August 13, 2025 • 57 mins
In this episode, the Literacy Talks team is joined by researcher Jake Downs for a lively recap of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR) Conference. From practitioner-day takeaways and cutting-edge studies to unexpected laughs and zero conference swag, they unpack the insights, surprises, and trends shaping the future of literacy instruction.
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Episode Transcript
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Narrator (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.
Stacy Hurst (00:46):
Welcome to this episode of literacy Talks. My
name is Stacy Hurst, and I'mjoined by Donnell Pons, Lindsay
Kemeny, and we have a specialguest today, Jake downs, and the
topic is the fact that Jake andI got to attend the triple SR
conference in Calgary. I'm goingto say the name the Society for
(01:09):
the scientific study of readingconference, and we thought we'd
do a recap. And so happy Jakethat you can join us for this
recap.
Glad to be here. Thanks for theinvitation. Yeah, and we'll
mention this another time too.
But Jake also has a podcast, andis it called Teaching with Jake?
What's it called teachingliteracy podcast? I knew it had
(01:33):
teaching in it. It's reallygreat. So we recommend that you
listen to that too. And Lindsayand Donnell were not able to
come to this conference. ButDonnell, you've been to the
triple SR conference before.
Unknown (01:49):
Yes, I've been to it was in Newport, and I even did a
recap on the podcast. Was a lotof fun to talk about, so this
will be a lot of fun for me tohear about the experience you
got. Zach, yeah, and Jake. Oh,sorry, Lindsay, what were you
gonna say? Oh, I'm just, I'mexcited to hear about it. You
know, we're like, livingvicariously through you guys.
Stacy, I have to say, I was alittle disappointed that you
didn't have the live Google Docand that you were typing notes
(02:12):
while we could watch, which iswhat happened if you guys listen
to our, our episode about thereading league Summit. Donnell
was there, and she was like,live posting for us in just a
private document. It was so fun.
So anyway, I'm excited to tohear, you know, your takeaways.
Both of you. Yeah, it was fun. Iremember accessing that during
(02:32):
class, even because I wanted tohear and I did fail miserably,
but in my defense and Jake, Idon't know if you know this
about Donnell, but her firstcareer, she was actually a news
reporter. I do not have thatmuscle, so I was just soaking it
all in and and loving what I washearing. I really wasn't
reporting anything out.
(02:55):
So next year, we'll do abreaking news you know, this
just in for yeah, good
Stacy Hurst (03:02):
plan. Okay, I'm gonna remember that Jake, just
to kind of set our listeners upwho may not know about the
organization or the conference.
How would you say it differsfrom other conferences that most
educators attend?
Unknown (03:19):
Yeah, I think the major difference here for Triple S R
is that it is a researchconference, and so the folks
that are presenting there are,you know, almost exclusively,
researchers at institutions ofhigher education or, you know,
like, You know, other relatedorganizations. So it isn't
(03:42):
the type of,I wouldn't say it's not, it's
not practitioner friendly, butit's researchers talking to
researchers. So you have to beable to code switch a little bit
and be able to think, Okay,well, what does this mean for
practice? And there definitelyis stuff there for
practitioners. And this yearthey had a their first ever
practitioner day, which was theday before the regular
(04:03):
conference, which they said waslike 10 years in the making.
They've wanted to do it for along time. Finally, we're able
to do it so that that's excitingto see it going forward. But I
would say that the differenceis, is that it's researchers
talking to researchers, ratherthan researchers or reading
experts talking to teachers,practitioners, you know, those
types of stakeholders. Yeah,that's a that's a great
(04:26):
description of it. I also
Stacy Hurst (04:32):
had the thought while I was listening to some
sessions. This is where whatends up being presented in other
conferences. This is where itstarts, right. You can see the
the research that leads into thepractice. And so I bet we could
have a window into the future.
We could probably name a fewsessions that we would be
attending at other conferencesbased on the research that was
(04:53):
shared here. So yeah, it wasreally great. And Jake.
You and I have both beenpractitioners. You taught
elementary school as well,right? And Jake is also teaching
at the university level. So Ifelt like that practitioner day
was it was very impactful forthe educators that were there,
(05:18):
and I was really tapping into mypractitioner
lens there. I thought was reallygood, any takeaways that you
think were very applicable forclassroom teachers from that
day,
Unknown (05:32):
you know, from the from the practitioner day, I really
enjoyed Dr Matt burns hispresentation.
It was on, it was on assessment,but it was on thinking about
aligning assessment withinstruction. And he basically
made the point and, and I hope,and this is a caveat throughout
the whole podcast, I hope thatI'm not putting words in any of
(05:53):
the people we talk so, you knowthat we talk about, you know,
putting words in their mouth.
But what I might take away fromit was that he basically said
something along the lines of,you know, without assessment,
everything else is lessimportant that it's assessment
is what really decides whatmakes it into prime time
instruction, what is secondpriority and what is a we'll get
to that if we, if we can. Andthat was just such a, I think, a
(06:16):
relevant, you know, it's it'seasy to assess students. It's
easy to over assess students,but being able to curate the the
right configuration ofassessments that can work
together to really identify whatyour students needs are, and of
course, like triangulate thatwith classroom observation and
such, but being able to useassessment to make the
(06:39):
instructional time very lean,because minutes are limited. So
I thought that was I had so manynotes I took from that, that
presentation, yeah, andsomething that he said that
stood out to me. I've heard himsay this in other places too,
that if you are perplexed abouta student and the way they are
(07:00):
not progressing, then youactually just haven't found the
right assessment. Because withthe right assessment, you will
be able to target what thestudent needs and see that
progress forward. He alsomentioned, and I thought this
was a great piece of practicaladvice that he just kind of said
As an aside, but I noticed hejust published a paper about
(07:21):
curricular programs that peopleuse, and he he mentioned it in
there too, but he said, You needat least 12 data points when
you're progress monitoring toreally make any really informed
decisions. And that made methink we progress matters,
sometimes weekly, but notalways, right? So even that
(07:44):
little tidbit of how we look atthe data was important, and
Stacy was the practitioner day,and Jake or Stacy other one of
you can answer. And I'm outsidethe Bozeman library, by the way,
so I'm a little I'm on location,as you might say, if you see my
background, and I'm proud to saythe Bozeman library is very
busy. They didn't have any spacethis morning for a conference
(08:05):
room. So I'm pleased with thatpeople are accessing their
library in Bozeman. But thequestion I had was about the
practitioner day. Was thematerial practitioner focused?
