April 10, 2025 • 46 mins
In this episode of Literacy Talks, we’re joined by the incomparable Dr. Louise Spear-Swerling—professor, researcher, and long-time advocate for evidence-based reading instruction. Building on her article in the 75th anniversary issue of Perspectives on Language and Literacy, Dr. Spear-Swerling dives into the how of Structured Literacy instruction and why it’s just as critical as the what.
Together with hosts Stacy Hurst, Donell Pons, and Lindsay Kemeny, Dr. Spear-Swerling explores what it really means to teach reading systematically and explicitly, how to use assessments to target instruction, and how teacher preparation programs can better equip educators to meet the needs of diverse learners. With practical strategies, powerful anecdotes, and expert-level clarity, this episode is a must-listen for educators at every stage of their journey.
Link to the article: https://www.flipsnack.com/B88EAE88B7A/perspectives-winter-2024/full-view.html?p=70
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Episode Transcript
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Unknown (00:03):
Welcome to literacy talks, the podcast for literacy
leaders and championseverywhere, brought to you by
Reading Horizons. Literacy talksis the place to discover new
ideas, trends, insights andpractical strategies for helping
all learners reach readingproficiency. Our hosts are Stacy
Hurst, a professor at SouthernUtah University and Chief
(00:27):
Academic Advisor for ReadingHorizons. Donnell Pons, a
recognized expert and advocatein literacy, dyslexia and
special education, and LindsayKemeny, an elementary classroom
teacher, author and speaker. Nowlet's talk literacy.
(00:49):
Welcome to this episode ofliteracy talks. For those of you
who've been listening thisseason, you know that we are
highlighting the perspectives75th anniversary issue of that
publication, and exciting newstoday, we have a very awesome
guest, and I'm going to turn thetime over to Donnell to
introduce her, because Donell,you are the one that made the
(01:10):
connection for sogreat. Yes, we are just so
pleased to have Dr Louise bearswirling with us today on the
podcast. And obviously, ifyou've been following along and
looking at the perspectivespublication, the one Stacy said,
is the 75th anniversary edition,and there's a free download at
the IDA website, theInternational Dyslexia
Association website, so if youhaven't looked at it and you
(01:31):
would like to you can for free.
You don't have to subscribe. Andthen if you have been following
along, then you'll be delighted,because you've either read the
article, or you were aware thatshe is one of the authors of an
article. So this will be a fundiscussion today, and I'm just
going to put a personal thing inthere. I've listened to you for
years, and I've thoroughlyenjoyed the way that you break
(01:52):
things down, and I know thatother educators feel the same
way. I'm not the only one. Youdo a really good job of helping
things that seem ratheroverwhelming, maybe a little
difficult, lots of moving parts.
You make them very approachableand understandable. And that's
one of the things I think isjust so good about your work
among many here. Thank you. Youbet you do a great job with
that. And so you know, Louise, Ithink we just like to start off
(02:13):
by having you tell us a littlebit about about your background.
You've been around a while, butthey might be new to some people
and some of us might notunderstand your whole
background. Tell us how you gotinto this field, and give us a
little bit of that story, sure.
Well, my father was a specialeducator, and so that kind of
gave me exposure to the field.
The field was very different inhis day, and his specialty was
(02:35):
not learning disabilities, but Isaw how committed he was to his
work, how important his work wasto him, and that, you know, when
I was casting about in my in myearly 20s for something that I
wanted to do as a career, thathad a big influence on me, and
then I was very fortunate. I'vebeen a really lucky woman in
(02:58):
lots of ways. So I went to ateacher prep program that was in
my area, and this was a reallylong time ago, like the late
70s, and I was prepared to teachwhat we would now call
structured literacy, which wasvery unusual for its time, but
(03:19):
the woman that headed theprogram, Elizabeth gallistel,
was very familiar with theHaskins laboratories,
researchers like Isabel Libermanand Donald Schenck Wheeler. You
know, she knew a lot of theearly icons of what we would now
call science of reading, andthat really shaped the program.
(03:43):
So I was very fortunate to havethat preparation, and then I
went into public schools toteach. I taught at an elementary
level. And then when I decidedto go into a doctoral program, I
decided to go into a cognitivepsychology program because I
wanted a broader background. Andat the time I started my
(04:06):
program, there was really wasjust pure serendipity. All of
this research on the importanceof phonemic awareness and
reading, but also cognitivestrategies in comprehension, all
of that was coming out, andalong the way, I was really
fortunate to have some greatmentors. Not only Betty, but my
(04:28):
my doctoral advisor, BobSternberg, Louisa Moats, was a
really important mentor to meearly in my career, Hollis
Scarborough, so you know, I wasreally fortunate that I think
back sometimes to think, Boy,you know, the career could have
gone a completely different wayif I had had a different teacher
(04:50):
prep program, and didn't havethe mentoring I had, or had
different people influencingme. So. Yeah, well, that's so
great. I love hearing thathistory, and I appreciate even
more now that because you did,as you say, You got lucky with
serendipity that you ended upwith these folks who had such
good information for you, putyou on the right path. So to
(05:11):
speak, on the science ofreading, that you've been
generous to share it with us,because that's what we're
relying on, right? Is, if wehaven't heard, others will help,
right, right? That's right,that's right. Absolutely pitch
in and helpeach other out. So, Louise, this
edition has been fantastic. Giveus a little overview of your
article, because you're in thesection of it's the you know,
how do we do this? And so tellus a little bit about what you
(05:34):
wanted to accomplish with thearticle, and then we'll get into
some of the aspects, sure.
So a lot of the discussionabout, you know, like science of
reading, and concerns thatpeople have about reading
instruction, a lot of thoseconcerns have focused on what
the article, what the issue,frames as the what. So the idea
(05:57):
that it's important to teachphonemic awareness and phonics,
or there's not enough emphasison spelling or written
expression, but, but how youteach is just as important. The
what is really important? It isimportant that we address those
areas, but if you teach amplephonics, but you do it in an
(06:19):
ineffective way, that's not sogood. So how you teach is also
important. So that was the focusof my article, yeah, and I
think you do such a good job,we'll dive right into that. And
I think it's important as you asyou know. So if you're reading
this perspectives publication,make sure you do hit all those
areas, because, as you'vepointed out, they give you a
(06:39):
different viewpoint as to whysomething is important, but you
need everything right to have afull understanding. So your
article in particular was, wastitled the how of structured
literacy just as important as awhat, like you've just said, and
it is fantastic. It gives us asnapshot of really, how you make
this all come together. But whatI loved is how you start the
article. It was really great,because very, very approachable.
(07:00):
And you said at the beginning,you recounted an experience at a
conference, which I'm sure isnot unusual, where a teacher
educator was learning about theimplementation of structured
literacy, and they asked, Ithink this is something we've
all probably heard. How is thisnew? We already prepared
candidates to teach phonics andthen tell us what your response
was.
So yeah, that teacher educatorthat had happened like the week
(07:23):
before I sat down to write thearticle, so it was fresh in my
mind, although, as you say, it'snot an unusual experience. And
the and she was, you know,obviously not like, not one of
the most persuadable people inthe audience, but she was really
focused on the what you know,that they already do this. We
(07:48):
already teach phonics, andwhat's the big deal? And she was
probably right. I think most youknow teacher prep programs do
teach at least some phonics, buthow it's taught is also really
important, and that was thepoint I tried to make in my
response. So you know, ourchildren being taught phonics in
(08:11):
an explicit, systematic way, oris the teaching kind of
incidental and haphazard? Is theis the teaching, is the phonics
teaching well integrated withspelling and the books that
children have to read? Or is itkind of a, you know, separate
carve out in literacy, but it'snot really integrated? A big
(08:36):
problem I see with a lot ofphonics teaching is that many
teachers have not been trainedto give good feedback when
children are reading text, soeven if phonics is being taught,
if when children are readingtexts, if the teacher just gives
them the word or encourages themto guess based on pictures,
(09:00):
based on sentence context, itkind of undermines the phonics
teaching. So all of those, youknow, those were points that I
tried to make in my response tothis person. I'm not sure I won
her over, but, but I tried. Youknow, I think I really
appreciate that too about thearticles, because as you're
hitting on these touch points,you speak to each one of these
(09:21):
in the article. So if there arepeople listening and they're
saying, oh gosh, I wish I could,yeah, it's in the article. So we
encourage you, even after thisconversation, you're going to
want to go back and review, andit's nice to have a little
roadmap to remind you of theconversation that we've had
today. That's really great andstructured literacy is
interesting because often it'semphasizing the explicit,
systematic instruction. And yourarticle explores that really
(09:42):
well for us, the systematic andsometimes even when you say it,
I'm not sure people reallyunderstand what that means. Can
you help us with that a littlebit? Sure. So,
um, so explicit means the skillsare being taught directly by
the. Teacher, children are notexpected to infer them only from
(10:03):
exposure with, you know, carefulchoice of examples, clear
modeling and guided practice.
