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All about Morphology – with Dr. Deb Glaser

TRT Podcast #150: All about Morphology with Dr. Deb Glaser

Dr. Deb Glaser is an author, educational consultant, and professional development provider with a special interest in morphology. In this episode she defines morphology and explains how to teach it, beginning in kindergarten and moving through the grades.

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Hello, this is Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom, and in this episode I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Deb Glaser. She's the creator of The Reading Teacher's Top 10 Tools, which is an excellent training for teachers who want to learn about the science of reading. She's the author of multiple books and some curricula for teaching morphology, and we'll be talking about that in detail today.

I have admired Dr. Glaser's work for a long time, particularly her morphology work, and so I'd reached out to her several times through a contact form and didn't hear back, but I didn't give up. When I was in New York this October for The Reading League Conference, I was walking down the street with my friends looking for a restaurant, and there was Dr. Glaser walking all by herself!

I said, "Hello Deb Glaser!" because of course I recognized her.

She was very nice, and I gave her my business card and she noted that it was nice and thick, which I do on purpose so that people are less likely to throw it away, and told her I'd love to have her on the podcast.

When I got home I was able to find an email address for her and then we were able to schedule this interview! I thoroughly enjoyed it and I am sure that you will too!

Anna Geiger: Welcome Dr. Glaser!

Deb Glaser: Thank you, Anna. I am so excited to be here with you today.

Anna Geiger: I am so happy that I tracked you down because so many people have wanted to hear something about morphology on the podcast, and I knew that you were the one that I would love to talk to about it because of the wonderful work you've done in the curricula that you've published.

Could you first introduce us to yourself and maybe start by telling us how you got into education?

Deb Glaser: Oh, sure. Well, it's been a number of years, and I was very fortunate in the beginning of my career to work with a teacher who was involved in the early CBM (curriculum-based measurement) research, so right from the very beginning, science was a very strong contributor to the work I was doing.

Initially my work was teaching in resource rooms. It was the beginning of Public Law 94-142, and I knew that the schools would need teachers so I went into special education. I worked with children with reading difficulties right from the very beginning for a number of years. I taught second grade, fifth grade, and then I became the director of education at a private learning center for children and adults with dyslexia, the Lee Pesky Learning Center here in Boise, Idaho.

That then opened up my world even further into the science of reading and I was introduced to many of the researchers at the time when the National Reading Panel first published their findings in 1999. I was very fortunate to bring the Shaywitz's, Louisa Moats, and Reid Lyon to Idaho for a conference and became further immersed in the amazing things happening in helping us understand what it takes to teach reading.

Education has been my life since the very beginning when you think about how long I was in school and all the way to getting my doctorate in education.

I recognized really early in my work that teachers lacked the products, the programs, and the systematic explicit processes that would help them not only understand and identify what their children needed in order to be successful readers, but to be able to teach them what to teach their students so that they could learn to read. The greatest gift we can give a child is the gift of reading.

Anna Geiger: So it seems like you sidestepped instruction in balanced literacy. Was that never given to you in any of your higher education, your doctorate, or anything like that?

Deb Glaser: Oh, that's a really good question because at one point I remember sitting with a group of my friends, teacher friends, and we were having coffee one morning and we were so upset because our school district wasn't letting us teach whole language.

Anna Geiger: Oh!

Deb Glaser: I mean, it was just so easy to get sucked into whole language, and that's what everyone was doing - the heart assessment of what whole language would be and opening up this world of being child-focused.

We spent a really short time feeling that way because we very soon realized that whole language is not whole language. It was actually very partial language because it left out some pretty important elements in instruction. In order for a child to read, they must be taught to read, especially the children that we were working with.

Anna Geiger: So in all your years of working with teachers, have you been seeing that the balanced literacy idea of three-queuing and leveled books has gotten in the way of some of the work you're trying to do, or do you feel like it creates issues that the special education teacher wouldn't normally have to see?

Deb Glaser: Well, I think of early on when a small group of us worked very closely with Louisa Moats on the development of the initial LETRS trainings. We were so like a group of disciples, very religious in our devotion to getting the word out there, and there were many years initially when the audience was very skeptical. Teachers were very skeptical. They wanted what they were comfortable doing, they wanted it to continue, and it was hard for them to think that there was going to have to be a change and they were very resistant. That resistance lasted for many years. As you know, Anna, and your listeners know, in just the last few years, the tide has turned.

Anna Geiger: It must be exciting for you to watch.

Deb Glaser: Oh, it's so exciting! What's most exciting is those of us who have been in this for all of these years are now able to step back, and there are so many gifted and thoughtful and smart young educators out there who are taking the reins and want to continue this movement. It's all to the benefit of our world, our children's world, and our community world, our social world.

Anna Geiger: I agree, it is a very exciting time. We're so thankful that so many of you are still willing to put yourself out there, give us lots of information, and are still publishing books, which is very helpful for people who are looking to learn this and, as you said, spread the word.

We're going to get into some technical stuff now.

Before we pressed record, I said that when I first started learning about the science of reading, there were some words that were brand new to me, like phoneme, grapheme, and morphology was definitely one. It seemed a little strange, like something I probably didn't have to think too much about. Now I realize how integral that is to how spelling works.

Can we start off with, first of all, some definitions, like the difference between a phoneme and a morpheme?

Deb Glaser: Well, both phoneme and morpheme are terms related to language, and the way we know that is because each of them ends in E-M-E, which is Latin for little bit. A phoneme is a little bit of sound. It is the smallest sound unit in any spoken language.

The combination of phonemes is what gives us our words, which are morphemes. A morpheme maybe is an E-M-E, a little bit, of form or meaningful form. It's the smallest form within a word that has meaning.

For example, if we have the word "seen," it has three phonemes, /s/ /��/ /n/. I can use that word in a couple of different ways, meaning the morpheme, the meaning of the word, changes.

Have you "seen" my car keys? That is the S-E-E-N. So there we have a grapheme representation as well, which is an E-M-E, the smallest unit, of writing in a word. So we have S-E-E-N are the graphemes.

Or it was a beautiful "scene" at sunset last night. The word is the same, /s/ /��/ /n/, from the phoneme and sound perspective. In this particular word, there is a different grapheme representation, but also a different meaning. We know that, well, I could get into the graphemes, but I think we're going to talk about that a little bit later... But what we need to know is a phoneme is the speech sound, and the morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. What's interesting is that a word can be really long and have a single morpheme, or it can be short and have multiple morphemes. Maybe we can talk about a long word that has a single morpheme like "alligator." It's all one unit of meaning, which is different from a shorter word like "unhappy."

Deb Glaser: "Unhappy" is two morphemes, "un" meaning not, and "happy" of course has its meaning of feeling of joy. "Unhappy" would be three syllables and two morphemes.

Anna Geiger: So how is phonemic awareness different from morphological awareness?

Deb Glaser: Yeah, that's a really good question, Anna. I talk about that sometimes with teachers in helping them understand that phoneme awareness has been around a long time, and the importance of teaching the awareness of phonemes as it relates to decoding.

But we've given very little attention to morphological awareness, and that is the awareness of the meaningful forms that compose our words. Both phonemes and morphemes are part of spoken language prior to children coming to us to learn to read.

Our job is to create an awareness of those components of language that will make it easier for students to learn the written system of the language that they speak.

Children come to us with a knowledge that is implicit about language. There's an implicit knowledge where they know that there's a difference between the two words, "cat" and "cot." They aren't aware what that difference is because they're focused on meaning, but they know what a cat is and that a cot is a little bed.

It's an implicit knowledge that they have about the language, and the same with morphemes. When we listen to young children speak, their implicit knowledge of how words are composed from the morpheme perspective becomes apparent.

My brother, who is a medical doctor, called me yesterday morning because he knows my field and the work I've been doing. I've been talking with him about it. He called and said, "Oh, one of the young doctors came in the other morning and was so tickled that his four-year-old said in the kitchen that night before, 'My mom is a cooker and my dad is a cooker'."

That's a really good example of that morphological implicit knowledge. One who teaches is a teacher, one who farms is a farmer, one who cooks is a cooker. It just makes sense!

So then when we create awareness of the morphemes, we teach children that E-R means one who or that which, because a cooker could be a pot. We'll have a cooker on the stove here like this pot, or a stove is a cooker perhaps. I think that's not really common in our use of that word here in the States, but that's that which cooks and a person would be the one who cooks.

That knowledge is implicit and there's no reason to bring an awareness to the phonemes or the morphemes unless we are teaching reading, because that is critical to word recognition, especially as children get older and the number of multisyllabic, multi-morphemic words increases in the written language.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. I think my favorite story about that was when my youngest, he's in second grade now, but when he was about four, he came in and hung his swimsuit on the rack and he said, "I hanged my swimsuit on the rack!"

I said, "Oh, you hung it."

He said, "Yes, it's hunging!" So he knew the morphemes, he didn't know the base, but it was pretty funny.

I know that that's so fun for parents as their kids are starting to talk and all the funny ways that they change words into past tense or things like that and all the things that they kind of approximate.

Deb Glaser: I tell a story about my three-year-old grandson and his creativity with words. After eating crackers off of his soup, he said, "I uncrackered my soup," which is adding a prefix and making cracker past tense. I mean, it's pretty amazing.

A teacher reflected to me how we celebrate a young child's temporary or inventive spelling when they're learning the grapheme-phoneme relationships, but she wasn't aware that we ever celebrate or truly understand what's happening when a child is using that temporary language and experimenting with morphemes. Because what an amazing acquisition, I mean, that's just such a beautiful representation of that biological language brain we have, that in a world where we're spoken to and we're read to, we're building that implicit knowledge about the construction of words.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, very interesting to think about.

So as you said, they don't have to have morphological awareness to understand how to speak or to start applying it in different ways, but as they're reading and spelling, especially, we need to teach morphology.

Could you tell us why is it important for teachers to understand morphology?

Deb Glaser: Well, you have to understand something to teach it, that's the bottom line. Many teachers have shared with me that they don't feel comfortable in their own understanding of morphology based upon their ability to know the meanings of every prefix, every suffix, every root.

Let me just point out right here, none of us ever know the meanings of every prefix, suffix, and root, and awareness is on a continuum. You can be aware of prefixes and suffixes, and it helps you read words and it helps you understand their meanings. Then as we grow along this continuum of awareness, when we are teaching prefixes and suffixes and roots, we are learning the meanings of those right along with our students.

That's one of the reasons I've been dedicated to this development of materials for teachers is to help build their own confidence in their understanding of what morphological awareness truly means and developing their knowledge of the meanings of those morphemes as they teach them.

Anna Geiger: That is very good to hear because I think it becomes very overwhelming, especially when you watch a presentation with someone talking about morphology and they're breaking the word apart and you're like, "I didn't know any of those things. How can I teach my students?" It's good to know that you don't have to know it all to get started, you just have to be a step ahead. That's good.

Deb Glaser: That's right. Absolutely.

It's important for teachers to understand morphology so that they can teach it because there is so much research out there, and we keep getting more research too, that supports the need for teaching morphological awareness.

Even in kindergarten, the implicit knowledge that children have about words can be brought to their attention through the phoneme and the morpheme as we prepare them to learn to decode, and early morphological knowledge and awareness shares a relationship with future literacy, the ability to decode and comprehend.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. It all comes down to understanding that we have a morphophonemic language and not just phonemic.

I remember doing this when I was a kid and one of my teenagers likes to do this. He'll just take words and say, "Well, if it was pronounced the way it was supposed to," say the word tripped, "it would be /t/ /r/ /��/ /p/ /��/ /d/." But of course, it's not supposed to be pronounced that way because that's not how English works. It's not a one-to-one for phonemes, and the E-D has a purpose in there.