And did they also speak aboutthe challenges practitioners
have in implementation. Or wasit just that the material was
more focused on practitioners,or were they also trying to
address how difficult it is toimplement some of these things?
Lindsay Kemeny (08:30):
Yeah. I mean, I think it definitely was focused
on practitioners and applicationfor classroom setting, I would
say that it varied by speakertalking about implementation,
but overall, you know, my mytakeaway was that there was an
emphasis on, and this is what itmeans for implementation, rather
than just here's theoreticalconstructs, right? Like this is
(08:52):
what, this is what you can doabout it. But I think it did
vary a little bit by speaker,yeah, I think it's very fitting
that they had Dr burns speakingand that on that practitioner
focused day, because that's justsomething I love about him, is I
feel like he really helps us,like, with the research. He's
like, I just, I admire him,because I think he's pretty
(09:14):
passionate and very helpful withhelping teachers, talking to
teachers, and trying to help usaccess this information. But
Stacy, that's reallyinteresting. What you said about
needing 12 data points in yourprogress monitoring, and you
think about, gosh, if I wasprogress monitoring every other
week, then that's like 24 weeksbefore you really see that clear
(09:36):
pattern. That's a littleconcerning, right before you
pivot, make a pivot. Sosomething to think about is
that, for some of our students,can we get that progress
monitoring data quicker and andweekly, like you said,
Stacy Hurst (09:52):
and then Dr Kerns also presented and that day. And
as most if you if you'refamiliar with his research.
He mostly talks about, well, hehas many things that he shares,
but one thing that was thesubject was how to break a word
into syllables. And I know hereally feels like it's important
(10:14):
for students to simplify thattask, and so that I thought that
was useful for people to bethere too, and Jake, some of our
side conversations were aboutthat, you remember, because
Jake, some of your research hasto do with you. Actually did a
study, didn't you about the waythat is it, every syllable has a
(10:35):
vowel. What's the acronym? He
Unknown (10:39):
shot lob? I think is how okay. I'm sure
pronunciations vary, right setfor variability there, but I
think Isha, love is, is whatI've heard it as. I don't know,
echelon, I don't know. I don'tknow I saw it. And I thought, is
that a Hebrew word? Like, whatdoes that mean? And I realized,
Lindsay Kemeny (10:56):
what was he suggesting for how to break it
up?
Unknown (11:01):
Well, I think the idea here was a he was saying that
what something that's superimportant for learning the code
and learning it well isrepetition and volume of
practice. And so sometimes wepush in metalinguistic things
with our word instruction thatmight not be as super
(11:23):
productive, like, if I remember,and I hope I'm not putting words
in his mouth, but, you know, hesaid that, well, students don't
really need to know thedifference of, like, a digraph.
What like the actual dictionarydefinition of digraph, tri
graph, you know, quadrigraph.
He's like, just call themconsonant teams. And the same
thing. It's like, you know, witha vowel team or a diphthong,
just call them Val teams, youknow, for students, like being
(11:44):
able to strip away some of themetalinguistic stuff and get it
to be very as few functionalrules as possible, because that
will allow time for a highervolume of practice. I think that
was the, one of the major thingsI remember. And then the second
thing being, you know, talkingabout, especially with, like,
multi syllabic reading, that,you know, syllables is actually
(12:09):
a feature of the sound of ourlanguage. It's not a feature of
the orthography. And so that'swhy, like doing syllable types.
And you know, the longer a wordgets, the more likely it is to
be irregular, essentially. Sosometimes that starts to fall
apart. Once we get beyond veryorthographically transparent
basic compound two syllablewords, it starts to get bit more
(12:32):
complicated in the upper gradesand so with the Echelon strategy
saying that, well, really whatmatters is, how can we, how can
we group, how, like differentgroupings are a Okay, when we're
splitting apart a long word, wejust want to group it around the
syllables in a way that thatmakes sense. And he had some
really great, great examples.
(12:55):
But, you know, like, I don'thave any off the top of my head.
This is, you know, poorpreparation on my part. But, you
know, like with some words,well, it doesn't matter if the L
sound is coming at the end ofthe first syllable or at the
beginning of the secondsyllable. Like, we shouldn't be
too super nitpicky about wherethe syllables are divided,
because that's actually inservice of being able to
(13:17):
actually read the long wordaccurately, which is where we
want to get to, and then beingable to coach students on
changing vowel sounds. So if theshort vowel sound doesn't work,
try a long vowel sound. If thelong vowel sound doesn't work,
try, you know, a schwa sound,and teaching them to be flexible
with reading multi syllabicwords to help them get to the
(13:38):
accuracy part to map it Stacy.
Is there anything that you wouldadd on to that, or any
additional context? Yeah, whichwas my question going into it,
because he was very adamantabout, we over complicate this
for students. And I agree,actually. And so I was like, but
what are you recommending inplace of that, kind of like
Lindsay's question was alludingto, so you did talk about that,
(13:58):
and the peeling off strategy,where we look at morphemes, like
prefixes and suffixes, and goingthat route too. Yeah, I thought
it was very interesting.
Stacy Hurst (14:11):
And a lot, I think there was a lot of buzz about
that, as he was talking aboutit, from the teachers in the
room.
So it was great. And that wasday one, that was the
practitioner day. And thenthere, there were some people, a
few that I recognized thatstayed for the rest of the
conference. And a couple of themhad mentioned to me that the
(14:32):
tone of the conference was verydifferent after that, right?
Because then it wasn't focusedon practitioners, it was more
about research. And some of themfelt very overwhelmed to be
there for the research parts.
