Anna Geiger's Blog, page 6

Understanding the Orton-Gillingham Approach – with Pryor Rayburn

 

TRT Podcast #189: Understanding the Orton-Gillingham Approach – with Pryor Rayburn

Pryor Rayburn, a teacher and Fellow in Training with the Orton-Gillingham Academy, shares education resources through her website, The Orton Gillingham Mama. In today’s episode she explains the principles of Orton-Gillingham, discusses what elements are not yet supported by research, and shares an effective routine for teaching those tricky function words (the, was, what etc.) that often trip kids up (spoiler alert: it’s all about meaning!).

Listen to the episode hereFull episode transcript Resources from Pryor Rayburn:Sight Words Framework FreebieOrton Gillingham Mama websiteCourse: How to Teach (& Master!) Sight Words in 5 Minutes a DayOrton Gillingham Mama on Instagram
YOU’LL LOVE THIS PRACTICAL BOOK!

Looking for an easy-to-read guide to help you reach all readers? If you teach kindergarten through third grade, this is the book for you.

Get practical ideas and lesson plan templates that you can implement tomorrow!

GET YOUR COPY TODAY!

The post Understanding the Orton-Gillingham Approach – with Pryor Rayburn appeared first on The Measured Mom.

How to apply reading research to classroom teaching – with Harriett Janetos

 TRT Podcast #188: How to apply reading research to classroom teaching – with Harriet Janetos

Harriet Janetos, an author and reading specialist, has a gift for sorting through reading research and understanding how to apply it in day-to-day teaching. In this episode we discuss practical insights from her book, From Sound to Summary.

Listen to the episode here

Full episode transcript Resources: From Sound to Summary , by Harriett Janetos Brain Words , by Gene Ouellette & Richard Gentry Harriet’s Green Lights, Red Flags, Gray Areas chart
YOU’LL LOVE THIS PRACTICAL BOOK!

Looking for an easy-to-read guide to help you reach all readers? If you teach kindergarten through third grade, this is the book for you.

Get practical ideas and lesson plan templates that you can implement tomorrow!

GET YOUR COPY TODAY!

The post How to apply reading research to classroom teaching – with Harriett Janetos appeared first on The Measured Mom.

The ultimate guide to phonics rules and patterns

I’m often asked about where someone might find a master list of phonics rules or a phonics rules cheat sheet.

I’ve put this post together so you have a place to find the most important phonics rules and patterns.

Let’s dive in!

Note: In this post, letters written between slash marks represent sounds. For example: /sh/ represents the sound you hear at the beginning of the word chef. Letters written between small brackets represent spellings. For example, and are both spellings for the sound /sh/.

Every syllable includes a written and spoken vowel. Before we examine this rule further, we should define vowel.

In English, we have vowel phonemes and vowel graphemes. A vowel phoneme is an open speech sound that you can sing. We often think of two kinds of vowel sounds: “short” and “long.” You can hear the five short vowel sounds in cat, bed, pig, mop, and hut. Long vowel sounds are the vowels’ names, as in rain, seek, light, coat, and cute. However, there are more than just the “short” and “long” vowel sounds, as you’ll soon see.

Vowel graphemes (written representations of the sounds) can occur as single letters (a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y) and in combination with other vowels and/or consonants.

Let’s take a look at the vowel phonemes and the graphemes that can spell them.

“Short” vowel phonemes are usually spelled with a single vowel letter. They occur in words with the consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) pattern as well as in words that begin and/or end with consonant digraphs or blends.

“Long” vowel phonemes occur in open syllables (that’s coming soon) and in combination with other letters. While some vowel teams can spell a short vowel (such as in bread), most spell a long sound. R-controlled vowels are those in which the /r/ alters the sound of the vowel. I consider the following to be r-controlled vowel graphemes: , , , , and . Finally, there are vowel diphthongs, in which the vowel is two sounds glided into one. Diphthong graphemes are typically listed as and ; and and sometimes and .

There is disagreement among experts about whether there is such a thing as “six common syllable types” in English spelling. However, most will agree that English has both closed and open syllables.

A closed syllable is one in which the vowel is “closed off” by one or more consonants. In a closed syllable, the vowel sound is usually short. (In a multi-syllable word, a closed unaccented syllable often includes the schwa sound. The schwa is the most common vowel in English; it is pronounced as a lazy short i or u.)

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Unlike closed syllables, open syllables end with a vowel, not a consonant. The vowel typically spells its long sound; however, in an unaccented syllable, the vowel grapheme may represent the schwa, as in the middle syllable of dinosaur.

The FLOSS rule tells us that when a one-syllable words ends in a short vowel and the letter f, l, s, or z, the final letter should be doubled. (Get a free FLOSS rule game here.)

This is not a phonics rule, but a distinction I need to make because of the common confusion that I see.

A digraph is two letters that join together to represent a single sound. Consonant digraphs include , , , , and .

A consonant blend (also called a consonant cluster) is 2-3 adjoining consonants that each retain their sound; however, the sounds are quickly blended together. Technically, a blend is not a grapheme because it is 2-3 graphemes next to each other. The reason many programs teach blends is because it requires greater skill to read words with the CCVC or CVCC pattern than it does to read CVC words. I think it’s important to spend extra time reading words with this pattern, but I do not think it’s advisable to teach blends as units or to teach each one individually.

When the /k/ sound is at the end of the word, it can be spelled with or . This is an important phonics rule that we want to teach students early on. You can get a free practice sheet for this rule here.

We often think of the final silent as having only a single reason for its existence: to make the preceding vowel say its name, as in lake. But there are many reasons for the final silent !

English words do not typically end with , , , , or Lyn Stone calls them “illegal” in her book, Spelling for Life. She also recommends this catchy chant: “, , , , … at the end of a word they cannot be!”

This rule is important because it helps us explain many English spellings.

Since is illegal at the end of English words, we use in words like shy, by, and my. We also use the spelling in words like pie, or tie. Exceptions to this rule include the words I and hi, as well as words from other languages such as ski (Norwegian) and broccoli (Italian).
Since is illegal at the end of English words, we use or as in cage or judge.
Since is illegal at the end of English words, we use as in unique.
Since is illegal at the end of English words, we use as in glue. Exceptions include words like flu (an abbreviation for influenza) and menu, which comes from the French.
Since is illegal at the end of English words, we use as in have, give, and carve.

For most English words, we form past tense verbs using the ending. The is called a morpheme, because it is a unit of meaning. The spelling communicates that a word is past tense. It is important to teach this so that students understand that a word like jumped is not spelled jumpt.

The ending can be pronounced in three different ways: /t/ as in jumped, /d/ as in played, and /id/ as in landed. The pronunciation depends on the consonant that precedes the ending. The important thing for our students to remember is that the spelling of the morpheme remains consistent, even when pronunciation changes.

This is an important rule to teach our students as soon as they learn to write words with inflectional suffixes such as , , and . All of these are examples of vowel suffixes because they begin with a vowel.

Drop the final silent when adding a vowel suffix (a suffix that begins with a vowel).

Examples:

live + ing -> living
serve + er -> server
bake + ed -> baked

Nonexamples (because these are not vowel suffixes)

hope + ful -> hopeful
like + ness -> likeness

Keep the final silent if it is needed to preserve the soft sound of or .

Examples:

change + able -> changeable
notice + able -> noticeable
outrage + ous -> outrageous

When a word ends with a consonant + , change the to before adding a vowel suffix.

Examples:

cry + es -> cries
hurry + ed -> hurried
identify + er -> identifier

When a word ends with a single short vowel and /ch/, spell /ch/ with .

Examples: batch, wretch, stitch, notch, hutch
Exceptions: much, such, rich, which

This rule typically applies to one-syllable words, but it sometimes appears within a short vowel syllable of a longer word.

Examples: satchel, kitchen

“Q and u stick like glue.” In other words, The letter may not stand alone in English spelling. Except for names and other proper nouns, the must always be followed by a and a vowel.

It’s important to note that in words with , the is usually acting as a consonant, since it represents the /w/ sound (of course, this isn’t true in words like plaque and unique).

Examples: quit, quaint, quest, queen, quiet

The letter spells its soft sound, /s/, when it immediately precedes , , or .

Examples: cent, city, cyst, icy, agency

The letter spells its hard sound when it immediately precedes the letters , , or .

Examples: car, container, curb

One reason these rules are important is because they affect the spelling of a word when you add a vowel suffix. For the word serviceable, for example, we might wonder why the final silent is not dropped when adding the vowel suffix . The reason the is not dropped is because it is needed to keep the sound of the soft.

Sometimes we need to keep the sound of final hard. Consider the word panic. If we add the vowel suffix , the word would be panicing. This makes it look like the should spell its soft sound, because it is followed by an . To preserve the hard sound, we need to add a : panicking. Other words like this inlcude picnicking, colicky, and frolicked.

Hopefully the conclusion that you are drawing is that English language is not illogical; it’s complex.

The letter may spell its soft sound, /j/, before , , or .

Examples: germ, ginger, gym

The spells its hard sound, /g/, before , , or .

Examples: gasoline, goat, gumbo, begun, cardigan

Sometimes the spells its hard sound, /g/, before the letters or .

Examples: get, gear, target, forget, girl, gift, begin

It’s true that there are multiple spellings for different sounds. For example, two common spellings for long a are and . Thankfully, for many of these sounds, it’s not hard to know which grapheme to use when we consider the vowel team’s position in the word:

The letter can represent a vowel or consonant sound, depending on its position in a word. Did you know that the letter spells a vowel sound more often than it spells a consonant sound?

Think of as a stand-in for the letters and . There is usually a logical reason that we use instead of these vowels.

In the word crazy, for example, we can’t use an to spell the long e sound because the word would be craze, and the VCE pattern tells us that the would be silent. The letter jumps in as a stand-in. (Or, as Lyn Stone writes in Spelling for Life, a stunt double.)

Also consider the word fly. We don’t write it as fli because is illegal at the end of English words. So the letter becomes a stand-in.

With this rule we are crossing over into morphology, but both phonology and morphology affect English spelling, so trust me – this is relevant.

Consider the words military and militia. Why isn’t the /sh/ in militia spelled with ? It’s because these words share the base milit. The spelling of that morpheme stays the same, even when the pronunciation changes.

I could give you an infinite number of examples, but let’s keep it short:

Nature and native Malign and malignant Signed and signature

I am a big fan of sound mapping, in which we map sounds to letters by spelling each phoneme on a single line or in a single box. However, sound mapping can get tricky when we try to assign every grapheme to a phoneme. Some graphemes aren’t spelling any sound at all.

For example, in the word two, the is not helping to spell /t/ or /oo/. It’s used to connect this word to other words with a similar meaning (twice, twin, twelve).

Another example is the word ladder. Technically, only the first is spelling /d/. The second is there to keep the vowel short.

What about the word since? The final is not part of the /s/ pronunciation. It is there to keep the sound of the soft.

I could go on forever, but let’s conclude with the word have. The final is not helping spell /v/. It’s there to keep the word from ending with the illegal letter .

This final rule does get hairy. For example, I consider a spelling for long u, even though you could argue that the is there to keep the word from ending in illegal . Different phonics experts and programs have different opinions about which letter combinations are graphemes and which are not. But I encourage you to think about this rule the next time you are confronted with a puzzling spelling. Could there be a logical reason for the intrusive letter?

Conclusion

I’ve worked to make this post as comprehensive as possible – but I could never list all the rules and patterns in a single blog post! I encourage you to check out these references for more insight.

References The Complete Guide to English Spelling Rules , by John J. Fulford Spelling for Life , by Lyn Stone Uncovering the Logic of English , by Denise Eide

The post The ultimate guide to phonics rules and patterns appeared first on The Measured Mom.

The 6 systems every school needs to improve literacy outcomes – with Pati Montgomery

 TRT Podcast #187: The 6 systems every school needs to improve literacy outcomes – with Pati Montgomery

Increasing teacher knowledge about the science of reading is one important step toward improving literacy outcomes in a school or district. But so much more is required! Pati Montgomery, founder of Schools Cubed, walks us through the six key systems that are essential for improving literacy outcomes.

Listen to the episode here

Full episode transcript Pati Montgomery’s Resources: Schools Cubed Pati’s new book with Angela Hanlin, It’s Possible!
YOU’LL LOVE THIS PRACTICAL BOOK!

Looking for an easy-to-read guide to help you reach all readers? If you teach kindergarten through third grade, this is the book for you.

Get practical ideas and lesson plan templates that you can implement tomorrow!

GET YOUR COPY TODAY!

The post The 6 systems every school needs to improve literacy outcomes – with Pati Montgomery appeared first on The Measured Mom.

The 5 systems every school needs to improve literacy outcomes – with Pati Montgomery

 TRT Podcast #187: The 5 systems every school needs to improve literacy outcomes – with Pati Montgomery

Increasing teacher knowledge about the science of reading is one important step toward improving literacy outcomes in a school or district. But so much more is required! Pati Montgomery, founder of Schools Cubed, walks us through the five key systems that are essential for improving literacy outcomes.

Listen to the episode here

Full episode transcript Pati Montgomery’s Resources: Schools Cubed Pati’s new book with Angela Hanlin, It’s Possible!
YOU’LL LOVE THIS PRACTICAL BOOK!

Looking for an easy-to-read guide to help you reach all readers? If you teach kindergarten through third grade, this is the book for you.

Get practical ideas and lesson plan templates that you can implement tomorrow!

GET YOUR COPY TODAY!

The post The 5 systems every school needs to improve literacy outcomes – with Pati Montgomery appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Why a skeptical balanced literacy teacher embraced the science of reading

 TRT Podcast #186: Why a skeptical balanced literacy teacher embraced the science of reading

Jolene Rosploch was a committed balanced literacy teacher. When Schools Cubed arrived to help her school improve literacy outcomes, Jolene was skeptical. Listen to find out what led her to embrace the science of reading.

Listen to the episode here

Full episode transcript Jolene recommends: Shifting the Balance , by Jan Burkins and Kari Yates
YOU’LL LOVE THIS PRACTICAL BOOK!

Looking for an easy-to-read guide to help you reach all readers? If you teach kindergarten through third grade, this is the book for you.

Get practical ideas and lesson plan templates that you can implement tomorrow!

GET YOUR COPY TODAY!

The post Why a skeptical balanced literacy teacher embraced the science of reading appeared first on The Measured Mom.

From struggle to success: A reading specialist’s structured literacy journey

��TRT Podcast #185: From struggle to success: A reading specialist’s structured literacy journey

Reading specialist Julie Speidel describes the struggles and triumphs that she faced as she supported her staff in improving literacy outcomes.����

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Hello, this is Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom and I'm also the author of the book, "Reach All Readers," which is an excellent book for a staff book study if you're looking to help your staff learn more about the science of reading.