Systematic means that within adomain of literacy, like
phonics, comprehension,composition, you're building
from simple to complex. So it isimportant to make the point that
(10:25):
these different domains ofliteracy are being taught in
tandem with each other. We'renot expecting children to map
totally master phonics beforethey get to work on
comprehension, right? But withinthe domain you're building from
simple words decoding simplewords to increasingly complex
(10:47):
words, within the domain ofcomprehension, you'd be building
from, you know, easier tocomprehend types of texts, maybe
easier vocabulary and conceptsand then sort of building
gradually over time. And thesame thing with composition, we
don't expect children to write,you know, a lengthy, complex
(11:09):
piece of writing, if they can'teven write a paragraph yet. So
that's really what systematicmeans.
Yeah, I think that'sinteresting, because Louise,
you're talking about, and ifthis feels like it's makes a lot
of sense to a lot of people whoteach in different fields, it
does make a lot of sense,because it's really a good
(11:30):
practice, isn't it? Sure atheart, sure, right, yes, yes,
yeah. So there, I thinkoftentimes I can start a
conversation with someone who'smaybe reluctant and maybe what's
the structure of literacy youspeak of? And sometimes you can
build a bridge right there,because that speaks to people
who have an understanding of howyou might teach, a concept if
you wantto teach as well. And sometimes
people you know do havemisconceptions, which I think is
(11:53):
probably true of the the storyabout the teacher educator that
I began the article with. Youknow, they have the
misconception that, oh, you'resaying all we need to teach is
phonics, or we have to drillphonics, and children don't get
to work on anything else inliteracy. That's not true, but
within a particular component ordomain you do want to build from
(12:18):
simple to complex, becauseotherwise, many children, you
know, there's always childrenthat, no matter how you teach,
they learn right? They'reresilient to the teaching
approach, probably because theycome into the classroom with
those skills already in place.
But for the children who haveany sort of vulnerability,
(12:41):
they're not if you throw thingsat them that involve
prerequisite skills that theydon't have, it's very
overwhelming and reallyincreases the odds of failure.
So I think of structuredliteracy as an approach that
tries really hard to avoidunintentionally confusing
(13:03):
children, and that also teachesin a way that's efficient as
well as effective. So you knowsome of these skills, like
spelling or phonics skills,yeah, children might infer it
from exposure, if you just waitlong enough, but it's not a very
efficient way to learn importantskills. And efficiency is really
(13:28):
important if a child is alreadybehind and you have to catch
them up, right? Yeah. Soyou could play a base in which
to do that. So Louise, you putup something interesting that
I'd like to touch on, because itwas a really good way of putting
it, and that is the integration.
So like you're saying, we're notexpecting a student to be a
master of one of these domains,but rather integrating as we go
(13:51):
is a good way in order to teach,right? The best way to teach.
And I'm just thinking about thework of other researchers like
Linnea Erie and others, withdevelopmental information that
would be useful and helpful,right to inform?
Oh, absolutely yes, yes. Well,all of the people that you know
were in the CO contributors tothe to the issue. I mean, many
(14:14):
of them were really importantinfluences on me in my own
career. You know Linnaeus, modelof word reading was one of the
things I wrote about reallyearly in my work, and that
really shaped my thinking aboutreading problems. You know, read
Lyon, Kate Cain. I mean, therewere so many wonderful people,
(14:37):
and also the editors werefabulous, Barbara Wilson and
Jessica Hammond. So those wereall people that were big
influences on me, and I thinkyou can see when you look at the
articles, if you look at theissue as a whole, there's
commonalities that sort of runthrough so the abilities that
(14:59):
are important. We're in andlearning to read, people are
emphasizing different abilitiesbecause that's what they're
writing about. But everybody hasan agreement on what kinds of
abilities are important inlearning to read. Nobody's
writing about word configurationcues or word shapes or, you
(15:19):
know, things like that, becausethe research does not support
that that's important inlearning to read. And I think
another thing, anothercommonality, is a shared belief
in the power of instruction tohelp children who have reading
difficulties. You know, there's,there's no question that there
are children who come to schoolwith a certain vulnerability
(15:44):
that might come from lack ofexperience or an intrinsic
disability. But we know a lotnow about how to help these
children, and all of the writersof for the issue, I think, have
a shared belief in in in thatthe power of that to help
children? Yeah, I think that'sreally interesting. I'm glad you
brought that up. I remember wehad the opportunity to speak
(16:07):
with Dr modes once, and shesaid, when there's
understanding, then there youall get behind and the work goes
easily because you have a sharedunderstanding. And so for a
first grade teacher listeningright now, and Lindsay, you are
a first grade teacher,yeah, what would be something to
take away from the article?
(16:28):
Yeah, Lindsay, sounds likeshe's, you know, a great
teacher. So she, she probablydoesn't need this advice. But I
think for many teachers, if theythey don't have a strong
background in reading, lookingat certain assessments to help
target instruction. So forexample, for you mentioned a
(16:52):
first grade teacher, for a firstgrade teacher looking at
criterion reference types ofphonics measures like the core
phonics survey, the GE test.
There's other measures too, butthe kind of measures where words
are organized into differentphonics categories. So you have,
you know, and they're andthey're ordered in in
(17:13):
complexity. So you have thesimplest word type, CVC words
and then short vowel words withdigraph, short vowel words with
blends, and then kind ofbuilding up to long words, like
words of two syllables or more.
So that's one way that a teachercould get a handle on okay, what
(17:36):
are the specific phonics skillsthat I need to teach? And then
another example of a goodassessment for first grade are
CBM measures of oral readingfluency, like DIBELS or aims web
or Acadian some of thesemeasures are available for free
(17:56):
download from the web. And for afirst grader, you wouldn't
usually start the ORFassessment, the oral reading
fluency assessment, until themiddle of first grade, but in
the second half of first grade,that type of assessment these
measures. So for people thataren't might not be familiar
with the measure, what childrenare asked to do is read a
(18:19):
passage aloud and the and itturns out that that's a really
good predictor of overallreading competence at the
elementary level about upthrough grade five or so, and
the teacher scores both thepercentage of words read
correctly and also words correctper minute. And ideally look for
(18:42):
a CBM that gives you separatebenchmarks for those two things.
So if you have a student whomeets the benchmark for
accuracy, but not for for ratefor words correct per minute,
then that's a student who justneeds to work on fluency, and
that would be very common at afirst grade level, so having the
(19:02):
student get more practicereading text, reading connected
text, like short stories andpassages and things like that.
But if you have a child who'snot reading the bench, meeting
the benchmark for accuracy, thenyou want to work on that first,
because you can't build fluencyuntil the student is accurate.
(19:24):
So again, these are the kinds ofmeasures that are useful because
they help the teacher targetinstruction. You can have great,
you know, instructional programsor teaching methods, but if it's
not really targeted to what thestudent needs, it's not going to
be helpful? Yeah, and I cananswer your question too.
(19:44):
Donnell, for something I thinkis important to take away from
this article for first gradeteachers, there was a part I
highlighted and starred, and itsays students do not need to
master the foundational skillsof word recognition before
developing their comp. Attentionabilities. And I think that's
really important for us lowergrade teachers, because, of
(20:04):
course, we have so much focusnow on that, you know, phonics
and building those foundationalskills, but we can still be
working on the other ones rightfrom the beginning, and a lot of
that is with read aloud andbuilding vocabulary and
discussions and oral languageand all of that. Absolutely, I
think, for teachers to, youknow, a lot of the teachers I've
(20:28):
met, they have the idea thatread alouds with young children,
that that's, you know, kind of awarm, fuzzy thing you do to
motivate reading and it and itis partly, but also especially
if it's combined with explicitteaching about the meanings of
words and, you know, other areasof language, it's also got an
(20:50):
important instructional purpose.
Yeah, I loved that you calledthat out so nicely in there. Oh,
good. I'm glad.
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horizons.comand you know, Louise, you also
did another thing. You givegreat profiles. You will take a
student, you'll give a profileof a student, and then give some
(21:59):
strategies, which I think isalways so helpful, but you do,
it's some of the best that I'veseen when you break it down,
because you're really able topicture this student. So talk to
us a little bit about you, andyou did some within the article,
which were great. You can choosethose two two to highlight, if
you'd like, but you give somesort of differences between just
a student who might be having ageneral challenge with some
things and just need support,and probably tier one, and how
(22:19):
you approach your teaching,there will be just enough,
versus a student who does havesome real challenges with
reading, and what you might do.