But I so I think thepractitioner day definitely was
successful for the intention ofit, and I was really happy that
I was able to be there. So yeah,for the first one ever, there we
(14:56):
are.
Unknown (14:59):
And.
Stacy Hurst (15:00):
Then day two, we started with the research
studies. And to be honest, outof the gate, the very first
session I attended, I was justso happy to be there. It was
great research. They weretalking about Jake. Were we in
the same session that first? Idon't think so. I actually I
(15:20):
skipped the first sessionbecause I had slides that I was
finishing up. Oh yeah, that'sright. Don't tell anyone. No,
no, I already gave Jake a hardtime about that,
Unknown (15:29):
and I did attend his presentation, which was
fantastic. So I hope we can talkabout that too. Actually, do you
mind Jake just talking aboutwhat you presented on? Yeah, I
can just briefly, you know, my Ipresented on data that we're
we're kind of framing it aslike, this was just a natural
experiment where there was aschool district that had adopted
(15:54):
a particular reading curriculumduring the reading first era,
you know, 20 plus years ago, andthey've really used and refined
that decoding curriculum, youknow, over the course of those
years,and then during this current,
like science of reading era andlegislation that they were like
heavily encouraged to updatetheir curriculum and to use a
new curriculum. So it was justcomparing, you know, in the
(16:16):
first half year ofimplementation, how did one
group of students in thedistrict do with the new
curriculum versus, you know, howstudents did in the regular
curriculum that they've youknow, that they've used? So kind
of comparing, and these are bothfairly large curriculum from
each of those areas. So, youknow, like I framed it as
(16:38):
comparing a curriculum from areading first era versus a
science of reading era.
And it wasn't, it wasn't theReading Horizons curriculum, so
sorry, you know, but it wasanyway so, but that's what I was
presenting on. And you know,there, there were a lot of
outcomes that were similar, buton the decoding measure we had,
(17:00):
so we used the core phonicssurvey that the the
newer curriculum outperformed,and
more the more complex skills onin that phonics inventory, the
students in the new curriculumdid better on so
more, more to come. There I'mworking on, like, doing like, a
really formal analysis andwriting it up, etc, but that's,
(17:23):
that's, that's the brief of it.
But I,
Stacy Hurst (17:26):
you know, it was kind of meant to be us, like a
snapshot of this is one schooldistricts experience, but with
signs of reading legislation andthe era that we're in, similar
things are happening, you know,in how many school districts
across across the country. So itwas kind of framed as like a
current, you know, slice ofreality. And here's some data to
(17:47):
talk about trade offs ofimplementation. I really loved
it because it's rare that you dohear the focus on the curriculum
right? Usually it's on teachingpractices or aspects of it, but
I really liked the comparison,and you did, your time was well
spent on the slides. You didknock those out of the park.
(18:10):
Also something to note about thethese presentations, they can be
very research heavy, and Iwouldn't go right to
entertaining, although I viewresearch as a story. Every study
is a story that I get reallyinvested in. But I will tell
you, Jake had everybodylaughing. They were all engaged.
(18:30):
It was just a really engagingpresentation, too, and some
really great questions at theend as well. So Jake, I did have
a question. It sounds superinteresting. Are you going to
follow those students to seewhat the outcome is a few years
down the road as well? I'mintrigued.
Unknown (18:47):
You know, I haven't, I haven't talked with the school
district to partner on anythinglike that.
It just would get really tricky,of because it's not that each
group stayed in that specificcurriculum. This was at the end.
This was the last half of firstgrade. So it's like tracking
them through into second gradeand beyond. I think there just
(19:10):
would be too much noise in thedata to pull, to pull anything
out long term, especially,you know, the sample size, I
think it'd be, I think it'd bepretty, pretty messy, because
they might have been usingeither of the curriculum in the
next year. Okay, you can't keepit pure, but, boy, you're asking
a really interesting question.
(19:31):
Because, like you say, this is ajuncture at which a lot of
people are at, is okay? So if wemake the changes, you need to
show how much better, or ifright? Yeah, and those changes,
so, gosh, this is greatresearch. And I think it's, this
is where, you know, sometimesresearchers are interested in
slightly different things thanpractitioners. So if I'm setting
(19:51):
up, like a quasi experimentalstudy or a randomized control
trial, you know that the controlgroup, you know, I'm just really
looking to set up a controlgroup.
That's going to be an accuratecomparison to see, you know, did
my treatment, you know, improve?
Basically, you know, theequivalent of being like against
a placebo and active. You know,control groups vary widely, but
typically, like practitionersare more interested in, well,
(20:14):
which, which curriculum is goingto do better, you know. And so
this one was more of, sometimesyou hear them called race horse
studies, of like, well, let'sjust give to curriculum rock and
roll and see what happens. Andthere's, there's a lot less of
that in the reading researchworld, but I think there's room
for for more. And I even had, Imean, there were a couple of the
(20:35):
researchers that people Irespect, that I think are
important in the field that cameup to me after and and told me,
Hey, we need more, we need moreracehorse studies like this that
are published in peer reviewjournals,
you know, to help researcherskind of keep their finger on the
pulse, but also to help, youknow, practitioners, people that
are selecting curriculum to havean evidence base to make
(20:58):
decisions off of, I really helpsme. We talk so much about
bridging research to practice. Ithink of it more like, ideally
it should be a swinging door,right? We're not quite there
yet, but that's one study that,one type of study that will
really help with that. I mean,it's very front lines, right? I
(21:19):
really appreciated that. It wasgreat. Thank you. Yeah, it was,
it was my first trip SRpresentation, and my first time
presenting statistics in frontof people that understand
statistics better than I do. SoI was, I was nervous, but I was,
I was pleased with how it went.
You could not tell. You couldnot tell. I wanted you to say,
I'll be here all week, folkslike, he really was,
Stacy Hurst (21:42):
it was great, informative and entertaining.
You can't get better than that.
