, because I'm like, "You have no idea what you're talking about."

And now here we are. That's literally how I learned and how I started.

Anna: That's so interesting, so interesting! My husband is also a teacher, but he teaches New Testament Greek, so it's not quite the same.

Heidi: Oh wow!

Anna: I was learning the science of reading and when I taught my youngest to read, I used the structured literacy approach and everything. When he heard him sounding out all the words, really slowly, he said to me privately later, "That made me feel sad," because he was used to hearing the other kids "read" so quickly! But of course, he picked it up very quickly and he's a very advanced reader now, but it is hard at first to switch over!

I think it's so funny that your journey was to prove him wrong because that was mine, but it was with the Emily Hanford article. When blog commenters pointed me to that article, it totally blew up three-cueing and just killed me! First of all, I didn't believe it could possibly be true, because what did she know? Then more people mentioned it, and I thought, "Ugh, I guess I have to go read it so I can respond to it."

That was my plan, to put a blog post out refuting the article. I never could because she was actually right! She had it all figured out in a very easy to understand article, but that's just so interesting.

Tell me how you got started sharing on social media.

Heidi: I had been on Instagram and just recently at this time had gone on TikTok because my older daughter was like, "Mom, you need to be on TikTok, it's fun," but I wasn't sharing teaching content at the time.

At the time when I first went there, it was only dyslexia specialists, reading specialists, and speech pathologists sharing about the science reading. If I Googled or if I searched the hashtag phonemic awareness, that was all I could find. I was like, where are the classroom teachers? There were a couple like Sarah's Snippets and Meredith from Creativity to the Core, but that was it. Everybody else was specialists.

I felt like, well, I'm not a specialist, but I teach first grade and I should know how to teach these kids how to read! Really now that I've learned about phonemic awareness and a lot of other things, I can literally picture kids in my mind all the time who I could have helped if I had only known, right?

As a classroom teacher, I'm the first step. They can get tier two and tier three instruction if they need it, but I'm their first go-to. I'm the first, let's say, line of defense, against illiteracy, right? I should have known about these things.

I started sharing just a little bit because I was a nervous, because I'm just still learning myself. I just started sharing like little bits and pieces and really I think that it caught traction when I started talking about sight words.

You know How Emily Hanford blew up the MSV? That's my goal for sight words, because as a first grade teacher that was literally my life and it was so stressful. It was stressful for me. It was stressful for the kids! It was stressful for parents. It's like, wait a second, there's a better way here. Orthographic mapping and sight words really kind of became my thing. I think that's what kind of caught traction.

Then I randomly shared a video on TikTok of my son reading, and it got a bunch of views. I was like, do people on TikTok care about watching a kid learn how to read? Because a lot of people think it's just like dancing, right? But there's so much education going on on TikTok, I just started sharing more there and it caught traction there too.

I was just like, okay, well, I guess I'm not the only one who didn't know. It's okay to say we didn't know it. It's not our fault, even though I felt guilty at first and I felt like it was my fault. I want other teachers to also know it's not your fault. We can't do better until we know better.

Anna: I agree with all of that. I want to ask you, for people that are in balanced literacy, they may not see that anything they're doing is wrong. It may seem to them like it's working. I thought it was working. I'm sure you thought it was working. But looking back, without giving too much detail that you're not comfortable giving, can you give us some examples of how you look back and think, "Oh, now I know I could have done that better."

Heidi: Oh yeah. I'll just talk about this one girl who always pops into my mind. I remember sitting with her and working with her, and I was doing all this, I know the listeners can't see me, but I'm tapping my shoulder, then my elbow, then my wrist, /k/, /��/, /t/, /k/, /��/, /t/, and then I go "cat." She's just staring at me. I'm like "cat" (said very slowly) and she's still just staring at me. I'm like "cat" (said very slowly in a different tone), and she's still just staring at me.

I didn't know what else to do. She was getting some tier three interventions, and I'm talking to the Title teacher asking, "What else can we do?" The Title teacher is still using leveled readers with her as well.

Well, NOW I know she didn't have the foundation of phonological and phonemic awareness. She probably was unable to identify even a beginning sound. If I said "cat," can you tell me what sound you hear in the beginning of the word "cat?" I'm almost positive she would not have been able to say /k/. Those are the skills that kids need to be successful readers.

Phonemic awareness is so important. That's just one example of a time where I'm like, "Oh, if only I had known. I know I could have helped her."

Anna: Yes, I have sad stories like that too. Now that I'm studying a lot about dyslexia, I know for sure that I had students with dyslexia. My advice to the parents was, well, read to them more and practice these leveled books more, which were not what was going to do the job. Then I think, especially now too as I learn so much, I really think that it's really important that third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade teachers study this stuff too!

My first three years of teaching were in a combined class, the third, fourth and fifth grades actually. Then after that, I moved on to primary grades, but I didn't know much at all, except how I learned to read. I hadn't studied anything about digraphs or any of that stuff in college. When I had a third grader who couldn't spell CVC and CVCE words, she kept mixing them up, it just didn't occur to me that I should give her a phonics assessment and give her some explicit instruction after school for ten minutes a day.

I mean, that would've really made a difference. This is for everybody, all teachers that teach children, not just for primary teachers, because when it gets missed in the primary grades, and it does, middle grade teachers can figure out what to do. Everyone needs this information, which brings me to your membership.

Tell us about your brand new science of reading membership and how you started that and what's included.