The point of this is to help our students realize that more goes into spelling than just one-to-one matching of sounds, phonemes and graphemes.

Maybe we can talk a little bit about why morphological awareness is so important for spelling.

Deb Glaser: Yeah, but let me just add one more point to what we were just talking about as well. Teaching morphological awareness is not new. Anna, you had shared early on that was something you weren't aware of in your early preparation for teaching.

When I did a lot of work for the National Council on Teacher Quality and reviewed texts that were being used for preparing teachers to learn to read, morphology was always there in those textbooks, but it was very surface and just lists of prefixes and suffixes to teach, without really helping teachers understand what the awareness of morphemes meant. We have always taught E-D as a past tense within our spelling lessons. Well, I wouldn't say ALL of us did, but it's always been there to teach.

A lot of the morphological awareness that we have is something we intuited ourselves. We weren't taught directly. In that way it's a lot like phoneme awareness, and before we taught explicitly phoneme awareness, there were some children who just intuited that these phonemes were sounds that we connected to letters without having been taught explicitly.

The same has been with morphological awareness. A lot of this is just intuitive about the language, but we can't take a chance that kids are going to figure it out themselves. They benefit a lot from morphological instruction.

One of the benefits is children become curious about words and they become excited about words, and they start asking questions and wondering, is that a root? What does it mean? Does this word have a prefix on it? Is that a prefix in this word? Those are the kinds of questions we want children to ask because the basic premise of building a long-term memory for something is spending time thinking about it. We remember what we think about. Giving opportunities to children to think about words along these lines builds a rich language classroom.

Anna Geiger: Well, and it's very fun as an adult to figure all this out too. I was reading "Beneath the Surface of Words" the other day, by Sue Scibetta Hegland, and she was talking about the root "cave" and how it's in words like "cavity." I never thought about that before! So I said to my teenagers who were sitting on the couch, "Have you ever thought about that? That cave is related to the word cavity? Why do you think that is?" We talked about it.

Then just at that very moment, my fourth grader was doing some homework and she had to write the word militia and she said, "I don't know how to spell it!"

I said, "Well, actually," and I wrote the word "military." I said, "It has to do with 'military.' Now can you figure it out?" And she could.

It's just so much fun. The more you learn about it as an adult, the more it opens up the conversations you can have with kids and the same is true for them. That little example I gave of course shows how important it is for spelling because so many words you might just guess and not know because there's a silent letter, but when you can connect it like "sign" and "signal," those silent letters are pronounced in other versions of the word.

Can you speak to us more about how it affects spelling?

Deb Glaser: Yeah. Well, Anna, you've already pointed out that the English orthography is morphophonemic, which means the spelling of the words is based on the morpheme and the phoneme. Both together are what can be used to explain the spellings of so many of our English words, which you just gave a beautiful example of "military" and "militia," and how nice you had that knowledge that you could share with your daughter.

The awareness helps us spell because, and I think it's best to explain this through examples, and "military/militia" was one of them, but at a simpler form too. Ken Oppel, who has given us a lot of our research on morphology, points out that the strongest research in terms of outcomes is when kids know the prefixes and suffixes. They really apply that knowledge.

If we have the word "irregular," for example, if I'm aware that "irregular" begins with a prefix I-N, which has to change its form to I-R, I will know I have to double the R in "irregular" because I have a prefix unit that must standalone, I-R, and I have my root, "regular," or actually it's R-E-G. Those two R's together, an R at the beginning of my root and an R at the end of my prefix, means I have to double it.

That is an example of bringing knowledge to the English orthography to help us explain the spellings. We don't have to memorize lots of spellings, but we have that basis in phonomorphemic knowledge and awareness to help us.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, and we can go back to a very, very basic example for kids learning to spell the word "jumped" and they spell it J-U-M-P-T. When we give them the understanding that even though it sounds like /t/, the E-D is the morphological piece.

Deb Glaser: That's right, yeah. Another really good example in the spelling is, and Doris Johnson, who was an early researcher, used these examples. She gave us several examples of how if we can recall the spelling of the root in another word form, it will help us spell other words within that family.

For example, if you have the word "medicine" and you hear that /s/ in there, "medicine," we know to spell that with a C because the root is "medic," which means health. Then we can work with students to develop other words that would fit within that family. We have "medic," we have "medicine," we have "medicinal," and those are all words that relate to health in some way, and also word forms.

Oh, and another point about morphology, and I've had teachers reflect this to me who have my program "Morpheme Magic," they say they've never realized that the part of speech was so important. When you add suffixes to words, you change the part of speech and how that word will fit within a sentence.

Syntax becomes another piece of the puzzle when you're teaching morphological awareness because what do these words sound like in sentences is dependent on how that part of speech will play out.

Anna Geiger: So teachers are hearing this and knowing that morphology is important, and they have maybe a base understanding, a little bit, but they're wondering, well, where do I get started?

I always tell people there's no research-based phonics scope and sequence; we just have a general idea of simple to complex. Is the same true for morphology? Do you have sort of a suggested sequence for teachers?

Deb Glaser: No, you hit the nail on the head, because you're right. There is no one true phonics scope and sequence that has shown and proven to give stronger results.

What does give the results is when the most common are taught first, so it's a common sense that we're applying. Holly Lane has recognized this and that there was no research that showed this is the set of prefixes or suffixes or roots that need to be taught first. So what she and her colleagues did was to go into the content areas and subject areas and study the most common prefixes, suffixes, and roots that occur within these different subject areas. They did this just to give teachers the basis from which to develop their morphological awareness instruction, starting with the most common and working through.

At the same time that we're teaching these prefixes, suffixes, and roots from the most common working to the less common, kids are reading and reading a lot, and they're coming across other affixes and roots. So if we have a language rich, morphologically rich classroom going, these kids are going to be learning these through their questioning because they have this awareness that we have helped to light a little fire under in their language reading brains.

That's another constraint about phonics and teaching the grapheme-phoneme elements is that there's an end to what they will learn in their application, but with morphology there isn't.

Anna Geiger: Right, yeah. I was thinking about that being a difference between phonemic awareness and morphological awareness too. With phonemic awareness, you kind of get it eventually, but with morphological awareness, like you said, it's on a continuum and it's constantly growing throughout your life.

I think some things you mentioned there too, it's important to do this explicit instruction in morphology, which your books will help teachers do, but also being ready to teach it when it comes up, like when my daughter had the question about "military/militia." The more a teacher knows about that, the more prepared they are.

There are also so many great online resources, like Etymonline, where if a student has a question, the teacher could say, "Let me check this really quick," and you can both expand your knowledge at once.

Deb Glaser: Exactly.

Anna Geiger: Your first book was "Morpheme Magic," and then I don't know how many years later it was that you did "Morphemes for Little Ones," but you started out by sharing it as a resource for grades 4-12, and then your second book was about teaching it in the primary grades.

Can you talk about the difference, maybe start with the primary and how you think it should begin and how it will change as you move into the middle grades?

Deb Glaser: At the early grades, we're focused on building language that will prepare students for the reading demands, and part of that is morphemes and morphology. When we look at the components of language, teaching morphology fits very, very nicely into our teaching of vocabulary, orthography, phonology, and syntax, what these words sound like within sentences.

So the K-3 program is very heavily focused on language. That's why the subtitle is "Bringing the Magic of Language into K-3 Classrooms." In kindergarten, the level one lessons are through oral and spoken language. We begin building attention and awareness to the phonemes in words that are going to help them read those words, start with plurals and past tense, what sound do you hear at the end of the word, this is how you spell it, this is how we use the word, and connecting it to classroom experiences.

Then in level three, there's a lot more explicit instruction in the orthography of the prefixes and suffixes. That program prepares students for the richer or deeper morphological lessons in "Morpheme Magic."

It's very language-rich, and teachers don't need another program in K-3. They're just beginning to learn how to teach decoding and phonics, so I make a very strong point that "Morphemes for Little Ones" is to help you incorporate this in the instruction that you're already providing in your phonics and decoding lessons. Which of the words in your decoding words this week are verbs that you can add I-N-G to and teach the doubling rule? It's a way to enrich the lessons in the programs our teachers are using through the lessons in the program.

Anna Geiger: Do you have a general idea in your mind about when you think it's an optimal time to start explicitly teaching roots, like Greek and Latin roots, to kids?

Deb Glaser: Well, I think it begins with teaching the Anglo-Saxon. Those are the most common words in a child's spoken language and also the first words children learn to decode. Teaching that that is a base, that is a stem, we could use the term stem if we want, upon which we can add prefixes and suffixes to build new words.

Then those early Latin roots like "act" or "sign," as you put it, those actually are roots, but they have become free in our spoken language as well. It can stand alone, so that's a very good beginning.

Words that have C-T in them are Latin. Those are based in Latin and there are several words we use like "act," which we can make "react" or "action" or "active." We can build a wonderful family around that simple word that children can decode early on.

But the introduction of the common Latin roots like "fer," for example, which means to bear, those are going to be introduced once children are consolidated readers, when they're beginning to recognize chunks within words to help them read unfamiliar words. They know that when they see the word "react," for example, that E-A in there is not a vowel team. We don't say /r/ /��/ /k/ /t/, but they recognize that "act" is a base, so that means this "re," which I know from "review" and "refer" and other words that start with "re" is a separate unit.

It helps knowing your students' phase of word recognition according to Linnea Ehri's phases of word recognition. Once our children are consolidated or moving into that consolidated phase, they're coming across all of a sudden thousands of words that they have not seen in print before. That morphological awareness helps them with the recognition of that word and they're also then ready to begin learning.

In fact, it's fourth grade pretty much, in the research you'll see this, fourth grade children are ready to start learning those Latin roots. In "Morphemes for Little Ones," in the third grade text I do begin to introduce Latin roots.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

So if a teacher is interested in checking out one of your books, and you can also separately buy a set of cards that go with each book that you can post and use as a teaching tool, but what might they expect in the primary? In "Morphemes for Little Ones," you talked about how the kindergarten level is more focused on oral language. As it moves through, if a teacher were going to use one of the lessons, how does it lay out?

Deb Glaser: There is a target morpheme, so there's a scope and sequence. At the beginning of the lesson, we introduce a keyword that is representative of the target morpheme through the phoneme. We say the word and ask what are the phonemes. Then if the children are decoding, we present the orthographic component of the word to read it, and then use the word in sentences orally. Then we teach the decoding of several words that contain that target morpheme, and not only decode them, but use them in oral sentences, and then we write. We're always decoding, followed by encoding, so that there's always a spelling component that is included in the decoding.

Then throughout the week, we create a morpheme lexicon or a vocabulary book that we're creating where we gather the morphemes as we learn them, word items that are representative of that morpheme, and writing sentences. This is not just writing a sentence using this word, but it's giving the students the word, talking about how that word could be used to reflect on a character in a book we're reading, or the guest speaker we had come in yesterday, or in social studies, or our community circle, or what we talked about this morning. Always connecting this to a conversation about what we are learning is really key to the work that we do in this morphological awareness arena, and lots of review is needed.

Anna Geiger: Just like when you're teaching new vocabulary words, you don't want to just teach it and forget about it. You want to weave it in as much as you can, put it in front of yourself so you remember to address it, and bring it up during the school week.