Like, it was really awesome. Andthat kind of helps me pivot a
little bit. Some of the sessionsI went to that I think stood out
a lot to me, and I'll ask youthe same question a minute,
Jake, were about teacherknowledge, and that very first
session, talked about, what isthe difference, you know, that
(22:03):
teachers knowledge makes fortheir students. And I thought
there were some reallyinteresting outcomes that were
reported. One that was aparticular interest to me, and
nobody will be surprised by thiswas, and I think this was a
Texas University. They also givea test that's about the
Foundations of Reading, and theywere measuring they gave the
(22:26):
teacher knowledge of basiclanguage construct survey to
their pre service teachers, andthen compared results from that
to how they did on that statetest to get their license. And
they saw high correlationsbetween students who knew those
who did well on the first surveyand how they did on the testing.
(22:47):
And that is interesting to me,because my master's thesis was
that basic was on the teacherknowledge survey, and I continue
to give it to my students everysemester. And we also have a
test, so I have all this datathat made me think, now I need
to start making comparisons andsee what I'm learning with that.
I even mentioned to Jake at onepoint like I think I've designed
(23:11):
15 different studies in my head,just going to all these, these
sessions. But anotherinteresting thing from that
particular session, and I thinkthis will resonate especially
Donnell with you, but they did,and this, I think, was Middle
Tennessee State, they cited someresearch about teacher knowledge
(23:31):
and who was working with themost striving readers. And they
learned that they surveyedteachers, classroom teachers,
reading specialists and specialeducation teachers. And
significantly, the people thathad the least amount of
(23:52):
knowledge were the specialeducation teachers. And
frequently, those are the verypersonnel that are working with
the students who have thegreatest need. So their research
concluded that we really need toensure that pre service
teachers, especially who aregetting a degree in special
education, are equipped with thesame information that a
(24:13):
classroom teacher readingspecialist would even have. That
was, I can't say that wassurprising to me, but it was
impactful,
Unknown (24:27):
yeah, and I think that's where, you know, you
mentioned the swinging dooranalogy, and I really like that
analogy. I'm going to keep it,but that I do see the field
being responsive to things thatare happening in the
practitioner world as well. AndI think that's one, there's been
a lot of talk the last few yearsaround teacher knowledge, and
it's important, there's been alot of professional development
(24:49):
initiatives to promote teacherknowledge. And so, you know,
there are, there is a decent setof researchers that are going
out. And you know how.
How, like, what, what is thevalue of research? How does
research or what is the value ofknowledge? How does knowledge
read to practice lead topractice, lead to student
outcomes? And trying to untangleall that, because it is, it is
(25:11):
really complex.
Coaching would be like anothersimilar area, area i i haven't
seen a ton of like coachingresearch in the last few years,
and maybe that's, you know, justthe silos that I'm in, but I
haven't, at least readingspecific coaching. There hasn't
been a ton, but I felt likethere was quite a bit, you know,
at Triple S, R and so, and Ihope these are things that
(25:35):
presentations that turn intopublications that can get pushed
out there, because there was alot of really interesting stuff
on thinking about the role ofcoaches and how coaches can
support instruction.
Stacy Hurst (25:49):
Yeah, I noticed that too, and they all, they all
stated, what I know to be trueis that just because you have a
coach at one school in the samedistrict, their job actually may
be very different than somebodyelse, so there was a call to
kind of institutionalize thatcoaching in a way, make it more
Unknown (26:11):
consistent. I think, yeah, and even in the research,
I think this was a comment inthe one session that we were
sitting next to each other in.
But you know that, you know sowhen you look at the like,
systematic reviews, or, youknow, where they've kind of
looked at studies of coaching,like across studies, and kind of
summarize them that there's alot of very the results vary a
(26:32):
lot across coaching studies. Andthe point was made was that it's
not just in practice that itvaries, but it's even in even in
the in the research literature,you know what the coach was
doing in this study, versus thisstudy versus this study, you
know Can, can vary widely. Sothat was, that was a something
(26:53):
that I've been munching on on alittle bit, is,
Stacy Hurst (26:59):
I don't think anyone's going to argue that
coaches are invaluable, right?
But there's definitely a rangeof practices that coaches are
engaging in, which thereforemeans there's a range of what's
going to be more or lesseffective. And so a need to kind
of hone in on what are thebiggest rocks that coaches can
attend to, especially when we'retalking, you know, reading,
(27:20):
reading achievement, and beingable to hone in on that. Yeah,
and I think we were in the samesession together where Dr
Washburn was talking about thestudy they did on teachers who
had completed the letterstraining and how that had
impacted their practice, andthey watched hours and hours of
videos, and the conclusion wasthat it did impact their
(27:45):
declarative knowledge and theirprocedural knowledge, but not
their conditional knowledge. Sotheir recommendation was
coaching to help them toactually explain why, like they
were modeling they were doingthat, but maybe not explaining
why they were modeling in theway they were, or being very
transparent about their thoughtprocess to their students as
(28:06):
they were doing that. And thatwas one suggestion that coaching
would be able to help with.
Unknown (28:13):
Yeah, super interesting, super interesting
stuff. I want, I like, want morecoaching research. Like, let's,
let's do this, like, let's getmore out there. Yeah, you know,
it makes me think about stay,you know, having a practitioner
day, that's fantastic, but italmost as if we need a decision
maker day. Do you know what Imean? So it's like, how do you,
how do you get this to filterinto the places where it needs
(28:36):
to go in order to impactdecisions that are being made
that directly affect students?
That, to me, is another level tothis. Yeah, like a stakeholder,
a stakeholder date, right? So,yeah, principals, district,
literacy, admin, you know, etc,etc, yeah, this is your data
Interesting. Yeah,
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Stacy Hurst (29:33):
Yeah, that's a really good point. And I'm
thinking of teachers likeLindsay, because Lindsay You
don't, you didn't attend thisconference. What do you do to
get research? You apply researchreally well in your classroom.
How do you do that? How do youknow what your I dive into
topics that I'm interested in,right? But there is
Lindsay Kemeny (29:55):
a research like and I will, you know, it's so
weird. But like.