Heidi: This is a track that I never thought I would be on, let's just say that. But when I started sharing, a lot of teachers and a lot of parents also were like, "Well, where can I find a resource about this? Or where can I learn more about this?" I started linking everything to different websites that I was using, different books that I was using, or resources, and then a lot of times I couldn't find a resource!

I started creating these resources because I saw a need and people were asking for them. It's nothing I ever thought I would do. Then some people were like, "Well, can I just buy all of your science of reading stuff, like a science of reading bundle?" So I created that. Then I started getting messages like, "Well, how do I even use this stuff?" People would just get the stuff and then they were like, "Now what?" So I created a membership. I created the science of reading 101 membership for people who would like a little bit more support.

Inside the membership, you'll get all of the materials, but they're organized in a way to where if you are teaching CVC words tomorrow, you can literally go to the membership, click on CVC words, and grab everything you need. Watch a couple videos, grab some lessons and go. Then there's also monthly live meetings with them. There's a member Q & A section where I'm answering all of their questions. There's a place where they can request resources. There's some exclusive resources.

I just want it to be tailored towards the members and towards what they need, because it's really built as a support. How can I better support these teachers who are looking to make the change and unlearn all the things like I am? Even though I have learned a lot, I still feel like I learn new things all the time.

Can you still learn about the science of reading without joining the membership? Absolutely. Like I said, it's all out there for you. I just felt like I got a lot of messages from people who wanted that extra support and a place to go. That's what the membership is for.

Anna: Yeah, and really it's a time saver, right? It's helping someone just zero in on exactly what they need. What would you say to someone who, whether or not they choose to join your membership, what are some resources that you found really helpful, maybe specific books or other places where you've learned a lot in the last couple years?

Heidi: I always recommend the book "Know Better, Do Better" by David and Meredith Liben. It's so clear, and it is written so nicely. It's an easy read with practical tips and great background information on how we got here, why we shouldn't stick with balanced literacy, and how we even got to that point. Why we shouldn't use leveled readers, and then practical tips and tricks for teaching things like phonological and phonemic awareness. I love that book for that reason. It's a great starting point.

Then also I always recommend the free training from Really Great Reading, and they have it from pre-K through 12th grade. You can literally just take the free training and be done. They don't send you a ton of emails afterwards like, "Hey, buy this. Buy that." They don't even do that.

Anna: Awesome. Well, I will link to all these things in the show notes. If anyone, again, wants to find Heidi Jane, if you for some reason haven't found her yet, you can check her out on TikTok @learningwithheidi or on Instagram @droppinknowledgewithheidi. Thank you so much for joining us today, Heidi.

Heidi: Thank you. It was great talking with you.

Anna: Thanks so much for listening. In the show notes today, you can find all of Heidi's recommended resources, as well as places to find her, including her science of reading membership. The show notes are located at themeasuredmom.com/episode82. We'll see you next week.

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Find Heidi here Science of Reading 101 Membership Droppin’ Knowledge with Heidi on Instagram Heidi’s free printable resources Heidi’s recommended resources Know Better, Do Better , by David Liben & Meredith Liben Really Great Reading’s on-demand workshops Get on the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader.

The post From balanced to structured literacy: A conversation with Heidi Jane appeared first on The Measured Mom.

From balanced to structured literacy: A conversation with Christina Winter

 TRT Podcast #81: Just start with one thing: A conversation with Christina Winter

In this episode I had the joy of meeting Christina Winter, a brilliant educator with a heart for helping teachers. Get Christina’s best advice for getting started with the science of reading! 

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Hello, Anna here, and we are continuing our Balanced to Structured Literacy podcast series.

Today we have the joy of hearing from Christina Winter, who I'm sure you'll be able to tell right away is just a very kind, thoughtful person who really has a heart for helping teachers. She has a beautiful website, Mrs. Winter's Bliss, and a successful online business. Even more than that, she's about helping teachers learn and grow, and she has many resources to help you do that. We'll get started right after the intro.

Intro: Welcome to Triple R Teaching, where we encourage you to think differently about education by helping you reflect, refine, and recharge. This isn't just about trying something new as you educate those entrusted to your care. We'll equip you with simple strategies and practical tips that will fill your toolbox and reignite your passion for teaching. It's time to reflect, refine, and recharge with your host, Anna Geiger.

Anna Geiger: Hello everybody! I am so excited to welcome Christina Winter to the podcast today. She is an experienced educator, she's been selling online resources for almost a decade, and she is open and honest about her journey from balanced to structured literacy, which is why we're really excited to welcome her to our Balanced to Structured Literacy podcast series. Welcome, Christina!

Christina Winter: Thank you so much, Anna, for having me! I feel so honored to be here. I feel like I've learned so much from you, and I'm excited for other teachers to have this opportunity to hear what we're going to share about today.

Anna: Yes. And ditto!

One thing that really strikes me about you, especially as a TPT seller, is that you also have a blog - a website - that's really dedicated to teaching teachers. That always sticks out to me because there's many people who sell, but that's all they do, and you make a point to educate people as well, which is fantastic.

I know that you were a first grade teacher for a lot of years, and you've shared with me that during that time, you were a balanced literacy teacher. Could you talk to us a little bit about what someone would've seen if they'd come in your classroom and watched you teaching reading?

Christina: Well, they would've seen all the balanced literacy, three-cueing, leveled text, no decodable readers, etc.

I was a teacher for twenty-one years, mostly first grade, and I never had any training on phonics or anything like Scarborough's Rope or the Simple View reading. I mean, it's amazing to me that all of that has been around for decades and I didn't get any training on that. I got training on guided reading, what to do with running records, Daily 5, using the cafe, I mean that's where I come from.