In today's episode, I'm interviewing Julie Speidel, who worked with her staff to help them understand and apply the science of reading. She walks us through her whole journey from when she was a balanced literacy teacher, to changing her understandings, and then the challenges, and ultimately success, that she faced when helping her staff move away from the more balanced literacy methods to more explicit instruction and more intentional instruction in foundational skills, as well as oral language and comprehension.

What I love about her story is it's very clear this is not always smooth sailing and there are ups and downs, but everyone is moving forward together, and you'll see how she developed a relationship with her staff as well as with the administrator so that all of them could work together to make these changes. Here we go!

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Julie!

Julie Speidel: Hi, there! Thank you for having me on.

Anna Geiger: Let's go back in time a little bit and tell us how you got into education.

Julie Speidel: Growing up I always knew that I wanted to be working with children, and I ended up in education. It's interesting because thinking about what area I wanted to focus in on, I thought to myself, "You know what? I just don't want to do early childhood. I just don't want to be responsible for teaching a kid how to read because that's so important, and I don't want to mess them up."

My initial license was first through sixth grade and I started as a fifth grade teacher teaching ELA part-time and working as a special ed para.

Then I got a job full-time as a second grade teacher in the building, and that's where my heart is. Even to this day, I love second grade. I think not only are they just learning so much, but they're developing their sense of humor, their independence, and it's such a big, big learning age.

I went back to school and got my degree as a reading specialist, then I got a job in Cudahy working as a reading specialist in 2014, and that's what I have been doing ever since.

Anna Geiger: I can relate to what you said about how not wanting to teach the primary grades where you're actually teaching kids to read because that's how I felt after I left college. I had classes in teaching reading, but we never really talked about how you get kids started with reading and I felt like, "Well, I'm going to teach the middle grades because I don't know how to teach kids to read, and I don't want to mess them up."

I wish I would've known that that's important to know no matter what grade you teach, especially in those middle grades when kids are stuck, if you don't know how it all begins, then you don't know how to help them.

But yeah, I can totally relate to that. A lot of it was just learning on the job and learning as I've done in the past few years.

So you've been in this position for about 10 years, but you shared with me that you have not always understood the idea of the science of reading and structured literacy. Can you go back in time and talk to us about what you were doing at first?

Julie Speidel: So one of the pieces that we talked about in our master's program is the importance of not specifically diagnosing, but still assessing our students to figure out what level they're at. In my district where I was a second grade teacher, I was really pushing for getting some sort of assessment in there, and we actually used the Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System. I was the leader and was gung-ho getting that into our building.

We assessed our students, but one of the things that we discovered was it was so overwhelming. I mean, you would sit with some kids for 10 minutes trying to figure out their right exact level!

Anna Geiger: Or longer.

Julie Speidel: Right! And what are the rest of the kids doing during that time? Not learning. It is not a valuable use of their time at all.

We got in their LLI program to do leveled text and working with it and using the three-queing system like, "Look at the first letter, think about the picture, what are you reading? What would make sense in this sentence?" Those were our go-tos; that's what we were working through.

Then when I came to the Cudahy District, I was like, "Yes, I know Fountas & Pinnell. I got to go to Chicago and I did their training with LLI, I met them, and I am totally on board, I know what to do, this is familiar."

So when I first came, that's where we were at. Our district had a hodgepodge of phonics programs. They were teaching phonics, but they were not teaching it consistently. We had five elementary schools in my district when I started and each school was using something different.

Our school was using, and we had somebody who was trained, on Wilson. They had brought in Fundations, and so I was intervening with that right away. That's structured literacy right there to an extent, because that's Orton-Gillingham based.

I'm reading these things and I'm like, "Oh, CK at the end of a word is because of the short vowel?" I mean, light bulbs were going off for me because growing up, I went to my lower elementary years in Florida and it was a big phonics state and a big push. Having those pieces, I knew how important it was.

I tried to get kids to sound out words and things, but then going to the training with Fountas & Pinnell, I mean, we had a consulting firm come in and they're like, "Know better, do better." They just kept saying that over and over again.

I think it was last month that I came across that it was actually Maya Angelou's quote, and it's, "Do the best you can until you know better. And then when you know better, do better." That very much resonated with me.

Even back then I was like, "Oh, this three-cueing system, this is the bomb. You've got to try this. This is the better." And it's not the better.

Anna Geiger: It sounds like from what you said that your master's program got the importance of assessment, but they were teaching you to use the wrong tools, and then you use the wrong tools thinking that those were useful because many of us thought that those levels meant something and now we find out they're basically arbitrary.

In your training with Fountas & Pinnell, did they talk a lot about teaching phonics to kids or were they more about using context and pictures and the first letter?

Julie Speidel: There was a lot of word-part things. There were games and things that went with the programs, but it wasn't very much honed in on a certain skill or a certain phonics pattern or something along those lines where they're going to be having that direct practice with it afterwards or within the text.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. So it was more embedded or haphazard?

Julie Speidel: Yes.

Anna Geiger: Which feels... That's the way that I did it for a long time too, and to me that felt like the better way. It felt more meaningful and for me it was nice. I felt like I had this freedom to know my students and to do what was needed at the time, but like you, I didn't really.

Even though I also learned with phonics, I didn't know all those phonics patterns because I had no program that was teaching them to me, and I had not learned them in college or graduate school. It's interesting how programs can also teach teachers, like you said, and Fundations was helping.

Now you were the specialist, what about in Tier 1? What kind of phonics instruction were the kids getting then?

Julie Speidel: In phonics, it was all over the place originally.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Julie Speidel: When I first came, they had Journeys and everybody was using their own phonics program. We had that for two years, I believe, and it was heavily focused on the Core standards, the Common Core standards.

Then we went through the process of adopting Benchmark Literacy, and that did have a phonics component. As specialists, we said, "Okay, we're getting this program and everybody is using this phonics program." The tool we started using was the easyCBM.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Julie Speidel: Then we eventually moved over to AIMSweb. We would do all of these early education assessments and early literacy assessments, and we would just be like, "Okay, here's where they are, here's where they're going," and kind of tracking that piece.

We weren't seeing growth. As a Tier 3 interventionist, I was seeing kids continue through the intensive intervention, or they would be referred for special education. We followed the protocols, the letter of the law, how many interventions to do, and we just weren't seeing the growth. I was doing LLI with them, and I was finding those pieces were missing.

Then that's when I started getting into David Kilpatrick and reading about the importance of phonemic awareness.

So then I said to my principal that as a district, we weren't aligned. Our schools were kind of an island, and so I said, "I want to try this." I would see growth in the kids in my small groups, but then it wasn't consistent back into the Tier 1 classroom, so the growth still wasn't happening.

In February 2021, I actually looked back in my notes from our meeting agendas, and we said that we need to have more direct instruction in our early literacy. We started to dig into it and kind of came across some webinars and things like that that. We were looking at this going, "Oh my gosh!" Our mind was blown.

I got really irritated and frustrated with my master's program because I was listening to the dates in these things and we're talking like 2000, 1999, the Simple View of Reading, I believe that's the '80s. I was just like, "Why didn't they teach me this?"

Anna Geiger: Yeah, we all feel that way.

Julie Speidel: So then I went down a rabbit hole of science of reading and dug in and took everything I could. I came across your program, your blogs, and that summer I took your Teaching Every Reader course.

Then our director of instruction at the time, she reached out to the Department of Instruction to see where the state was going and got connected with a consulting company called Schools Cubed and Pati Montgomery.

They came in and did an assessment, an audit, of what our classrooms were doing, and how they were teaching, and how we could do better, and then we signed a contract to work with them for three years on improving and switching over to that structured literacy piece that the science of reading shows is more effective.

It was a ton of heavy lifting that first year.

Anna Geiger: I know you mentioned in your notes before we were talking about how you don't want to make teachers feel like what they've been doing all this time has been wrong. You want to support them in moving forward, but you don't want to put a heavy burden on teachers because of course not everything was wrong, but also there were some practices that need improvement. Do you have any advice for someone who's working with teachers and trying to help them make the shift in a supportive way versus an accusatory way?

Julie Speidel: I have made many mistakes in how I went about doing that, and the best information on that that I can offer is listen to your teachers and present the information and listen to what they're saying back.

There are lots of whys. Have the answers. If you don't know the answer, don't be afraid to say, "Hey, I'm going to go find that out."

The other piece that I got was that this is just a pendulum shift. This is going to go and it's going to be here for a little while, and then I'm going to have to go back to a different way of teaching. I would bring it back to that, and this is where I'm not quite sure of my numbers, about 75% of kids are going to learn to read no matter how you teach them.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, I think it's lower. I think you're referring to Nancy Young's Ladder of Reading and Writing, and I think it could be up to 50%, maybe 40-50%. But you're right that some kids, even if you use balanced literacy, they're going to be fine. Now, they could be better, but they're going to appear just fine. But to your point, many kids won't. A large percentage of kids must have this structured approach or they're just not going to be good readers and spellers.

Julie Speidel: Right. So why not change this practice? I mean, it's not a pendulum shift, it's an actual way of teaching that makes sense, and something that I don't want to go away from until I know better again.

Anna Geiger: You've already talked a little bit about what was happening already. It was kind of haphazard, different programs for different teachers in one school, no phonics program. Can you compare that to what's happening in classrooms now? And also talk a little bit about your data and how that's shifted?

Julie Speidel: Every teacher is teaching the phonics to fidelity, and that is insured by the specialists in the building coming in and doing observations and providing feedback.

In our buildings, it's not like observations in the past where your principal would come in and he would let you know, "Hey, I'm coming in to see you. I'm going to be observing this. Where's your lesson plan?" All of those things. The specialists and my principal were part of almost every planning session initially, and the first two years it kind of got a little busier when we merged schools and we went from a school of like 130 to a school of almost 300.

It's not just the phonics and the phonemic awareness piece. Our lesson plans include all of those five pillars from what a lesson needs for that structured literacy. Those pieces are all there.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. For someone listening, that would be, you're also teaching comprehension, building fluency, and teaching vocabulary.

When I visited a school in your district, I did see that. We got to go to different classrooms and see phonemic awareness being taught, we saw phonics lessons. We saw phoneme-grapheme mapping, which is application of phonics skills. We saw a teacher explicitly teaching vocabulary and another teacher teaching comprehension. It was really neat.

I love how you talked about how the visits to the classrooms are different now. It seems to me that the previous visits, and I know because I've had them as a teacher, were more almost like a pop quiz or a test, whereas now they're more of a coaching session. I'm assuming the teachers are interested in your feedback, and it's more of almost a problem-solving situation where you're working together to help fix any issues that there might be. Would you agree?

Julie Speidel: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That's personally how I run our sessions. I want them to come to me and say, "This is not working." I mean, I am curious to see how this shift would've gone in my first two years of teaching or my first two years as a coach versus having almost been there eight years. I mean, there's a lot of trust building. You talk about building trust with students in your classroom. It was building that trust with the teachers and letting them know that I'm in this too.

I guess that would be part of my advice is you have to make yourself vulnerable and show them that this is a struggle for you too. You don't know everything, and it's all a collaboration. There's no hierarchy.

However, they do still do that. They're always like, "Oh, Ms. Speidel is here! The police are coming to check to make sure I'm doing it right."

I think some of that goes away when you're in the classroom so much. I was in and out of there every day, whether it was coming to get students to take them to do intervention, and I would always stay for an extra 30 seconds to see or if it was interacting with the lesson. I knew what the lesson was because I was part of the planning process.

The other piece that I would suggest if you're making the shift, and I apologize, this is kind of going all over squirrel moment in my brain.

Anna Geiger: No problem.

Julie Speidel: Is that first year I didn't try to tackle everything. My first year I really focused in on how to improve the phonics component, putting together something that allowed for that extra meaningful practice as a class.

We decided that our best route of instruction was for everybody to use the same materials as we created slideshows, and then we would put together practice grids of the letters. They would go through and say all the different letter names and then do the sounds, and then you could say, call on certain groups to do that.

It was very engaging and quick and you could isolate, "I know these three kids are struggling with a certain sound, I want to have just these three kids go and see if I can hear them doing it."

Then we also did the same thing for our high frequency words, spiraling the ones we're practicing, and having the new ones in there.

We have district routines now for how to teach our high frequency words. We have district routines for how to teach our vocabulary and those kinds of things, so putting those in place. That first year we did that, we got those in place.

Then we also worked on, it's called the six-step lesson plan. It was designed for a small group situation where you introduce one new letter, you review three letters, and you practice those, and then it kind of scaffolds and goes... So then once you have your phonics skill, then you introduce the high frequency words, and then you go into the decodable that practices the phonics skill that you did and work through those pieces.

We kind of took that. We use that in our small group, and we used that for kindergarten when they were ready for a book, first grade, and second grade. We worked really hard to make sure that those pieces were in place. Our first year we didn't have good decodables, so Schools Cubed recommended we purchase the Super Readers, Challenge Readers from Voyager Sopris, The Power Readers.

Anna Geiger: Yes, and they're very inexpensive.

Julie Speidel: Yes. And the primary phonics ones.

My school had some extra funding through state funds and federal funds, and I did research and we got in some other decodables. I created so much that first year, basically like a card catalog of phonics skills for all of the extra titles that we got. Teachers could come and pull books because they knew, "Oh, we're working on EIGH. I need a book that practices that." They would go to the spreadsheet and find it, they'd come to my room and check out the books for their small group, and things like that. You have to have the resources available.

Anna Geiger: When I look at how you've worked to build trust and help support your teachers as you do this, here are some things I noted. First of all, there's very much a team mindset. It's not you at the top saying, "You've got to do this. Now I'm checking on you." It's more, "I'm learning this with you and here are the things I've learned. I didn't always know these things and here's why we're going to do them."

You talked about the importance of why, not just giving instructions.

You also have a humble and vulnerable perspective in terms of admitting past mistakes. "We all have things that we wish we'd done differently as teachers, and we need to be able to accept that and be open about that. But also now we know better, so let me share with you the tools that will help you implement this approach."

And you've got that lesson plan, which sounds to me like a pattern for explicit instruction because so many of us didn't really know what that was, didn't really understand what it means, to be explicit in our teaching, and then to fill in that review. It's scaffolded practice.

You give them what they need to do that, but then also you're there to help them as they figure this out. I like how you said you were in their classrooms often, and hopefully that was a comfort to them versus a scary feeling. And the more you build that relationship, the more that can be not a scary thing but, "Oh, good, she's here to help and give me feedback."

You talked about when you shared with them feedback, you start with the positive. We all know how important that is. Teaching is such a personal thing. We really need that for someone to start with a positive and acknowledge what we're doing. Teaching is wonderful, but really tough, even on good days. There are just so many things that go into it. I love that you're able to start that way with your teachers.