So I would say there's a kind oftwo, two concepts here that are
important. So one has to do withthe poor readers profile. So
(22:41):
that's something I've beenreally interested in in my work,
and I keep trying to get it intoeducation more. But my my
success is, you know, not asgreat as I would like, but the
for your listeners that are manyof them are probably familiar
with the simple view of readingright, which says that good
(23:02):
reading comprehension depends ontwo broad types of abilities,
being able to read the words andhaving good language
comprehension. So the profileskind of flow out of that. The
poor reader profiles arebasically three different
profiles. There's the studentwho has trouble only with
reading the words, but languagecomprehension is good. Or the
(23:23):
student who only has troublewith language comprehension,
which in turn will affectreading comprehension, but their
word reading is at, you know, atgrade level or better. And then
the student that has troublewith both types of things,
right? And any of these studentscould be a student with a
disability. The profile is notabout whether or not a student
(23:47):
has a disability, it's abouttheir pattern of strengths and
weaknesses. So for instance, inthe type of profile that's
called a specific readingcomprehension difficulty, a
student could have limitationsin their language comprehension
because they have a languagedisability, but they could also
(24:10):
just lack exposure. Like manyEnglish learners have difficult
have that kind of profile, notbecause they have a disability,
necessarily, but because theyhaven't had exposure to English
vocabulary and academiclanguage. So what I would
encourage teachers to do isfirst think about the profile,
(24:30):
and this is other peoplecertainly have written a lot
about this, like Hugh Katz, isone of the people that's written
about this a lot in hisresearch. Don Compton a book
that I just published called thestructured literacy planner is
built around poor readerprofiles,
which I'm just gonna say isgreat. I'm just gonna give you a
plug.
(24:52):
Thank you. So think about theprofile first, and then, as you
know, a researchers. Like JackFletcher have pointed out what
really works best, instead ofhaving a test then teach model
in identification ofdisabilities, first teach, then
(25:13):
do more of the testing. So youknow the initial testing should
focus on, how do you understandthe student's strengths and
weaknesses? The profile, becausethat tells you, Well, do I need
to teach decoding? Do I need toteach comprehension? You know,
do I need to intervene in thoseareas? And then the student's
(25:38):
responsiveness to theintervention tells you whether
there might be a disability. Sostudents with disabilities
typically need much moreintensity than students who
don't have disabilities.
Students who have disabilitieswill will learn too, but they
often need a smaller group size,you know, more opportunities for
(25:58):
practice, more opportunities torespond. So if your school has,
you know, a tiered interventiontype of model, the children who
respond to initial, you know, totier two are probably students.
If they're showing evidence thatthey're on a trajectory to catch
up, they're probably not, thestudents who have disabilities,
(26:21):
the students who really needsomething more, who just don't,
it's just not enough intensityfor them. Or they keep
forgetting, or they keep fallingback behind other students that
that's more likely to be astudent who has some sort of
disability, if it's you know, ifthe profile is difficulty with
(26:42):
decoding and phonologicalskills, that's more like a
student with dyslexia. If theyhave a broader pattern of
difficulty, but that isresistant to intervention, then
that might be a student with adevelopmental language disorder
or a mixed reading disability,that type of profile. So, so
(27:04):
sort of, you know two, two broadconcepts, what's the student's
profile, and then how responsiveis the student to initial levels
of intervention.
And I know you and Stacy werechatting a little bit before I
jumped into this podcast. I knowyou guys are probably talking
(27:26):
about pre service experiences,because you both have taught
teachers to be teachers and howto do this work in classrooms.
And what are some of thechallenges that you face when
you have a new teacher, a newgroup of teachers, and you're
giving them all of thisinformation. So I'm just
thinking and Stacy, you probablywant to have this little
conversation too. You guys,little conversation too. You
guys can have a sidebar abouthow you prioritize for those
(27:46):
educators, and what should betheir expectation going to that
classroom their first year,because I can't imagine how
overwhelming it mustbe, right? I love the word you
just said prioritizing, becausethat was one of the most
important things I found, bothin my work as a teacher educator
and also in different policywork, especially here in my
(28:08):
state. So I was on a number ofpanels on, you know, how should
teachers teach reading and whatkind of test licensure exam
should the teachers take and I,after a while, I realized it was
pretty easy that Connecticutlikes to bring in people with
diverse viewpoints and try toget them to, you know, hold
(28:31):
hands and sing Kumbaya by theend of the panel's work, which
didn't, didn't always work outtoo well, but thinking back, it
was relatively easy to getpeople to agree that a certain
skill was important. So eveneven the people that were kind
of Die Hard whole languagepeople, they would agree that,
(28:52):
yeah, you have to teach somephonics. And certainly even
people that were strongadvocates of phonics would
agree, yes, it's important toteach comprehension. The hard
part is prioritization. Youknow, there's only so many hours
in a school day, right? Andthen, by extension, if you take
it to the teacher prep classroomat the university level, you
(29:16):
know, what are the things thatare really important for that
first year teacher to know,walking, you know, walking into
the classroom for the firsttime. And it does mean you have
to make some you're not going todo everything equally well.
There's going to be, you know, adomain of things that you really
want to make sure people areprepared. I would argue that's
(29:39):
things like formativeassessment, you know, using
assessment to improveinstruction and intervention,
understanding things like basiccomponents of reading and how to
teach them. And also, you know,of writing, being able to teach
spelling. And writtenexpression. And you know, that's
(30:00):
not an exhaustive list, butthose are some of the things
that would be on my must dolist. And then there's some
things that, you know, if I'mable to do them great, like
technology, okay, some of what'sout there in terms of
technology, I don't want to makeall the tech people mad at me,
but is it the number one? Youknow the technology is only
(30:25):
useful if the teachersunderstanding how you use it,
and to understand that, you haveto understand, have a broader
understanding of what abilitiesare important and how to teach
it if you're going to selectamong good programs. So I think
it's, you know, a desirablething for teachers to learn
(30:47):
about, but it's not going to beat the top of my priority list.
So, but it's hard. It's a veryhard thing. And I remember one
time my department chair, youknow, my department chair, who
was really, a really, reallynice person. She would read
books, education, relevantbooks, not textbooks, but things
(31:08):
that were, you know, popularbooks about education. And she
would say, oh, you know, you'vegot to cover this in the 435
which was the course where Itaught all of the reading stuff,
and I would think like, Well,I'm not going to cover this book
because I there's no time.
(31:29):
There's literally no time. Andafter a while, I just learned to
say to her, if you want me toadd something new, you have to
tell me what I'm taking out. AmI taking out spelling? Am I
taking out assessment? You know,I just can't it. I can't add one
more thing. And so theprioritization issue is huge. So
(31:51):
I'm glad you mentioned that.
And so I want to ask, and youknow, Stacy can probably speak
to this too, and take a littlemoment here, because I know it's
one of the challenges, and thatis, Louise, do you see things
improving at the pre servicelevel in terms of giving enough
attention to how you teachreading to be able to teach our
educators who are going to be inclassrooms? Is that improving?
(32:12):
From your perspective?
I think, I do think there'simprovement. And I'm glad you
asked that question, because Ithink it's very important. So
you know, the you might haveseen the NCTQ does these reviews
of teacher prep programs, aboutaround teaching of elementary
level reading, and they did seeimprovement that was very
(32:35):
encouraging. It's not likethere's not room for more
improvement, but at least inrelation to what they had
measured previously, there weresigns that programs were
improving. You know, we've seen,we've seen efforts in certain
states like Mississippi, forexample, that really focused on
(32:56):
improving teacher prep. We'veseen that bear fruit. So I do
think that there is improvement.
We still, you know, have a longway to go to make it more
systemic, so that you can assumethat your child will get a good
grounding in reading in theearliest grades, but it's better
than it was.
(33:19):
I appreciate that question. Andagain, the word prioritize comes
to mind. I'll just take a minutehere to brag about my
university. We were one of theuniversities featured in the
last NCTQ report, because we didget all the points on all the
things. But that being said,it's definitely not a Oh, good.
(33:40):
We've We've got it going on.