So when I started to learn about the science of reading, I think what caught my attention is that I was kind of doing some of the things that the science says, which we can get into, and that was working in my classroom, but I didn't really have a name for that. And so I feel like now that I've discovered and I'm on my journey with science and reading, I feel at home.

Anna: Yeah, I think finally when you start to put together all the science of reading, when it all comes to light, all of a sudden everything fits together in your mind versus to me, balanced literacy was a lot of pieces, and I really struggled to fit them together. They didn't always fit logically. I taught phonics, and I'm sure you did too, it just wasn't very explicit or systematic.

What was your approach to teaching phonics when you were a teacher?

Christina: I knew phonics and that we had to teach it because we're teaching first grade. I knew that it was the code to teaching reading, but again, I wasn't provided any type of scope and sequence or anything like that. It was like, "Go teach short vowels and then teach long vowels." We had standards on our report card and then had to make it up.

I think it was with my experience after years of teaching that I knew they needed to progress through short vowels and then blends and then digraphs, and so I kind of created my own scope and sequence. The more I've learned, I learned more about the systematic progression and exactly how to make it helpful for students, and then the amount of time that's needed for students to practice. I mean, if I took myself now and went back to the classroom, it would definitely look a lot different. There would be a lot more instructional time dedicated to it.

Anna: So one thing for me when people started talking about three-cueing and whether it was a problem in leveled books and everything, they would say, "Well, over here, you're teaching phonics, but then here, they're practicing in these books, but they're not getting to apply their phonics." That was hard for me to hear because I really liked my leveled books, but I had to admit that it was true. In your experience, what can you say about the use of leveled books in the early grades like kindergarten and first grade?

Christina: Well, so what you said earlier about how you had these pieces but they didn't all really fit together, that is exactly one of the struggles I was feeling. Because here I was doing these whole group phonics lessons, "We're going to learn short vowels," or, "We're going to learn digraphs." Then I was going with my small groups and some of my students would do a little bit of word study, but it was not a lot. Then we were doing more of comprehension and leveled texts, so it wasn't really making sense.

But I think the thing that teachers like about leveled text, and this is something that's hard to get over, is that we FEEL the celebration when our students are reading those very emergent readers, when they're saying, "I like the red balloon. I like the blue balloon," the whole patterned text. We have this celebration like, "They're reading!" I've even seen friends post videos of their kids saying, "My child's reading!"

Now that I know better, I know they're not reading. I mean, if you've ever watched that video on YouTube. Is it the purple project?

Anna: The Purple Challenge, yeah.

Christina: It's such a good video, but it just really shows an explanation of how the kids AREN'T reading, but we're celebrating it as that! As teachers, we want to feel like we are doing our job, and our kids are getting it, and they're moving from level A to level B. I mean, the kids are saying, "I'm a level C!" It's hard to let go of that.

But the trade-off is that if we can switch and see how what we're explicitly teaching, and our kids are having the opportunity to apply their knowledge and practice, then they are truly feeling successful in themselves. We know that when students feel successful, it propels them to work harder.

Anna: Yes, I agree with all of what you said. With all my own kids, I also started teaching them to read using these very predictable books. I could say, "Oh, look, you're reading!" and try to get them all excited because it does sound like they're reading. I think that's the issue, and that's why teachers get excited about it because it looks like they're reading and they're "reading so fluently" and reading fast enough that they can talk about the book, right?

But when you switch to decodable text and you start out with that, it's painful for the teacher at first because they have to sound out EVERY word and it feels like, "Well, now we've totally thrown comprehension out the window because there's no way they can understand it if they're reading this slowly," and you feel like you're sort of going backwards.

When my youngest first started to read a year and a half ago or so, I started teaching him only with decodables after the first day because I had learned about the Science of Reading by then, and I realized they contradicted each other. It just didn't work, so we only did decodables. My husband was walking through the room and he said to me later, "It makes me feel sad to hear him read like that," because it was every word REALLY slow, and that's not what it was like with the other kids.

But pretty soon after, he was starting to read words automatically and it was coming together. Then we'd see him sit on the couch with these little Flyleaf books like the very first Flyleaf decodable book that says, "I am Sam. Sam I am," or something like that. It's just a snake over and over, but he would just read that over and over and over without me asking him to because he knew what he was doing. He knew he was actually pulling the words off the page.

For our listeners, the video that Christina's talking about, which I can link to in the show notes, is called The Purple Challenge. It's a two-part YouTube video by a parent. She's not a teacher, but she's a research scientist, and her daughter came home and "read" this leveled book. It's actually a book I used with my own kids when I was teaching them to read, it's about a little girl who paints everything purple.

But she noticed that her daughter could not read the words outside the book. She could only "read" them by using the context and the pictures. So to the mother, this didn't seem right. Was she really reading? Then she actually gave her daughter an explicit phonics lesson with some of those concepts and then her daughter could apply it and read those words out of the book. I think I'm remembering it right. That is just a really enlightening video to watch, so we'll link to that in the show notes.

Do you remember what it was that finally got you listening or perked up your ears, or helped you realize that maybe some things you'd been doing or teaching had been incorrect?

Christina: Like what led me into structured literacy, learning more about the science of reading, and things like that?

Anna: Yeah, what got your attention?