Deb Glaser: Right. That's one reason why I developed the visuals too. The cards in "Morphemes for Little Ones" are to build the oral language. They're a very stimulating picture, and the teacher presents a sentence reflecting the picture and engages children in deeper conversation about the picture, using words that have the target morpheme. Those then can be posted on a wall, and there are examples of what a morpheme wall might look like in my book and also on the Facebook group page. It's to give teachers an idea of, first of all, the purpose, and it keeps it in the teacher's frame of mind to bring up and refer to, and it gives the children something to refer to and also to remind them. It's the same with "Morpheme Magic."

Anna Geiger: So does "Morpheme Magic" follow a pretty similar lesson sequence as the one for the lower grades?

Deb Glaser: Yes, it does, only in "Morpheme Magic," I created connected passages. There is context, stories that I wrote, that are contextual where students use the focus words to fill in and complete the story. It's really important when using those that teachers talk through the story and the meanings of the words within each sentence the first time through to really build a substantial understanding of how this word can be used.

Anna Geiger: So I was recently at The Wisconsin Reading League event and someone, is it Michelle Elia? Is that correct? She's from your team, I think?

Deb Glaser: Yes.

Anna Geiger: She gave a wonderful, very funny, if morphology can be funny, she gave a funny presentation. She talked about the sentences in your book, and I have the books, but I did not notice initially that with these little passages you have with the underlines, the idea is not to use it as a quiz. You have the words in order and you want kids, when the blank comes, to fill in the next word. It's a teaching tool; it's not a testing tool. I thought that was really interesting.

Deb Glaser: Yeah, it's not a guessing game. No guessing, please!

Anna Geiger: Yeah, but that's great because giving them that, you're showing them how to use the words in context and not just in a sentence, but in a paragraph.

Deb Glaser: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Thank you so much for sharing so much about morphology. I know people are going to want to learn a lot more, and I'll definitely link to all of your resources, but I know you've done so many other things. Can you talk to us a little bit about some other projects that you've done or are working on?

Deb Glaser: Yeah, especially for "Morpheme Magic" and the intermediate grades, middle school, and being used in secondary intervention, teachers clamored and just begged me for assessments. If I wasn't going to give them to them, they were going to make up their own assessments.

I know you've got to give the kids a grade, but I just was very resistant. But I began to recognize that assessments could be very beneficial and could be a teaching tool, not just for the students, but for the teachers as well. So I committed to creating these assessments, and I'm apologizing to everyone who's listening who waited and waited and waited. I finally got them done, and yes, they're published.

I based the assessments on everything I could find about assessing vocabulary and morphology. There is a proximal level of meaning that is assessed and also a distal. The distal form of assessment consists of questions you ask that take children into a whole different context to determine whether or not they understand the meaning of that word.

What I became very aware of in my work when I shared it with a famous vocabulary researcher, Margaret McKeown, was that she was quite perplexed with the way I was developing these assessments, and she said it's the base of the word that carries the most meaning. The assessment I had shared with her was one based on a prefix.

So I also then took that to heart and built into the assessments to make sure the children know and can recognize what is the base and what is the prefix and suffix, because the base carries the critical meaning and then is modified by the prefixes or suffixes that are added to it.

For example, if the word is "transparent," "trans" meaning across, "parent," meaning to see a light coming across, then a question to determine a deeper level meaning might be why would it be unwise to have a transparent backpack?

I know you're thinking right now, but these are the kinds of questions I want teachers to learn to ask in any vocabulary assessment. Not even an assessment that you're taking a grade on, but just the teaching assessment we do. Who really gets this word? I'm going to ask this question.

I tell teachers to look at the assessment that you're going to give at the end of the week, read through what we're asking students to know and to show us they know, and think to yourselves, how can you incorporate the content of that assessment during your teaching this week? The assessments are giving teachers another teaching tool.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, that is brilliant.

Deb Glaser: I hope teachers see them that way.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, that's wonderful. Like you said, your book does that for teachers that are coming in not knowing much about morphology, they learn it as they teach it, and to know that the assessment can also be useful. Are the assessments sold separately somewhere? Where would teachers find those?

Deb Glaser: Well, yes, they're in the second edition of "Morpheme Magic." If you've never bought "Morpheme Magic" before-

Anna Geiger: Oh, there's a second edition, okay.

Deb Glaser: It's in the second edition. That's the only change I made to the book, but there are thousands out there that have the first edition book, but not the assessments, so the assessments are also sold separately.

Anna Geiger: Okay, wonderful. I'll link to those for sure. Tell me a little bit really quickly about the book that you just coauthored.

Deb Glaser: Oh, yes, "Next STEPS in Literacy Instruction: Connecting Assessments to Effective Interventions." It's our second edition and we've updated it. It's based on the outcome-driven model, so that goes way back to Good and Kaminski's work with DIBELS years and years ago.

The outcome-driven model that we follow is a very common model, but one that many schools have never implemented. When we have a good benchmark assessment that helps us identify the children at risk, the next step is to diagnose what the issue is. Once we have that, then we meet collaboratively with other teachers.

We determine small groups from those needs and focus attention and instruction to identify diagnostic needs those students have. We start them in their small groups, monitor their progress to determine how well students are responding to the instruction, and make any changes that need to be made. We continue in the cycle of instruction and monitoring the progress, making changes as we need to and as we see in group composition, in instructional focus, or continuing as we're doing because students are making gains, until the next benchmark period when we identify again those who continue to be at risk and further diagnose.

This book is built upon that outcome-driven model with lots of ideas and structure for the small group instruction.

Anna Geiger: Well that is wonderful because teachers really are looking for that. I know not every school, but some schools are starting to do those screeners more, but the teachers aren't sure what to do with it afterwards and so that's wonderful.

Deb Glaser: Yeah, they're just learning. There's a welcoming environment out there now and a desperate need for this information.

What's so beautiful too is that the leaders in the schools, not only the teachers, teachers are leaders as well, but those administrative positions that are making the decisions now are looking for the products and the tools that are backed by research. They can bring that in and provide for their teachers knowing that this is effective stuff, and now let's support you in your application of this.

Anna Geiger: So are there any other projects in the works that you're willing to talk about?

Deb Glaser: No, I don't have any projects right now. I told my husband after this last book I was going to take a break. However, I do have some children's books kind of percolating in my mind.

Anna Geiger: Oh, really? How wonderful.

Deb Glaser: I do. I know a couple of beautiful, wonderful illustrators, so I'm kind of thinking about doing something a little bit different, but at the same time those books would be building vocabulary for their listeners.

Anna Geiger: Something for your grandkids.

Deb Glaser: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: That would be exciting.

Well, thank you so much. I could talk to you all day, but thank you so much for your long career of helping teachers and that you continue to do that. Your work is appreciated by so many people.

Deb Glaser: Thank you, Anna, it was a pleasure. I just wish all of you out there listening the best in the world of morphological awareness and I would love to hear from you anytime you have questions or would like to talk about morphology.

Anna Geiger: Oh, I'm sure they would. We'll put your contact information in the show notes. You'll probably get people take you up on that.

Deb Glaser: Thank you, Anna!

Anna Geiger: You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode150. 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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Books and Resources from Dr. Deb Glaser Morpheme Magic curriculum Morphemes for Little Ones curriculum Next STEPS in Literacy Instruction: Connecting Assessments to Effective Interventions , with Dr. Susan Smartt Reading Fluency , with Dr. Jan Hasbrouck Morphology courses for teachers

Email Dr. Glaser: reading (a) drdebglaser (dot) com

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The post All about Morphology – with Dr. Deb Glaser appeared first on The Measured Mom.

How to use assessment data to inform instruction

TRT Podcast #149: How to use assessment data to inform instruction – with Rachel Beiswanger

In today’s episode, special education coach Rachel Beiswanger explains how she uses assessment data when deciding what to teach her students. We list screening measures and list specific things you can do if students are scoring below benchmark. I list all the details in the show notes, so be sure to check them out!

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Hello, it's Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom, and today I have an interview with Rachel Beiswanger, a special education literacy coach. In this episode we talk about how you can use the results of Acadience Reading, which is a universal screener, to inform instruction.

Before we get into the episode, I would like to briefly explain Acadience's measures, just in case you're new to it, so this episode makes sense. You might be using a different screener like FastBridge or DIBELS, or maybe you're not using one at all.

If you're using one of those others, you can probably compare those measures to what we're talking about in today's episode. If you're not using a screener at all, this will show you how a screener is very useful for informing instruction.

A few weeks ago, I explained the four different types of assessment, and one of those is a screener. Acadience is a universal screener, that means that its job is to show you which students are on track to be adequate readers and which are not, which are at risk, in other words. If students score below benchmark, which is the lowest score they need to be on track to be okay at reading, we have to do something about that. We need to provide intervention.

So in this episode we talk through the different Acadience measures and specific things you can do if a student is scoring low in a particular area.

I just want to talk through those measures really quickly so you don't get lost if this is new to you.

First, there's First Sound Fluency (FSF) that's given in kindergarten where students have to say the first sound in a given word. If you say "sun," they have to say /s/.

Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) is when students have to break a word apart into all its phonemes. You would say the word "hall" and they should say /h/ /��/ /l/. That's given the middle of kindergarten through the end of first, whereas First Sound Fluency is just given in kindergarten.

Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) is when students read nonsense CVC words. I didn't mention this, but in this and all the other measures, they have one minute to complete it. They read as many nonsense CVC words as they can in a single minute, and you measure their correct letter sounds as well as the number of whole words read. Whole words read means they read the word instantly without needing to sound it out. So if they saw the nonsense word "mip," and they read it as /m/ /��/ /p/, they would get three for correct letter sounds, but zero for whole words read because they had to sound it out. If they saw "tup," and they said "tup," they would get three for correct letter sounds because they got all the sounds correct and one for whole words read because they read it instantly without having to sound it out. Nonsense Word Fluency is given in the middle of kindergarten through the beginning of second grade.

Oral reading fluency (ORF) is when students read aloud a grade level passage for one minute and you measure their words correct per minute as well as their accuracy. They also have one minute to do a retell of what they've read, and that's given starting in the middle of first grade through sixth grade.

If you're a regular classroom teacher, you would give the appropriate measures for your grade level three times a year: beginning, middle, and end. If a student scored below benchmark, you might give a diagnostic assessment to dive in deeper to figure out exactly what their needs are.

Rachel's situation is a little different because she teaches in a special education school, so she does something called Acadience Reading Survey which can be done any time you have students who are maybe a little bit older and struggling to figure out exactly where their point of need is.

What you're doing is you're testing students gradually in lower levels of materials until you find their instructional and progress monitoring level. In other words, you figure out exactly what you need to teach them and how you can measure their progress. So with Acadience Reading Survey, you would possibly start way up there at ORF, and then if a child doesn't do well at that, you would back up and you would test them on NWF, Nonsense Word Fluency. If they don't do well on that, you would back up and assess them on PSF, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency. If they don't do well on that, you might back up and do First Sound Fluency. Basically, you're trying to find the skill where they're successful so that you know that the next step is to move past that into the next skill in your instruction.

I hope that makes sense. We're going to move into the episode now, and in the show notes you'll find a kind of summary of the things we talk about, so you'll want to be sure to head over there after you listen.

Anna Geiger: Welcome, Rachel!

Rachel Beiswanger: Thank you! Thank you for having me!

Anna Geiger: Could you introduce yourself to us a little bit and explain how you got to where you are today?

Rachel Beiswanger: Sure! So my name is Rachel Beiswanger, and I am a K-12 reading specialist. I work at an all special education school in upstate New York. I kind of work partially as a literacy coach pushing into classrooms, and then the rest of my time I spend working one-on-one doing interventions with students. Then in my spare time, I am kind of in the Instagram world sharing resources and tips for implementing the science of reading in your classroom.