As we get closer to wrapping this up, the teachers prior to this were doing more of their own thing kind of, but now there were a lot more expectations from the district and support from you in terms of, "We're all doing this." How did that go over, and how have the teachers feelings toward this explicit structured instruction changed over time? Are there any stories you could share or any comments about how the teachers feel about this and what they've seen?

Julie Speidel: Yeah, so we've actually had that conversation, and I can specifically think of sitting down and the faces of these teachers saying how overwhelmed and burnt out that they felt initially. At the same time though, they wouldn't go back and do it differently because by basically being thrown in the pool, you learn to swim. If it had kind of been rolled out a little more gradually, they may not have bought in as quickly because they could still kind of do their own thing and be wishy-washy with it.

Is there a better way to do it? There might've been. We could have maybe in that first year just focused in on that small group. Maybe that's the piece that we should have done.

But as I said, the teachers said, "I don't know if I would've done it differently."

Other teachers sitting around were going, "You know what? I think you're right." They were kind of feeling that same thing.

I think having the level of support that they had from myself and the other specialists in the school I think was tantamount as well.

The fact that the principals were involved and that the principals were part of the trainings and the principals were part of the walkthroughs, that was huge. That puts your principal to them in an approachable light because they're in there just as frequently, not doing those official pop quiz type observations. It was very informal.

We had the opportunity to talk through these observations and what we were seeing, what's working, what's not working, how can we tweak this? Then having the specialists go back to the teachers and having those grade level meetings. I think that has been very helpful.

Anna Geiger: A lot of people now are talking about how can we make changes and implement the science of reading and structured literacy? So many kids are failing, but it's a hard thing to do because just kind of jumping in can turn some people off, and it can be overwhelming.

But you have a success story where you did that. You had the specialists come in and teachers knew we're just going to do this now. There was lots and lots of support, but it was hard at first. What are teachers saying about it now a couple years later? Do they compare the way they used to teach with how they teach now and what do they think?

Julie Speidel: They're seeing the difference in their students.

One of the big pieces that we worked on with our younger grades is that oral language development, getting them to talk about what they're reading, talk about the phonics skills, talk about the rules, talk about the vocabulary. We can see the progression in our students.

It's crazy because I'll walk in, and I'll be doing an observation and be like, am I watching a YouTube video of a class doing this? You watch these exemplar YouTube videos of kids saying, "I heard you say that the word soar means to fly high above." And they're doing it! They're practicing it, they're responding, and it's sticking with them.

Walking down the hall to kindergarten I hear, "Ms. Smith, we're having a crop of fresh vegetables for our snack today!" And your heart just goes, yes! You're just so thrilled. In that sense, we're seeing that happening drastically.

We're also seeing... You had asked about the data side earlier. We're seeing kids that are not stuck in intensive intervention. They're moving back into the classroom. I don't have specific data on this, but I would say I probably referred two to three students a year around that second and third grade level, as they had had the opportunity to go through the different interventions by that point.

In the past three years, there has been one student that I would say needs some special education testing and referral. Even though three to one seems very small, it's still huge.

The other piece is kids would just continually be in those interventions because they weren't getting it. Now they do their structured intervention with us in the Tier 3 level, but what they're doing in the classroom is supported by that.

It's so much extra practice that just from this year to next year, in second grade, we started the year I think with four or five small groups for intensive interventions in second grade. Not that they were below the 25th percentile, they were just below the 50th percentile.

Anna Geiger: Gotcha.

Julie Speidel: We started with four of those. Moving into third grade for next year, we have none.

Anna Geiger: Oh, wow! That's so exciting!

Julie Speidel: For our first graders, we use the CORE phonics screener, so we know which skills that they're missing, which ones that they need to work on that have been previously taught. And so in our intensive intervention, let's say we'll work on short U, and we will use the decodable from the classroom, and we have that six-step lesson plan that we format. They practice the skill, they practice the high frequency words, they practice reading the text multiple times, and they do that with us for 15 minutes. Then they also do it in their classroom with their classroom teacher for 15 minutes. They practice writing the words and things like that.

It's repetition of these skills and just kind of moving that needle slowly initially so that when we get to those upper levels, we're finding that we don't need as much support.

Anna Geiger: You're taking care of most of it in the early grades, which is what we're supposed to do.

Julie Speidel: Yeah. We're doing it in kindergarten too like, "What letters do they know? What letters don't they know? How can we work on this? How can we improve it with their handwriting? How can we tie it all together?"

I think I referenced purposeful practice. "If this is what I'm teaching, how can I practice this multiple times in multiple ways, what can I connect together so that it makes sense?"

Anna Geiger: We covered a lot of things. We talked about your journey about how there was a lot of hodgepodge things going on. You brought in outside support, you dove right in. It was hard at first, but there was lots of support from the reading specialists.

As the years have gone by, the teachers have really seen a huge change in their students. You have fewer kids that are stuck in intervention, I should say. You're taking care of what they needs in intervention versus kind of wondering what to do next.

For me, that's been a huge difference between the idea of balanced and structured literacy is, "Oh, now I understand the big picture."

I also understand the use of a universal screener and then a diagnostic. I know how to pin down what's the problem, and I know what to do to fix it. And I have a system, like your school does, for helping kids get what they need when they need it, but then move them out so they don't have to be stuck in this extra support forever because we can take care of it.

Are there any final thoughts that you have or resources that you would send people to, whether classroom teachers or reading specialists, to learn more things that you found really helpful?

Julie Speidel: Yeah, I would definitely say as a team, I think that they would very much benefit from doing the "Shifting the Balance" book together, because I think it really portrays what balanced literacy is and what structured literacy is, and seeing that we're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are things that are the same, and they're easy shifts. There is no set way of how to do this, and it's going to be a struggle.

For phonemic awareness, David Kilpatrick's "Equipped for Reading Success," that book to me was very helpful.

I don't mean to be a plug for your program, but that Teaching Every Reader course, it was very helpful.

Surprisingly, Stanislaus-

Anna Geiger: Dehaene, I think it's Dehaene. I think I heard him pronounce it that way. It's tricky.

Julie Speidel: A neurobiologist talking about how your brain... I find him very engaging. Other people are probably like, "He's so dry," but I'm just a nerd. We were actually showing some of his clips to the teachers now on how is this working? Trying to get them still to understand and buy in.

Anita Archer has been huge with that vocabulary piece and the student engagement.

Then I did the first portion of LETRS, and that was very eye-opening. It's very similar to what our state is mandating that 4K through third grade teachers and principals have to go through mandatory training, and the program that we're using is similar, but those pieces are very eye-opening.

Anna Geiger: Well, I will be sure to link all those things in the show notes. Is it okay if people send me questions that I pass them on to you and then you can help a teacher?

Julie Speidel: Absolutely.

Anna Geiger: That'd be great because I'm sure a lot of people have more questions about the specific things that you were doing that we didn't get into. Also, especially someone in a reading specialist position that's trying to support their staff, that can be a tricky thing.

Thanks so much for sharing your story. I know this is going to help a lot of teachers.

Julie Speidel: Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity to do this.

Anna Geiger: This is actually the second in a four-part series talking about the work that a school district has done to move from balanced to structured literacy. That is Cudahy in Wisconsin. Last week I talked to Candice Johnson, this week it was Julie. Next week will be another reading specialist from the school. Then finally, in the fourth week, we'll talk to Pati Montgomery, leader of Schools Cubed.

With that, I want you to check out the show notes, and you can get all the links to the resources that Julie mentioned. You can find those at themeasuredmom.com/episode185. Talk to you next time!

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

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Julie’s recommended resources Shifting the Balance , by Jan Burkins and Kari Yates Equipped for Reading Success , by David Kilpatrick Reading in the Brain , by Stanislas Dehaene Anita Archer’s website LETRS
YOU’LL LOVE THIS PRACTICAL BOOK!

Looking for an easy-to-read guide to help you reach all readers? If you teach kindergarten through third grade, this is the book for you.

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The post From struggle to success: A reading specialist’s structured literacy journey appeared first on The Measured Mom.

How one school moved from balanced to structured literacy – with Candice Johnson

��TRT Podcast #184: One school’s journey from balanced to structured literacy – with Candice Johnson

Today’s episode tells the story of a Cudahy, Wisconsin school’s journey from balanced to structured literacy. Reading specialist Candice Johnson describes how her school implemented systems, high impact instructional routines, and more��to improve reading instruction in every classroom.��

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Hello, this is Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom and the author of "Reach All Readers." Before we get started, I want to quickly share a portion of a review of my book written by David Pelk on Amazon.

He wrote, "'Reach All Readers' is a great learning tool and resource for all educators. Anna Geiger has a true gift of summarizing research and then connecting it with practical ways to use it. She has given you the support, including additional ideas and materials to make it practical. Her layout of her learning will not only point you in the direction you want to go, but will also provide the next places you might go as you figure out your own next steps. This is a book you want to have in your resource collection to support all readers."

You can learn more at reachallreaders.com.

Today is the first in a four-part series. I'm interviewing Candice Johnson, reading specialist at a small school in Cudahy, Wisconsin. Her district worked with an organization called Schools Cubed to help improve literacy learning across the board. In this episode, she walks us through what that looked like and how their school has implemented particular systems, high-impact instructional routines, and more to improve reading outcomes for everyone. Then she talks about where they're going next.

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Candice!

Candice Johnson: Hi, Anna! Thanks for having me.

Anna Geiger: This last spring you and I met at a presentation that I was giving about the science of reading, and you invited me to your school in Cudahy to see all the changes that your school's made. That was a wonderful morning of visiting different classrooms and talking with teachers about the systems changes you guys have made, so I'm really excited to dive into the details today.

Before we do that, could you introduce us to yourself and talk about how you got into education?

Candice Johnson: Absolutely. My name is Candice Johnson, and I am a reading specialist instructional coach for the school district of Cudahy. I really love my job and the work that we're doing, but I definitely did not see myself as being in this role and doing the work that I'm doing.

My journey kind of started off a little bit different. I've been teaching for almost 15 years. I started off as a substitute teacher and that's where I landed my first job, and I was really excited. My first couple years as a teacher, one of the things that I realized and did a lot of reflecting on was that I wasn't trained to teach kids to read. We did some of the things that you hear about. We did the assessment system three times a year, and we would collect this data, but we really didn't do much with it. We would look at it and go, "Oh, that's too bad."

I had so many questions, and I had so much responsibility sitting on my plate, looking at 25 kids in front of me. My expectation is we've got to get these kids to read, and I knew that I didn't have the capacity to do that in the way that I wanted to.

About five years into my journey, I took a risk and went back to school, and I got a master's degree from Cardinal Stritch University. As I evolved with my education, things started changing in my classroom, and it was really amazing. I will never forget I had gone on a field trip one day and my building administrator had asked me to meet her in her office. She asked me to be the building reading specialist, and I looked her dead in the eye and I said, "Absolutely not."

That classroom, those kids, those were my people. That's what I love doing. Those are my community of kids. It took about five or six times of having the same conversation and pulling me into the office.

What really got me to put my foot into this role is she sat me down and she said, "Listen, Candice, I have seen you go from being that new teacher to what you are today. You can see and you can feel the change that has happened in your classroom, and it is remarkable. I need that change to happen across our building. The impact that you're making is great, but we can make a bigger impact together, and I need that knowledge and that coaching to go along with me as your building administrator."

Anna Geiger: Have you been in Cudahy this whole time?

Candice Johnson: I have, yeah.

Anna Geiger: Could you talk to us a little bit about the Cudahy school system and what that looks like?

Candice Johnson: The Cudahy School district serves roughly 2000 students. We have gone through some challenges in the last couple years. As our community has been growing, I've watched the particular elementary school that I work in go from being over 400 students to now, we have declined to less than 200 students. We have faced a school closure and potential more school closures, and that's a really devastating feeling to have in education.

But we're a very proud district. We are a district who has done some reflecting and has made some very positive changes. Several years ago, my curriculum director, Karen Savaglia, who is wonderful, really recognized that in looking at our school data from the state report card, we were underserving our community.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Candice Johnson: And we needed some outside help. She had reached out to a company they called Schools Cubed. It's a consulting firm that is run by Pati Montgomery based out of Colorado.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Candice Johnson: She and her team stepped in during the time where we were seeing that we were really failing our students. Especially after that pandemic, I think a lot of schools saw a very big decline in their numbers. I know in my school, we, I think historically, were always around the 30th percentile, which is not good. Reflecting back, I don't even think I knew what those numbers were.

Anna Geiger: Right. Right.

Candice Johnson: Nobody talked about them. So we started having conversations and we started looking at graphs together, and we had dropped to 21% and went, "Oh my gosh, this is not okay."

Anna Geiger: For people who are listening, does that mean 21% of kids were reaching benchmark for reading achievement? Is that what you're saying?

Candice Johnson: Yes, according to the state reading assessments, the Forward assessments.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Candice Johnson: We said we have to make this change. We have to be reflective, and we need to move forward.

It has been quite the journey. It has been a difficult journey, but it has been the most amazing and rewarding journey because of the results that we have seen in the three years. We're going into our fourth year.

For my school in particular, we were at, according to state testing, 21% of students reading at proficiency. After one year with Pati Montgomery, we raised that to 42%.

Anna Geiger: Great!

Candice Johnson: That was huge. Three years into that journey, we are now at 47%, building that momentum and continuing to grow our students.

Our goal is to really follow some of the statistics that we're hearing from research. The National Institute of Health has come out and said the brain has the cognitive capacity to read, and that should be reaching 95% of our population, with the other 5% roughly having cognitive disabilities.

Our goal is to continue to prove to the Cudahy community that we can take a community that has low socioeconomic status, it is a diverse community of learners... In the past, there have been a lot of excuses as to why these kids could not learn, and we've been able to push those aside and say, "Yes, they can." That's our journey right now and moving forward to that 95%.

Anna Geiger: Talk to me about what the teachers were told initially and maybe what kind of pushback you may have gotten.

Candice Johnson: The unfortunate thing about being in the teaching profession is that you have a very short window before you are sitting with kids to get professional development. You're coming off of summer break, and so when our teachers, including me because I didn't have much information either, sat down with our first presentation and were hit with a lot of information really fast, then it was just zero to 100. It was incredibly overwhelming, and it kind of just felt like everybody was just drowning in new information and figuring it out as we went, but things got better. I think it's just the nature of what education is in not having that time that we need to prepare in advance.

What we learned in this process is that Schools Cubed is all about systems, structures, and instructional routines. Pati has developed some really great tools that have really helped us along.

She has what she calls a literacy evaluation tool. It is a tab that sits on my computer every single day. It's essentially a rubric, and that rubric is compromised of six categories. That's universal instruction, intervention assessment, data-based decision making, professional development, and school leadership. All of those categories have a rating system that has been the tool that my team... When I say team I mean the amazing teachers that I work with who are the ones in the classrooms implementing all of this work, and my amazing administrator who is leading this work.