Christina: Yeah, so like I said before, I had done things like dictation, and I knew phonics was key with my students. Many years ago I taught with Open Court phonics, probably my first few years of teaching, which I know is pretty heavy and very phonics-based. I knew that my students needed scaffolds of support and they needed tools so that when they were working, mostly on writing, so had we used sound cards, the sound-picture cards. It was an Open Court thing and that was actually my first experience with it.

So about two years ago in my Facebook group, a lot of teachers were talking about kids struggling with reading and I was listening to what's happening. I was just thinking and reflecting back on my experiences as a teacher, and I was like, "I think they need a sound wall." I didn't even know that I was going to call it a sound wall, but I knew that they needed those phonics tools that I gave my kids.

I thought, "I feel like I need to create this resource because I think it will be really helpful," and so I just started searching and I ended up watching Dawn Durham's sound wall video. That propelled me into creating my own that replicated what I was already using in my classroom. That's a really popular resource on Teachers Pay Teachers. On my blog, I have a ton of blog posts about how to use a sound wall and the parts of a sound wall and all of that. That is what kind of propelled me into it.

Then I don't know how I got hooked up into the science of reading Facebook group, and there are some very knowledgeable people in there. I just wanted to learn more and more and more. Like I said earlier, it was like I was doing all these little pieces in my own experience and in my own classroom, and all of a sudden I had a name for it. Ironically, I was using decodable readers with my very lowest students because it was working for them. So I'm all in now!

Anna: For someone that knows that there are some things they're doing that aren't quite right, that don't align with the research, what would you say are some first steps towards understanding and applying the science of reading and the structured literacy approach?

Christina: So it feels overwhelming because it's a lot of new information for a lot of people. Personally, I think a couple of things. One, you're going to choose ONE thing to start with, just one thing. Whether it be implementing a sound wall or starting to change how you teach high frequency words, if you're going to use the heart word method or however you're going to teach kids to really look at and decode, to match the phonemes with the graphemes. Then using that one thing and seeing how your students are responding. We're always using data to drive our instruction, so use that data to say this is working and feel good about doing that one thing.

Then get a buddy on board with you, someone who you can bounce ideas off of or share research with. I mean, I'm always sending articles to my poor friend who lives next door to me, she's a first grade teacher, and I'm always sending her articles to read or watch. So get a buddy who's on board with you and just start there.

Also, I know because I get so many emails and so many messages, teachers feel guilty. We have to let that go because really, I was never taught anything about structured literacy. It was not until I started doing my own research out of the classroom. You have got to let go of that guilt, it's really not fair.

Anna: A lot of people in the science of reading structured literacy movement will say, "Know better, do better." To be honest, when people would say that all the time when I was first learning about it, I felt like they were being condescending to other people, and I found it annoying. Then over time, when I started understanding things I didn't understand before and I looked back and I thought of students that I really could have helped if I knew this stuff, I felt really sad about it. And that's what the "Know better, do better" means. It means you "know better" now, so you're going to "do better" now for the students you know and the students you will know. And I agree, you have to let it go so you can move forward.

I think a really good practice for teachers, and I know teachers are so busy, but if you could set up for yourself, maybe thirty minutes a week, and where you just put it on your calendar. Maybe you put all the emails you get from people about the science of reading or whatever, or from blogs that you follow, and you just put them in a folder, and then in that thirty minutes a week, just go through it a little bit. Just take it in small doses. I'm assuming that the more you get into it, the more time you're going to want to spend on it, but at the beginning, small bits is fine.

Christina: Yeah, I agree. I think one of the things that has helped me so much is listening to podcasts. I mean, like I already said, I love your podcast. I think what I love about your podcast is you're coming from a teacher's point of view who has been in the classroom, who works with children, and you're always sharing how you're working with your son who's a kindergartner. So you're seeing what you are teaching or what you are sharing is happening in real life, right?

I have found that when you're doing the dishes, when you're folding laundry, or when you're driving your kids to soccer practice, that's a great time to listen to podcasts. I mean, you can listen to music or you can listen to podcasts. It's a great learning opportunity.

Anna: Yeah, I agree. I also want to let our readers know that Christina has put together a science of reading toolkit, which is a lot of resources from her website that will get you started. If you just head to her website, mrswintersbliss.com, you can find that, but we'll also leave a link to the toolkit as well as where you can find Christina on YouTube and Instagram, and also, of course, her website and her TPT store. Those will all be in the show notes for you.

Is there anything else you want to share with us today, Christina, before we sign off?

Christina: I'm excited for teachers to get that toolkit. It really came because teachers were asking questions, which is exciting because now I'm at home working full-time, I'm not in the classroom, so I have the time to research and learn and then share. That's how the toolkit came about. It's, in my opinion, an awesome starting place because you're going to get a scope and sequence, phoneme-grapheme dictionary, some parent letters, and teaching posters. But also, I've got a five-day email series so that you can get a little bit of information each day on a topic.

Anna: That is awesome, and I'm glad to be able to send that to them. Thank you for joining us today, and I'm looking forward to the rest of our series with other teachers, so thanks again, Christina. I know that everybody will be excited to visit your website and get to know you.

Christina: Thank you so much, Anna.

Anna: Thanks so much for joining us for this interview. You can find everything that Christina and I mentioned in the episode in the show notes, which are at themeasuredmom.com/episode81. We'll see you next week!

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The Purple Challenge Video Find Christina here Getting Started with the Science of Reading (blog post) Free Science of Reading Toolkit Using Sound Walls in the Classroom (blog post) Mrs. Winter’s Bliss on Instagram Mrs. Winter’s Bliss on YouTube Get on the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader.

The post From balanced to structured literacy: A conversation with Christina Winter appeared first on The Measured Mom.