Anna Geiger: That's where I learned about you because you have a wonderful Instagram account with lots of really good information at _readingrachel_, right?

Rachel Beiswanger: It's _readingrachel_, yeah.

Anna Geiger: Okay, got it. You have a really good way of talking about using assessments to inform instruction, so we're going to talk about that today. Maybe you could start with explaining how you give Acadience assessments to your students, and then what you decide to do with that screening data.

Rachel Beiswanger: Sure. So we use Acadience Reading Survey, and a Survey level assessment helps you to pinpoint a student's lowest skill deficit. Typically you use this with upper elementary students who you sense are significantly behind in reading, so that's why we use the Survey assessment.

You start with their chronological grade level, and each grade level has specific measures in Acadience. If you have a first through a sixth grader, the measure is oral reading fluency, so typically you're going to give an oral reading fluency measure at that student's grade level to begin.

If you find from that measure that the students are below benchmark for their grade level, then you would drop down and give either the next grade level below, or if it was kind of really hard for them to access that passage and you know that they're much lower than you thought they were, you could drop down to Nonsense Word Fluency, NWF, which is the measure below first grade oral reading fluency.

Let's say, for example, I had a grade three student, and I gave them the oral reading fluency passage for grade three. They were below the benchmark, and I decided to drop down, as I just said, to Nonsense Word Fluency because they were struggling to even kind of get through that first sentence. They were sounding out every word, for example.

For the Nonsense Word Fluency measure, the students are timed for a minute and they read as many CVC nonsense words as they can in a minute. What this measure tells you is a lot about students' knowledge of the alphabetic principle and letter sound knowledge.

So as they're reading a nonsense word, let's say the nonsense word is something like "taf," and they say "/t/ /��/ /f/, taf," then what you know from that is that the student is saying each letter sound correctly. That tells me one, that their letter sound knowledge is good and they're blending correctly, but they're not able to just look at taf and say taf. That's what we want them to be able to do. We want them to have that sight recognition and be able to read that word.

If that was a pattern on their assessment, I'm talking if they did that on several of the words, not just one, then that would be an indicator that in my instruction with that student, I really need to focus on moving them from sound by sound blending to reading words automatically. I would do blending strategies, things like successive or continuous blending.

I should also say that if when I gave that Nonsense Word Fluency, they were still below the benchmark in that measure, I would also drop below Nonsense Word Fluency to Phoneme Segmentation Fluency. That's the measure below Nonsense Word Fluency on Acadience, and that assesses the students' phonemic awareness.

I would want to check that also because when you're surveying a student, when you're kind of dropping back and dropping back, you want to find that point where they ARE at benchmark, where they are successful, because then you know that the next step up is where your instructional need is. That's where they need to work, if that makes sense.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, and for some teachers it feels a little overwhelming because they have students with deficits in many different areas. So you're saying to take the lowest skill that they're not successful at, according to Acadience Survey, and start with that. Then do you recommend working on multiple things at once or just working on that one thing?

Rachel Beiswanger: Yeah, that's a really good question. So in this example that I just gave, if that student needed work on blending to get to the whole word, I would still likely open my lesson with that student with a segmenting and blending warmup.

Even though they were great at phonemic awareness, I would still kind of prime them for the lesson by giving them that blending and segmenting warmup. I wouldn't just isolate the Nonsense Word Fluency skills, however that would be my primary focus, if that makes sense.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. So in Acadience, there's FSF where they have to give you the first sound in a word that you say, and then there's the PSF where they break a word apart into its phonemes.

Let's say they're struggling all the way down at FSF. What do you do to remediate that?

Rachel Beiswanger: Yeah, so if they aren't able to isolate the first sound in a word, then that is what you're teaching toward, and sometimes you can just teach that. You can say, okay, the student doesn't have that skill, and that skill is really the stepping stone to being able to segment and blend.

You would start with words that begin with continuous sounds and you would model for students how to say that word. For instance: "Say sun."

"Sun."

"Okay, let's stretch out sun," and then they'd say it slowly. Then you'd ask them, "What's the first sound you hear in ssssssun."

If they couldn't do it, then that's where you step in and you scaffold and you say, "Okay, listen to me. Ready, I'm going to show you that the first sound and sun is /s/. Did you hear me say /s/? Okay, now let's say sun together," and you just break it down like that.

Sometimes that can be even still too abstract for some students, and so from there you would scaffold back and you would move to larger chunks like onset and rhyme. You would see if students could isolate the onset in the word.

Then you would go back even further if they couldn't do that, and you might see if they can isolate the first word in a compound word or the first syllable in a two syllable word.

Anna Geiger: Perfect. Okay.

Now let's say the issue that they have is that they are struggling with PSF, so they can't break a word apart into its phonemes or they break it apart into some phonemes, but not all the phonemes, maybe they can't split a blend up, for example. What are the things that you do to work on that?

Rachel Beiswanger: If the student is struggling with consonant blends, I really like to do word chaining with that student because I feel like that is one way where they can really deeply see the details in the word. I always think of Louisa Moats when I say that because she has always said students need to know the intricacies of the sounds in the words, right?

Anna Geiger: Mm-hmm.

Rachel Beiswanger: So when you're word chaining, you're giving students a word, and you're asking them to change out one sound. This is great because it's phonemic awareness, but it's also using letters, and so students are changing out one letter at a time, and that's what we know research supports with phonemic awareness practice. So teaching them how to do word chains is one thing.

Just in general, if they're having trouble segmenting three and four sound words, then you always want to scaffold back to two sound words and see if they can segment a word with two sounds. And again, the words with continuous sounds to start like, "so," "me," or "hi," those words are going to be easier to segment.

I will say too that working not just on those two-sound words, but three-sound words that students are familiar with, I've noticed, seems to click for some kids and help them figure that out when you bring in words that are already in their vocabulary. If they know the word "sun," but they don't really have the word "so" in their vocabulary, then "sun" might be easier for them to segment.

Anna Geiger: Have you found that using manipulatives helps a lot with this?

Rachel Beiswanger: Yes. Yeah, for sure. I just stick to traditional Elkonin boxes where I'm sliding chips or kids are sliding chips into boxes. That seems to work really well for kids. Then I defer to phoneme-grapheme mapping which is really beneficial because you're segmenting, sometimes with manipulatives, and then you're matching the letters right up to the sounds.

Anna Geiger: Yeah. So just for people who are listening who maybe are new to that, the idea is that you have a set of boxes for a word, and then you put a tile in for each box for each sound.

So if you say, "The word is swim. Repeat."

"Swim."

"Let's say the sounds of swim," and maybe they put a chip in each box for /s/ /w/ /��/ /m/, and then you isolate each sound and help them spell it.

We know, we talked about this before in the podcast, that research shows that phonemic awareness instruction with letters is most effective, so we're combining phonemic awareness and phonics, and that can actually help kids learn phonemic awareness better than if it's just isolated oral activities.

So we've talked about Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, which is PSF, and then we've got the upper level after that is Nonsense Word Fluency, NWF.

Some people wonder about the use of nonsense words, and the point of that is so that we really know if they know their phonics knowledge because they could have memorized a word, if it's a real CVC word, but the Nonsense Word Fluency tells you a lot in terms of... For instance, I've given these assessments and the word might be "mip," so if they know their phonics knowledge, they would say "mip." but I've heard kids say "mipe," right?

Rachel Beiswanger: Right.

Anna Geiger: That really could not be a word because of what we know about phonics patterns and spelling patterns.

There are really multiple issues that could be at play if they're struggling with Nonsense Word Fluency. One that you mentioned was that they can sound it out, but they HAVE to sound it out. They haven't mapped it; they can't read it instantly. I hear this a lot from people like, "What do I do to get my kids to stop sounding out letter by letter? How do we get them to cross over?"

What are some things that you would suggest for that?

Rachel Beiswanger: Sure. So I suggest a few different things. Sometimes I think the issue is that students are just so used to sounding words out that they literally just need somebody to tell them to say the sounds in their mind and practice doing it that way. They can practice not saying the sounds out loud and just get in the habit of saying the sounds in their minds. That's one trick to try.

The other trick to try is successive blending, which I really like this strategy. With successive blending, let's say you have the CVC word "mat." You would model for the students how to touch and say /m/, and then you would say /��/, the second sound. Then you would demonstrate what those two sounds sound like when they're blended together, so you would say, "mmmaaaa." Then you would add on the last sound and you would say "mmmaaaa-t." So you're going, "mmm, mmmmaaaa, mmmaaat," and then you would practice that with them, and then they would do that.

Sometimes I think kids get stuck with a single sound, single sound, single sound, and sometimes just connecting those first two is a great way to do it.

Then let's say you've done that with a list of five words. Once you've had them practice that blending strategy, then have them go back and read those five words again because then you're building their sight word recognition, and that's when those words become orthographically mapped and they no longer have to sound them out.

Sometimes it really is about fluency and more exposures to those words, so don't be afraid to practice reading the same words every single day. I think sometimes that happens too, where we feel like we have to teach so many different words every day, which is important because we want to expose our kids to the words that they're going to need to be able to spell and that they're going to be seeing in text. But sometimes, for some kids, they just need to see those words again and again before they stick.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, and I also believe that sometimes seeing those same word families at the end of words is helpful because they can start to map chunks. Those nonsense words aren't real words, so they haven't, I guess, technically mapped that word as it appears. But as they become more efficient readers, they know that I-F is "if," and they know that O-T is "ot" and so on.

So then we move up to ORF, which is oral reading fluency. Now most of the assessments I've given have been in the primary grades, so in third grade, does Acadience include any other assessments or is it just ORF?

Rachel Beiswanger: You can do another assessment. Acadience has another comprehension measure called Maze, which I'm not as familiar with, but I know that it's basically a passage that students read, and then they are supposed to fill in the correct word in certain blanks based on the meaning of the sentence.

Anna Geiger: And that one they do independently, you're not marking things down, you're just checking it.

Rachel Beiswanger: Yeah.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, I've seen that before where they have the sentences and then multiple words to choose from that would fit in the blank.

So ORF, oral reading fluency, is when usually you have them read three passages. You have them read for one minute, and there's also, in Acadience, a retelling measure where you just keep track of how many words they say. It sounds hard, but it's not because they talk kind of slow and you just mark the meaningful words they said. If they say, "I don't remember," you don't mark those words. If they repeat themselves, you don't mark those words.

Then down below there's a subjective measure where you say that they gave the main idea or they gave details in order or so on. So it's subjective, but I do find it's very useful.

ORF starts in middle of first grade, I believe, right?

Rachel Beiswanger: Yes, yes.

Anna Geiger: So let's say that their words per minute, their number of correct words because they also maybe have low accuracy, is below benchmark. Then what do you do first?

Rachel Beiswanger: Right. So ORF has the three scores, as you said: the retell score, the words correct per minute score, and the accuracy score. When you look at their results, you want to look at all three of those scores because each individual score gives you information on a specific skill, which is, in my opinion, the best part of Acadience. It's very informative in that way.

Let's say I have a student who did well on the retell, but they were, as you said, below benchmark on words correct per minute, and they were below benchmark on accuracy. Is that what you said?

Anna Geiger: Mm-hmm.

Rachel Beiswanger: Then I would give them a decoding diagnostic, because if their accuracy score is low, it's an indicator that there is a decoding issue. We're talking about how many words did they read correctly, and if they're reading words incorrectly, then they're decoding incorrectly, right?

Anna Geiger: Mm-hmm.

Rachel Beiswanger: So that would be the next step there. But if that student had a good accuracy score, so they were reading words correctly and their words correct per minute score was still low, it wasn't where it should be, it was below benchmark, then that indicates to me that that student needs work on fluency. Then I would work on fluency in my instruction.