The part that really changed the mindset with our implementers, our teachers... At first it is so hard to hear, especially when you've been teaching for 20 plus years, that there are all these changes to make, and to undo and unlearn things is really challenging. And so people, of course, are going to be very resistant to wanting to make that change.

But there was a school board meeting where Pati had gone to the school board and presented some information. In her discussion with the school board, a light bulb moment went off with all of our staff. In that moment, she basically told them that the purpose of her consulting firm and what sets her apart from other consulting firms is that this isn't about critiquing teachers. This isn't about going in and telling them they're doing everything wrong. This is about building leadership. So Pati's belief is that when we have principals who are literacy leaders and are evaluators, that is when the change is going to happen.

When Schools Cubed started coming in to do visits, which happened once a month, they would visit classrooms, but they didn't really sit down and talk with teachers as much as they did sit in and have a two-day discussion once a month with the building administrator and myself. It really came down to building that strong team and teaching a principal, what are those look-fors? What does that research say? Because when I leave here, you are the one who has to do the work, and you are the one that has to hold these teachers accountable, and you are the one who is going to set the tone for the expectations moving forward.

That was a very pivotal moment for the staff that I work with. When they saw that their leader had to do the learning first, it was much more impactful.

Anna Geiger: When you had this leadership, you all became basically forced to be on the same page. Can you talk about that, about before and after? How did things change with Schools Cubed kind of taking leadership here?

Candice Johnson: I can be super honest and tell you that as I have to make my schedule based off of other people's schedules, I realized reading really wasn't being taught. It wasn't in the schedule for some classrooms, and that was really alarming to me. I think there was an upsurge in Teachers Pay Teachers, with good intent, but not a lot of direction on how to use materials. Walking into classrooms, oftentimes reading was just a mixture of worksheets that students were working on that really didn't have a solid objective to the learning that needed to be had.

We had a 90 minute literacy block, and half an hour of that was shared reading and maybe ten minutes of phonics. Then it was an hour of what we call the Guided Reading, using a lot of Fountas and Pinnell and a lot of LLI kits during that time.

The transition that we first made with Schools Cubed was that our principal now had to make the master schedule. Teachers were not in charge of that anymore. That ensured that our literacy blocks were put down at a certain time, and so when an evaluator was to walk into your classroom with that schedule, you should be teaching your ELA block when you said you were teaching that ELA block.

Anna Geiger: Gotcha.

Candice Johnson: Because a lot of times that was a problem.

Our 21% proficiency was very low. As a school who was deemed high need at that time, we moved into 120 minute literacy block.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Candice Johnson: We had to invest the time in to make the changes. Since then, we've brought it down to 90 minutes that we're rolling into this year because we've seen great growth and success, but that was a transition that we had to make. So fidelity to the master schedule was important.

The next part was pacing. Within our block, we really tried to base the block off of the five pillars, and starting in a very specific order. We're going to start with phonemic awareness, we're going to roll into phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and then really the belief is that fluency and oral language development, that should be woven into all of the components that we're doing. We should see that everywhere. It's not its own component.

The belief is if your literacy block starts at 8:30, and I know when you came to visit my school, I'm like, "No, we start at 8:30!" If you are not on your pacing, if you have too many kids that need to use the restroom and you take a classroom break, and then you come back, you're eating time, and so we had to be really critical about sticking to that. It was a really hard adjustment at first because we were never clock watchers, I guess, if you want to call it that. But then we got into a groove and to a pacing, and we started to see a difference with that.

Anna Geiger: So in a way, you're accepting this urgency of this situation, right?

Candice Johnson: Absolutely.

Anna Geiger: And urgency requires absolutely that we're sticking to the time that we've committed and we're not letting other things suck time out of it, which is hard for teachers because so many things can suck time out, right? How did you help the teachers stay on track with that?

Candice Johnson: One of the things that changed within my role when Pati and her team came in, the role evolved into more of an instructional coaching role. Another very profound thing that was said to me by my coach, Jill, who we worked with, is... The first time we ever met her, she sat my administrator and myself down, and she really clarified those roles. She looked at me and she said, "Candice, you are the coach. You are the cheerleader. You are the grower. You are going to go into classrooms once a week, and you're going to watch those teachers, and you are going to be their best friend, giving them the advice and the feedback that they need."

By feedback, what I learned was being able to transcribe what I was seeing so that a teacher could read it back, but then providing them some feedback in terms of, let's reflect on some things. I'm going to ask you some questions, and we'll develop from there.

Then she looked at my administrator and she said, you are also a grower, but you are the evaluator. That is very different from being the coach, the grower.

The distinct differences between us are that I really had to form relationships and trust with teachers for them to be able to accept feedback. It is very scary to have someone like me walk in and sit in the corner or sit down next to your students and watch you teach. That was a very rough start to our journey because it had never been done.

Anna Geiger: Sure.

Candice Johnson: It was only really accepted when the evaluator came in once in a while to do those evaluations. Whatever feedback or discussions that I have with teachers was never to go to my administrator. That was between me and the teacher, unless the teacher decided that they wanted to talk to the administrator about it.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Candice Johnson: Same thing with my administrator. Whatever she saw in her evaluations that was between her and the teacher.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Candice Johnson: We could have general conversations and say, "Hey, I'm seeing a common thread happening in our K-2. Maybe it would be nice if the two of us could go in together to do some observations and talk about some of those things, and do some reflecting on that tool with our universal instruction." That would allow us to have some conversations, but I think that really helped bridge a trustworthy relationship with myself and with the staff that I work with.

Anna Geiger: So you've talked about basically reestablishing of roles and understanding what everyone's job is, and then a handing of the schedule to the teachers versus teachers developing it on their own, and also this pacing, keeping on track with the schedule. Is there anything else that was a big shift for everyone?

Candice Johnson: Instructional routines. What you were doing within that time limit was really important, and it had to be purposeful.

School districts adopt programs, and sometimes we get too much training, sometimes we get too little training, sometimes we get no training. These textbooks are thick, and there's a lot of information in there.

One of the things that my teachers have come to realize is that we have to be really grounded in what we believe. As we made the shift to structured literacy and this body of reading research, we have to be up to date on our knowledge and be able to be consumers of a curriculum, rather than have that curriculum textbook be able to... Because it's a program, it can't tell us what to do. We have to be able to be educated professionals who can go in and say, "This is what's going to fit our needs for our community," and be able to pick and choose what that is. That was a really huge part in the instructional routines that we did.

Anna Geiger: To that, I would say, in the past, that may have been happening as well. People were just picking and choosing, but they didn't have the shared knowledge. Would you agree?

Candice Johnson: I would absolutely agree because there's a time limit, right? You could spend a full day trying to get all of the things done in that book. You have to pick and choose what you do, but I think it was based more on, oh, this is just what I want to do versus what my data is telling me what I need to do.

Anna Geiger: Exactly.

Candice Johnson: Because when I look at this classroom, each classroom every year is going to be different. They have different needs and different changes need to happen with that. But within those instructional routines, what Schools Cubed really brought us back to that were not strong at all in our school, was equity of instruction and making sure that all students were required to participate. No one gets to put their head down, no students are getting pulled out of the classroom.

During that time, we formulated what we refer to as focus walls that are really a great visual tool for both a student and teacher, but also someone like me who's walking into multiple classrooms in a day, or an evaluator who is coming in to know what your focus is of that day or that week and the purpose, your objectives.

We really started to dive really deep into Anita Archer and really understand explicit and scaffolded language. We had to develop very intimidating lesson plans. I think that was maybe something that started early on in those August dates that kind of hit us with the brick, is that we were going to now have to plan our lessons, very detailed, by the way, and submit those into a Google Drive where our administrator or myself could pull them up and follow along as you're teaching.

Anna Geiger: Sure.

Candice Johnson: That was a really hard shift for teachers too. At first, I'm not going to lie, I had my head down on my desk and I had doors slamming in my faces, and people didn't want to hear or see from me, but there was a relationship that grew over time.

I had an amazing team who was really open to listening to some of my crazy ideas, and they were willing to try them in their planning process, and then let me watch them teach it and give me feedback and say, "You know what, Candice, this was too much. We need to tone it down here. This isn't realistic. Or maybe we take a little bit of the planning out of this and shift it here where there's a lot more going on in this department that I need to focus on. This seems more routine, and I kind of got this piece." So yes, I would say it took about a year or two to really fold into that.

I'll also say, which is really interesting, when we first had Pati and her team come in year one, we moved to structured literacy still using our old programming.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Candice Johnson: So we were using all of the things we had used from Benchmark for years, but we had to really learn how to be consumers of that. Then in year two, we adopted Wonders.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Candice Johnson: So there was some lesson plan changing there. We were feeling really good year one, and then year two came and there were more changes, but we were, I think, more ready for them within the instructional routines.

The other things that Schools Cubed really brought, you mentioned it earlier, is that urgency in that pacing, and we really honed in on our culturally responsive practices, and student management, and engagement. If students are not engaged, they are not learning.

We also really toned down teacher talk. Teachers view themselves more as a facilitator, as a coach, but we have to give kids time to be able to collaborate with each other and be able to have that think time to be part of that learning. That was very different for us.

We also learned how to engage students in frequent responses. We learned how to navigate turn and talk routines. We also went from picking on students who had raised their hands, because what we've found is that it's always the same kids and the expectations of learning are only going to the kids who are willing, and sometimes those aren't the kids who need it the most. So we kind of started a policy where we just don't call on hands, and we cold call and the students know that and I think they like it.

At first, it was a little different, but it keeps them on their toes and they're really excited, and we have procedures in place, right? You may call on a student who doesn't have an answer, and that's okay. But the system may be that we will say, "Okay, we're going to come back to you. We're going to jump to somebody else who's going to help us find that answer." Then that student's going to repeat that answer so that we can confirm that they have a better understanding. But we also like to set them up so that they can have maybe a partner talk before we do that cold calling as well.

Also, I think the last important thing for anybody who's listening, who teaches the real little ones who are very wiggly, and you're thinking 90 to 120 minute reading block, that's not sustainable. We had to, again, reflect and evolve into understanding that we had to build in movement breaks. We've had to be really strategic about when we're standing, when we're sitting, what movements they're doing, at what time. The kids really look forward to it and they really enjoy it, and you can see the engagement in the classrooms.

Anna Geiger: So you've basically doubled your numbers, but I know you're still working towards that 95%. Can you talk about what are your next steps to keep raising those numbers and helping more kids reach benchmark or exceed it?

Candice Johnson: One of the pieces that we have been evolving and learning and working on is understanding data. Data can be very complex, especially when it comes to students and the varying data points that we do collect. We started off in year one with a data system that really helped us see a bigger picture. Now what we're learning to do is to dive really deep into that data and really break apart what some of those categories mean. Let's take these results and let's use it to reflect on our teaching.

We're in that process of going slowly because it can be very complicated to understand those results and to think about the impact of maybe what we feel versus what our data is saying, because we might think we're doing amazing at teaching vocabulary, but our scores maybe weren't as high as those feelings. So we have to do some hard reflection and some navigating and go back to some of those routines, and really think about the progress.

Our kids are not the same that they were in this journey three years ago. They're growing, and those numbers are becoming more proficient. We have to evolve with those students and meet their needs where they're at. So I would say that's where we're at, really navigating that data right now.

Anna Geiger: Well there are so many things we could pick out of this episode. For teachers, or maybe administrators, who want to start making school-wide changes, but may not be at a point where they're able to hire someone, some things you talked about were being sure we understand everyone's role, having a system where if you hopefully have a reading specialist they have a schedule for visiting teachers and a time to provide that positive and helpful feedback. Like you said, that can be slow going at first, but slowly building that relationship, and then having expectations for what classrooms are doing at different times of the day.

I know that can be really hard for teachers because I know one thing I loved as a teacher was my autonomy, which I thought was a good thing at the time, but looking back, there was a lot I was doing that was definitely not supported by research in it, and I would've benefited from some leadership that helped me understand that.

Also, school-wide professional development that's shared versus you're going here, you're going there. We're all going to learn this, and here's what we're learning, and we're making time for that as well as providing it in a way that teachers can digest it. Then learning to own that data as a school, not just by classroom, but this is our data and working together on it. A lot of it, I think, comes down to the fact that we're not little islands. We're a whole community, and we're all responsible for everyone's success. Would you agree?

Candice Johnson: Absolutely. I think you really defined the work that we've done. That was beautiful.

Anna Geiger: I will make sure that if people leave a comment on the blog post or send me an email hello@hemeasuredmom.com with questions that I can direct them to you and you can answer those.

Candice Johnson: Perfect.

Anna Geiger: All right, well thank you so much, Candice! This was very exciting, and I know the teachers are going to enjoy also listening to the other teachers from your district that have things to share as well.

Candice Johnson: Thank you, Anna!

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode184. Talk to you next time!

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

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“I didn’t believe him” – How one mom learned that her son’s school wasn’t teaching him to read – with Dr. Irene Daria

��TRT Podcast #183: “I didn’t believe him” – How one mom learned that her son’s school wasn’t teaching him to read – with Dr. Irene Daria

Irene’s kindergarten son was attending a prestigious Manhattan public school. When he told her that the school wasn’t teaching him to read, she didn’t believe him. When she finally realized he was right, she set out on a challenging journey to save his academic life. You won’t want to miss this one!

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Hello, my name is Anna Geiger. I'm the creator of the Measured Mom website, and also the author of the recently published book "Reach All Readers." I would love for you to check it out. It currently has 84 five-star reviews on Amazon. I'm going to read one of those really quick before we get into our interview today.

B. Romero wrote, "This book should be required reading for every elementary school teacher. It thoroughly explains the theory in understandable terms, gives examples of what structured literacy looks like in the classroom, and gives ideas for lesson formats and activities that you can print and use today. Anna has created one of the most practical resources on the science of reading that I have seen so far." You can learn more at reachallreaders.com.

In today's episode, I'm interviewing Dr. Irene Daria, who is the author of a wonderful book called "I Didn't Believe Him." It's all about how her son years ago was not being taught how to read, and when he told his mom, she didn't believe him. In this episode, we talk about her experience with that, and then we go into a little bit of detail about the book. I highly recommend it. You can learn more about the book in the show notes. Here we go!

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Irene.

Irene Daria: Thank you, Anna! Thank you for having me!

Anna Geiger: We're here to talk about your book, "I Didn't Believe Him," which, as I've said, it reads like a novel. It's fascinating, horrifying, and entertaining at the same time. We're going to talk about that in a minute.

Before we do that, could you talk to us a little bit about your life story? What led up to you writing this book and what you're doing now?

Irene Daria: What led me up to writing this book is the fact that my son's school didn't teach him how to read. We'll talk about that in a minute. What I am doing now is directly related to the fact that his school did not teach him how to read.