You can get a lot of PD throughsocial media, and especially if
you're following researchers andthings. And one researcher that
I follow, Shane piasta, was atTriple S R I was curious if any
of you, either of you, went toany of her sessions.
Stacy Hurst (30:18):
I love her research, and I did not. I
didn't go to hers. Did you Jake?
Yeah. I went to,
Unknown (30:26):
yeah. I went to the language symposium that I think
had two of her for sure, one,but I think two of the
presentations she was a coauthor on, and then our CO
presenter, I guess. And thenthere was a poster session
Lindsay Kemeny (30:41):
by Alita Hudson that she was also a co co author
on. But, yeah, I think, I thinkDr PIAs is doing just really
great stuff. And like herLinkedIn, like she's doing good
on the social media side to,like, push stuff out to those
that are interested. And that'swhat I was watching. I was
watching her conference recap,and I was particularly
interested in one of herresearch studies, it's called
(31:02):
patterns of preschoolphonological awareness,
development and later literacyoutcomes really interesting
because one of the majortakeaways is that and they were
studying over 300 preschoolstudents, and They found that
focusing solely on phonemicawareness might be insufficient.
(31:24):
Focusing on phonologicalsensitivity instruction is also
important, especially for atrisk children. So my question
was, is that specific to pre K,or, you know, is that also the
take the takeaway forkindergarten? Because that's, I
mean, that's huge right there,because we've been having this
(31:45):
shift where phonemic awarenessis most critical. Don't get
stuck with the larger units,which is true, phonemic
awareness is very critical. Butdo we need to be training some
of that phonological sensitivityin kindergarten as well? And she
told me, well, she's presentingat the reading league
conference, just like in Octoberon this. And so I'm really
(32:06):
excited to go and listen to hearwhat she has to say. But Jake,
do you have any thoughts onthat? Yeah, so that was Aleta
Hudson's poster, which I I'mjust throwing this out to the
universe. I think thepractitioner conferences should
do poster sessions. So it's,it's a big room. Researchers
have posters, and you can go up,and it's just a lot more
(32:27):
interactive than like a sit andget anyway, I'm just throwing
that out there, right? Becauseteachers don't have time, we
don't have time to read all theresearch studies. Just tell me
what I need.
Unknown (32:38):
So I, I talked with Alita about this,
about her poster, for probably,like, 20 minutes, and it was
really interesting. Yeah, thedate, and I'm, you know, Alita
would be the one, and Shanewould be the ones to really talk
about it. But, you know, fromwhat I recall, it was a it was a
profile analysis. So they werekind of looking so profile
(32:59):
analysis is where you group. Youhave different variables, and
you group students by thosevariables. It's a statistical
technique of like, oh, like,these were people that started
off, you know, with highphonological sensitivity, but
they had low growth. And hereare people that start off with
low but they had medium growth.
And so they had a chart that hadall sorts of lines, you know,
going across to show thedifferent profiles. And I can't
(33:19):
remember, you know, the thespecifics, but I, but I, yeah, I
do remember the takeaway beingthat phonological sense. So
training phonological awarenessalongside phonemic awareness,
that that those students thathad both of those produced the
most, or, you know, grew themost or had the best reading
(33:40):
outcomes. I think it was at theend of first grade. But see,
you're really astute. Lindsay toask like, well, is that, is that
feature of the pre K population,or does that transfer to
kindergarten? And first,I don't, I don't feel qualified.
(34:01):
I mean, that's not my line ofresearch. So I, I'll give a
couple hypotheses. And, youknow, we could maybe have some,
some some capital E expertschime in their thoughts. But,
you know, okay, Option A is, itcould be, yeah, attacking both
on is going to be beneficial,because it's a way of getting,
you know, additional volumethat, yes, we know that phonemic
(34:22):
awareness is really important,especially blending and
segmenting, but evenphonological work is is going to
be exercising those muscles. Andso maybe we don't need to think
of it as this linear path, butwe we need to think of it as a
bit more like hierarchical thatwe can be doing all of those
things with an emphasis onblending and segmentation, and
that's going to have good, goodresults, because it's exercising
(34:44):
that flexibility part that'sreally important for future
reading. B there could beceiling effects, right? That
phonological awareness, phonemicawareness, it is a constrained
skill there. There is a ceilingwhere.
More phonemic awareness is notnecessarily going to have the
same downstream benefits, youknow. So it could be that with
(35:07):
preschoolers, you know, they'reparticularly primed to need
phonological awareness work,because that's going to lead
into more productive phonemicawareness work. So it could be a
feature of preschoolers that,because they are starting out
at, you know, ground that theground floor, they are starting
out from the beginning, that itwould make sense that those
(35:28):
students would be particularlyprimed to benefit from, you
know, receiving both that we'regoing to be start with the
basics of where they're at, butwe're also going to sprinkle in
some where they're headed at theedge of their current Proximal
Development,those, those would be my two
theories. And this was thestudy. It wasn't like a control
trial. It was sort of take likethere wasn't a, here's treatment
(35:49):
a, here's treatment B. Let's seewhat happens. It was sort of
taking existing data and thentriangling That with
instructional practices thatteachers reported were
happening, or maybe they wereobserved. I can't remember, but
so that's kind of like somethingto remember as well.
But whether it's a, you know,Route A that I talked about,
(36:10):
route B that I talked about, orsome other route, you know, I I
don't know.
Stacy Hurst (36:16):
I don't feel, I don't feel expert enough to,
like, make a supposition, butthose would be my guesses. Yeah,
great thoughts. It's superinteresting. And I'm just like,
even more, like, looking forwardto attending her session at the
reading league this October, tohear more, yeah, and you know, I
will say I heard more um,research studies on pre in
(36:42):
preschool, then I feel like Ihave for a while. I know they've
been happening, but maybe theywere just emphasized here. One
of them had to do with contentarea instruction in preschool
and having basically having alanguage objective at the same
time, and the impact that thathad on students. And I thought
that was really interesting,being more dialogic in those
(37:05):
subject areas.
Unknown (37:08):
That connects to another one of Shane PIOs
presentations. We're talkingabout language as a vehicle.