Then the last example would be if that student's accuracy score was great, their words correct per minute score was great, but their retell was kind of a struggle and below the benchmark, then that would indicate that I should work on reading comprehension. We would work on comprehension strategies, building knowledge, teaching vocabulary, and this kind of thing.

Anna Geiger: Okay, so let's go back to the accuracy one. You talked about a diagnostic, and when this podcast goes live, it'll be following some other episodes about that sort of thing, so people can refer back to that one. There will be an episode about different kinds of assessment.

Right now we're basically talking about a screener to figure out if children are on benchmark, which means are they meeting the minimum standard to be on track to be a good reader, but if they're below benchmark, then we need to figure out the problem and remediate that, so we have to dive in more deeply. The screener gives us basic information, but doesn't give us the details.

When you mentioned the diagnostic, that would be a specific phonics assessment that shows you exactly where the breakdown is. Maybe they're good with CVC words, CCVC words, and CVCE, but then they're struggling with vowel teams, or whatever. That would show that you need to work on those specific vowel teams. I think that's an easy one in terms of what's next. We talk a lot about in this podcast and on my website about teaching phonics.

Let's go to the fluency one. Do you see that less often? I'm just curious to know.

Rachel Beiswanger: Yes.

Anna Geiger: So it's more often a word reading problem with decoding, but sometimes, maybe not as often, they can read the words, but they're reading very slowly. What are things you do for that?

Rachel Beiswanger: Yeah, so repeated reads are the gold standard that are recommended by the National Reading Panel and confirmed over time through research to be an effective practice for building fluency.

With my intervention students, the way that we do that is that when they read a new decodable text on, let's say it's Monday, then the next day, the next lesson, I'm having them read the same decodable text to open that lesson. Then I'm collecting their decodable passages in a decodable folder, and they're practicing reading those with a partner at centers. Ideally, I have a teaching assistant or whomever giving corrective feedback because that's a really big part of it. I ask them to give corrective feedback if students are making errors.

Part of fluency too is modeling how to read like you're talking, how to read like you're having a conversation, modeling that for kids, and then having them repeat it back to you. Some echo reading is really beneficial for fluency as well.

Anna Geiger: That moves us on to kids who... And I'm wondering if this at your school, I don't know, if this would be at a higher level than what most people would see. Do you find that there are a lot of kids who can read the words, are reading at a good rate, but can't explain what they read? Do you see a lot of that?

Rachel Beiswanger: I do, actually. I do. I think that those are the two camps for me in my experience. It's the students who really, really struggle with decoding, and so that's where we start, or the students who can decode anything and then when you ask them what they read about, they might relate it to something that happened in their lives, or they're kind of tangentially related to the passage. I do notice that a lot. I think it's really hard for students, especially ones with specific learning disabilities, to hold information in their working memory and to be able to retell it back to you. I do see that a lot.

Anna Geiger: It seems to me like that would be a harder thing to take care of because, as we know, comprehension is so complex. We don't have a nice easy scope and sequence like we do for phonics. So what are some things that you've found that have helped?

Rachel Beiswanger: It's definitely harder to remediate because it's not linear, and there are multiple things that go into reading comprehension so there are multiple things to try.

I'll say this first, Acadience does have a Comprehension, Fluency, & Oral Language diagnostic. It's called CFOL, and it's a comprehension diagnostic. That is one way you can kind of get to answering some questions like, is the students struggling with figurative language? Is it this, or that, or whatever?

But one of the things I think that works really well for students is teaching them how to pull the main idea from a paragraph. Modeling that is really helpful for kids, teaching them how to pull out who the paragraph is about, find the most important information from that paragraph, doing that throughout a passage, and then eventually combining that into a summary.

Then the other thing that I've noticed that I typically go right to as a starting point for me, just because it's common with a lot of the students that I work with, is checking their sentence level comprehension. Because if you think about it, if a student doesn't really know what's going on in a sentence, they're not going to know how to string a bunch of sentences together when they're reading. They're not going to be able to keep those ideas connecting as they're reading and connect ideas across sentences, let alone across paragraphs to get the whole gist of the passage.

So I like to just give them a sentence and say, "Okay, who's the person in the sentence? What are they doing? Why they doing it? How are they doing it?" Having them answer those basic function level questions is helpful.

Anna Geiger: Wonderful. Well, you've just given us a lot of stuff. I might just have to type this up in the show notes as a kind of an outline for people so they can see the specific things.

Where can people find you?

Rachel Beiswanger: I am most active on Instagram, and my Instagram name is _readingrachel_. Then I also have a blog, and that's readingrachel.com.

Anna Geiger: Wonderful! Well, thank you so much for taking time to share your wisdom with us today.

Rachel Beiswanger: Thanks for having me, Anna!

Anna Geiger: Thank you so much for listening. You can find the show notes at themeasuredmom.com/episode149. 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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The post How to use assessment data to inform instruction appeared first on The Measured Mom.

It’s a giveaway!

 

To kick off this month, I’m hosting a giveaway for the fantastic book,��7 Mighty Moves,��by Lindsay Kemeny.

This is a wonderful book by a classroom teacher who made the switch from balanced to structured literacy after everything she knew didn’t help her severely dyslexic son learn to read.

The good news is that now he’s thriving – thanks to what she learned and implemented.

In the book, Lindsay shares 7 important moves she made as she transitioned to a more effective way of teaching.

The book is beautiful, inspiring, and informative – I can’t recommend it enough!

Please note: This giveaway is for U.S. residents only.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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Should students use invented spelling?

Invented spelling has always been a hot topic in the reading world. What exactly is it – and should you allow your students to use it?

First things first.

What is invented spelling?

Invented spelling is when students spell words based on the phonemic awareness and phonics knowledge that they have, even if the word is not spelled conventionally.

The above octopus, spelled “ODPS,” was drawn by my now thirteen-year-old when he was almost four years old.

He also drew this picture of Pete the Cat, who is on the beach (spelled “ON THE BC”).

Each of these spellings show that my son knew basic letter-sound relationships but did not hear and represent all the sounds when spelling. He had memorized the spelling of “the” but did not know how to spell /ch/ as in “beach.”

In this way, invented spelling is very useful: It gives us a window into a child’s literacy development.

The argument against invented spelling

The name “invented spelling” has turned some people off, because it sounds like teachers are encouraging students to spell however they’d like, with no care or regard for conventional spelling.

This may be why some have attempted to rebrand invented spelling as “temporary” spelling or even “estimated” spelling. (I like both of these rebrands, by the way).

But invented spelling is not when teachers allow their students to spell words any which way.

The value of invented spelling

When we remember that spelling is not about memorizing but rather about applying phonology, orthography, and morphology (learn more here), we understand that students need time to learn correct spellings.

Expecting our young writers to spell everything conventionally is unrealistic. It’s also a bad idea to supply every spelling; when students are writing a string of letters that we provide, without any thought as to why they’re writing those letters, they’re not really learning.

In fact, invented spelling gives students a chance to apply the sound-spellings they’ve learned. It also increases their awareness of phonemes in words (Martins & Silva, 2006).

It even gives them decoding practice as they sound out the words while reading their writing.

To be clear: it’s not that we teach our students to invent spellings. Rather, we teach them to apply what they’ve learned from our explicit phonics lessons as they spell words. Since they haven’t learned everything about English spelling, some of their spellings will be invented rather than conventional.

The importance of feedback

We shouldn’t allow our students to use invented spelling with nary a word from us. Instead, we should gently hold them accountable for the spellings they’ve learned and correct their spelling whenever it feels that they will learn from the correction.

When my son who wasn’t even four spelled octopus as “ODPS,” I recognized what a major achievement this was and cheered him on.

On the other hand, when my fourth grader spelled beautiful as “beyutiful,” I gave her a mnemonic for spelling the word correctly: “be-a-U-ti-ful.”

It’s also important to remember that invented spelling is a means to an end. We can affirm our students’ efforts without declaring that their spellings are “correct.” We should always look for ways to push their learning.

Will invented spelling hurt students’ spelling achievement?

In 2013, Oulliette et al found that kindergartners who used invented spelling with feedback had similar (even slightly superior) conventional spelling to other students when they reached first grade.

What if students won’t write a word unless you supply the proper spelling?

I had a little boy like that; he’s fifteen now. But my refusal to spell every word for him as a little boy often led to tears.

I learned that he did better if I asked him to attempt the spelling, circle it if he was unsure, and wait for me to offer the conventional spelling later in the day.

Another things you can is recopy the correct letters from the child’s spelling and leave blanks for the missed letters; see if the student can correct the spelling.

For example, when my daughter spelled physical as “phyisicle,” I could have written the word this way and encouraged her to try filling in the blanks.

ph_sic_ _

This allowed her to see all the letters she got right while also decreasing the size of the task.

When should students stop using invented spelling?

When children have finished the phonics curriculum (usually by the end of second grade), teachers should expect conventional spelling most of the time.

When editing their writing, students can be taught to identify words that might be misspelled and find their correct spellings.

As always, teachers should explain why a word is spelled a certain way whenever possible, For example, if a fourth grader spells militia as malisha, you can share the spelling of military and explain that the words are related. Then guide the student to the correct spelling.

A final tip: When a student asks you for a spelling, always ask him/her to do their best spelling of the word first (even if it’s on a separate piece of paper). This will give you a window into the child’s spelling development, allow you to celebrate all the letters he or she got correct, and give you a focus for helping him or her spell the word correctly – rather than simply naming a string of letters the student will likely forget next time.

Did this post help you clarify what invented spelling is, and why it’s useful? The following articles may also help.

For further reading Explicit spelling instruction or invented spelling? by Tim Shanahan Invented spelling and spelling development, by Elaina Lutz on Reading Rockets

References

Martins, M. A., & Silva, C. (2006). The impact of invented spelling on phonemic awareness. Learning and Instruction, 16(1), 41-56.

Ouellette, G., S��n��chal, M., & Haley, A. (2013). Guiding children’s invented spellings: A gateway into literacy learning. Journal of Experimental Education, 81(2), 261-279.

Click on the image below to see all the posts in my spelling series!

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What are the must-know spelling rules?

Welcome back to our spelling series! In this post we’ll discuss spelling rules and which ones are worth teaching.

First, I should note that I am talking about spelling, not reading rules. Some rules, like the FLOSS rule, make perfect sense when it comes to teaching spelling. But I don’t think that we need to explicitly teach this rule for children to read words like hill, miss, and buzz. It’s enough to demonstrate that a double letter is only pronounced once.

At the same time, I believe that phonics and spelling instruction should be aligned in the early grades, so teaching the spelling rule makes sense to me – as long as we understand that children do not need to know this rule to read. It’s useful when children are spelling.

Must-know spelling rules

In addition to learning basic letter-sound correspondences, children need to know alternate spellings and when to use them. They need to know rules about dropping and doubling letters. They know when to use a silent e. They need to know which letters are “illegal” at the end of English words.

These are the spelling rules and patterns that I think are important for teachers and students to know.

Are there other spelling rules and patterns you should teach?

This is largely a matter of opinion. Here are other resources with a list of rules that is not identical to my preferred list.

Logic of English has a longer list of spelling rules. You can learn about the rules in detail in Denise Eid’s book, Understanding the Logic of English. In her book, Spelling for Life , Lyn Stone has a set of uniquely named spelling rules. (All her books are worth purchasing!)Silver Moon Spelling Rules is a program that focuses on a set of 21 rules. You can learn more by downloading the Progression of Skills on this page. How to teach spelling rules

1. State the rule.

In her book with Charles Hughes, Anita Archer explains that rules are generally understood through an If-Then statement.