From balanced to structured literacy: Chatting with Savannah Campbell

 TRT Podcast #80: It’s all about the kids: A conversation with Savannah Campbell

In this episode I have the privilege of chatting with Savannah Campbell from Campbell Creates Readers. She shares her journey from balanced to structured literacy and helps us put it all in the proper perspective. 

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Hello, Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom, and I'm so excited to kick off the first of our series of interviews with teachers who transitioned from balanced literacy to structured literacy. Our first interview is with Savannah Campbell of Campbell Creates Readers. She's got an amazing presence on Instagram. She also has a wonderful blog and TPT store, and I know you're going to enjoy the conversation today. Her love for students and her passion for helping them really comes out. The only issue is that when I was recording this, I did not have my mic set up properly so my audio is not very good, but Savannah is the star of this episode and you will hear her nice and clear. We'll get started right after the intro.

Intro: Welcome to Triple R teaching, where we encourage you to think differently about education by helping you reflect, refine, and recharge. This isn't just about trying something new as you educate those entrusted to your care. We'll equip you with simple strategies and practical tips that will fill your toolbox and reignite your passion for teaching. It's time to reflect, refine, and recharge, with your host, Anna Geiger.

Anna Geiger: Hello everybody! Welcome to another episode in our Balanced to Structured Literacy Series today. I'm really excited to welcome Savannah Campbell. She's a reading specialist and she is active on Instagram, on her blog, and in her Facebook group. They're all called Campbell Creates Readers. Welcome Savannah!

Savannah Campbell: Thank you, Anna. I'm so excited to be here! As I told you when you reached out to me, I have followed your blog for years!

Anna: Yeah, I am very honored. You are rocking it over on Instagram so it's exciting, very exciting, to hear that there was a connection.

Can you talk to us a little bit about your understanding of how to teach reading and how that looked for most of your teaching experience?

Savannah: Yeah. So I like to say that I was born and raised in a balanced literacy world. I've been teaching for eleven years, and all eleven years, I've taught at the school that I went to as a kid, so it's a really special place for me. From the beginning, I've always cared and I've always tried my hardest and I've always had relationships with children. And yet, I couldn't figure out why my kids weren't performing the way I knew they could.

I actually have two master's degrees from William and Mary - one is in elementary education (I got that in 2011), and then I got my reading specialist degree in 2015. And I hate to say it, but neither one of those programs taught me how to teach children how to read. I did everything they told me to do, and my world was really centered around authentic literacy experiences for children. I thought that if I just gave them the right books and if I just could help them find their voice as writers, they would magically learn to read and write.

I just remember always thinking, "What is missing? Is it me? Why am I not making progress? I'm doing everything. I'm reading all the books." I would read like twenty professional development books each summer and do everything I could. And yet, it still just wasn't working.

It wasn't until about 2018 that I realized it's because no one had ever taught me about, and I hadn't learned, what explicit instruction was, truthfully.

Anna: Except you probably learned that it was boring, right? That it wasn't something you wanted to do?

Savannah: Yes, that's right! They made it seem like if you just taught children something that was like a no-no, like you can't just teach children stuff, that they have to discover and they have to explore and they have to categorize. It's just so funny, looking back now, how I never realized that you kind of just have to teach them some things.

Anna: Yes, and I am totally with you, we probably read a lot of the same books! I loved all the Fountas and Pinnell books, Lucy Calkins, Regie Routman. I just devoured them, they're full of notes and I still have those in my basement.

Savannah: And Richard Allington.

Anna: Oh yes. They made it sound so inspiring, and I think that's positive, because we want to be excited about teaching reading! But I was just talking to someone else today, and in Lucy Calkins' "Art of Teaching Reading," I think the book is like six hundred pages, and there's only like six pages about phonics! So it's about dreams, which is very exciting, but that won't get kids to read.

Savannah: Well, and it's funny that you mentioned that and the likability factor. I literally would talk about Lucy like she was my friend. I read all of Lucy's books, "The Art of Teaching Reading," "The Art of Teaching Writing," and I would go around quoting them. And you're right, they make it feel so much like a craft, it's very much what you bring into it and the teacher's personality and all these things, but it's so flimsy. The actual instruction part of it is SO flimsy, but it makes you feel good.

Anna: So true.

Savannah: And that's I think how they fooled us for so long.

Anna: In some ways, they're correct, how they say that what the teacher brings to it is so important. That's really important, but at the same time, if you don't equip the teacher with what they need to give to the kids, then it's just not going to work. Personality won't teach someone to read.

Savannah: I agree, and there's a difference between being a good teacher and bringing your own spin to it, and not actually giving teachers the skills to teach. That's what I think that they were really missing for a long time. It's hard to reflect back on sometimes.

Anna: I know, I know it is. If you're able to, can you share any examples of something where you look back and you see what the issue was now, but you didn't know it at the time?

Savannah: Absolutely. I remember I taught these fourth graders and they were these boys who were so smart, and they were so articulate, and they were so funny, and they just had everything going for them, except for they couldn't read. It's not that they couldn't read CVC words. If it had been that obvious, I think we would've noticed it. They knew their letter sounds, they could do CVC, where it's that kind of a thing, but there was just some disconnect between how intelligent and articulate they were and what they were able to do in print.

I couldn't figure out the disconnect, and I remember thinking, "If I can just put the right book in their hands." I thought that was going to be the magic solution. I bought every book, literally every book, that I thought that they might have a shred of interest in. At the end of the year, guess what? They still couldn't read, and they still didn't love to read, because I never actually taught them. It wasn't until years later that their mothers actually told me that they got diagnosed with dyslexia.