We're great. I am keenly awareof all of the things that we
still need to add and the timewe need to spend on certain
things. So, yeah, there'sprioritize. That's the important
word for me to remember. And aswe're talking about this too, I
and as I read your article, andI mentioned before we started
(34:00):
the podcast, I have read yourresearch for decades. Thank you,
and I think I am getting I needto be more explicit in my pre
service with my pre serviceteachers about integrating
pedagogy, knowledge of languageand also how somebody learns to
read like we need to integrateall of that in our teaching,
(34:23):
added like you're saying, thatknowledge of assessment and how
we use that and give feedback. Ihave a question, and I will say
in one of my courses, we areusing the assess, teach, assess
model, and we only have 15weeks. We're doing our best, and
we do use the assessments in thethe core phonics survey for one
(34:45):
in the assessing readingmultiple measures book, which is
amazing, if anybody agreed, Irecommend it. But one thing that
I know I have given my studentsguidance on this, in fact, you
may. Hugh Katz, we did a podcastepisode where he mentioned how
to notice if somebody isstruggling with oral language of
(35:05):
young student, but we don'toften see assessments that are
ubiquitous for oral languagewith every student. What do you
do? You have something that yourecommend? Or how can I prepare
my students to sort of assessthat and quantify it? Right now,
their assessment is veryqualitative.
(35:27):
I don't have a particularassessment of oral vocabulary. I
think assessment of of theseskills orally is really
important because otherwise it'scontaminated with decoding,
right? So you can't, so youcan't tell if the student is
gets a low score. Is it becausethey didn't know the meaning of
(35:51):
the word, or they couldn't readthe Word? When I do, I do a lot
of formal evaluations forschools, like independent
evaluations, so I will alwaysgive like, sub tests from the
Woodcock Johnson or the Wyatt orsomething like that. And it's,
and it's usually like 10minutes. I mean, it's really
quick to do something like aWyatt, you know, receptive
(36:15):
vocabulary and oral discoursecomprehension, but maybe more
than 10 minutes, but not thatbad. It's not that long. But
these are not the kind of testsyou use in screening of large
numbers of kids. For one thing,I think, just too expensive for
schools to purchase. I believe Ihave read about is there? I'm
(36:37):
not sure if I'm right aboutthis, but maybe the cubed
assessment, there was anassessment I read about
recently, but I have not givenit myself. So not, you know, not
really familiar with it, but Iwould do, I would scout around
and see if you can findsomething online, because I
believe there is something thattests oral vocabulary and like
(37:03):
listening comprehension. Youknow, those are the two things
to me that are most important ina screen. And then if you see
signs that the child is weak inone or both, then you could
always follow up with more indepth testing of the type that
usually a speech pathologistwould do. Yeah,
(37:23):
thank you. That's very helpful.
I know we have had someintroduction to Ox ed that is
out of England, of course, butthey have a screener. I don't
know how accessible it is to themass. Actually,
I've read, I've read about thattoo, and it looks good. And I
mean, the people who developedit are wonderful. So that might,
that actually might be the one Iwas thinking of.
(37:45):
Okay, yeah, I'll have to seewhat we can do about getting my
students at least exposed tothat. And then I do, we do teach
dialogic reading, which, as Iread your article too, I thought
all, all the important thingscan come together in that
moment, right when you're doinga read aloud. And like you said,
it can be a warm, fuzzy moment,but let's make it really
(38:07):
intentional as well. And I thinkin those situations, I at least
I've noticed from my students,they're more aware of how their
students respond and what theirwhere their oral language may or
may not be. So just teachingthem great assessing,
yeah, yeah, absolutely right. Imean, well informed observation
(38:29):
by a teacher with the teacherknows what kind of things to
look for that could be reallypowerful, especially as an
initial screen. The other thingI always used to tell my
students to do, and here inConnecticut, we do emphasize
this in terms of, you know,guidelines for identification,
(38:49):
for intervention and forlearning disabilities,
eligibility is to look atwhether the student has a
history of early language delay,like kids who have gotten you
know, have qualified for Birthto Three because of speech
language problems. Many teachersare not aware that even if the
(39:09):
children no longer qualify forservices when they enter
kindergarten, they're still atincreased risk of reading
problems. So it bearsmonitoring. You know, it's
really worthwhile to monitorthose kids more carefully to
make sure that you catch anythey won't all, of course, go on
to have reading problems, but asignificant percentage do, and
(39:33):
you can catch them early ifyou're monitoring more
carefully. I reallyappreciate that, because the
parent of a child who was pickedup early. It was never brought
up again when we entered theschool system, and it was one of
those signs, right, right,right. Yeah, there's some my
colleague, a former colleague ofmine, from Southern institution
where I taught full time,Richard zipply, has written a
(39:57):
lot. He's a speech path who hasa strong interest in reading,
and he's done some great work inthis area on, you know,
identification of readingproblems early, using these
signs of, you know, from likeearly language delay and things
(40:18):
like that. Another thing that'skind of a predictor is if
there's a history of readingproblems in the family, close
relatives, you know, parents,siblings, aunts, uncles. And I
once did a consultation on astudent who had four siblings
who had all been diagnosed withdyslexia, and the parent was
(40:42):
extremely aggressive aboutmaking sure that he was
identified early, so he wasactually identified in
kindergarten. And he because ofthe parents advocacy, he got a
lot of intervention very early,and I was called in to evaluate
him when he was in third grade,to decide whether he needed
(41:05):
special ed services anymore. AndI'll tell you what I expected to
find. I expected to find astudent who was a grade level
decoder, maybe grade levelphonological skills, but
lingering problems, maybe inspelling or rate of reading,
because that would be a commonprofile. Well, this student, he
(41:28):
was like, Great in everything hewas. And then I thought, Well,
maybe he never really had aproblem to begin with, but the
school, I had all his data fromthe time he was in kindergarten,
he really did show signs ofphonological, you know,
precursors of dyslexia. And atthe PPT, when I said he, you
(41:51):
know, technically, he did notmeet eligibility criteria, and
the parents said to me, Well,what do you mean? He had
dyslexia, and it just went away.
And I said, Look, what I'mtelling you is he looks like a
child who really had a strongvulnerability to dyslexia. He
(42:11):
got very appropriate intensiveintervention right away, and he
had a great response to thatintervention, and he should be
monitored, because we know hehad this vulnerability. So it's
very important to continue closemonitoring, and kind of know
that he might need more servicesin the future. But it it says
(42:34):
something about the power ofearly intervention. I think the
thing that's hard for schools ishe got a lot of intensity very
early. And it's not feasible forpublic schools, really, to do
that with every child who has ayou know, he was getting, like,
an hour a day for years, one toone with a teacher. And if we
(43:00):
and I know there is research inthis area, more research that
lets us predict, you know, thelevel of intensity that a
student might need to kind ofmake it more feasible for
schools to to meet the needs ofa wider range of students. But
he always he was an amazingstudent. He could spell better
(43:21):
than my undergrad. He was, yeah,fantastic.
Like you say, power of goodintervention, that's right,
right. Done, done early, yes,done with a sufficient level of
intensity. Soyou've really got me thinking
about something as I know weneed to wrap up, because we've
had you for a while. We can goon all day, by the way.
Fantastic. We are aware. Youhave other things to do, but I
(43:42):
was just going to say, what aresome of the challenges that are
facing us now that we have a lotof this good information. You
know, a lot of a lot of statesnow have legislation that is
very helpful as well. There'smore information, more people
understand what you mean whenyou say structured literacy. But
what are some of the challengeswe face in the future, moving
forward, we should be aware of,you know,
(44:03):
I think that maybe this ispartly just, you know, my the
fact that I've had this longterm interest in teacher prep, I
still think teacher prep is amajor challenge, particularly in
relation to pre service, andparticularly in relation to
general educators, who are moreoften have kind of a, you know,
(44:24):
constructivist, you know, don't,you know explicit teaching is
bad. You know, that kind oforientation and making good,
although I, as I said earlier, Ido think there's been
improvement making those goodteacher prep practices more
systemic, so that wherever yougo to get your teacher training,
(44:47):
just like if you're a doctor,you know, whatever medical
school you go to, they're notgoing to teach you that bad
humors in the body causedisease. They're going to teach
you about, you know, antiseptictechniques. Germs and that sort
of thing. I think that, youknow, doing that is really
important, and I think, youknow, to kind of credit my my
(45:12):
teacher prep colleagues, becauseteacher preparation can be a
really challenging job. I foundit really rewarding, and I I
never, ever regretted going intothe field. But there's a lot of
challenges in terms of thingslike, like, my article for
perspectives was on the how welldoing the how is really requires
(45:36):
demonstration modeling, youknow, having candidates work
with children under supervision,and there need to be supports
for that. And also, you know,ideally, you really need
teachers in the field who'vebeen well trained, because you
don't want the teacher candidateseeing a teacher who's modeling,
(45:57):
you know, guessing at words orword shapes or something like
that. So
Donell Pons (46:02):
Louise, this has been delightful. Thank you so
much. Oh, my
Unknown (46:05):
pleasure. I had a great time. It was great talking with
you.