I had been working as a journalist, and I went back before this happened with Eric's school to get my degree in psychology. I thought I was going to be doing clinical psych. Then when Eric's school failed to teach him how to read, I dove into the research and realized how many kids were being labeled learning disabled, not because there was anything neurologically wrong with them, but just because their schools were not teaching them how to read.

I thought that was a terrible tragedy. The library was giving a presentation on how children learn to read. This was back in 2007. The librarian said, "Your kids will be learning phonics in school."

After the presentation, I very politely raised my hand and said, "Not necessarily. They may not be learning phonics in a systematic explicit way in any event."

If kids don't learn phonics, often... Kids are not like adults. When we don't understand something, we'll raise our hand, and we'll say, "I don't understand." Kids don't do that. Kids move to the back of the room and become silent, or they become behavior problems.

Almost inevitably, the school begins thinking something's wrong with the child. The school, especially at that time, never thought that maybe its teaching methods were wrong, and the child was struggling.

I gave the parents tips again in a very non-alarming way. If your child isn't getting phonics in school, this is what you can do to help them.

A mother came up to me afterwards and said, "What you described is exactly what's happening to my daughter. Her school, as far as I can see, isn't teaching her how to read. They send home what we know are patterned books. They send home books full of big words that she can't possibly read, like peanut bar."

I remember she said, "What's a peanut bar anyway? Who eats peanut bars?!"

She said, "Would you teach my daughter how to read?" She was my first client.

School thought her daughter had ADHD, and they wanted to evaluate her. The mother said, "I'm sure my daughter does not have ADHD. If she did, I would do everything in the world to help her, but I really don't think that's the problem. I think she just needs to be taught how to read."

I taught her, and I really felt like I had saved this little girl's academic life. It was the most rewarding feeling.

I was at a school where you go for a master's first and then you apply to the PhD program, and I was on track for clinical psych. I was doing a book with the head of the department, and everything was great. I went to them and I said, "I want to switch to cognitive developmental psychology. I want to research reading. I want to learn about reading. This is what I want to do."

That's what I decided to do. My goal was to help prevent problems from happening as opposed to fixing them after they had already happened.

It was an immediate success. I passed out flyers at my local school. Parents came. Their kids learned to read beautifully.

The parents said, "You taught them how to read so well. Just keep them and do whatever you want." Now we're a K through 12 tutoring company, but my heart still lies in beginning reading. My heart still lies in helping kids learn how to read. That's a very long answer to your question.

Anna Geiger: All right, so let's go back in time. Your son, Eric, is now in his mid-20s, but back when he was in kindergarten, that's when he told you that the school wasn't teaching him to read. Take us back and explain what he was telling you and why you didn't believe him.

Irene Daria: So, actually, Anna, before I answer your question, which I'm going to answer, I have a pressing question that is nagging me that I have to ask you. You said the book is horrifying and inspiring, and you know so much about reading and how kids learn to read. I've followed your work for years. What was horrifying to you?

Anna Geiger: Well, first of all, a lot of it for me was horrifying because I was seeing myself in those teachers, because that's the way that I taught reading, balanced literacy. To get it all in place and to see that this is really happening, that teachers are actually telling parents that we don't explicitly need to teach phonics, and labeling children as having a problem because they're teaching them incorrectly. It made me look back, and I would say that the school he went to was what I would call an extreme form of balanced literacy.

As you know, balanced literacy has a million definitions, and everybody applies it differently, but I definitely saw myself in there in terms of dismissing a parent's concerns and assuming I had it all right. For someone who taught balanced literacy previously and to see the effect that would have in a child's life who's not successful is very sad. You guys overcame it, but it was hard going. Then to see how much effort it took for you to get things to change, that's just wrong. This shouldn't have to happen.

It's horrifying that this has existed in schools. Now, this was a long time ago, but we know that this is still happening. That to me is horrifying. The inspiration, of course, is that you got your way through it, through a lot of effort on your part and your son's part, and then it's also an entertaining story. There's a lot of humor in there too, so people can feel like this is a book they're going to sit on the beach and enjoy.

Irene Daria: And enjoy! I'm glad to hear you say that!

So, to answer your question, Eric came home at the beginning of kindergarten, a five-year-old boy, and the exact words that he said were, "Mommy, my school isn't teaching me how to read. They tell us to look at the pictures and guess what the words are, and that's not reading, Mommy. How do you read?"

He was going to a school named Lower Lab, but I didn't name the school in the book because it was too emotionally painful for me to use the school's name. It wasn't that I was trying to keep it a secret. I gave the geographical location of it. Anyone in New York would know what school it is, but it was so painful for me to revisit and write that that just took it to a different...

I changed the teacher's name, so it wasn't as if I was really... Because when you write, it's like you're in that moment again. The teachers' names were different, but I literally could not emotionally bring myself to use the school's name. It's a school for gifted kids in New York City with a stellar reputation. Test scores are off the charts. You have to apply to get into it. It's a school on the Upper East Side.

We live in Greenwich Village, which at the time was much more low key than the Upper East Side, which is the wealthiest zip code in New York, full of very high achieving, driven families who work with their children at home. We didn't. Eric showed up and tested. We just brought him. We didn't do any prep or anything like that.

He got in, and I was so in awe of this school that when he told me they were doing something wrong, I didn't believe him. How could this amazing school do something wrong? My son just doesn't understand yet what they're doing, I figured.

Before he said those words, I attended a presentation where his school explained how they taught reading, and it made zero sense to me as a parent, just zero. They explained about how they used post-it notes to cover the words, to encourage the kids to guess what the words are from the pictures. They used context. They made a poster for the presentation and the strategies included ask your neighbor what the word is. Sounding out was at the very bottom.

His teacher WAS teaching letter sounds. They were teaching the letter sounds so the kids could use it in their invented spelling and writing. I thought they were doing it in reading. I did not realize that they were not sounding out words at all.

Anna Geiger: What finally got you to realize, "Hang on a second, something's wrong. I need to do something."

Irene Daria: So just to fill in, I don't want to give away too much of the story because like you said, it does read like a novel. But to make a long story short, Eric's kindergarten year was absolutely horrible for the poor little kid. He had been happy and extroverted in preschool, and he still was socially extroverted and happy on the playground. But in school, sitting in the back of the room, silent, just hanging his head in shame because he was in a classroom. What made this curriculum look effective was that the parents taught their kids how to read before they started school. The vast majority of the parents had worked with these kids at home. He was in a classroom of gifted children who knew how to read. One boy was reading Harry Potter in kindergarten. This is extreme.

Anna Geiger: Oh my goodness.

Irene Daria: My kid didn't know how to read a word. He started having nightmares, screaming, screaming, screaming, screaming during the night dreaming that he was drowning. He was drowning because he didn't know how to read. This was coming out like that. He was saying, "I don't want to go to school. I hate school." It still brings tears to my eyes. It was terrible.

I asked his teacher, "Do you know what's going on?" No, she had no idea.

I remember she sent an email saying, "I read with him today, and he figured out the pattern in the book and went with it."

How I wish I had asked questions, "What's a pattern in a book?" I didn't know what that meant. How I wish I had questioned things, but I trusted.

So what finally happened was in the summer, I realized he couldn't read a word. I tried to teach him myself. I did not yet know how to.

First grade came, and what he did... Now imagine the thought that went into this for a six-year-old child. I don't think he even knew what the word memorize meant. He could not tell me. He had memorized the books in his classroom and therefore appeared to be reading them. That's why he was bringing home great grades in reading.

He came home, and with a really angry expression on his face and anger in his voice said, "Mommy, you want to see how I read? I'll show you how I read."

I said, "Okay, yeah."

He put the book behind his back and "read" it, and he turned the pages really loud, and he on purpose made this kind of rustling sound so that I would recognize he was turning the page, and he "read" the entire book behind his back. That's when I realized he had memorized every little patterned book and was reciting them from memory. That's why his teacher thought he was reading, and why I thought he was reading, and why he wasn't reading.

Anna Geiger: That's so interesting to me how astute he was. You talk about that in the book, how this little guy knew that what he was doing was not really reading, but none of the adults around him were picking that up.

I think as a balanced literacy teacher and learning about the structured approach a number of years ago, a hang-up for me was, "I think they're not going to like reading if they have to read these decodable books."

I talked to a principal who called me up to talk about this, and he said, "At our school, these kids, at first, they can't read, so giving them these patterned books, making it seem like they're reading... They know they're not reading, but when you give them a book and they can pull the words off because they have the tools to sound it out, that's where the pride and the joy comes in."

Did you see that with your son?

Irene Daria: Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I remember when he... He used to be afraid of books. When I first had him try to read a Bob book, he just was scared of it. Then he began to feel empowered. The more phonics he learned, the better he felt, and the more excited he was about reading.

I have to tell you, there's a scene in the book. I don't know if you remember, but I praised him when finally... I remember the shining moment was when he could read "Little Bear." That was when it all clicked, the frequently used important sight words and the phonics rules. He read a "Little Bear" story so perfectly, and it's how I finally got through to his school.

We need to talk about that too, why they thought he was not reading, and he was at home.

I said to him, "You know you're going to be the talk of your school because yesterday they thought you couldn't read, and now they realize that you can read 'Little Bear.'"

Instead of looking proud, he looked so guilty. I said, "Eric, what's the matter?"

He said, "Mommy, the only reason I could that read book was because I knew the words in it."

Anna Geiger: That is so-

Irene Daria: Can you imagine?

Anna Geiger: I remember that. Yeah, that is amazing. I mean, I don't even know what a word for that is, but just that he thought there was something wrong with that because that wasn't being communicated to him. That reading is reading every individual word.

There are a lot of moments like that in the book that just hit you in the face. As someone like me who was teaching kids to read with patterned books, there are a lot of moments where I was like, "Oh my goodness." I mean, I already have come to terms with what I was doing, and I feel really bad about that. I'm working to educate teachers about what was wrong with that.

When you talk back to the teachers having the workshop about how they taught reading, I wasn't there, so I don't know exactly what they said, but I'm guessing if it were me giving it back then, it would've been something about three-queuing and how reading is all about meaning, and we identify words in different ways, and phonics is only one way. Here are the other things that we do, and that's why these patterned books are so useful because then kids can read fluently.

It seems like they're fluent, because once they know the pattern, they just go through it really quickly. They're getting to meaning right away because they're not slowly sounding out words. It really just represents a complete misunderstanding of how reading works, right?

In the book, there's a lot of tension for you, which I completely understand, in terms of, "Well, I don't want to undermine the teachers. I don't want to teach him that teachers are wrong, but at the same time, I want to teach him to read. I don't want the school to label him." Can you talk a little bit about the tension between wanting to be supportive of the school, but at the same time, right some wrongs?

Irene Daria: I was terrified of the school. I think you need to live in a place like New York City. I'm not sure if San Francisco is still like this, but at the time, admission to public school, good public middle schools and high schools, was done on a competitive basis. You don't just go to your local neighborhood school. The principal carries so much weight and power. A word from her to another school and your child is kaput basically. So, that put a different layer on it.

For me and for my son, I wanted him to respect his school, and selfishly, I didn't want him to come to rely on me as his teacher.

In a perfect world, how amazing it would've been to homeschool him, but I couldn't! I had to work. I had to earn a living. I was in school.

I don't know if you remember, but I was in charge of giving him his spelling words. Not only was I teaching him to read, but the school let me give him his spelling words, which another school, like my older son's public school, would've said, "Get lost. We know what we're doing. Go away."

So I never came right out and said, "You're doing things all wrong."

I'm going to share this with you, Anna, and with your listeners. I haven't shared it yet. Like I mentioned, I've not been on any podcasts aimed at teachers yet, but I've been on podcasts talking about the book that are aimed at parents. I don't want to give away too much of the book, because it does read like a novel. I want people to turn the pages and say, "Oh, what happened? What happened? What happens next?"

But, I really do need to share with your audience that Eric's school labeled him learning disabled. Even though their evaluation found nothing wrong with him, even though he was high average or superior in every category, they were telling me, "Oh, he has a problem with phonemic awareness," as if that was a disorder. I didn't know what phonemic awareness was.

Anna Geiger: It means you need to teach it.

Irene Daria: It means you need to teach it! But I thought it was something wrong. "Oh, no, my son does not have phonemic awareness, and maybe he needs help."

But then my husband said, "The only way we're going to get through to them, the only way we're going to show them that nothing is wrong with him, is by letting them evaluate him." Indeed, an evaluation found nothing wrong, and then they labeled him learning disabled because his reading level did not match his high IQ. I mean, could you just die? Could you die?

Anna Geiger: That was a stunning moment in the book. Oh my goodness, I wasn't expecting that.

Irene Daria: I share this because I'm getting... I've sent out some advance readers copies, and I don't know if this book will sell. I don't know how it will do. I don't know who it will reach, or if it will have any impact, but already, I can sleep well at night because I've gotten one text and one phone call from people who had an advanced readers copy.

The text came from a teacher at a public school in Harlem that I worked with years ago in her classroom. I actually taught her students reading. She had me come in, and I volunteered in her classroom. She works in a K-8 school, and she said, "Your book has made me question every kid in my school who's been labeled learning disabled and has an IEP," because they were using balanced literacy. They were not teaching phonics. It made her stop and think, "Huh, is there really something wrong with these children, or is it just that we didn't teach them reading correctly?"

Another one came from a school psychologist. The phone call came from the school psychologist who said, "I've got to tell you, I could not put this book down." She said, "I was horrified." That's why I wondered what you were horrified by. She said, "I realized I was evaluating children, and seeing they have these problems with decoding, and I never realized they had never been taught to decode."

Anna Geiger: Yeah, exactly.

Irene Daria: That is criminal. I hate to say the word criminal, I'm sorry, because teachers were as much victims as the parents and students were, right? I mean, I didn't know. You didn't know. All the teachers out there didn't know. No one certainly wanted to cause harm, but wow.

I think one of the reasons I wrote this book, because, as you know, writing a book is a lot of work, and there could have been a lot of other things I was doing. It was to get the word out about that, and to prevent it from happening to other children, and a little bit of survivor's guilt because if my little boy had not come to me, and held that book behind his back...

Now remember, I ignored him the first time. If he hadn't finally figured out how to get through to me, my child would've been a struggling reader possibly for the rest of his life. My child would've been labeled learning disabled, probably would've had low phonemic awareness, which I would've thought was a disorder, and would have been on such a completely different academic track that I feel like we narrowly, narrowly missed a train wreck.

Anna Geiger: I would agree with you because especially, I mean, it's a blessing that you got this early. I know first grade... It would've been better to do it sooner even than that. But for many parents, this doesn't really come up until third grade, because that's when it really shows when those patterned books are gone. Then by then, you've got so many more issues to compound it. Your son was already dealing with a lot of feeling really bad about himself and feeling defeated by school, and that just compounds by the time you're in third grade. Then it makes it even harder.

What would you say made the most difference in helping him?