In my reading specialist program, my professor had actually told us that dyslexia doesn't exist.

Anna: Oh my goodness.

Savannah: And that was 2015 that I went through that program!

Anna: I'm totally with you on that one, and I feel so bad because of it.

I started out teaching with third, fourth, and fifth grade for three years, in a combined class. Then, after that, I taught first and second. I didn't know anything, except what I had learned growing up, about learning how to read. I didn't know anything! I didn't know about a phonics scope and sequence or what order you should teach it.

I had these third graders, looking back I'm sure there were two of them that had dyslexia, and I had just told their parents to read to them more and give them more books and just practice, practice. And when I had a third grader who was spelling CVCE words as CVC words, it just never occurred to me that I should give her an assessment and sit down and work it out.

For years too, when people would email me in my blog and say, "I need help with my child with dyslexia," I would just say, "I really don't know about that, but here's some websites."

I never considered that it was something I should really study. I just thought it was just kind of this rare thing that only a few people know about.

But now we know many children have it and all teachers should understand it. So that's sad to hear that they were still giving that bad information not that many years ago.

Savannah: Well, and too, the teaching that benefits children with dyslexia can benefit all. It's not going to hurt any child, but for some children, they absolutely HAVE to have it.

There's one other thing I was going to say about balanced literacy and how attractive it is. I truly think that, for teachers, it's made so much sense because that's how we learn to read. So many teachers were part of that 40% that are going to learn to read, no matter what.

I felt like when I grew up, as a child, I just opened a book and I knew how to read, and so it was difficult for me to understand why, for some children, that didn't work. As teachers, many of us are readers and we love to read, and we don't understand how it can be a different process for those children. Not that we learned to read differently, but that it's not the same ease with which I had learned it.

Anna: Well, when I think about why I was, for so long, against this explicit teaching, I think it's because that's how I learned to read back in the eighties, with explicit teaching.

Savannah: Oh, really?

Anna: Yeah. So I'm older than you, I'm sure, by quite a bit. My mom taught me to read when I was like five with a little notebook, which I still have, of a decodable story that she wrote and illustrated for me. I actually just posted about it on Instagram.

Savannah: Oh wow, that's so cool!

Anna: So that's how I first learned to read, but my memories of reading in school were that I was bored. I was a quick reader so I was bored by the decodable stories that we had. That's a whole different issue because when you talk about explicit teaching, it can also be differentiated and everything. But balanced literacy just is so exciting!

Savannah: It is. It's almost like you try to get to the end point, in balanced literacy, too quickly. You try to get to the authentic books and the writing whatever you want, way too quickly without realizing that we have to actually teach them how to do both of those things.

Anna: I read somewhere that sometimes, with balanced literacy and whole language, it's like we want to see our kids pretend to be adult readers. That's what we do by giving them these leveled books, where, all of a sudden, they're fluent because they just figure out the pattern and then they sound like they're really reading, so we think they are. But when you learn to break down the Simple View of Reading and you understand that when they're not actually decoding, that it's not real reading comprehension, it's a hard pill to swallow because you've been doing it for so long.

Savannah: I absolutely agree. It is. I love what you said about we're having them pretend to do what readers are doing. That's so true.

Anna: It's so true! So, what got your attention?

Savannah: Yeah, so in 2019, I was Orton-Gillingham trained. The state of Virginia was sending seventy-five teachers, twice a year, to be Orton-Gillingham trained through Dawn Nieman, with the Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators, AOGPE.

I remember sitting there, during the four or five day training, and I was like five months pregnant at the time, and I'm sitting there like, "Why did nobody tell me this? Why did nobody tell me this? Oh my gosh, I never knew!"

I literally never knew there were rules. Nobody in my entire life had taught me that there were rules for English. In fact, they told me that English doesn't make sense, and I believed them. I kind of just sort of thought my children would miraculously weave their way through this thing that doesn't make sense.

That's why, I think, we try to put them in these authentic texts because it's like, "Oh, well, English doesn't make sense. You just have to see it a whole lot. And if you see it a whole lot, then you'll learn to read."

But then, when I learned things about the fact that TCH says /ch/ when it comes right after a short vowel, I was like, "What? That's a thing?" Or the fact that words in English don't end in I, and so, that's why we use AI in the middle and AY at the end, OI in the middle, OY at the end. That really just lit a fire, but I have to say it wasn't a complete transformation overnight.

At the time, I was teaching third grade. So I started with one kid, this one kid in third grade who nothing seemed to be working for. He started staying after with me and doing it. All of a sudden, this kid was able to spout these rules that I didn't know until I was in my thirties.

But the thing is, I still wasn't fully transitioned because the very next year I was hired as a reading specialist and in that first year, I was using LLI and I was trying to somehow meld LLI with this explicit phonics instruction. So what I would do is I would teach the phonics rules and then I'd give them a leveled text. We had to have our Orton-Gillingham person come in and observe me, and she was like, "Savannah, I think you're losing a little bit of the explicit systematic nature." And I was like, "What do you mean?"

Anna: For our listeners who don't know what LLI is, could you explain what that is and how it works? I can say it's from Fountas and Pinnell, it's their intervention program, but tell us more about how it works.