Yes, thank you. Thank you. Andthank you to those of you who've
been listening to our podcast,and I know that you will
especially love this one, soplease join us next time for the
next episode of literacy talks.
(46:25):
Thanks for joining us today.
Literacy talks comes to you fromReading Horizons, where literacy
momentum begins. Visit Readinghorizons.com/literacy. Talks to
access episodes and resources tosupport your journey in the
science of reading you.
Welcome to literacy talks, the podcast for literacy
leaders and championseverywhere, brought to you by
Reading Horizons. Literacy talksis the place to discover new
ideas, trends, insights andpractical strategies for helping
all learners reach readingproficiency. Our hosts are Stacy
Hurst, a professor at SouthernUtah University and Chief
(00:27):
Academic Advisor for ReadingHorizons. Donnell Pons, a
recognized expert and advocatein literacy, dyslexia and
special education, and LindsayKemeny, an elementary classroom
teacher, author and speaker. Nowlet's talk literacy.
(00:49):
Welcome to this episode ofliteracy talks. For those of you
who've been listening thisseason, you know that we are
highlighting the perspectives75th anniversary issue of that
publication, and exciting newstoday, we have a very awesome
guest, and I'm going to turn thetime over to Donnell to
introduce her, because Donell,you are the one that made the
(01:10):
connection for sogreat. Yes, we are just so
pleased to have Dr Louise bearswirling with us today on the
podcast. And obviously, ifyou've been following along and
looking at the perspectivespublication, the one Stacy said,
is the 75th anniversary edition,and there's a free download at
the IDA website, theInternational Dyslexia
Association website, so if youhaven't looked at it and you
(01:31):
would like to you can for free.
You don't have to subscribe. Andthen if you have been following
along, then you'll be delighted,because you've either read the
article, or you were aware thatshe is one of the authors of an
article. So this will be a fundiscussion today, and I'm just
going to put a personal thing inthere. I've listened to you for
years, and I've thoroughlyenjoyed the way that you break
(01:52):
things down, and I know thatother educators feel the same
way. I'm not the only one. Youdo a really good job of helping
things that seem ratheroverwhelming, maybe a little
difficult, lots of moving parts.
You make them very approachableand understandable. And that's
one of the things I think isjust so good about your work
among many here. Thank you. Youbet you do a great job with
that. And so you know, Louise, Ithink we just like to start off
(02:13):
by having you tell us a littlebit about about your background.
You've been around a while, butthey might be new to some people
and some of us might notunderstand your whole
background. Tell us how you gotinto this field, and give us a
little bit of that story, sure.
Well, my father was a specialeducator, and so that kind of
gave me exposure to the field.
The field was very different inhis day, and his specialty was
(02:35):
not learning disabilities, but Isaw how committed he was to his
work, how important his work wasto him, and that, you know, when
I was casting about in my in myearly 20s for something that I
wanted to do as a career, thathad a big influence on me, and
then I was very fortunate. I'vebeen a really lucky woman in
(02:58):
lots of ways. So I went to ateacher prep program that was in
my area, and this was a reallylong time ago, like the late
70s, and I was prepared to teachwhat we would now call
structured literacy, which wasvery unusual for its time, but
(03:19):
the woman that headed theprogram, Elizabeth gallistel,
was very familiar with theHaskins laboratories,
researchers like Isabel Libermanand Donald Schenck Wheeler. You
know, she knew a lot of theearly icons of what we would now
call science of reading, andthat really shaped the program.
(03:43):
So I was very fortunate to havethat preparation, and then I
went into public schools toteach. I taught at an elementary
level. And then when I decidedto go into a doctoral program, I
decided to go into a cognitivepsychology program because I
wanted a broader background. Andat the time I started my
(04:06):
program, there was really wasjust pure serendipity. All of
this research on the importanceof phonemic awareness and
reading, but also cognitivestrategies in comprehension, all
of that was coming out, andalong the way, I was really
fortunate to have some greatmentors. Not only Betty, but my
(04:28):
my doctoral advisor, BobSternberg, Louisa Moats, was a
really important mentor to meearly in my career, Hollis
Scarborough, so you know, I wasreally fortunate that I think
back sometimes to think, Boy,you know, the career could have
gone a completely different wayif I had had a different teacher
(04:50):
prep program, and didn't havethe mentoring I had, or had
different people influencingme. So. Yeah, well, that's so
great. I love hearing thathistory, and I appreciate even
more now that because you did,as you say, You got lucky with
serendipity that you ended upwith these folks who had such
good information for you, putyou on the right path. So to
(05:11):
speak, on the science ofreading, that you've been
generous to share it with us,because that's what we're
relying on, right? Is, if wehaven't heard, others will help,
right, right? That's right,that's right. Absolutely pitch
in and helpeach other out. So, Louise, this
edition has been fantastic. Giveus a little overview of your
article, because you're in thesection of it's the you know,
how do we do this? And so tellus a little bit about what you
(05:34):
wanted to accomplish with thearticle, and then we'll get into
some of the aspects, sure.
So a lot of the discussionabout, you know, like science of
reading, and concerns thatpeople have about reading
instruction, a lot of thoseconcerns have focused on what
the article, what the issue,frames as the what. So the idea
(05:57):
that it's important to teachphonemic awareness and phonics,
or there's not enough emphasison spelling or written
expression, but, but how youteach is just as important. The
what is really important? It isimportant that we address those
areas, but if you teach amplephonics, but you do it in an
(06:19):
ineffective way, that's not sogood. So how you teach is also
important. So that was the focusof my article, yeah, and I
think you do such a good job,we'll dive right into that. And
I think it's important as you asyou know. So if you're reading
this perspectives publication,make sure you do hit all those
areas, because, as you'vepointed out, they give you a
(06:39):
different viewpoint as to whysomething is important, but you
need everything right to have afull understanding. So your
article in particular was, wastitled the how of structured
literacy just as important as awhat, like you've just said, and
it is fantastic. It gives us asnapshot of really, how you make
this all come together. But whatI loved is how you start the
article. It was really great,because very, very approachable.
(07:00):
And you said at the beginning,you recounted an experience at a
conference, which I'm sure isnot unusual, where a teacher
educator was learning about theimplementation of structured
literacy, and they asked, Ithink this is something we've
all probably heard. How is thisnew? We already prepared
candidates to teach phonics andthen tell us what your response
was.
So yeah, that teacher educatorthat had happened like the week
(07:23):
before I sat down to write thearticle, so it was fresh in my
mind, although, as you say, it'snot an unusual experience. And
the and she was, you know,obviously not like, not one of
the most persuadable people inthe audience, but she was really
focused on the what you know,that they already do this. We
(07:48):
already teach phonics, andwhat's the big deal? And she was
probably right. I think most youknow teacher prep programs do
teach at least some phonics, buthow it's taught is also really
important, and that was thepoint I tried to make in my
response. So you know, ourchildren being taught phonics in
(08:11):
an explicit, systematic way, oris the teaching kind of
incidental and haphazard? Is theis the teaching, is the phonics
teaching well integrated withspelling and the books that
children have to read? Or is itkind of a, you know, separate
carve out in literacy, but it'snot really integrated? A big
(08:36):
problem I see with a lot ofphonics teaching is that many
teachers have not been trainedto give good feedback when
children are reading text, soeven if phonics is being taught,
if when children are readingtexts, if the teacher just gives
them the word or encourages themto guess based on pictures,
(09:00):
based on sentence context, itkind of undermines the phonics
teaching. So all of those, youknow, those were points that I
tried to make in my response tothis person. I'm not sure I won
her over, but, but I tried. Youknow, I think I really
appreciate that too about thearticles, because as you're
hitting on these touch points,you speak to each one of these
(09:21):
in the article. So if there arepeople listening and they're
saying, oh gosh, I wish I could,yeah, it's in the article. So we
encourage you, even after thisconversation, you're going to
want to go back and review, andit's nice to have a little
roadmap to remind you of theconversation that we've had
today. That's really great andstructured literacy is
interesting because often it'semphasizing the explicit,
systematic instruction. And yourarticle explores that really
(09:42):
well for us, the systematic andsometimes even when you say it,
I'm not sure people reallyunderstand what that means. Can
you help us with that a littlebit? Sure. So,
um, so explicit means the skillsare being taught directly by
the. Teacher, children are notexpected to infer them only from
(10:03):
exposure with, you know, carefulchoice of examples, clear
modeling and guided practice.