Irene Daria: Systematic, explicit phonics, without a doubt, and going step by step and celebrating each step. There's such joy. Phonics has gotten such a bad rap. Like you were saying, this is really fun and empowering and wonderful for kids. They go from not being able to... I'm not sure you know this, but I've written a series of workbooks that parents and teachers can use.

Anna Geiger: I'm familiar with those.

Irene Daria: They follow the order that I did with him. I taught him the word family "at" first. I taught him words that end in A-T, and then we celebrated him being able to read those words. Then we moved on to A-N. Every step that he took, there was a feeling of completion and accomplishment, and it was that continued feeling of accomplishment and awareness, and then giving him decodable readers. That was so difficult. For me to find decodable readers back then, it was impossible.

Anna Geiger: Oh yes.

Irene Daria: Now there are so many being written and being published, but even now if I go into a bookstore, they're really hard to find.

Anna Geiger: Definitely. That's true, but you found Bob Books, which is what we had back then, right?

Irene Daria: Right.

Anna Geiger: That was pretty much it.

Irene Daria: Right.

Anna Geiger: Eventually then, he was able to just read, like you would say, regular books. You talked about "Little Bear." I don't remember what other ones you talked about, because some of the ones that I would put in that category are probably more being published now, but that's the classic I Can Read book that was written for kids who are just starting to read. Nowadays, books at that same level would be like "Henry and Mudge" or "Poppleton." There are so many.

Irene Daria: We read those two.

Anna Geiger: That's where you want to go, right? It's when they've learned enough of the code that they can figure out some of those words they don't know, but still benefit from continued instruction. Would you agree?

Irene Daria: Yes.

Anna Geiger: Tell us now what you're doing in your tutoring. This is so fascinating, but you've actually worked with some famous people, so tell us about how that came about.

Irene Daria: Kate Winslet was my first famous client, and that happened because her kids went to the same preschool that Eric went to.

Anna Geiger: Interesting.

Irene Daria: I've been told I'm allowed to talk about this. I'm not going to talk too much about her kids, but the way she realized her daughter was having trouble reading. This is... I think US has that column called Celebrities are Just Like Us. Celebrities are just like us when it comes to reading, and their kids in school, and knowing, and not knowing.

Anna Geiger: Interesting.

Irene Daria: Her daughter was attending a private school in New York. At the time, Kate and her family were living in New York. They're now in London, but they had a house in Connecticut. They were in Connecticut at the time. This is a little similar to Eric's story. Her daughter picked up a book to read, and began reciting the words that were in a different book that looked similar that was in their apartment in New York City. So she was "reading" words from that other book thinking that it was the book that was in her hands.

Anna Geiger: Interesting.

Irene Daria: That's when Kate realized there was a problem, and she came and she brought her daughter. Then she brought her son. She's just the loveliest person. She is so down to earth. She is such a dedicated mother. She rolled up her sleeves and worked with her kids. She was right there doing everything that she could to support them.

Anna Geiger: Super neat. Anyone else that you're able to share, someone famous we might know?

Irene Daria: I've worked with Kate Blanchett's kids. I worked with Philip Seymour Hoffman's son on reading comprehension. I worked with Tom Brady and Bridget Moynihan's son on beginning reading. Lots of really interesting people.

Anna Geiger: That's amazing. So, tell us... Well, maybe we should wait and let people read the book to know what your son is up to now, but spoiler alert, he's doing very well.

I would highly recommend your book for anyone, especially obviously, of course, primary teachers, but also parents with kids in school.

Would you say... Like I mentioned earlier, I would say this was extreme balanced literacy at your son's school. It was more extreme than I was as a balanced literacy teacher, but I definitely saw things that I had done that were incorrect.

Would you say that things have improved in your area in general? Are you seeing improvements overall? I know the conversation has shifted more to the science of reading, but what has been your observation as a teacher especially?

Irene Daria: So, Eric's school introduced Fundations the year after his first grade year. They never said anything to me. I mean, his teacher told me, but they never said, "Oh, we learned a lot from your experience," but I was glad that that change happened at his school.

Lucy Calkins' work is based in New York City at Columbia, and her curriculum was throughout New York City public schools. She actually said in her letter in response to Margaret Goldberg's open letter, I don't know if you remember. She said, "The proof is in how well New York City children are doing with my curriculum." Well, New York City threw it out.

Anna Geiger: We also know from your book that the dirty little secret of the school was that so many parents were teaching their kids to read.

Irene Daria: Exactly.

Anna Geiger: If they struggled, they taught them. They were filling in the gaps left by what was supposedly a good program.

Irene Daria: That's the elephant in the room. That's actually how that curriculum got into the public schools in the first place, because the school's chancellor wanted every school in New York to have what schools in the well off Upper East Side and Upper West Side schools had. They were using this curriculum, but the parents were tutoring.

Anna Geiger: Oh my goodness, that's so interesting.

Irene Daria: No one thought to look at that confounding variable.

Anna Geiger: Oh, that's so interesting. I never thought about that, but I often talk about how in the schools that I taught in, they were small parochial schools, that it made sense, and balanced literacy was working for most of the kids, because most of the kids came from average middle class homes with experiences.

If you have anyone who doesn't have the experiences that maybe middle class or upper class kids have, they can't get through those leveled books because they don't know the vocabulary. To use that as an example and then think that was what everyone else needed to choose is horrifying right there. Super interesting.

Irene Daria: Anna, did you see balanced literacy working in your classroom? Were your students learning to read?

Anna Geiger: See, I think a lot of my... The kindergarten teacher did a lot of sounding out with them, so they were mostly coming to me able to sound out words. But when I had kids who struggled, just a basic sounding out, just a basic sound...

Irene Daria: You were first grade?

Anna Geiger: I taught first and second, but the first year was just first grade. It was a combination classroom, but the first year, it was just first grade.

I did have a student that year who didn't know her letters and sounds. She'd been in kindergarten for two years. Looking back, I would guess she had dyslexia. I'm almost sure of it, and probably severe dyslexia. I didn't have a systematic way of helping her, so I knew some sounding out was good, but I was trying to get her to memorize "the." It took three months before she could remember it. So obviously, what I was doing wasn't working.

I didn't have a plan for what to do for the kids who were struggling. I just had them do more leveled books.

To your point, at the very beginning stages, they didn't know your son was having a problem because he could memorize these patterns. I think that's what I was seeing with some of the kids.

Then the other kids, we know from Nancy Young's work that 40-50% of kids are going to learn to read with balanced literacy because they're built that way. They're going to figure it out. I think that most of my kids fit in that percentage.

What I look back and am really sad about is the kids that weren't in that, and even though they had good oral language and good background knowledge, they couldn't crack the code. Instead of giving them explicit phonics instruction using a diagnostic to finding out where they were at, I just said, "Well, we just need more practice."

That was something else you talked about too in the book, how you were showing that he was reading "Little Bear," which is in Fountas and Pinnell, it's like level J, but he was still stuck in the lower levels at school because those lower levels have so many words they can't sound out.

Irene Daria: Exactly.

Anna Geiger: If they can't figure out the pattern or the pattern's hard... I should say they shouldn't figure out the pattern, but they can't figure out that final word on the page, then that's where they get stuck.

I remember working with some kids, and the book was called "Amazing Machines," and it was like Level B or C, but you're supposed to tell them the title. Because I believed in this so much, I thought, "Well, I just need... If they can't do this, then we can't move on." It doesn't make any sense once you understand but...

Yeah, so I thought it was working. I mean, this is what I had learned, especially in graduate school, I would say. We didn't talk about this too much in my college, because that was late '90s, but in graduate school, early 2000s, it was very, very heavy balanced literacy. I didn't have any reason not to believe them.

I've talked about this before too, but I was swimming in that world. I wasn't reading anything else. I was reading Fountas and Pinnell, Lucy Calkins, Regie Routman, Sharon Taberski. They were all on that same page, and their books were so much fun to read and inspiring.

So, I thought... I don't know. I could go about that for a long time, but yes, I thought it was working.

Looking back, I can absolutely see the problems, and I think I would've seen them more if I'd have taught them in third grade, but I wasn't. I was teaching them still with those patterned books. I think maybe some of the gaps were being filled at home too, which I maybe just wasn't aware of.

I think it's exciting to see the tides changing. I think there's still a lot of work to be done, as we know.

I'm not sure if this is still true, but not long ago, Fountas and Pinnell was still the most widely used program in American schools. I think that people are becoming wise to that, and there are so many things, but the first step is getting the foundational skills piece, which is what you were aware of and were able to attack.

Irene Daria: Anna, do we still have time for a little bit, for one more thing?

Anna Geiger: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Irene Daria: You asked something else about what am I seeing as a tutor? So, New York is getting rid of Units of Study in two phases. Last September, it got rid of it in some schools. This September, it's getting rid of it in District 2, which is where Eric's school is located and other districts as well.

What I am seeing as a tutor... I tutor kids, a lot of kids, from a school that is still using Units of Study, but it's using the one that has the phonics element in it, and they also use Fundations. The kids are getting that phonics base, but I'm getting a lot of kids from the school anyway, because what they do, they teach Fundations, but they zip their way through it. The kids come to me, and they can recite their phonics rules. A little boy says, "I've learned short vowels, digraphs, r-controlled vowels".

I'm like, "R-controlled vowels? You're six years old! How can you know that phrase?" But they learned them. They know what they are.

If they're reading the decodable books, they are applying and reading, but the school is still sending home patterned books for them to read for homework.

Anna Geiger: Yes, exactly.

Irene Daria: I am seeing kids struggling. I'm seeing... I have a video that I actually... When I have time, I must put it on my website. It's of this little boy reading a patterned book saying, "How am I supposed to know that word? How am I supposed to know that word?" He knows his phonics rules; he knows what he's been taught. He knows what he can read. I mean, kids are a lot sharper than we give them credit for. They know what's up.

Another girl who is maybe a little less confident than this boy is, she's bringing home the patterned books, and she hates reading now. Even when a school thinks it's doing everything right, we have to get rid of those patterned books.

Anna Geiger: No, I 100% agree. That is something I hammer all the time, because you can't teach how to sound out words over here, and then give them practice material that doesn't let them do that.

I've told this story before, so people who listen to my podcast know this, but when my youngest... We have six kids, and our youngest is going to be in third grade. When he was in preschool, I taught him to read because I wanted to teach all my kids to read even though I don't homeschool them.

By that time, I understood about... I was learning about structured literacy and the science of reading, and I realized, "Okay, it's really important that I do structured phonics with him. I'm going to do that, and we're going to use these decodable books, which I had sparingly used with my other kids, very little, but I don't want to get rid of these leveled books. I really like them, so we're going to do both."

The very first day of teaching him to read after I knew he had good phonemic awareness, he had letters and sounds, we used the decodable book first. It was a Flyleaf book. It was like, "Sam. I am Sam. Sam." It was about a snake. Then I got the leveled book, and he started to read it very, very slowly. He was getting to those words at the end of the pattern, and he was trying to sound it out with what little knowledge he had. I said, "Oh, well, you actually can't do that. Let's use the picture."

That's when the light bulb finally went off. I'm like, "What am I doing? I'm completely confusing him. What is the point of this?"

So then I put them away, and we didn't get them back out again until he was just reading any old book. But those early patterned books aren't all that entertaining, so I don't think he ever picked those to read by himself.

But yes, that is the thing. I think Fundations is a very structured program, although people may have different opinions about its pacing and everything, but I think the problem is it doesn't actually come with decodable text. You have to buy those separately, and the Geodes, I think, go with them. I may not be right about that, but that's important.

If people get a structured phonics program, they need to make sure the reading material comes with it, because otherwise, teachers will have to say, "Well, what do we have? We're going to do this." That's very interesting.

Hopefully more schools will see that those are not useful for beginning readers. They might be something for teaching concepts of print with preschoolers, but when we're teaching kids to read, that's not what we should be using.

Any final words for people who are listening? I'll make sure to link to your website and your workbooks and your book, of course. Anything else you'd want to share?

Irene Daria: My hat really goes off to teachers. I think there's this massive change that's happening across the country. I lived through the previous change, or am aware of, in the year 2000 when the National Reading Panel first released its findings, it seemed like everything was going to change, and it didn't.

Now, it seems like... There have been other times where it seems like everything is going to change, and it didn't. I really think the reason change will happen now, why I really believe in it, is because of teachers. Being a teacher to me is the hardest and most important job that there is, I think. I think teachers are so underappreciated.

I especially think first grade teachers are so important because that year, if they learn to read or they don't, it makes or breaks a child's confidence.

Those are my parting words. You go, ladies and gentlemen, you teachers!

I think the reason things didn't change when whole language turned to balanced literacy... Ken Goodman wrote a book, and in the dedication to it, he dedicated it to teachers who... This is a loose quote, but something like they politely nodded when they were told what to do, and then closed their classroom doors, and continued doing what was not working.

But now, those doors are open, and teachers are on board, and that's going to make a world of difference for children.

Anna Geiger: Wonderful parting words. I can't say enough for teachers, and I love the work that I get to do. I'm not in the classroom now, but supporting teachers who I agree have the hardest, most exhausting job. When it goes well, when they have the right support and the right tools, it is so incredibly rewarding. We're so thankful for all those people, like you said, with their boots on the ground, doing the hard work.

I think teachers will enjoy this book, and I'm excited that hopefully we'll get it in more hands. Thanks so much for talking with me today.

Irene Daria: Thanks, Anna! It was great.

Anna Geiger: If you've ever seen my science of reading book list, it is very, very long. I've read all those books cover to cover. It's not often that I have one sitting on my desk, and I just pick it up to read while I'm having a snack or just sitting outside, but this was one of those books. I hope you will check it out. You can find links to Irene's book and her workbooks and her website in the show notes, which you can find at themeasuredmom.com/episode183. Talk to you next time!

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

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Which literacy assessments are worth you and your students’ time? – with Sean Morrisey

��TRT Podcast #180: Which literacy assessments are worth you and your students’ time? – with Sean Morrisey

Sean Morrisey, former school psychologist turned fifth grade teacher, walks us through the many different literacy assessments teachers administer. Which are useful, and which are a waste of time? You’ll love this practical episode!

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Hello, this is Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom, and in today's episode I'm interviewing Sean Morrisey, a former school psychologist, now a fifth grade teacher. We're going to talk about the problems with over-testing, particularly over-testing literacy in schools. We're going to talk about what types of assessments there are, what's their purpose, which ones are not very useful, and why it's important to choose just a few assessments for specific purposes, rather than go completely overboard. I hope you'll get a lot out of this episode. Let's get started!

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Sean!

Sean Morrisey: Hi, Anna!

Anna Geiger: I'm so glad you're here. I enjoy seeing all your comments on X, as we call it now, and especially about vocabulary. Then I just got the book "Know Better, Do Better" by David and Meredith Liben, and I see that you have made your way into that book quite a bit. They talk to you a lot about some of the things they were sharing about building knowledge and vocabulary.