You know that typically whenteachers are using language
practices, they're not using itjust for language sake, although
that is an important benefit,but they're using it to Drive
content based, you know,learning and understanding. And
(37:29):
so thinking about, how do we,how do we support content
learning via oral language inthose early grades was that was
a big takeaway for me. But Ithink, you know, I'm, you know,
my line of research is more withupper elementary that's more my
background. I really care about,okay, after kids have, like, the
basic code down, what next? Youknow, what is the net? What are
(37:50):
the next thresholds? And I thinkthat same analogy applies really
well to reading comprehension,that, you know, various
strategies or standards, the, Icall it, you know, the quote,
unquote comprehension, thingsthat we're doing, they're not
productive in a vacuum, right?
They're they're productive whenwe're using them to learn
content. And I think sometimesthe last few years, like
(38:11):
knowledge learning, you know,learning for knowledge versus
learning for strategies likethat, those have kind of pitted
against each other, but it'sactually like the strategies are
the verb in the sentence thatare getting you to the noun or
the outcome or the comprehensionthat's happening. And, you know,
models of comprehension aresimilar to models of language,
because it's, you know,comprehension is language via
(38:32):
orthography, right? So it wouldmake sense that those two to
apply, but, yeah, yeah. Superinteresting stuff on oral
language in early elementary andpre K stuff happening out there,
yeah, what were some memorablepresentations or speakers for
you, or takeaways, or what weresome of the things that, yeah,
(38:58):
you know, one, that one thatreally stuck out to me. Well,
there, there were, there was asymposium. So symposium, being
that, it's a group ofresearchers all presenting on
the same thing, that's organizedby a specific person, so it kind
of has like a theme was, wasFreddie Hebert's symposium,
which, you know, I, I alwaysfind Freddie's stuff so
(39:19):
interesting. But there was,there was one presentation by Dr
Matthew Borken Hagen from theFlorida Center of reading
research. And it was sort ofshowing models of how, like AI
can be used to simulate theorthographic mapping process,
which was really interesting,because if you think about, you
(39:40):
know, like, how many, okay, youknow, a student is learning,
you know, ch that ch says,Sorry, I shouldn't have it,
right? It says, you know, howmany interactions does it take
for that specific letter soundcombination to be on?
Automatic. Okay. Well, then howlong does it take for, you know,
(40:03):
words that are having ch to beautomatic? And then, okay, in a
corpus of text, they had acorpus of text that was, you
know, from a couple popular corereading programs that they were
seeing, like, how often thosewords were present that had
those, those sound letter soundcombinations. And it was really
interesting. I mean, they playedsome, like, simulations of, I
(40:23):
mean, I can't remember, but itwas like 10s of 1000s of
interactions showing howautomatic the sound and the
words would become over time.
I'm, I'm sure, I'm, like,butchering what the presentation
was actually about. Because itwas like, you know,
I yeah, it just was really overmy head, right? But, but that
(40:43):
was, like, super interesting.
And it is just like, you know,we know that word learning,
there's more to it than just thethe phonologic and orthographic
connection. And that's, I think,a major limitation right now the
AI models. It's not taking in,you know, semantic or syntactic
stuff or other things thatmatter, but that is a huge part
of it. And so kind ofunderstanding how many
(41:04):
repetitions it takes, and thenwhat are the how many
repetitions are they likely toget with the text that teachers
are commonly using? I mean, thatwas, that was really
interesting, you know, that wasreally interesting to me
in a different session, DrDeborah Reed, the whole, her
whole presentation was, wasgreat,
(41:25):
but, you know, she just, she hadone slide that opened her her
presentation where she talkedabout different cut offs that
are used to determine if astudent has characteristics of
dyslexia or not. And she wasreally careful to point out that
talking about, you know,typically in schools like we're
we're not diagnosing studentswith dyslexia, but we're trying
(41:46):
to say, you know, what are thecharacteristics that they might,
you know, that they could haveso but looking at the cut offs
being and some of these were cutoffs from studies, some of these
were cut offs from stateagencies, but the fifth
percentile of reading, the 10thpercentile, of reading the 15th
percentile, the 25th percentile,you know, all those being
different, cut offs of readingachievement, where student might
(42:10):
have characteristics ofdyslexia. And you know, that
was, that was just reallyinteresting to me, because, you
know, if I'm in a state, or, youknow, whatever, in my contact
text, if they say it's the 20thpercentile, let's say,
are the reading needs of the kidat the 19th percentile that
different than the kid at the21st or even the 30th, you know,
(42:33):
probably, probably not like Iit's still the same game plan
for me As a teacher, I'm just,you know, trying to be more
strategic, more diagnostic, moreprescriptive. You know, as
students have lower, you know,levels of achievement, but
(42:54):
you know heranyway, her point kind of being
with that is there really isvery inconsistent in research
and in practice of, well, what,what cut offs are we going to
accept? And that's, I think, anarea where, you know, we could
do better at as a field ofresearchers and a field of
practitioners, you know, but,but at the end of the day, I
(43:16):
it's not that the 15th versusthe 25th and maybe, maybe I'm
wrong here, but it's not thatthey need completely different
stuff. It's just that the needto be more intentional with
screening, more intentional withdiagnostic, more strategic, with
instruction, more responsive todata, is where that primary
difference is going to be. Butthe orthographic mapping process
(43:37):
being able to go from non readerto reader to automatic reader.
You know that that cognitively,like the very there is, there's
just not a lot of variation, andin how that, like that sequence
of things,it just matters in our
instruction of how well we canaccelerate students along along
that. So that was a reallydiluted conversation for a
(43:58):
single slide, but that that wassomething I've thought about a
lot as as well.
Stacy Hurst (44:05):
Stacy, what were your most important like, what
were your sessions that you hadmost interesting takeaways from
so many? One that was anunexpected takeaway. It was
another symposium, and Iactually don't remember what the
type the subject was, but oneresearch study that I remember
looking at the studies that werelisted in this symposium and
thinking, I'm not as interestedin this study. It was very
(44:26):
interesting to me, and it was aChinese researcher, and they've
actually created robots to be inclassrooms that used AI to help
students during literacy and allkinds of learning, right? And so
I was right away like, oh, theyshowed pictures of the robots.