For example, if a one-syllable word ends with a short vowel and /ch/, then /ch/ should be spelled with tch.

2. Present examples and non-examples.

Examples of this rule include catch, notch, and sketch.

Non-examples include bench (because the word ends with a short vowel plus a consonant before the /ch/) and beach (because the word has a long vowel).

3. Guide students in analyzing examples and non-examples.

For example, ask your students how to analyze the word switch. How is /ch/ spelled in this word? Why?

A nonexample would be the word stench. How is /ch/ spelled in this word? Why?

4. Check students’ understanding of the rule.

One way to do this is to do spelling dictation with immediate feedback. Dictate words that follow (and don’t follow) the rule. After students spell each word on paper or on a dry-erase board, post the correct spelling and discuss it as needed.

Reference Explicit Instruction , by Anita Archer

Click on the image below to see all the posts in my spelling series!

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Should you teach syllable types?

In this post we’ll be looking at the six syllable types and considering the question: Should you teach them?

What are the syllable types?

Most written English syllables can be organized into six kinds of syllables (called syllable types) based on their spelling.

Because every syllable has a single vowel phoneme (sound), the syllable types are defined by the location and/or spelling of the vowel phoneme.

The chart below defines each type and gives an example in orange.

Variations

The “magic e” syllable type is also called the “vowel-consonant-e” or “CVCE” syllable type.

The “r-controlled” syllable type is also called “vowel-r.”

The “consonant-le” syllable may also be called the “final stable syllable.”

And some programs identify a seventh type: the “diphthong” syllable. Others include diphthong spellings with the “vowel team” syllable type.

What are the arguments for teaching syllable types?

1. When students learn to recognize syllable types, they can use this knowledge to help read longer words. I like to think of syllable types as opening the door to multi-syllable word reading. If a student can read closed and magic e syllables, they can read cupcake. If they can read r-controlled vowel syllables, they can read further.

2. Some programs (particularly those based on Orton-Gillingham) teach syllable division rules. An understanding of syllable types is necessary for pronouncing each part of the word because syllable types help you know how to pronounce the vowel in each syllable.

3. Syllable types can also help students with their spelling.

For example, if an open syllable (la) is combined with a consonant+le syllable (dle), the d is not doubled.

On the other hand, if a closed syllable (rat) is combined with a consonant + le syllable (tle), a double consonant must result.

What does research say about teaching syllable types?

Not much. Programs that teach syllable types and programs that don’t teach syllable types have both shown positive outcomes.

What is the argument against teaching syllable types?

1. One reason not to teach syllable types is that they are not always consistent. The schwa, which is the common English vowel, often takes over a spelling in an open or closed syllable.

For example, in the word CACTUS, you would expect the closed syllable TUS to have a short vowel sound. Instead, you hear the schwa.

2. Some argue that syllable types are unnecessary when students are taught flexible syllable division strategies.

For example, when students read the word HABIT, they could break it apart by remembering that each syllable has a vowel. This may end up looking like HA – BIT. Even though syllable types tell us that this word should be prounced hay-bit, students who don’t know syllable types could simply try both the long and short vowel for the “a” in HA, eventually landing on the correct pronunciation.

3. We don’t want to overwhelm students’ working memory.

Some argue that teaching students to learn the names of syllable types is simply too much unnecessary information. We should save their working memory for the task of sounding out words, not storing extra information (like the names of the syllable types) that they don’t need to be successful.

Final thoughts

Researcher Devin Kearns has written and spoken about syllable types and syllable division patterns. His conclusion is that syllable division patterns are so inconsistent that it is probably not worth our time to teach them.

As for syllable types, he thinks that teaching the most common syllable types, open and closed, is useful. But he prefers to call them “long vowel syllable” and “short vowel syllable.” He questions whether it’s important to teach the other syllable types.

In this video presentation, Dr. Kearns explains his position and shares a more flexible approach to syllable types and syllable division.

As for me, I think teachers should know the six syllable types and teach students to read each syllable type.

However, I’m not convinced that students need to identify and label syllable types. In my experience, this has been time-consuming and may not give us a bigger bang for our buck than a more flexible approach.

To be clear – here is not much research on this. These are just my conclusions.

What do you think? Do you think it’s important to teach the six syllable types?

For further reading Six Syllable Types , by Louisa Moats & Carol Tolman How Spelling Supports Reading , by Louisa Moats 7 Syllable Types for Reading and Spelling , by Mark Weakland Syllable Types , by Sarah Paul Phonics and Syllable Rules: Do We Need Them? by Nora Chabazi Does English Have Useful Syllable Division Patterns? by Devin Kearns

Click on the image below to see all the posts in my spelling series!

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What do phonology, orthography, and morphology have to do with spelling?

Welcome to the second post in my series about teaching spelling!

Today we’ll be diving deep into the structure of words as I answer this question:

What do phonology, orthography, and morphology have to do with spelling?

Sometimes my oldest son likes to take regular English words and pronounce them “correctly.” For example, he’ll say, “The word raining should really be pronounced /r/ /a/ /i/ /n/ /i/ /n/ /g/.

I remember doing the same thing as a kid. And I would have been right, if English spelling was based solely on phonology.

But to be good spellers, students need knowledge in three areas: phonology, orthography, and morphology.

Phonology refers to how we distinguish, order, and say sounds in words.

Spellers use phonology when they break a word apart into its sounds to spell it. For example, when spelling the word mat, students can break the word apart into its sounds, /m/ /a/ /t/, before spelling each sound.

In order to use phonology, students must first have phonemic awareness, the conscious awareness of sounds in words – and the ability to blend and segment phonemes.

Orthography refers to the spelling system of a language.

Phonology only gets us so far when spelling, because English has approximately 44 phonemes (individual speech sounds) but at least 250 graphemes (ways to spell those sounds). There’s not a one-to-one match.

When students have a good knowledge of orthography, they know that ck is not used to spell /k/ at the beginning of a word. They know that the ay spelling for long a only appears at the end of a base word.

It’s important to combine spelling instruction with explicit phonics instruction so that students learn to apply these patterns.

(Here’s my free phonics scope and sequence if you need one.)

But even phonology and orthography aren’t enough.

Morphology refers to the smallest meaningful units of words. These can be base morphemes (sometimes called roots) or affixes (prefixes or suffixes).

A long word can be a single morpheme. For example, the word alligator is a single morpheme.

Other words have multiple morphemes. For example, the word uncomfortable has three morphemes: un, comfort, and able.

When spelling the word roped, students need to use phonology, orthography, and morphology.

They use phonology when they break the word apart into its four phonemes: /r/ /o/ /p/ /t/.

They use orthography when they remember that this word spells long o with o-consonant-e.

They use morphology when they give the word an ed ending instead of using the letter t, because ed shows past tense. (They also using orthography when they remember the spelling rule that the e must be dropped before an ed ending.)

Just when you thought we were done, I want to take a look at one more element: etymology.

Etymology is the study of word origins. It can help explain unusual spellings.

For example, the word ballet is not spelled ballay because its origin is French.

Pharmacy is spelled with ph because it comes from the Greek.

If you or your students are ever curious about the history of a word, check out Etymonline. It’s free!

Final thoughts

Understanding the difference between phonology, orthography, and morphology can help you when examining your students’ spelling and determining next steps for instruction.

If a child spells the word JUMP as JUP, you can see that the child needs instruction in phonemic awareness (because the phoneme /m/ is not represented in the spelling).

If a child spells the word KICKED as KICKT, you can see that the child needs instruction in morphology (because the ed ending was not used to spell past tense).

If a child spells the word SKATED as SKAITED, you can see the child needs instruction in orthography: specifically, learning when to use the ai spelling to spell long a.

Learn moreWatch Spelling in a Complex Orthography , with Lyn StoneWatch Spelling: Visible Language to Inform Instruction and Intervention , with Dr. Pam Kastner Tambra Isenberg

There’s a lot more to come in this series! Click on the image below to see all the posts as they are published.

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Do’s and don’ts for how to teach spelling

Welcome to the first post in my series about teaching spelling!

How to teach spelling: Do’s and don’ts

Let’s examine some “do’s” and “don’ts” for teaching spelling in the primary grades.

A scope and sequence tells you what to teach, and when. A quality scope and sequence orders skills from simple to more complex.

DON’T create personalized spelling lists for each student – when you watch for words that students misspell and make these their weekly spelling words. Besides being a management nightmare, this method guarantees that you will miss particular phonics patterns because it doesn’t let you teach in a systematic way.

Following a scope and sequence for spelling is easy when you follow the next DO …

At least through first grade, the words your students are spelling should match the sound-spelling(s) they’re learning in their explicit, systematic phonics lessons.

For example, if you’re teaching students to read CVCE words, their spelling list could include words like grape, dime, stroke, and flute.

(Here’s my free phonics scope and sequence if you need one.)

DON’T include a “word of the day” or words from your social studies and science unit if they don’t match the focus phonics pattern. Yes, children need to know the meaning of amphibian, but this word doesn’t fit in a first grade spelling list.

If you decide to include challenge words for students who can handle them, be sure to explicitly teach how to spell each sound. Don’t present them as strings of letters to be memorized.

I admit that when I was a balanced literacy teacher, my spelling lessons were not very explicit.

I began each week by giving my students words to cut apart and sort. I thought that having my students discover the phonics pattern was better than explicit teaching, so I asked them to figure out the pattern as they sorted the words. (Unfortunately, I didn’t know how strong the evidence is for direct instruction.)

Instead, I should have clearly introduced each new spelling and explained when to use it.

DON’T expect students to discover spelling patterns on their own. The research is clear: students benefit from direct instruction.

When teaching the long o sound, for example, students can learn to spell words with oa, as in goat, and ow as in show. Teaching a single pattern at a time will really slow you down. And yet …

DON’T teach too many spellings at once. Too many basal spelling programs flood lists with more than three spelling patterns. This is overwhelming and probably counter-productive.

Spelling “rules” are also called spelling patterns or spelling conventions. No matter what you call them, these are generalizations about spelling. As for which rules to teach, and how many, this is up for debate. Stay tuned for the “Must-Teach Spelling Rules” post that will be coming later in this series.

Don’t be afraid to teach spelling rules, but make sure that the rules are fairly consistent. Rules like “When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking,” is false more than half the time.

If you’re not sure what this means, stay tuned for the next post in this series. Put simply, spelling isn’t one-to-one. We’re not using a single letter to spell each sound. If that were true, phones would be spelled fonz. When spelling this word, we consider phonology and spell each sound: /f/ /o/ /n/ /z/. We also consider orthography when we remember that English has certain spelling conventions; one of these is that one way to spell the long o sound is o-consonant e. We consider morphology when we spell the final /z/ sound with an s, because we know that the letter s can be used to denote a plural form.

DON’T call English spelling “crazy.” When we take into account phonology, orthography, and morphology, we recognize that there are good reasons for why we spell words the way we do.

Spelling dictation, phoneme-grapheme mapping, and word ladders are all meaningful ways to practice spelling. Stay tuned for the final post in this series, which will share a variety of ways to practice spelling words.

DON’T use activities that turn the focus to memorization, such as writing words five times each or rainbow writing.

There’s a lot more to come in this series! Click on the image below to see all the posts as they are published.