I know you know many things as a teacher, but today we're going to narrow in on assessments and the problem with over-testing.

Before we do that though, can you talk to us about your history as an educator and what got you to the classroom?

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, so with my history, my path is a little bit different. I went to graduate school for school psychology, and I became a certified school psychologist. I worked as a school psychologist for about eight years. Probably five years in I realized, "Ooh, I really want to go in the classroom and just teach." I have a lovely wife who took care of the three kids for about a year when I was kind of trying to do both, so I could go back to school. I became a certified teacher and I've been teaching for, I think this is my 17th year as a teacher.

Anna Geiger: Okay, so for people who might wonder, what is the big difference between being a school psychologist and a classroom teacher in terms of responsibilities? A lot, I know.

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, I mean there are kind of silly things, like the silly things I didn't realize when I became a teacher like, oh, your bathroom times, you've got to really space that out!

Anna Geiger: Yeah, no more drinking water!

Sean Morrisey: No. As a school psych, you can plan that easier.

As a school psychologist, a big part of my job was kind of assessing kids for learning disabilities who were kind of brought to child study teams and things like that, even as early as first grade. I think early on I realized, wow, reading is so key with academic success and it's just a major component of schooling. With all that time spent we're just kind of assessing for, "Does this child have a reading disability or not?" And then, "Do they qualify for special education services?" That was hard to do.

In the changeover, I just wanted to get in the classroom and actually teach and just have 20 to 25 kids where I could focus on their instruction. It was hard because you just had a lot of talking with teachers, trying to consult, and I don't think that was my forte. I think my forte is more teaching kids. Yeah, for sure.

Anna Geiger: So you come to this from a different angle than a traditional classroom teacher because assessment was a major part of your study to be a school psychologist. Whereas for teachers, I think it's just kind of shoved in there when there's time.

Maybe we can start by just talking about what's out there in terms of literacy assessments, and then we can start breaking down what's actually useful.

Sean Morrisey: In my district, and in my school, I think of about five different assessments that are out there.

You have curriculum based measures, and I still refer to them as that because of my school psych background, like Acadience or DIBELS or AIMSweb. My district early on uses AIMSweb for kindergarten and first grade.

You have those measures kind of screening for early literacy skills, and as the kids grow up we're talking about oral reading, what is their rate, their accuracy, and even some prosody as well. You have those measures that schools use, and they're pretty widely used now, for sure.

You have other measures that have come from the balanced literacy realm, informal reading inventories like the Benchmark Assessment System. My district still calls it Fountas and Pinnell, or even in my school, up until recently, we used Teachers College running records.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, so with those inventories, it's basically, like your viewers probably know, kids read a leveled text, answer questions, and then depending on how well they do, they're given a letter like A through Z where they fall on that.

Anna Geiger: Is the DRA like that? I haven't used it, but I've heard of it. Is that similar to the Benchmark Assessment System?

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, I think the DRA is. That's not one that I'm super familiar with, but I think they have a similar leveling system as well.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, yeah. So you've got the curriculum based measures like Acadience, you've got running records, and now I think it's gaining market share, I would call it the computer adaptive tests, that's like i-Ready and STAR. My district uses i-Ready kindergarten through I think eighth grade now.

Anna Geiger: Oh, wow.

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, these are tests where it's all on the computer, even for kindergartners, which we'll talk about in a little bit, which yeah, I shake my head at that as well. They're adaptive where based on the previous five answers, they'll change the level of difficulty.

Anna Geiger: So it kind of decides for you where you're going to fall pretty early on if you make some mistakes.

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, pretty early on if you make mistakes, and I think a guess here or there can dramatically change where you're headed.

For i-Ready in fifth grade, kids will spend probably about two sessions an hour each, so two hours taking that test on the computer, and it kind of gives you an overall norm reference score. It'll say like, "Oh, you're at the 50th percentile, so you've done better than 50 out of a 100 kids in fifth grade." They also have kind of a cut point of are you at a fifth grade level?

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Sean Morrisey: That's how they do that. Usually the cut points, from what I've read, are based on your state assessments. It's interesting, the cut point for i-Ready is the 66th percentile, so if you're at the 66th percentile or better, you're on grade level. If you're below that, you're not on grade level-

Anna Geiger: Interesting.

Sean Morrisey: ... which is kind of an interesting point.

Anna Geiger: Yeah.

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, yeah. We also have the typical state tests that kind of test general reading comprehension and a little bit of general writing to prompts. They're not really diagnostic in nature, but you get the info of are you proficient as the state says at a fifth grade level?

Anna Geiger: Are those multiple times a year or just the end of the year?

Sean Morrisey: For New York, it's just once a year.

Anna Geiger: Like the outcome assessment?

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, so it's a difference from when we talked about the CBMs, the running records, and the computer adaptive tests, most districts give those three times a year. The state test is once a year, and then you may have multiple ones, depending on the state. Our state has two days for ELA, two days for math, and now fifth grade has one day for science.

That was new for us this year.

For science, it was basically kind of like a warm reading test, so it was a reading test, but based on scientific topics they covered in grades three through five. For fifth grade, it was long. The average student took about two hours and forty minutes to complete it. Think about that.

Anna Geiger: Wow, wow. So maybe before we get into which ones are... Did you list all the ones you wanted to talk about?

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, just one other thing because I think there's a lot of talk about K-2 because we talk about early literacy a lot, but when you get into upper elementary and middle school, districts are doing a lot of standards-based assessments. They'll have those three times a year where basically it's a passage and there might be main idea questions and they try to mirror it like the state assessment because they want to know, "How are the kids going to do on this?" It should be like the state assessment. That's just an additional test that some kids take.

Anna Geiger: So before we talk about the ones that are a problem, why so many tests? Where does that come from?

Sean Morrisey: I am kind of flummoxed. That's the word. I just don't...

I think district administrators think we need all of these tests, we need to test the kids on all these things, and we need to have tests on the computer. We definitely need early literacy CBMs, but I am still kind of baffled as to why we need four or five different tests throughout the year.

One thing that I don't think is talked about enough is time. At the start of the year, do we ever think about how much instructional time we want to set aside for testing?

I've never heard anyone in any district ever say, "Ooh, we're going to only spend 5% of our instructional time testing," because if we really looked at the time, I think teachers see it, but I think administrators, their eyes would be wide open if they saw how much instructional time we're losing.

Yeah, I just don't know where it came from historically. It seems like a lot.

I mean, in some regards, I guess in one case, like, I think i-Ready. Teachers in New York state get rated and we get a HEDI score. Years ago i-Ready put in how you can use i-Ready for the HEDI score, so-

Anna Geiger: What's HEDI score?

Sean Morrisey: I don't know what it stands for, but-

Anna Geiger: How do you spell that?

Sean Morrisey: H-E-D-I. It's basically how effective we are as teachers.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Sean Morrisey: In grades three through five, up until recently, our effectiveness was based on how the kids improved on i-Ready, which that's another whole podcast.

Anna Geiger: Ooh. Yes, it is.

Sean Morrisey: Maybe for administrators, that was was easy. It was like, "Oh, this is easy. We don't have to think about creating anything. It's there." Yeah, yeah.

Anna Geiger: So I guess when we think about the point of the testing, so we know CBMs... I usually just call them universal screeners because I still don't understand the phrase curriculum-based measurement. I don't get that, even though I've read the definition a million times.

Universal screeners we know are to find out who's at risk so we can give the proper instruction, so that's supposed to be very directly connected to instruction.

Then we would say for things like running records and Fountas and Pinnell's Benchmark Assessment System, those are supposed to be connected to instruction too, it's just that they don't do what they say they do.

Sean Morrisey: Right.

Anna Geiger: So they're not... Well now we're getting into something else, but that's what they're supposed to be. I'll wait until we talk about what's problematic, but-

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, yeah.

Anna Geiger: And then what about i-Ready, is that supposed to be a screener?

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, so i-Ready, well, that one's interesting because they call it a diagnostic assessment, but as we talk about that, it's like they use it as a screener and a diagnostic assessment. I would say it's definitely, for fifth grade, more of a screener and not a diagnostic assessment. And we'll talk about why, yeah.

Anna Geiger: Oh boy. So then the state tests are more like the outcome-based assessment to see if they learned what they were supposed to learn in school. But it seems like we're sometimes doing the same thing twice. Is that what you see happening?

Sean Morrisey: That's perfect. Why have multiple comprehension measures? Basically, your computer adaptive tests like i-Ready are really, for fifth grade, a comprehension assessment. There are basically three domains: comprehending literature, comprehending information, and then they have a vocabulary part. The early phonics and decoding, by fifth grade, those measures are so easy, the kids have basically tested out, so you're not really diagnosing anything there.

So if you have an outcome measure, like a state test, and you can see at the end of third grade how those kids do, then with i-Ready in fourth grade, you're basically testing the same thing.

But then schools say, "Oh, but we can look at the i-Ready scores, and they'll sort of predict what the kids will do on the state test." They do an okay job of predicting, but it's just another measure that's the same. We already know with the state assessment how they're going to do on a measure like that.

Anna Geiger: What's the point of knowing how they're going to do? If it seems like they're not going to do well, then you're supposed to do something about it? Or you're just supposed to know, "Okay, this is how they're going to do." Is it supposed to affect instruction?

Sean Morrisey: Well, I mean, I think in some regards schools will look at how kids will do. But with i-Ready, and I think this is the big issue, it's labeled as a diagnostic assessment, so all the teachers think it's a diagnostic assessment.

It has a vocabulary sub-tests, so it kind of teases out vocabulary a little bit, but you don't know really if a student is scoring far below grade level based on decoding. Maybe they're only reading 50 words a minute. Or is it based on vocabulary or things like that? It's hard to tease out with that.

Anna Geiger: Just as a review for anyone listening, because I wouldn't have known this five years ago, the difference between a universal screener and a diagnostic is a screener tells you who's at risk and the diagnostic is supposed to help you dial in and figure out what exactly the problem is. But not all kids need a diagnostic assessment.

Sean Morrisey: Correct.

Anna Geiger: Teachers are dialing in to figure out what the problem is to know what they need to do to fix it. So yeah, those tests that have these broad things that they're testing aren't useful in that way.

Which ones would you say are just problematic all around?

Sean Morrisey: I think the most problematic are running records, like the Benchmark Assessment System or Teachers College running records. I think they're really problematic because of a few things.

Number one, even if they were really good assessments, it takes so long to administer.

Anna Geiger: It just takes so long, so long. I know.

Sean Morrisey: Coming from the school psych realm, I was always big into data. I'm still very much a data guy.

I actually figured out, I estimated, how much instructional time that takes to complete running records three times a year for a typical fifth grade class, in our district that's like 24. I mean, if you're doing them like you're supposed to, that's like 30 minutes a kid three times a year, so you're talking 36 hours just completing an assessment to get a "level", which really doesn't mean very much at all.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Sean Morrisey: When you talk about instructional time... I kind of break up my day into literacy, and I group science and social into that. Science, social, and ELA to me are all literacy and math is kind of separate. I figured out doing running records takes about 9% of our instructional minutes for the year.

Anna Geiger: Ooh. Well, that's a really good way to look at it. The percentage of your time really makes you think.

Sean Morrisey: 9%.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, and sometimes they can take more than 30 minutes, especially as they get older and they're reading longer texts.

I was a big running records person. I taught teachers how to give running records because I thought that information was valuable. I thought, "Well, this is what I need to know because I need to find their level and move them up, and this is the best way to figure that out."

Also, and this is the thing that people will still say about running records, which I understand, that you get so much out of listening to them read.

I agree that it is very valuable to listen to kids read. The problem of course with running records is you're trying to figure out what queuing system they're using, which is not what we're trying to figure out.

You can listen to them read when you're doing ORF with your universal screener, you get a lot out of that. Then there are places there to make notes about particular reading behaviors that they have. There are ways to listen to them read that actually give you useful information, and we want to listen to them read often anyway.

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, this has been brought up probably in the last month or two by others about if we're moving away from running records, are we listening kids read enough?

I think you could easily... I don't even think you need to administer an oral reading fluency measure. For instance, today, we were reading One Crazy Summer in my class, that's our novel for the next month, and students were chorally reading a few pages. Sometimes I'll sort of be like the leader where I'll lead the choral reading and I'll pace it out. Sometimes I have students do that.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Sean Morrisey: So today one student was being the pacer, and I was just walking around listening during choral reading time, listening to kids read right there.

Or if we're reading, like today, we were reading an article and students were repeatedly reading that article, like alternating paragraphs. Well, I'm walking around and listening to kids read there as well. I think you can easily do that in your school day. Yeah, for sure.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, thanks for pointing that out because many teachers are thinking about how to do reading instruction that's not primarily small group. Guided reading was primarily small group; there wasn't much whole class instruction at all. It's helpful to think about how you can listen to kids read. I know that choral reading is really valuable, and everybody's got to be reading, and you can check and see who needs support too.

What about computer adaptive tests?

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, so I would call computer adaptive tests the "meh." That's kind of how I phrase it. I wouldn't say they're terrible. I think they're better than maybe spending so much time on running records because they don't take nearly as much time.

Anna Geiger: You said i-Ready is one of them. Are there any other ones you can list from here?

Sean Morrisey: I think the big ones are i-Ready and STAR. I think those are used a lot in our country. i-Ready is used in our district at K-8, and it takes, I would say throughout the whole year, probably about six hours. So it doesn't take the 36 hours of running records, but six hours is still six hours.

And what are you gaining from them? What information are you gaining? It's a screener. Is it predicting how well they'll do on a proficiency measure like the state test? Yeah, I think it does an okay job with that. I think the research shows it does a decent job, but how is it helping you with instruction?

For me, it doesn't really help me too much with instruction, and that's why I'm not the biggest fan. When you look at kindergarten and first grade, I don't think there's one teacher out there using computer adaptive tests that say they like it for their kids. I mean, they're kindergarteners. You're spending time trying to teach them how to manipulate the mouse or click on things. I think that's kind of silly.

Anna Geiger: I remember when I was a first grade teacher, I don't know if this was a new thing, but they decided to do the fill in the bubbles for my first grade for the first time. It was maddening, maddening because I think all of it was so overwhelming to them. They were marking things wrong that I knew they knew. I knew they knew the answer, but they were just, I don't know. But I couldn't say anything. It was maddening. I thought, "This is just too much for them." It was just too much. And that wasn't with a computer screen.

Yeah, and the universal screening with the little kids is really fun to do actually. I get to volunteer to do that at my kids' school. It's amazing to me how much you get from a little kid in 10 minutes about seeing what they can do, and what they're struggling with, and comparing them to the people in their group. I can say, "Oh, I can see that a lot of kids are struggling with this," or, "This kid is an outlier," either in the higher or low direction. You can get a lot out of 10 minutes, so it's really great when teachers can do that.