Savannah: LLI is Leveled Literacy Intervention and it's through Fountas and Pinnell. There's different colored kits, kindergarten is an orange kit, first grade is a green kit, second is blue and on and on. These kits cost thousands of dollars a piece, I think, maybe $3,000 a kit. Basically the focus (I know that they won't say that this is the focus, but this is how it was presented to me), is taking children through a series of leveled texts and getting harder and harder.

One thing that I had really liked about it, at the time, was with LLI, if you did a level D one day, the next day you would read a level B, then a level D, and then, a level B. It was an easier one and a harder one, but it is fully rooted in leveled text. Every year when I taught leveled text, I felt like my goal was to get them through a certain number of levels.

I didn't really see it as my goal being to equip them with certain skills. It was all about the levels and not the skills I wanted them to leave me with. So I was still trying to push them through the levels, because in a lot of places, that's how they're still assessed. They're still assessed with things like DRAs, and so, I thought that's what they still needed to do. I was trying to do both the phonics skills that I had learned, but then I thought they needed the authentic practice in a leveled text.

Anna: So this was the first thing. You started doing Orton-Gillingham, and she said to you, "This doesn't match up." So then, what was the next thing?

Savannah: So I think the pandemic is what really moved me along on this journey. I was telling you, before we started recording, that in March of 2020 when the world shut down, my cueing strategy posters were still on the wall. For those who don't know what those are, those are things like, "Get your mouth ready. Skip to the end. Does it make sense? Look at the picture." All of those strategies that are actually teaching our children to guess. They were still hanging up on my wall.

When we shut down, T/TAC, which is an organization through William and Mary, was doing a book study of Kilpatrick's "Essentials for Preventing, Assessing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties." And so, every week for several months during the pandemic, I sat there on Zoom with a group of teachers for about an hour and a half. We really dug into the book and it helped me understand it in a way that helped me to more fully shift over.

I have to say that I'm also extraordinarily lucky for a couple of reasons. My district was making the shift already, and my district reading specialist is very gentle with the way she helps people shift. She never makes you feel like she's attacking you. And so, when she was first talking about not doing the cueing strategies, I was like, "Over my dead body!" But she knew how to gently usher me into it. The second thing is, I have an administrator that really believes in me and knows that I'm doing what's best for kids. That's been really helpful because as I've transitioned, I haven't been afraid to try these new things. I knew that there were people that were supporting me in my school, so that was extremely helpful.

But then, I think, the floodgates opened. I had my first tiptoes of OG and then that book study, and then it was like, I was all in! I can't tell you up from down, because everything I did was, all of a sudden, about understanding how children learn to read. And I eventually became LETRS trained, I've done both volumes of LETRS, and I've got 30 more hours of Orton-Gillingham training under my belt. I've done The Reading Teacher's Top 10 Tools. I've tried to do as many things as I could to help myself understand better, for the sake of kids.

Anna: Awesome. So now you're a specialist versus a classroom teacher, can you talk to us a little bit about your first steps when a child comes to you and what some of your sessions look like?

Savannah: I'd love to! I teach kiddos K through five, and most of the children that I come across need the explicit phonics instruction. Most of the time, if they're at a point where an intervention needs to be in comprehension, they're way past the phonics level. With the phonics that I'm doing, they would need morphology and that kind of thing. But my groups are really either targeted on letter sound and phonemic awareness instruction or phonics instruction.

We do our universal screeners three times a year. After our fall universal screeners, we use STAR, but we also use something called PALS, which is a uniquely Virginia thing. Once we get those scores, when they come to me, I do a couple of additional assessments.

For the older kiddos, I do a spelling inventory and I do the Gallistel-Ellis, which is a phonics screener. Between the spelling inventory and the phonics screener, I have a pretty good idea of their decoding and encoding abilities, and that helps me to start.

Overall, I really do a typical Orton-Gillingham lesson, where we go from the sound level, to the symbol, to the word, to the sentence, to the connected text level. You're really thinking about building from the smallest unit to what we want, which is the connected text. So I follow pretty much that, and it's a lot.

One thing that I've started incorporating, that I just never realized the importance of, is review. I think that if every teacher in this country could set aside ten or fifteen minutes a day in their classroom to review skills taught, I think we would have a much better outcome for students. There simply isn't enough time spent reviewing reading and spelling.

Every day I always try to think about, "Am I giving my kids enough time to read and enough time to spell the skills that I've taught them?"

Anna: Okay, so you recommended a Kirkpatrick book, "The Essentials of Preventing Reading Difficulties." Are there any other books or resources that were helpful to you, that you would recommend to people getting started?

Savannah: Yeah, so there's a few books. I really love "Know Better, Do Better" by Liben and Liben. They were administrators who started their own school and they're like, "Huh, this is weird. Our kids don't know how to read." So they did all this research into what works and they ended up being instrumental in changing things in New York City. I think they've had a big impact in changing and moving away from the Lucy Calkin ages. "Know Better, Do Better," I feel, is very friendly and very to the point. It's got a good balance of theory and practice to it, which makes it pretty accessible.

Kilpatrick is good, but Kilpatrick can be a lot. "Equipped for Reading Success," I think, is a lot friendlier than the "Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties" book. But even "Equipped for Reading Success," when you look at it, is a hefty one, whereas "Know Better, Do Better" is pretty short.

I also am obsessed with Lyn Stone's "Reading for Life," but I will say, if you are just moving away from balanced literacy, you probably shouldn't read it because she's got this snark in her book that I just adore. I adore it, but she literally has a chapter in the book about cults and comparing balanced literacy to a cult. So if you're trying to gently move away, don't go there, go to her later.