For further reading How Spelling Supports Reading , by Louisa Moats How Words Cast Their Spell , by R. Malatesha Joshi, Rebecca Treiman, Suzanne Carreker, and Louisa C. Moats Why Spelling is Important and How to Teach it Effective ly, by Virginia Berninger

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Balancing whole group and small group reading instruction with Dr. Sharon Walpole

TRT Podcast #148: Balancing whole group and small group reading instruction with Dr. Sharon Walpole

Dr. Sharon Walpole explains how teachers can balance whole group and small group reading instruction using her free open-access curriculum, Bookworms, and the phonics lessons in her book, How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction.

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Hello, Anna Geiger here from The Measured Mom, and in today's episode I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Sharon Walpole. She is director of the Professional Development Center for Educators and a professor in the School of Education at the University of Delaware. During her long career, she's done many things and may be best known for co-authoring the book "How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction" with Michael McKenna. She's also the author of the free open-access educational resource called Bookworms. That is a free curriculum online that includes loads of resources for shared reading, interactive read alouds, and more.

In this episode we're going to start by talking about her way of differentiating foundational skills. She actually starts with a whole group spelling lesson on level and then she differentiates based on where students are with their knowledge of phonics skills. Then she also talks about the whole class work that happens within the Bookworms program.

She definitely challenged my thinking in a few ways, as you'll see, so you'll have to let me know what you think of our conversation. You can leave a comment in the show notes. With that, let's get started!

Anna Geiger: Welcome Dr. Walpole!

Sharon Walpole: Thank you!

Anna Geiger: Today you agreed to meet with me to talk a little bit about differentiating reading instruction, especially in the primary grades.

Can you talk to us a little bit about your experience in education and what brought you to where you are now?

Sharon Walpole: Thank you. Yes. I was actually a high school history teacher, if you can imagine, and my students couldn't read very well so I became interested in studying reading. I always thought I would study adolescent literacy, but when I went to the University of Virginia I had the opportunity to work with some really, really fantastic folks in beginning reading and shifted my focus.

Then because I really did want to do my research in elementary school, instead of going to a university job right away, I became a literacy coach in an elementary school to sort of get some street credibility because there's nothing first grade teachers hate more than having a high school teacher tell them what to do. So I learned a lot about how to run a reading program which was much more than just how to teach reading.

I did that work for three years and then I moved to the University of Delaware in 2002, and I've had a really wonderful career at the University of Delaware. I've studied literacy coaching, I've studied the design and evaluation of interventions, and I'm also the author of a K-5 reading curriculum that's open-access called Bookworms.

Anna Geiger: Yes, and we'll talk about that at the end.

So you have co-written "How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction," and I think multiple versions of that have come out. Tell us about where that came from and what the book was written for.

Sharon Walpole: Yeah, actually it's kind of an interesting story and it houses sort of the whole trajectory of the move from guided reading into direct instruction. Mike McKenna, my late partner, he died in 2016 suddenly, and I had worked together for about 15 years.

In the early 2000s, we were working in Georgia with Reading First. We were the state architects of professional learning, so we went to Georgia and we visited schools a couple of times a month.

One of the things that Reading First required was that teachers collect data on foundational skills development, and that was kind of the beginning of DIBELS being very widely used. It was the test that was used in Georgia. At the same time, teachers were required to use a core program that was based in SBRR, scientifically-based reading research, and there was a big movement for that.

So there were these two mandates and they kind of overlapped because the assessments revealed foundational skills deficits, but they didn't tell exactly what to do about them. They were screening mechanisms.

I thought that teachers needed to know not just that kids were at-risk, but exactly what they needed to learn. We actually developed a diagnostic assessment that's very easy to use called the Informal Decoding Inventory.

The other thing that we learned was that the Reading First mandate had a big conceptual hole because back at that time, almost all of the curricula that were on approved lists for SBRR actually had some version of guided reading.

Teachers had a grade level passage or reading that went across the week and then they had three small groups. Typically, those small groups had a guided reading lesson in one of three little books that were related. They had some shared vocabulary, but there was the easy version, the middle version, and the hard version.

That made no sense to me because the easy version, especially in kindergarten, first grade, and the beginning of second grade, was typically a predictable book.

So we had data to show that students were at-risk for their decoding proficiency and for their oral reading fluency, and we had diagnostic data to show exactly what they needed to learn, whether they needed to firm up their letters and sounds, whether specific decoding proficiencies had been mastered, and those are pretty predictable. We know a lot about how decoding develops.

But there was no mechanism for teachers to actually address what kids really needed, so they were in small groups doing something that made no sense at all to me, predicting what the words might be.

So we actually said, let's sub out that small group, that weakest group, and teach some phonics. And so that's how the approach actually began.

There are things about guided reading that were always very attractive to teachers. It's not hard to do. It can be done in a sort of routine regular way with students learning to manage their self-directed work and teachers calling groups.

So we used that structure, but subbed out the content. There was no problem with that in the Reading First world. I know people say that it was very rigid. It wasn't for us, because after we started that in Georgia, we also worked across most of the states on the east coast to try to promote this same idea, and it was very, very well-received.

So that's how it started. It started as a feasible replacement for guided reading instruction for kids who needed to learn to decode.

Anna Geiger: Okay, and then in your book of course you lay out all the different types of lessons that you would have depending on where they're at.

Sharon Walpole: Yeah, we ended up scripting it. We started out with just frames, saying this is what the lesson should contain, and a lot of literacy coaches filled in those frames, but then when I came to watch them, sometimes they were just a little bit off. The scope and sequence wasn't exactly right or the level of difficulty wasn't exactly right, so we just said, well, we can write them easily.

That's how we ended up writing a book that talks about the science of reading and also has a fully-scripted set of lessons for building basic alphabet knowledge, initial phonemic awareness, and then more advanced phonemic awareness, segmenting and blending, and single-syllable phonics instruction.

Anna Geiger: So what is your opinion on the idea that yes, all kids need to know this, but I'd rather teach the grade level skill, according to my curriculum, to everybody at once. It will include the elements of explicit teaching and all that, and then if someone's struggling, then I'll remediate in a small group? Or if they are more advanced, then I'll give them a small group a couple times a week, but we always start with this 20-30 minutes of whole group phonics. Do you have any opinion on that?

Sharon Walpole: I actually think that that's pretty normal and it's a good idea because in the end, it's not feasible for teachers to differentiate everything. What I worry about is how long that whole group lesson is.

Even in Bookworms, that's how we do it. We have a short word study lesson that focuses on spelling and on letter formation in kindergarten, and then on decoding regular and high frequency words in first grade, and then on more mature letter patterns starting in second grade, and then on syllable types starting in third grade. You can still do that whole group phonics instruction for the grade level relatively quickly.

For students who are struggling in that area, they may not be mastering the content that the teacher is teaching because on the continuum of word knowledge they're starting out much lower. However, it doesn't mean they're not learning anything. They might be learning word meaning or they might be building phonemic flexibility, even if they're not quite learning decoding and spelling.

I know that one of the things that you had asked me to think about was whether that's previewing the content so they can learn it later, and I don't think that makes sense. I think they're learning something else about words. Some students do need us to go back to really where they start on that continuum, but I don't think it's reasonable, nor would it be effective, not to have grade level instruction. Because what about the students who are on grade level? They need to keep advancing their knowledge across the grade, and if there's no scope and sequence for grade level word knowledge building, those students won't be served.

Anna Geiger: What about someone who would say, let's give them a diagnostic assessment for phonics and then just put them all in instructional groups based on where they are on the scope and sequence, and that's how we give our instruction?

Sharon Walpole: Well, that's what we do, but we do both. We first have a grade level quick word study lesson every single day, but then also give students a diagnostically-driven small group lesson. I do think that that combination, at least so far in the research on the effects of Bookworms, has been really dramatic, so we do both.

Anna Geiger: Can you help me understand the purpose of the short whole group lesson for everybody?

Sharon Walpole: Yeah, so in Bookworms, it's a spelling lesson.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Sharon Walpole: At its very beginnings in kindergarten and first grade, word knowledge, spelling, and decoding can either be developing together or they can diverge. That happens a lot where students end up doing really well in their decoding, but their spelling starts to drop off.

So what I decided to do was to differentiate phonics instruction to get decoding ahead as quickly as we could, and then have a really systematic attention to spelling instruction. Ideally in a Bookworms school, a student's placement in decoding lessons in small group would be ahead of where their word study spelling instruction is at the whole group.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, that's very interesting because I know a lot of kids might enter kindergarten and first grade reading well above grade level, but their spelling is not at the same place.

Sharon Walpole: Yep.

Anna Geiger: How does that work though if you're doing the whole group spelling, and you have someone who's only reading at CVC level, but the whole group spelling is much further along? How do they do with that?

Sharon Walpole: Not well.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Sharon Walpole: I think that that's important information for teachers and families. I think it's easy to say my students are doing well when I'm instructing them at their just-right level of decoding knowledge, but we need to have a reminder that it's an emergency and that they're well below grade level.

So yes, I would expect students who are in second grade and decoding at the CVC level to do very poorly on grade level word knowledge assessments because they're not at grade level.

Anna Geiger: So in those small groups, would you do any kind of encoding work?

Sharon Walpole: We don't because there's not enough time. It's not that that might not add value, but to me, the costs are too great. Whenever students are in a small group in a classroom-based intervention, the rest of the class is waiting. The longer that time is... So that's just a pragmatic decision that I made, and I might be wrong for sure, but that's why I made it. I want to really protect the amount of time that students are not in teacher-managed work.

Anna Geiger: Right, and it is just a tug of war kind of because you're trying to meet everybody's needs specifically, but you also realize that the other kids aren't getting you at the same time.

Sharon Walpole: That's right.

Anna Geiger: They're just not learning as much. They're in a situation where they may be practicing something for automaticity, but there's no direct instruction there so I know that that is a really hard thing for teachers.

I know some schools have managed this by having a grade level team work together and each teacher is given a group, so they're all getting a good length phonics lesson at once.

For a teacher that is finding that they don't have the support to do a really good small group setup for the Tier 1 instruction and that their main phonics instruction mostly needs to be whole class, a longer whole class lesson, do you have any tips for differentiation within that?

Sharon Walpole: I just don't believe in that. I think you can either teach grade level instruction or you can teach different content based on students' assessed needs, but you can't do both at once. People have tried it. I don't think that that's an ideal design.

People in Bookworms schools differentiate sometimes for students who are struggling by giving them a preview lesson for the word study, but not from the teacher because the teacher has to be managing the whole crew, right? That's if they have intervention providers. Some people have also designed response cards so that the teacher can actually monitor more visually how quickly students are responding because they're touching items on a response card.

I still think that students can be learning different things. For example, one student might actually be building phonemic blending skills while another student is learning how to spell patterns - at the same time. I think that always having phonics and/or spelling instruction have a phonemic content actually is a way that you're both building automaticity for all kids, but also differentiating, inside one lesson.

Anna Geiger: So I'm trying to conceptualize how all this looks day-to-day for the teacher who's trying to figure out how to apply this. Maybe you could just briefly walk us through it. Let's say it's the beginning of the year for a first grade teacher, what does she do first?

Sharon Walpole: I'll tell you how Bookworms is designed. In a Bookworms first grade classroom, the teacher would start with shared reading probably. There's three segments: shared reading, English language arts, and differentiated instruction.

Let's say she starts with shared reading. Shared reading in Bookworms starts out with about 10 minutes of compare and contrast spelling instruction. It's called word study in the lesson plans, and all the lesson plans are open so you can actually look at them. They're open-access.

In the first four weeks of school, the kids are reviewing their letter names and sounds, but then in week five they start comparing and contrasting short vowel word families. Every day they sort words by their sound and then by their patterns once they become more sophisticated. They also do full phonemic analysis of words and they learn to spell six high-frequency words every week.