But for teachers to do it, it's got to be quick, right? It's got to be really efficient.

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, and I think some of the issues with the computer adaptive tests too is what they do with the data. You have to be sort of an expert in data analysis to understand where the weaknesses are. Teachers, they don't go through test construction methods class.

There's a term called standard error of measurement, so basically any test that kids take in reading, it's not an exact score. There's a range. On an i-Ready in fifth grade if you score at the 50th percentile, so you're doing better than 50 out of a 100 kids, really the range is you're doing better than 40-60% of the kids.

And that's not 100%. There's only a 68% chance that you're falling between the 40th and 60th percentile. So just based on error, there's a third chance that you're below the 40th percentile or above the 60th percentile. We're not talking about a specific exact reading score. I mean the range is huge.

I even heard a story where students were getting ice cream parties for improving on i-Ready from their start score to their end score. Some kids who are really, really strong readers, they didn't "go up enough" so they didn't get the party, but they were grade levels above in reading.

Anna Geiger: Oh my goodness. Oh, that's very sad.

Sean Morrisey: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Wow.

Sean Morrisey: You just shake your head on decision making like that when you just know...

Coming into fifth grade when the kids take i-Ready in the fall, I know the four or five kids who are going to make the least amount of growth on i-Ready because they scored a certain score in fourth grade, and on fifth grade they did markedly better. But that was error, that's by chance. You know they're not going to do that well in the future or vice versa.

I'll have kids who scored maybe in the 80th percentile in fourth grade in the fall, winter, and spring. They were consistently above grade level, and then they scored in the 40th percentile in the fall of fifth grade. Well, I know I don't even have to teach them that year and they're going to do better by the end of the year. There's error there. No one ever talks about that kind of stuff.

Anna Geiger: So what would the school leadership say in terms of why you're doing i-Ready?

Sean Morrisey: I think to collect data and to see which kids are struggling, so we could use that data point to put kids into different reading groups and things like that.

My thought to that is I think we could use other measures that do a better job, that will group kids even better than i-Ready.

That's kind of my thing, that it's not the best assessment for that. Even these tests, they'll group the kids based on how they answered the questions, but when veteran teachers look at the groups they are like, "I would never put that student with that student." They have different needs, and i-Ready is not picking that up.

Anna Geiger: So does i-Ready try to do the grouping for you?

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, they'll do the grouping for you. They'll say this is this group. They'll give you some general things like, "Oh, these kids generally need this." And then...

Well, they have their intervention part as well where they say, "Now it's adaptive so wherever they fell on this test, here are computer lessons that the kids could use that are basically tailored to that student."

Anna Geiger: Ooh, I don't like that at all. I think computers can only do so many things and no, I don't like that idea of the computer giving them their intervention either, but that's a whole different story I guess.

Sean Morrisey: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: So we've talked about how it's a problem to do too many because it's a terrible time drain. You said in your district some teachers are spending over 15% of instructional time completing assessments, and that's crazy because teachers are always saying we need more time, right? We always do, every day.

Sean Morrisey: Right, right.

Anna Geiger: And you're saying that more is not better when you have that opportunity cost, especially if teachers don't know what to do with it or it's giving you data or guidance that maybe isn't good.

Sean Morrisey: Right.

Anna Geiger: Anything else that you can share that might be a problem with giving too many?

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, I think just even additional ones. For instance, sometimes districts will try to create standards based assessments where we're like... The state test scores will come back and you get all these kind of piles and piles of data. For instance, "Your kids did bad on this question, it was main idea." Well, when you get down to it...

For instance, one year we realized where it might've been coded as main idea, but the question asked, "What was the benefit?" Well, the kids didn't know what "benefit" meant.

Anna Geiger: Right, right.

Sean Morrisey: It must've been like seven or eight years ago, and that kind of spurred my big learning about vocabulary because I realized, "Oh, I'm assuming that kids in fifth grade know some of these words and they really don't."

It was coded as find the main idea, but it was really that the kids didn't know what benefit meant. So the districts will say, "Oh, we need to teach kids how to find the main idea better. We need to come up with more lessons on all these different passages for main idea," which is just the total opposite of what you really want to do.

I mean, it's hard because even Tim Shanahan has blogged about this. I think he probably has five blogs about these standards based assessments and every one he starts off with, "Dear Administrators, you're not going to like this." That's how he starts it. But still, it feels like many, many districts still want to do this, and it's just not probably the best practice.

Anna Geiger: Is that similar to, let's say with a universal screener, if someone does poorly on the nonsense word fluency assessment and the teacher says, "Oh, so now we've got to do lots of nonsense word reading as the solution." Is it similar to that where they score badly?

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, that's a great analogy.

Anna Geiger: So you're not getting at the root of the issue. Okay. Yeah. Just because you score badly on a main idea assessment, there are many other things that go into that is what you're saying, like vocabulary and all kinds of things.

We've talked about a lot of problems with assessments, but of course we know assessments are important and useful. If teachers had a choice, what should they do?

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, so I think this is key. I'm a big fan of screeners like Acadience. Early on, in kindergarten and first grade, assessing early literacy skills with phoneme segmentation fluency or even nonsense words is important to see if they're picking up the decoding skill.

Then as you move along, oral reading fluencies are so predictive of how kids are going to comprehend what they read.

I've actually had some data where in my classroom over a span of about four years, kids who are below the 60th percentile on oral reading fluency, like Acadience or AIMSweb, I haven't had one student proficient on the ELA assessment if they're below that. That's a pretty high correlation. So even if you're at the 50th percentile of fluency, I still haven't had one student proficient on the state ELA assessment, and our ELA assessment is pretty hard, so boy is that a big indicator.

I really like oral reading fluency measures. They're brief, they're standardized, all the kids are getting the same one, and you can progress monitor. They're more sensitive to improvement compared to the other measures that we talked about.

But it's hard because with the other measures, they know "progress monitoring" is a key word in academics now, so they'll put in, "Oh, aside from these three benchmarks, you can do progress monitoring." But on computer adaptive tests, I've done progress monitoring to see how close it would be, and the variability was crazy. It wasn't even... It's not like on Acadience where you're reading 100 words today, two weeks from now you might be at 108, then you go down to maybe 105, then up to 116. This is like you were at the 25th percentile, then you're at the 80th percentile, not even in the same geographical area.

Anna Geiger: So they haven't clearly tested these to make sure...

Just for teachers to know, because again, this is not something I would've understood five years ago, but the point of the screener is to figure out who's at risk and then you can dig deeper. So if someone is, like you said, below 60% on ORF, well then we have to figure out why. Is it a word reading problem? Is it a comprehension problem? If it's an accuracy issue, it's probably a word reading problem.

Now we give them the diagnostic phonics assessment so we know what to teach. Then that progress monitoring that we do every week or every two weeks, which is very, very fast, like a minute or two, that measures if what we're doing is working.

If it's a word reading issue and we're doing some multisyllable word intervention for 20 minutes a day, and we find out in two weeks that there's still no growth and we keep testing, but after six weeks there's still no growth, then we need to be doing something different. That's the point of progress monitoring to see if it's working.

But we have to start with something, and the nice thing is not everybody needs the diagnostic unless you're using it to form groups that might be useful. Do I have that right?

Sean Morrisey: Right. Yeah, I would say you're exactly right. I mean, if students are in first grade and they're reading 80 words a minute, they're breaking the phonics code. You don't have to do a phonics survey with them. They're on the path to strong reading, for sure.

Anna Geiger: I know a lot of people ask about comprehension assessments, and the ORF does correlate very well with comprehension. If kids are reading accurately at an appropriate rate, then most likely they understand what they're reading. But we do have kids who might be reading and not being able to answer any questions about it or talk about it.

Have you found any comprehension diagnostic assessments that you like?

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, so I'm going to throw this one out there. I think of it more with vocabulary.

I'll give you a little bit of data from my classroom. When I go back to what I said where if you're below the 60th percentile on oral reading fluency, zero students were proficient in the state assessment. If you're above that, it's between 70 and 80%, so there's still 20 or 30% of those kids not proficient on the state assessment. So what's the reason?

For me, and this is a little bit anecdotal, but there's some research to back this up. I think vocabulary is a main piece. I think quick measures of vocabulary where it's still in the field, there's not much out there, as kind of a screener.

I think it's very, very important, so I do vocabulary measures that I've created, or I've used a couple of others. I give them to students, and they do very, very well predicting what students will be proficient on comprehension measures. I think they actually predict better how kids will do on comprehension measures versus two comprehension measures correlating with one another, if that kind of makes sense.

I'll give you a couple of examples. Here's an example of a multiple choice question looking at more academic vocabulary. "In subsequent weeks, we learned how to protect earth's resources," and the word subsequent is underlined. The four choices on what does subsequent mean are "earlier, later, superior, main." Do they know what that academic word is?

Here's another example, "The group comprises ten individuals." Comprises would be underlined. Does that mean "include, nominate, exclude, co-opt"?

Questions like that you could very quickly administer as a class. I found personally in my classroom that as a screener, they work really, really well.

Another one I do that's such a good screener is when there are four words, and I call it Odd One Out. One word is different than the other three.

I'll give you an example, "assemble, congregate, convene, disband." Obviously in that one, disband is breaking apart and convene, congregate, and assemble are groups or something being put together.

I have found that those kinds of questions really will put my kids into groups. Kids who do really well on that, they always are proficient. Kids who struggle on those types of vocabulary, well that's one reason they're not meeting these proficiency levels on comprehension tests.

I've been able to predict up until about 95% accuracy which kids will be proficient on the state assessment by using ORF and a quick vocabulary measure, which I don't think you can really ever get better than that. That's pretty high.

Anna Geiger: Okay, so if they do poorly on your vocabulary assessment, then what? How do you help those kids?

Sean Morrisey: In my classroom, vocabulary is kind of embedded throughout the day. I think with vocabulary compared to decoding, it's more whole group instruction, really teaching words, using words, and trying to embed even morphology all day long because kids just need just many, many language experiences throughout the school day.

Anna Geiger: Do you do anything different for those kids who you noticed were doing poorly on vocabulary?

Sean Morrisey: I think the big thing is multiple exposures. I have a really great relationship with my reading specialist in my building.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Sean Morrisey: She knows exactly what topics in science and social and primary vocabulary words I'm using. She in many cases is giving kids many more exposures in a small group, so they have just more opportunities. That's one way that's been working out really nicely this year.

Anna Geiger: That makes a lot of sense. She's not just trying to build a vocabulary by picking more words, but she's taking the words you're already teaching and teaching them, like you said, and giving more exposures, which is what those kids probably need.

That's very helpful to think about what you do with that particular information. Anything else to share about what teachers can do with assessment results?

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, I think we're trying to get into the weeds too much with all of these different assessments.

I think we should just kind of take more of a simple view of reading. Obviously there are more factors, like sometimes kids aren't strategic readers or they're struggling with text features. But when we're thinking about the basics, is it a decoding problem, is it a language problem, or is it both?

If it's a decoding problem, you need to get to a certain threshold with decoding to improve your comprehension, so more time has to be spent there either in intervention or in Tier 1 in the classroom.

If it's a vocabulary problem, well, we need more intervention in vocabulary.

The issue is when kids struggle in both and we have a lot of work on our hands. Those students may need more instructional time throughout the day, maybe after school experiences or before school experiences, things like that.

Anna Geiger: That's why, like you said, teamwork is so important.

And that's why we want our Tier 1 to be strong, so we don't need them to be doing something necessarily completely different in intervention if our Tier 1 is strong. Then it can be more intense, more supported, and more small group.

In general, just to sum up, we talked about how there are lots of literacy assessments, but what we really want to figure out is who's at risk? Then we need to figure out what to do to help them, and maybe this might be something to share with an administrator who is over-testing.

I know you know a lot about this, and you haven't seen a lot of change in your district, or have you? Any advice for teachers who want to know what to do?

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, I think there is change. Even in my school, I have a wonderful principal, and she made running records optional.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Sean Morrisey: She didn't want to just mandate it because some teachers are still transitioning in that, but now they're not mandated. Now as a fifth grade teacher, I don't have to spend loads and loads of time doing that.

But it's having these discussions with administrators, and I think for administrators to kind of just... I think the big thing is to think about how many minutes of instruction you have and how much time do you want to set aside for assessment. If it's 15% of your instructional time, I think using common sense, that's just too much. It should be probably down to about 5% at most.

Anna Geiger: So really the big question to ask is, what are we getting out of this assessment and is it worth the time we're putting into it?

Sean Morrisey: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Is it informing our instruction?

Well, thank you. Is there anything else you'd like to share about assessment or anything else?

Sean Morrisey: I've been a big fan of your website and podcast, so I just very much appreciate you having me on.

I think teachers will be nodding their heads, like, "Yep, that makes sense. That makes sense." It's just a matter of how do we get everyone in the educational world, including administrators, sort of on the same page, and how are we using this?

Maybe one more point is sometimes when you test too much, then we take a lot of time analyzing the results. I know in lots of districts, especially when we're giving tons of fall assessments, they don't want to make groups until after those assessments are done and after analysis. Then students aren't getting intervention for four to five weeks after the start of the school year.

Anna Geiger: Oof, yeah, yeah.

Sean Morrisey: My recommendation would be to ask how many of these assessments do we need to do in the fall since we have spring scores, and let's right away on the second day of school get these kids into groups. Then we can do quick brief screening assessments after the fact. Do we need to wait five weeks before intervening?

Anna Geiger: Yeah, no. The answer would be no.

Well, thank you so much. I think for teachers a good start is just to understand all the vocabulary around all this so they can have intelligent conversations about it, because I think it can be really overwhelming. For teachers who maybe don't have your background, they may not be aware of all the types of assessment and why they're useful. I'll probably put some links in the show notes that can help people that are still figuring that out. Stephanie Stollar does a great job explaining assessments.

Then for anyone who's interested in vocabulary, I'll link to your podcast episode with Melissa and Lori because that was a really great one about how to teach vocabulary and that can be applied across the grades too.

Sean Morrisey: Yeah, I would agree with you about Stephanie Stollar with MTSS, she just does a nice job explaining it in very understandable terms.

It's interesting that you mention her because I just put an email out to my principal and a couple other individuals suggesting maybe we can get together and listen to her, she was recently on a podcast. I think we do a pretty good job at our school, but after listening to that, maybe we could even do a little bit better. She just hits everything perfectly on how to intervene and use time efficiently and that sort of thing.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, for sure, for sure. Well, thank you so much! I really appreciate your time.

Sean Morrisey: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode180. Talk to you next time!

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

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Resources to learn moreStephanie Stollar’s podcast episode on using MTSS Sean Morrisey’s podcast episode on vocabulary instruction with Melissa & Lori Love Literacy

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The post Which literacy assessments are worth you and your students’ time? – with Sean Morrisey appeared first on The Measured Mom.