Systematic means that within adomain of literacy, like
phonics, comprehension,composition, you're building
from simple to complex. So it isimportant to make the point that
(10:25):
these different domains ofliteracy are being taught in
tandem with each other. We'renot expecting children to map
totally master phonics beforethey get to work on
comprehension, right? But withinthe domain you're building from
simple words decoding simplewords to increasingly complex
(10:47):
words, within the domain ofcomprehension, you'd be building
from, you know, easier tocomprehend types of texts, maybe
easier vocabulary and conceptsand then sort of building
gradually over time. And thesame thing with composition, we
don't expect children to write,you know, a lengthy, complex
(11:09):
piece of writing, if they can'teven write a paragraph yet. So
that's really what systematicmeans.
Yeah, I think that'sinteresting, because Louise,
you're talking about, and ifthis feels like it's makes a lot
of sense to a lot of people whoteach in different fields, it
does make a lot of sense,because it's really a good
(11:30):
practice, isn't it? Sure atheart, sure, right, yes, yes,
yeah. So there, I thinkoftentimes I can start a
conversation with someone who'smaybe reluctant and maybe what's
the structure of literacy youspeak of? And sometimes you can
build a bridge right there,because that speaks to people
who have an understanding of howyou might teach, a concept if
you wantto teach as well. And sometimes
people you know do havemisconceptions, which I think is
(11:53):
probably true of the the storyabout the teacher educator that
I began the article with. Youknow, they have the
misconception that, oh, you'resaying all we need to teach is
phonics, or we have to drillphonics, and children don't get
to work on anything else inliteracy. That's not true, but
within a particular component ordomain you do want to build from
(12:18):
simple to complex, becauseotherwise, many children, you
know, there's always childrenthat, no matter how you teach,
they learn right? They'reresilient to the teaching
approach, probably because theycome into the classroom with
those skills already in place.
But for the children who haveany sort of vulnerability,
(12:41):
they're not if you throw thingsat them that involve
prerequisite skills that theydon't have, it's very
overwhelming and reallyincreases the odds of failure.
So I think of structuredliteracy as an approach that
tries really hard to avoidunintentionally confusing
(13:03):
children, and that also teachesin a way that's efficient as
well as effective. So you knowsome of these skills, like
spelling or phonics skills,yeah, children might infer it
from exposure, if you just waitlong enough, but it's not a very
efficient way to learn importantskills. And efficiency is really
(13:28):
important if a child is alreadybehind and you have to catch
them up, right? Yeah. Soyou could play a base in which
to do that. So Louise, you putup something interesting that
I'd like to touch on, because itwas a really good way of putting
it, and that is the integration.
So like you're saying, we're notexpecting a student to be a
master of one of these domains,but rather integrating as we go
(13:51):
is a good way in order to teach,right? The best way to teach.
And I'm just thinking about thework of other researchers like
Linnea Erie and others, withdevelopmental information that
would be useful and helpful,right to inform?
Oh, absolutely yes, yes. Well,all of the people that you know
were in the CO contributors tothe to the issue. I mean, many
(14:14):
of them were really importantinfluences on me in my own
career. You know Linnaeus, modelof word reading was one of the
things I wrote about reallyearly in my work, and that
really shaped my thinking aboutreading problems. You know, read
Lyon, Kate Cain. I mean, therewere so many wonderful people,
(14:37):
and also the editors werefabulous, Barbara Wilson and
Jessica Hammond. So those wereall people that were big
influences on me, and I thinkyou can see when you look at the
articles, if you look at theissue as a whole, there's
commonalities that sort of runthrough so the abilities that
(14:59):
are important. We're in andlearning to read, people are
emphasizing different abilitiesbecause that's what they're
writing about. But everybody hasan agreement on what kinds of
abilities are important inlearning to read. Nobody's
writing about word configurationcues or word shapes or, you
(15:19):
know, things like that, becausethe research does not support
that that's important inlearning to read. And I think
another thing, anothercommonality, is a shared belief
in the power of instruction tohelp children who have reading
difficulties. You know, there's,there's no question that there
are children who come to schoolwith a certain vulnerability
(15:44):
that might come from lack ofexperience or an intrinsic
disability. But we know a lotnow about how to help these
children, and all of the writersof for the issue, I think, have
a shared belief in in in thatthe power of that to help
children? Yeah, I think that'sreally interesting. I'm glad you
brought that up. I remember wehad the opportunity to speak
(16:07):
with Dr modes once, and shesaid, when there's
understanding, then there youall get behind and the work goes
easily because you have a sharedunderstanding. And so for a
first grade teacher listeningright now, and Lindsay, you are
a first grade teacher,yeah, what would be something to
take away from the article?
(16:28):
Yeah, Lindsay, sounds likeshe's, you know, a great
teacher. So she, she probablydoesn't need this advice. But I
think for many teachers, if theythey don't have a strong
background in reading, lookingat certain assessments to help
target instruction. So forexample, for you mentioned a
(16:52):
first grade teacher, for a firstgrade teacher looking at
criterion reference types ofphonics measures like the core
phonics survey, the GE test.
There's other measures too, butthe kind of measures where words
are organized into differentphonics categories. So you have,
you know, and they're andthey're ordered in in
(17:13):
complexity. So you have thesimplest word type, CVC words
and then short vowel words withdigraph, short vowel words with
blends, and then kind ofbuilding up to long words, like
words of two syllables or more.
So that's one way that a teachercould get a handle on okay, what
(17:36):
are the specific phonics skillsthat I need to teach? And then
another example of a goodassessment for first grade are
CBM measures of oral readingfluency, like DIBELS or aims web
or Acadian some of thesemeasures are available for free
(17:56):
download from the web. And for afirst grader, you wouldn't
usually start the ORFassessment, the oral reading
fluency assessment, until themiddle of first grade, but in
the second half of first grade,that type of assessment these
measures. So for people thataren't might not be familiar
with the measure, what childrenare asked to do is read a
(18:19):
passage aloud and the and itturns out that that's a really
good predictor of overallreading competence at the
elementary level about upthrough grade five or so, and
the teacher scores both thepercentage of words read
correctly and also words correctper minute. And ideally look for
(18:42):
a CBM that gives you separatebenchmarks for those two things.
So if you have a student whomeets the benchmark for
accuracy, but not for for ratefor words correct per minute,
then that's a student who justneeds to work on fluency, and
that would be very common at afirst grade level, so having the
(19:02):
student get more practicereading text, reading connected
text, like short stories andpassages and things like that.
But if you have a child who'snot reading the bench, meeting
the benchmark for accuracy, thenyou want to work on that first,
because you can't build fluencyuntil the student is accurate.
(19:24):
So again, these are the kinds ofmeasures that are useful because
they help the teacher targetinstruction. You can have great,
you know, instructional programsor teaching methods, but if it's
not really targeted to what thestudent needs, it's not going to
be helpful? Yeah, and I cananswer your question too.
(19:44):
Donnell, for something I thinkis important to take away from
this article for first gradeteachers, there was a part I
highlighted and starred, and itsays students do not need to
master the foundational skillsof word recognition before
developing their comp. Attentionabilities. And I think that's
really important for us lowergrade teachers, because, of
(20:04):
course, we have so much focusnow on that, you know, phonics
and building those foundationalskills, but we can still be
working on the other ones rightfrom the beginning, and a lot of
that is with read aloud andbuilding vocabulary and
discussions and oral languageand all of that. Absolutely, I
think, for teachers to, youknow, a lot of the teachers I've
(20:28):
met, they have the idea thatread alouds with young children,
that that's, you know, kind of awarm, fuzzy thing you do to
motivate reading and it and itis partly, but also especially
if it's combined with explicitteaching about the meanings of
words and, you know, other areasof language, it's also got an
(20:50):
important instructional purpose.
Yeah, I loved that you calledthat out so nicely in there. Oh,
good. I'm glad.
Interested in diving deeper intotoday's episode and exploring
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(21:39):
collective, dot Readinghorizons.com Join the Science of
reading collective today and bepart of a movement that's
eradicating illiteracy, that'scollective dot Reading
horizons.comand you know, Louise, you also
did another thing. You givegreat profiles. You will take a
student, you'll give a profileof a student, and then give some
(21:59):
strategies, which I think isalways so helpful, but you do,
it's some of the best that I'veseen when you break it down,
because you're really able topicture this student. So talk to
us a little bit about you, andyou did some within the article,
which were great. You can choosethose two two to highlight, if
you'd like, but you give somesort of differences between just
a student who might be having ageneral challenge with some
things and just need support,and probably tier one, and how
(22:19):
you approach your teaching,there will be just enough,
versus a student who does havesome real challenges with
reading, and what you might do.