Anna: I'm totally with you, and actually, I just talked to Heidi Jane, from Instagram and TikTok, and she recommended "Know Better, Do Better." That's actually the first book that I read. I think I bought Lyn Stone's book on Kindle, and I started to read it and was very offended by how she talked about balanced literacy. Recently, I bought all of her books in print and I enjoy them a lot, but I was not ready at first, so that's a good point.

Savannah: Oh no, you have to be ready. But I will say, I think, the first thing all people should read, if they are trying to transition from balanced literacy to structured literacy, is the Emily Hanford "At a Loss for Words" article or listen to the podcast. I think, for many of us, that's the article that we were like, "Oh, oh. Yep, yep. This isn't good."

I actually was speaking to a parent, recently, who has a son who was having some difficulties. I was like, "Does your son look at a word and look at the first letter of the word and just guess?

And she's like, "He does. That's exactly what he does!"

And I was like, "Why don't you read this article? I think this will give you a little bit of insight into what's going on."

And she was like, "That was fascinating!"

Anna: Yeah, well, that article was what it did it for me, but not right away. I just got mad the first time I read it. I think it was probably a year later that I went back to it and my whole goal was just to refute it. I was thinking that have to study this, so I know what to say, and I couldn't come up with a response because she was right.

Savannah: Well, and I think we need to be okay with being mad at first. It's okay to be mad that what you thought was true for a very long time is turning out to not be true. And it's okay to be mad, but because I know that we're educators that care about children, I hope that through our anger, we also have open minds and that we always take it back to what's best for children.

Anna: Yes, very well said! Your interest in doing this led you to branch out on social media and share. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got started on Instagram? And then, how that branched out into your own online business?

Savannah: Yeah, so it's really weird looking back because when I first started on Instagram, I remember thinking, "Okay, if I just post pictures of my dog and my baby, I'll get a million likes," and I had no idea what Instagram was about. So I was just posting a bunch of nonsense and then, I don't even know the first science of reading-ish posts that I did, but it started getting traction.

I realized, "Well, hey, if we're not talking about this in teacher prep programs, then this is a place that we can talk about it." And so, I just started talking and I've never stopped, I guess. Instagram was my first because as I told you before, I had quit Facebook. I feel like Instagram can be less toxic in some ways, and so I really focused all my energy on that.

I just found this incredible community. There's so many people that are willing to talk to you and listen to you. I think my first person that really listened and spoke to me was Meredith, from Creativity to the Core. She was just so good at helping me work through things. Then I realized that I wanted to be that person too. I want to be the person who can listen and can help you problem solve, whether it's your own child, as a parent, or if you're a classroom teacher because I, once again, have been extraordinarily lucky in the district that I live in. Many people are doing this alone and you shouldn't have to.

So by being on social media, I hope that we can let people know that they're not alone. When you have all these people coming in your face about balanced literacy and you're starting to wonder if maybe you do have this wrong, then you have this place that you can go to and you can get facts. I guess that's just kind of who I want to be. I want all children to have a chance to live a literate life and it's going to come through the educators who are teaching them.

Anna: Well you have a lot of really interesting phonics facts and other things and challenging quotes that you put on Instagram that really inspire people to think. I like how you say you're not going to sugarcoat it. You're just going to say how it is, and that's really important because that's really how you get people's attention. It's just by saying it straight out.

Savannah: When we get caught up in all of this stuff, I think we forget who it's about. It's about these children's actual lives. I told you that I teach at the school that I went to as a kid, and it's a Title 1 school. These kids are growing up in the same apartment complex that I lived in. When I think about how I broke that cycle of poverty, I think about a mother who loved me and the fact that learning to read came easy to me. Then when you have these children who are living in these adverse circumstances and reading isn't easy for them, we have a responsibility to those children.

It's not just about reading words or balanced literacy or Fountas and Pinnell. It is about an actual child's life and that is somebody's baby. So many of these parents are desperate, because they don't know why their children can't read, and the teachers are telling them to just read twenty minutes each night, and they're like, "We're reading an hour and they still can't read."

It doesn't have to be that way, because we know almost every single child can learn to read. We have an obligation. They're babies, and they're our babies. Now that I'm a mom, I'm even more fired up about it.

Anna: That's awesome. I always said, as a teacher, there's nothing like sitting down for a parent teacher conference and talking with the people who love this child who was driving me crazy, more than anybody in the world, to give you a whole new perspective.

Well, thank you so much for all that you're doing on your Instagram and on your website. We're going to link to all those things on the show notes and definitely encourage people to check you out and follow you on Instagram and check out your TPT store. It has been so nice to talk to you, Savannah, and to hear your story. You have a lot of good perspective for people who are maybe stuck in the middle of trying to jump over from balanced to structured literacy. Thanks so much for sharing.

Well, that concludes my interview with Savannah. I'm sure you got from that interview what a special person she is and how dedicated she is to her students. In the show notes for this episode, which you can find at themeasuredmom.com/episode80, you will find links to Savannah on social media, as well as her blog and her TPT store. I hope that you will check her out because she has so many wonderful things to share. We'll see you next week!

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Find Savannah here Campbell Creates Readers blog Campbell Creates Readers on Instagram Campbell Creates Readers on TPT Savannah’s recommend resources Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties , by David KilpatrickKnow Better, Do Better, by David & Meredith Liben Equipped for Reading Success , by David Kilpatrick Reading for Life , by Lyn StoneGet on the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader Join the waitlist for Teaching Every Reader.

The post From balanced to structured literacy: Chatting with Savannah Campbell appeared first on The Measured Mom.