And I thought, oh my gosh, firstgraders would love this, you
(44:46):
know. But the findings weresurprising to me and somewhat
comforting to be honest, becauseI think the question was, are
these robots ready to replaceteachers? And resoundingly, the
answer was.
Know, because those robots werekind of powered by AI, and AI,
as we know, currently stillmakes mistakes, mistakes that
(45:08):
the first graders noticed. Andso they were less likely to
trust those robots in theirclassrooms. And so they saw them
more as a teaching assistant ora friend that was learning along
with them, but definitely notsomebody that had the knowledge
to help them out. So I thoughtthat was an interesting finding
that is happening that was inChina, like I said,
Unknown (45:31):
and so I'm interested to see where that goes. I don't
know. I thought that was in thesession that I presented, and it
was kind of like, oh boy. It's abrave new world out there. Yeah,
I think, like, let's use AI tograde and give feedback, and
then let's use, like, teachersto teach. That's kind of my
that's, that's where I'm at withthings, but I don't know. I
(45:53):
mean, we'll see where things areat in a year or two years
before. Yeah, things can changeso rapidly. But yeah, that was
kind of a oh boy, yeah, what'son the horizon? No, I was like,
Oh, wow. And then the otherthing, you know, as you were
talking about that session of DrHubert,
Stacy Hurst (46:12):
I was so comforted, because it was probably the
furthest away from swinging doorpractitioners, because it was
very I mean, if you think it wasover Jake's head, it was double
over mine. But somebody thereasked a very sophisticated
question that I maybe understood30% of the question. And Jake
turned to me and said, That'sexactly what I was gonna ask. Of
(46:34):
course, he was kidding, but itmade me feel like, okay, I'm not
the only one that's like,feeling like, this is but I
think there's a there, there,right? That eventually it'll get
to the point and where we'retalking about applying these
things, I think of Dr Hebertalmost in the same category, not
quite as Dr Aries research,because that research is very
(46:55):
robust. It has not historicallybeen translated into practice as
much as I think it should be,and I think Dr Hubert is closer
to that. I mean, definitely, butthere's so much more that goes
into what she studies that Ithink those of us who are
practitioners, we still don'thave the tip of the iceberg on
(47:17):
that, and I know you workclosely with her, so you
probably have a greaterunderstanding than most. Yeah,
I've been, I've been luckyenough to have a fellowship with
Freddie Hubert from the, fromthe reading Hall of Fame as an
Emerging Scholar thing. But, youknow, I mean, I think a lot of
like, I gravitated towardsFreddie stuff when I was a
practitioner. I know a lot ofpractitioners that do, and I
(47:39):
think her main contention is, Imean, her website is called Text
project, right? So her maincontention being that, well,
reading is always a function oflike the text, like, if we are
reading, by definition, there isa text that's being read. And
so, you know, her work issaying, Well, what do we know
about texts that are being read?
What do we know about the textwe're putting in front of of
students? And she has a verystrong vocabulary thread in
(48:01):
there of, well, how do we whatdo we know about the vocabulary
that's being used and itsorthographic properties and how
easy or hard it is to decode,and, you know, but what about,
you know, using text forproductive purposes? So, you
know, she's kind of like theother she's the other side of
the coin, right? Like we'realways talking about
instructional practices andwhat's happening in the brain,
(48:23):
and all those are importantthings. And then Freddie saying,
Yeah, but let's also rememberthat there's an interaction with
the text that's happening thatwe also can't ignore, because
that helps us understand how tobe responsive with instruction
and how to understand how theprocesses are happening in the
brain. Yeah, I'm looking forwardto more people really
understanding that and how thatwill improve their practice,
(48:46):
honestly. And speaking of that,Kate, would you come our also
presented her research talkingabout comprehension. And she's
also, in my opinion, always veryrefreshing to hear, because
she's very blunt a lot ofthings, no guessing what she's
saying. But I've also beenreally impressed with her
(49:07):
outcomes of her studieson text, right? Her main idea
there is to teach students thestructure of text to get to all
the things you need to do tounderstand and learn from it.
Unknown (49:23):
Did you attend any of her sessions or I'm sure? Yeah,
I so good, so good. I reallythink the field owes a debt
to Kay wajikumar and hercolleagues, of like, what
they've been able to do, youknow, and what they've been able
to do has been a has pushed,like, the reading research field
(49:44):
forward, you know? I mean, she'sjust been involved on just some
really good meta analysis, somereally good papers that are just
trying to untangle everything weknow about comprehension and
kind of like, make it fit, youknow. But in the practitioner
world, what what she's doing is.
As well, is really impressive.
So, you know that Texas A and Mmachine that she has going is a
(50:08):
great thing, but, yeah, she, shewill call it like it is, you
know, one of the studies, youknow, that she presented on they
talked about the importance of,you know, in a lot of the
practitioner stuff they've done,they've just trained the
teachers. And this one, Theybroadened out, and they included
coaches and principals. And theywere actually like, teaching the
coaches and principals how towrite summaries and things like
(50:30):
that. And, you know, they weretalking about the, you know, the
Peter Principle of, if you don'thave it, you can't give it. And
so if the coach doesn't have theskill to write a summary, it's
gonna be really hard for them togive that to the teacher, for
the teacher to then give it tothe to the students. And I hope
I'm remembering that correctly,because it's been a couple of
weeks, but really interestingstuff there. Yeah, I was in that
(50:52):
session too. I do remember thatI was so back to your you're
noticing about coaching, right?
And how important that can be.
Yeah, that's really cool.
Stacy Hurst (51:04):
Anything else that stood out to you or that that
you feel like will really impactyour work going forward.
Unknown (51:12):
You know, as far as like, stuff I'm interested in,
I've kind of been munching onword difficulty lately. And
Laura tortorelli and LaurieBrunner had a session in
Freddie's symposium that wasthat was talking about that,
but, you know, thinking about,like, what text factors make a
word easier or harder to read?