So I would say there's a kind oftwo, two concepts here that are
important. So one has to do withthe poor readers profile. So
(22:41):
that's something I've beenreally interested in in my work,
and I keep trying to get it intoeducation more. But my my
success is, you know, not asgreat as I would like, but the
for your listeners that are manyof them are probably familiar
with the simple view of readingright, which says that good
(23:02):
reading comprehension depends ontwo broad types of abilities,
being able to read the words andhaving good language
comprehension. So the profileskind of flow out of that. The
poor reader profiles arebasically three different
profiles. There's the studentwho has trouble only with
reading the words, but languagecomprehension is good. Or the
(23:23):
student who only has troublewith language comprehension,
which in turn will affectreading comprehension, but their
word reading is at, you know, atgrade level or better. And then
the student that has troublewith both types of things,
right? And any of these studentscould be a student with a
disability. The profile is notabout whether or not a student
(23:47):
has a disability, it's abouttheir pattern of strengths and
weaknesses. So for instance, inthe type of profile that's
called a specific readingcomprehension difficulty, a
student could have limitationsin their language comprehension
because they have a languagedisability, but they could also
(24:10):
just lack exposure. Like manyEnglish learners have difficult
have that kind of profile, notbecause they have a disability,
necessarily, but because theyhaven't had exposure to English
vocabulary and academiclanguage. So what I would
encourage teachers to do isfirst think about the profile,
(24:30):
and this is other peoplecertainly have written a lot
about this, like Hugh Katz, isone of the people that's written
about this a lot in hisresearch. Don Compton a book
that I just published called thestructured literacy planner is
built around poor readerprofiles,
which I'm just gonna say isgreat. I'm just gonna give you a
plug.
(24:52):
Thank you. So think about theprofile first, and then, as you
know, a researchers. Like JackFletcher have pointed out what
really works best, instead ofhaving a test then teach model
in identification ofdisabilities, first teach, then
(25:13):
do more of the testing. So youknow the initial testing should
focus on, how do you understandthe student's strengths and
weaknesses? The profile, becausethat tells you, Well, do I need
to teach decoding? Do I need toteach comprehension? You know,
do I need to intervene in thoseareas? And then the student's
(25:38):
responsiveness to theintervention tells you whether
there might be a disability. Sostudents with disabilities
typically need much moreintensity than students who
don't have disabilities.
Students who have disabilitieswill will learn too, but they
often need a smaller group size,you know, more opportunities for
(25:58):
practice, more opportunities torespond. So if your school has,
you know, a tiered interventiontype of model, the children who
respond to initial, you know, totier two are probably students.
If they're showing evidence thatthey're on a trajectory to catch
up, they're probably not, thestudents who have disabilities,
(26:21):
the students who really needsomething more, who just don't,
it's just not enough intensityfor them. Or they keep
forgetting, or they keep fallingback behind other students that
that's more likely to be astudent who has some sort of
disability, if it's you know, ifthe profile is difficulty with
(26:42):
decoding and phonologicalskills, that's more like a
student with dyslexia. If theyhave a broader pattern of
difficulty, but that isresistant to intervention, then
that might be a student with adevelopmental language disorder
or a mixed reading disability,that type of profile. So, so
(27:04):
sort of, you know two, two broadconcepts, what's the student's
profile, and then how responsiveis the student to initial levels
of intervention.
And I know you and Stacy werechatting a little bit before I
jumped into this podcast. I knowyou guys are probably talking
(27:26):
about pre service experiences,because you both have taught
teachers to be teachers and howto do this work in classrooms.
And what are some of thechallenges that you face when
you have a new teacher, a newgroup of teachers, and you're
giving them all of thisinformation. So I'm just
thinking and Stacy, you probablywant to have this little
conversation too. You guys,little conversation too. You
guys can have a sidebar abouthow you prioritize for those
(27:46):
educators, and what should betheir expectation going to that
classroom their first year,because I can't imagine how
overwhelming it mustbe, right? I love the word you
just said prioritizing, becausethat was one of the most
important things I found, bothin my work as a teacher educator
and also in different policywork, especially here in my
(28:08):
state. So I was on a number ofpanels on, you know, how should
teachers teach reading and whatkind of test licensure exam
should the teachers take and I,after a while, I realized it was
pretty easy that Connecticutlikes to bring in people with
diverse viewpoints and try toget them to, you know, hold
(28:31):
hands and sing Kumbaya by theend of the panel's work, which
didn't, didn't always work outtoo well, but thinking back, it
was relatively easy to getpeople to agree that a certain
skill was important. So eveneven the people that were kind
of Die Hard whole languagepeople, they would agree that,
(28:52):
yeah, you have to teach somephonics. And certainly even
people that were strongadvocates of phonics would
agree, yes, it's important toteach comprehension. The hard
part is prioritization. Youknow, there's only so many hours
in a school day, right? Andthen, by extension, if you take
it to the teacher prep classroomat the university level, you
(29:16):
know, what are the things thatare really important for that
first year teacher to know,walking, you know, walking into
the classroom for the firsttime. And it does mean you have
to make some you're not going todo everything equally well.
There's going to be, you know, adomain of things that you really
want to make sure people areprepared. I would argue that's
(29:39):
things like formativeassessment, you know, using
assessment to improveinstruction and intervention,
understanding things like basiccomponents of reading and how to
teach them. And also, you know,of writing, being able to teach
spelling. And writtenexpression. And you know, that's
(30:00):
not an exhaustive list, butthose are some of the things
that would be on my must dolist. And then there's some
things that, you know, if I'mable to do them great, like
technology, okay, some of what'sout there in terms of
technology, I don't want to makeall the tech people mad at me,
but is it the number one? Youknow the technology is only
(30:25):
useful if the teachersunderstanding how you use it,
and to understand that, you haveto understand, have a broader
understanding of what abilitiesare important and how to teach
it if you're going to selectamong good programs. So I think
it's, you know, a desirablething for teachers to learn
(30:47):
about, but it's not going to beat the top of my priority list.
So, but it's hard. It's a veryhard thing. And I remember one
time my department chair, youknow, my department chair, who
was really, a really, reallynice person. She would read
books, education, relevantbooks, not textbooks, but things
(31:08):
that were, you know, popularbooks about education. And she
would say, oh, you know, you'vegot to cover this in the 435
which was the course where Itaught all of the reading stuff,
and I would think like, Well,I'm not going to cover this book
because I there's no time.
(31:29):
There's literally no time. Andafter a while, I just learned to
say to her, if you want me toadd something new, you have to
tell me what I'm taking out. AmI taking out spelling? Am I
taking out assessment? You know,I just can't it. I can't add one
more thing. And so theprioritization issue is huge. So
(31:51):
I'm glad you mentioned that.
And so I want to ask, and youknow, Stacy can probably speak
to this too, and take a littlemoment here, because I know it's
one of the challenges, and thatis, Louise, do you see things
improving at the pre servicelevel in terms of giving enough
attention to how you teachreading to be able to teach our
educators who are going to be inclassrooms? Is that improving?
(32:12):
From your perspective?
I think, I do think there'simprovement. And I'm glad you
asked that question, because Ithink it's very important. So
you know, the you might haveseen the NCTQ does these reviews
of teacher prep programs, aboutaround teaching of elementary
level reading, and they did seeimprovement that was very
(32:35):
encouraging. It's not likethere's not room for more
improvement, but at least inrelation to what they had
measured previously, there weresigns that programs were
improving. You know, we've seen,we've seen efforts in certain
states like Mississippi, forexample, that really focused on
(32:56):
improving teacher prep. We'veseen that bear fruit. So I do
think that there is improvement.
We still, you know, have a longway to go to make it more
systemic, so that you can assumethat your child will get a good
grounding in reading in theearliest grades, but it's better
than it was.
(33:19):
I appreciate that question. Andagain, the word prioritize comes
to mind. I'll just take a minutehere to brag about my
university. We were one of theuniversities featured in the
last NCTQ report, because we didget all the points on all the
things. But that being said,it's definitely not a Oh, good.
(33:40):
We've We've got it going on.
We're great. I am keenly awareof all of the things that we
still need to add and the timewe need to spend on certain
things. So, yeah, there'sprioritize. That's the important
word for me to remember. And aswe're talking about this too, I
and as I read your article, andI mentioned before we started
(34:00):
the podcast, I have read yourresearch for decades. Thank you,
and I think I am getting I needto be more explicit in my pre
service with my pre serviceteachers about integrating
pedagogy, knowledge of languageand also how somebody learns to
read like we need to integrateall of that in our teaching,
(34:23):
added like you're saying, thatknowledge of assessment and how
we use that and give feedback. Ihave a question, and I will say
in one of my courses, we areusing the assess, teach, assess
model, and we only have 15weeks. We're doing our best, and
we do use the assessments in thethe core phonics survey for one
(34:45):
in the assessing readingmultiple measures book, which is
amazing, if anybody agreed, Irecommend it. But one thing that
I know I have given my studentsguidance on this, in fact, you
may. Hugh Katz, we did a podcastepisode where he mentioned how
to notice if somebody isstruggling with oral language of
(35:05):
young student, but we don'toften see assessments that are
ubiquitous for oral languagewith every student. What do you
do? You have something that yourecommend? Or how can I prepare
my students to sort of assessthat and quantify it? Right now,
their assessment is veryqualitative.