That word study instruction is fully scripted in the lesson plans, and it lasts about 10 minutes. At the end of that, all the students write a dictated sentence. The teacher says a sentence, the students memorize the sentence, and the students write the sentence. That allows the teacher to have daily progress monitoring in first grade when things are such high stakes for kids.

After that, they have their reading lesson, which starts out with choral reading. Bookworms only uses trade books. The teacher doesn't select them; they're already selected, and they're fully curricularized. The teacher is going to read the day's text segment with students chorally, which means everybody's reading together keeping their voice as best they can with the teacher's voice, and then immediately they reread it in partners. The teachers have partners already set up. The students just move to their partners and they reread that day's segment.

By about October 15th probably, the time that students spend in that repeated reading is about eight or ten minutes.

So they've read with the teacher, and then they reread.

Then on Tuesday, the next day, the teacher reads the next part of the book and the students reread it. They're always reading and rereading so they have a repeated reading intervention every single day. Then they have a discussion with open-ended questions, and the teacher makes an anchor chart of the content of the book. They do that every single day in shared reading.

Then the 45 minutes have elapsed for that instruction, and now it's time for differentiated instruction. At this time, the teacher can see up to three groups for 15 minutes each. When the students are in their groups, either they're getting additional phonics lessons that are based on diagnostic data, or they're getting an additional repeated reading lesson.

While the other students are not with the teacher, they have a written response to the day's shared reading. There's always a question that they write, and then they practice their word study in a workbook. In first grade, they also have handwriting practice.

Anna Geiger: Okay.

Sharon Walpole: Those are those two blocks. Then there's a third 45-minute block, in Bookworms at least, that has either units of read-alouds to build knowledge, followed by grammar instruction or writing instruction, composition instruction.

Anna Geiger: Okay. Let's go back to the shared reading time. So these are trade books? These are not decodable texts necessarily?

Sharon Walpole: Right.

Anna Geiger: So can you walk us through that? Because I think some people would be concerned by that and wondering if we're teaching kids to memorize words, or how can they access the words if they don't have the patterns?

Sharon Walpole: So that's a really good question and probably in the first few weeks of first grade, there are a lot of kids who are memorizing the words because the books themselves are short enough for that to happen. But after that, they're just too long so they can't memorize the words.

I think the benefits of repeated reading have been very well-documented in the research literature, but you're right to be skeptical because basically they say that the benefits of repeated reading start when kids are past, in the old-fashioned terminology, about a primer level.

Basically we have to get them up to the primer level as fast as possible for the benefits of repeated reading to kick in. Now our small group phonics lessons do have decodable text to practice, but that decodable text is matched to the decoding instruction. In some ways, for some kids, at the beginning, maybe even the first month of first grade, parts of shared reading might just be a placeholder as we're using the rest of the day to get their skills built enough that they could read at a primer level.

Anna Geiger: What do you see as the learning goals or the benefits of the shared reading time?

Sharon Walpole: It builds community, that's one, and motivation for sure. Actually, I've been amazed at how much it builds student motivation to read, but that's just frosting. The real benefit is kids building automaticity with a wide range of words. I think that there are special educators who will disagree with me and say that all the reading has to be controlled, but that just never ends up intersecting with natural language text in my view.

I put natural language text in front of kids, but with this intense scaffolding of choral reading. Students do learn words, they learn a lot of words, just by reading them successfully several times.

I'm influenced by the work of David Share, and one of the things that he's argued that really resonated with me is that words are in a sort of gauge of known. They go from unknown to fully known. The number of times kids saw a specific word, or a word with a specific set of features, differs by the individual and brings a word to known.

So I think that this repeated reading intervention, even at the beginning of first grade, is building the corpus of sight words in a child's lexicon. We're addressing it very systematically with a spelling continuum, with a decoding continuum, and with repetitive reading in natural text.

Anna Geiger: This is so interesting because I know that there's not a ton out there in research about decodable text, and then there was also a meta-analysis and their conclusion was that we shouldn't limit kids to decodable text. So you're basically showing us a way to scaffold other text reading.

I think it's still a little hard to wrap my brain around because there's so much about automaticity at the word level and achieving that before you move kids into these more authentic texts. Do you have anything to say about that?

Sharon Walpole: Kids are capable of learning a lot more than we think they are, especially if we're providing a really engaging environment and a lot of scaffolding, which is what Bookworms provides. They're also able to build a literate community, even in a first grade class, where kids actually collaborate to solve reading problems.

Of course other people would say, well that's what they do in a reading and writing workshop, but that's actually also what they do in science of reading-based classroom. As long as you've taken time to build community and also as long as you've proven to kids that they're going to learn to read, they're going to be able to participate every single day and they're going to do things that are both interesting to them and challenging, and they're going to do them in community.

Anna Geiger: So to someone who would say any choral reading type of exercises or fluency-building type of exercises for early readers should be... Let's say they're doing reader's theater and they'd say, well, it should only be decodable readers theater. That is a lot of what I hear. Can you respond to that? I think you would disagree with that, right?

Sharon Walpole: Yeah. I've never actually heard that ever. Reader's theater can't be with decodable text. That's not what readers theater is so I don't know what those people are talking about.

Anna Geiger: It would be people who believe that we shouldn't... There are people that are working hard to understand the research believing that when kids start reading, they orthographically map words by matching the phonemes to the graphemes and actually sounding it out, and if we're giving them a lot of words they can't sound out, then what exactly are they doing?

Sharon Walpole: Yeah. Okay. I hear you now. What exactly are they doing is sometimes they are actually processing words more holistically when they're embedded in natural language text. There's no way around that, of course, that's what they're going to do. But some of those words will be processed during that time with enough depth to actually build them into the lexicon, not all of them.

Maybe the bets I'm trying to hedge are that we can teach decoding systematically and that's going to build word knowledge. We can teach spelling systematically and that's going to build word knowledge. We can also engage kids in repeated reading and that's going to build word knowledge too. So two of them are along very predictable lines of development and one is out in the wild.

Anna Geiger: Okay. So I know in your lessons you have decodable sentences, and then we have this other time that they're doing this other reading, this choral reading with scaffolding. Some of those words they are sounding out because they have the knowledge to do that, but we're also giving them access to a chance to build prosody and build knowledge and community and see patterns in words so that eventually, like you said with David Share, when you have some phonics knowledge, you teach words yourself. Thank you for walking me through that.

Sharon Walpole: Maybe I'm just actually trying to give kids the opportunity to come to that time when they're ready. You know what I mean? To be engaged in this really, really rich word world in Bookworms. I actually think it's fine for some students to be in the same world but learning different things at the same time. Maybe in some ways, that's the definition of differentiation.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, that's very interesting.

Sharon Walpole: But it's not because of what the teacher's doing to make it different; it's because of what the student's bringing.

Anna Geiger: Yeah, I've never thought of it that way. Very interesting. Well, thank you.

Well thank you so much for sharing how Bookworms works, and of course I'll link to that in the show notes and to your book.

Is there anything else you want to share about your work or things that you'd like people to find from you?

Sharon Walpole: I really would love people, especially people who use the "How to Plan" book because they have experienced a trust in what Mike and I together learned about how to build word knowledge, to look at the full curriculum to see how we can expand that idea to all the skills that kids need to be successful at grade level. It's easy to sign on, to open up resources, and get access to the lesson plans that are free. All you have to do is buy the trade books that go along with them.

Anna Geiger: Well, thank you. I know I've sent many people especially to your interactive read alouds there because they're just so well laid out the vocabulary is taught so nicely, and I'll make sure everybody can find all that. Thank you so much for joining me.

Sharon Walpole: Thank you!

Anna Geiger: Thank you for listening. You can find the show notes for today's episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode148. 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 from Dr. Sharon Walpole How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction Free Bookworms K-5 Reading and Writing curriculum

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The post Balancing whole group and small group reading instruction with Dr. Sharon Walpole appeared first on The Measured Mom.

How to teach summarizing in the early grades

This is the final episode in our series about reading comprehension strategies! Let’s talk summarizing.

What does it mean to summarize a text?

When you summarize a text, you give a brief statement of the main points.

Why should students learn to summarize?

Summarizing goes hand-in-hand with comprehension monitoring and is a powerful strategy for improving comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000).

Students should start with oral summaries and gradually progress to written summaries, since we know that writing about their reading improves students’ comprehension (Graham & Hebert, 2011).

What’s the simplest way to teach summarizing for the early grades?

I recommend the paragraph shrinking strategy from Fuchs & Fuchs (2005). This can be done orally after a whole class read-aloud or in pairs after partner reading.

(It’s not just for the early grades, either … you can use this strategy through high school!)

[image error]How to teach paragraph shrinking

1. Introduce the strategy.

Today you will learn a strategy called Paragraph Shrinking. After I read each paragraph of our passage, we will shrink it by stating only the most important information. Paragraph Shrinking is also called summarizing.

2. Explain why you’re teaching the strategy.

Summarizing is a way to help you understand and remember what you read.

3. Model Paragraph Shrinking and gradually involve your students in the process.

a. Listen to me read the first paragraph of this passage about Louis Braille. (By the way, ChatGPT created this passage for me. I simply wrote, “Write a third grade level passage about Louise Braille. Each paragraph should be clearly about one main thing.”)

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b. The first thing I need to do is name the who or what. This passage is about Louis Braille.

c. Now I need to identify the most important thing about Louise Braille in this paragraph. This paragraph tells us that Louis Braille was clever. It tells us that he hurt his eye and became blind. It tells us that loved learning, and he went to a school for the blind. I think that most important thing in this paragraph is that he hurt his eye and became blind.

d. Finally, I will put this information into a sentence that’s 10 words or less. I’ll put up my finger for each word that I say. If I start to run out of fingers, I’ll have to start over.

“Louis Braille hurt his eye when he was young and … ” I’m already at ten words. Let me start over.

“Louis Braille became blind when he was three years old.” Perfect!

e. Listen to me read the next paragraph.

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f. What is the most important who or what in this paragraph? Yes, Louis Braille is the most important who or what.

g. What’s the most important thing about Louis Braille in this paragraph? You have one minute to discuss this with your partner … __________, what is the most important information about Louis Braille? Yes, he made a special code that helped blind people read. Let’s put that into a complete sentence that’s 10 words or less.

Louis Braille created a special code that helped blind people … oh, I’m already at 10 words. Let me try again.

Louis Braille created a code that helped blind people read.

We did it!

h. Listen to me read the final paragraph.

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i. What is the most important who or what in this paragraph? Hint … it’s not Louis Braille! The most important who or what is Louis Braille’s special code.

j. What’s the most important thing about this special code? Yes, it helped people all over the world.

k. Let’s put this information into a summary that’s ten words or less.

Louis Braille’s special code helped people all over the world.

See the strategy in action

If you’d like to learn more about paragraph shrinking – and how to give students practice using this strategy with a partner – I highly recommend this video from Lindsay Kemeny. She explains how partner reading, with paragraph shrinking, builds fluency while also supporting comprehension.

And don’t forget to check out the rest of our series about reading comprehension strategies!

References

Fuchs, D., & Fuchs, L. S. (2005). Peer-assisted learning strategies: Promoting word recognition, fluency, and reading comprehension in young children. The Journal of Special Education, 39(1), 34-44.

Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (2011). Writing to read: A meta-analysis of the impact of writing and writing instruction on reading. Harvard Educational Review, 81(4), 710-744.

National Reading Panel (U.S.) & National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.). (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.Agarwal, P. K., & Bain, P. M. (2019). Powerful teaching. Jossey-Bass.

The post How to teach summarizing in the early grades appeared first on The Measured Mom.