(35:27):
I don't have a particularassessment of oral vocabulary. I
think assessment of of theseskills orally is really
important because otherwise it'scontaminated with decoding,
right? So you can't, so youcan't tell if the student is
gets a low score. Is it becausethey didn't know the meaning of
(35:51):
the word, or they couldn't readthe Word? When I do, I do a lot
of formal evaluations forschools, like independent
evaluations, so I will alwaysgive like, sub tests from the
Woodcock Johnson or the Wyatt orsomething like that. And it's,
and it's usually like 10minutes. I mean, it's really
quick to do something like aWyatt, you know, receptive
(36:15):
vocabulary and oral discoursecomprehension, but maybe more
than 10 minutes, but not thatbad. It's not that long. But
these are not the kind of testsyou use in screening of large
numbers of kids. For one thing,I think, just too expensive for
schools to purchase. I believe Ihave read about is there? I'm
(36:37):
not sure if I'm right aboutthis, but maybe the cubed
assessment, there was anassessment I read about
recently, but I have not givenit myself. So not, you know, not
really familiar with it, but Iwould do, I would scout around
and see if you can findsomething online, because I
believe there is something thattests oral vocabulary and like
(37:03):
listening comprehension. Youknow, those are the two things
to me that are most important ina screen. And then if you see
signs that the child is weak inone or both, then you could
always follow up with more indepth testing of the type that
usually a speech pathologistwould do. Yeah,
(37:23):
thank you. That's very helpful.
I know we have had someintroduction to Ox ed that is
out of England, of course, butthey have a screener. I don't
know how accessible it is to themass. Actually,
I've read, I've read about thattoo, and it looks good. And I
mean, the people who developedit are wonderful. So that might,
that actually might be the one Iwas thinking of.
(37:45):
Okay, yeah, I'll have to seewhat we can do about getting my
students at least exposed tothat. And then I do, we do teach
dialogic reading, which, as Iread your article too, I thought
all, all the important thingscan come together in that
moment, right when you're doinga read aloud. And like you said,
it can be a warm, fuzzy moment,but let's make it really
(38:07):
intentional as well. And I thinkin those situations, I at least
I've noticed from my students,they're more aware of how their
students respond and what theirwhere their oral language may or
may not be. So just teachingthem great assessing,
yeah, yeah, absolutely right. Imean, well informed observation
(38:29):
by a teacher with the teacherknows what kind of things to
look for that could be reallypowerful, especially as an
initial screen. The other thingI always used to tell my
students to do, and here inConnecticut, we do emphasize
this in terms of, you know,guidelines for identification,
(38:49):
for intervention and forlearning disabilities,
eligibility is to look atwhether the student has a
history of early language delay,like kids who have gotten you
know, have qualified for Birthto Three because of speech
language problems. Many teachersare not aware that even if the
(39:09):
children no longer qualify forservices when they enter
kindergarten, they're still atincreased risk of reading
problems. So it bearsmonitoring. You know, it's
really worthwhile to monitorthose kids more carefully to
make sure that you catch anythey won't all, of course, go on
to have reading problems, but asignificant percentage do, and
(39:33):
you can catch them early ifyou're monitoring more
carefully. I reallyappreciate that, because the
parent of a child who was pickedup early. It was never brought
up again when we entered theschool system, and it was one of
those signs, right, right,right. Yeah, there's some my
colleague, a former colleague ofmine, from Southern institution
where I taught full time,Richard zipply, has written a
(39:57):
lot. He's a speech path who hasa strong interest in reading,
and he's done some great work inthis area on, you know,
identification of readingproblems early, using these
signs of, you know, from likeearly language delay and things
(40:18):
like that. Another thing that'skind of a predictor is if
there's a history of readingproblems in the family, close
relatives, you know, parents,siblings, aunts, uncles. And I
once did a consultation on astudent who had four siblings
who had all been diagnosed withdyslexia, and the parent was
(40:42):
extremely aggressive aboutmaking sure that he was
identified early, so he wasactually identified in
kindergarten. And he because ofthe parents advocacy, he got a
lot of intervention very early,and I was called in to evaluate
him when he was in third grade,to decide whether he needed
(41:05):
special ed services anymore. AndI'll tell you what I expected to
find. I expected to find astudent who was a grade level
decoder, maybe grade levelphonological skills, but
lingering problems, maybe inspelling or rate of reading,
because that would be a commonprofile. Well, this student, he
(41:28):
was like, Great in everything hewas. And then I thought, Well,
maybe he never really had aproblem to begin with, but the
school, I had all his data fromthe time he was in kindergarten,
he really did show signs ofphonological, you know,
precursors of dyslexia. And atthe PPT, when I said he, you
(41:51):
know, technically, he did notmeet eligibility criteria, and
the parents said to me, Well,what do you mean? He had
dyslexia, and it just went away.
And I said, Look, what I'mtelling you is he looks like a
child who really had a strongvulnerability to dyslexia. He
(42:11):
got very appropriate intensiveintervention right away, and he
had a great response to thatintervention, and he should be
monitored, because we know hehad this vulnerability. So it's
very important to continue closemonitoring, and kind of know
that he might need more servicesin the future. But it it says
(42:34):
something about the power ofearly intervention. I think the
thing that's hard for schools ishe got a lot of intensity very
early. And it's not feasible forpublic schools, really, to do
that with every child who has ayou know, he was getting, like,
an hour a day for years, one toone with a teacher. And if we
(43:00):
and I know there is research inthis area, more research that
lets us predict, you know, thelevel of intensity that a
student might need to kind ofmake it more feasible for
schools to to meet the needs ofa wider range of students. But
he always he was an amazingstudent. He could spell better
(43:21):
than my undergrad. He was, yeah,fantastic.
Like you say, power of goodintervention, that's right,
right. Done, done early, yes,done with a sufficient level of
intensity. Soyou've really got me thinking
about something as I know weneed to wrap up, because we've
had you for a while. We can goon all day, by the way.
Fantastic. We are aware. Youhave other things to do, but I
(43:42):
was just going to say, what aresome of the challenges that are
facing us now that we have a lotof this good information. You
know, a lot of a lot of statesnow have legislation that is
very helpful as well. There'smore information, more people
understand what you mean whenyou say structured literacy. But
what are some of the challengeswe face in the future, moving
forward, we should be aware of,you know,
(44:03):
I think that maybe this ispartly just, you know, my the
fact that I've had this longterm interest in teacher prep, I
still think teacher prep is amajor challenge, particularly in
relation to pre service, andparticularly in relation to
general educators, who are moreoften have kind of a, you know,
(44:24):
constructivist, you know, don't,you know explicit teaching is
bad. You know, that kind oforientation and making good,
although I, as I said earlier, Ido think there's been
improvement making those goodteacher prep practices more
systemic, so that wherever yougo to get your teacher training,
(44:47):
just like if you're a doctor,you know, whatever medical
school you go to, they're notgoing to teach you that bad
humors in the body causedisease. They're going to teach
you about, you know, antiseptictechniques. Germs and that sort
of thing. I think that, youknow, doing that is really
important, and I think, youknow, to kind of credit my my
(45:12):
teacher prep colleagues, becauseteacher preparation can be a
really challenging job. I foundit really rewarding, and I I
never, ever regretted going intothe field. But there's a lot of
challenges in terms of thingslike, like, my article for
perspectives was on the how welldoing the how is really requires
(45:36):
demonstration modeling, youknow, having candidates work
with children under supervision,and there need to be supports
for that. And also, you know,ideally, you really need
teachers in the field who'vebeen well trained, because you
don't want the teacher candidateseeing a teacher who's modeling,
(45:57):
you know, guessing at words orword shapes or something like
that. So
Donell Pons (46:02):
Louise, this has been delightful. Thank you so
much. Oh, my
Unknown (46:05):
pleasure. I had a great time. It was great talking with
you.
Yes, thank you. Thank you. Andthank you to those of you who've
been listening to our podcast,and I know that you will
especially love this one, soplease join us next time for the
next episode of literacy talks.
(46:25):
Thanks for joining us today.
Literacy talks comes to you fromReading Horizons, where literacy
momentum begins. Visit Readinghorizons.com/literacy. Talks to
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