(51:35):
You know, like, we know that,okay, like, orthographic
regularities can be part of it,but there's also, you know,
length, there's morphologicalstructure, but there's other
things we don't think about asmuch so, like how
concrete or how abstract theword is. Like, abstract words
tend to be have a lowerlikelihood of being read, you
know, accurately. And the onethat's kind of cropped up in a
(51:56):
couple studies that that Lauratortorelli has done now is
actually age of acquisition. Sowords that are acquired later
have a greater likelihood ofbeing read incorrectly. And some
of that's like, Okay, well, youknow if, if words are, you know,
there's a length co varyingthere as well, right? But even
(52:17):
when they controlled for length,like on this study, they
present. I believe age ofacquisition was still like,
controlling for, like all someof those variables I just
mentioned, and others, but ageof acquisition, you know, was
there, and kind of thinkingabout that as you know, there is
anyway. There's a lot of factorsthat contribute to how easy or
hard a word is to readaccurately.
(52:38):
The Age of acquisition, youknow, that might be an a
repetition effect, right? Thatif a if a word has a higher age
of acquisition, then it's lesslikely to be encountered in
text, so therefore it's lesslikely to be, you know,
orthographically map. Well, whatdoes that mean for, you know,
the books we give students, youknow, in it for instruction,
(52:59):
right? Does it mean that we givekids books with higher age of
acquisition with lower age ofacquisition. Like, and the
difference here is on thefringes, right? We're thinking
about like a money ball approachof like, well, if we can make
texts 2% more efficient, youknow, for orthographic mapping,
like, what kind of output does,you know? How does that change
things longitudinally? You know?
So these types of things arestarting to play at the margins,
(53:21):
but I think we have enough ofthe big rocks in place. You
know, the margins are what's,what's really important. So that
was something I was reallyinterested in, especially, like,
you know, thinking about multisyllabic reading, reading long
words. How to do that withconnected, challenging text? So
there, there was, there. I mean,I had a ton of takeaways, but
that's something I've reallybeen munching on since the
(53:42):
conference. Yeah, and how toscaffold for those things. Just
in conclusion, too, I will sayit was so good to be exposed to
those researchers who are doingthe research that I consume. But
we had it was her misfortune,but our good luck that we were
on the same flight home as youngSook Kim, she had, yeah, that's
(54:04):
a whole other story, but we wereable to talk to her about her
model, her dire model of ofreading, and how that's evolved
over the years. Yeah, dear, howthey say it, how it's evolved
over the years. And having her,she was into many of the
sessions that I attended, andthe questions she asked were so
Stacy Hurst (54:27):
astute. I thought, oh, man, I want to have that
ease with research that shedoes. So it was really, it's a
small enough conference, youknow, back to how it differs
from other conferences we mightgo to that you do? You get to
see these researchers and hearfrom them face to face. Also,
there was absolutely no merch
Unknown (54:50):
being sold. Yeah, there's, there's no vendor Hall.
There's no merch. I didn't even,I didn't even get a pen from it,
right? I actually took one fromthe hotel. But.
It that? Okay, that's different,yeah.
Hotel. Do you know where it willbe next year? Where will it be
held?
Netherlands. Oh, neat. Okay,it's in, not Amsterdam. It's a
(55:14):
just south of Amsterdam. Andthen the after that, it's in
Santiago, Chile. So, I mean, itis an international conference.
I ate dinner with someone fromRussia. You know, there are
presenters from China there.
Australia has a strongcontingent. So, but they do kind
of alternate between, you know,northern hemisphere, like, you
know, they all, they just, theyswitch, they switch locations,
yeah. And one of the researchersthat shared her research said,
(55:36):
This is my first presentation inEnglish. So yeah, you get to
have a lot of exposure to whatis happening research wise in
other countries, it's reallygreat.
Stacy Hurst (55:50):
Well, thank you so much, Jake for this
conversation. I Jake and I wereon the same flight to the
conference too, and probablyright after I said, Hey Jake,
the next question out of mymouth was, do you want to join
us for the rehab?
And I'm so glad you did. Thankyou so much. Thanks for the
invite. It was a this is a greattime chatting. And it was, it
(56:11):
was great to hang out with you abit in Canada as well. Yeah,
likewise, and all of you who arelistening to our podcast also
listen to Jake's. It's a littlebit different than ours, but you
will learn a lot from listening,so it's really good. Recommend
it.
Donnell Lindsay, any other finalquestions or Well, thanks you
(56:31):
guys. Thanks for joining us.
It's been great. Yeah, thankyou. Thanks for the
conversation. Thanks again,Jake, and thank you to our
listeners, and hopefully you'lljoin us for the next episode of
literacy talks.
Narrator (56:47):
Thanks for joining us today. Literacy talks comes to
you from Reading Horizons, whereliteracy momentum begins. Visit
reading horizons.com/literacytalks to access episodes and
resources to support yourjourney 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.
Stacy Hurst (00:46):
Welcome to this episode of literacy Talks. My
name is Stacy Hurst, and I'mjoined by Donnell Pons, Lindsay
Kemeny, and we have a specialguest today, Jake downs, and the
topic is the fact that Jake andI got to attend the triple SR
conference in Calgary. I'm goingto say the name the Society for
(01:09):
the scientific study of readingconference, and we thought we'd
do a recap. And so happy Jakethat you can join us for this
recap.
Glad to be here. Thanks for theinvitation. Yeah, and we'll
mention this another time too.
But Jake also has a podcast, andis it called Teaching with Jake?
What's it called teachingliteracy podcast? I knew it had
(01:33):
teaching in it. It's reallygreat. So we recommend that you
listen to that too. And Lindsayand Donnell were not able to
come to this conference. ButDonnell, you've been to the
triple SR conference before.
Unknown (01:49):
Yes, I've been to it was in Newport, and I even did a
recap on the podcast. Was a lotof fun to talk about, so this
will be a lot of fun for me tohear about the experience you
got. Zach, yeah, and Jake. Oh,sorry, Lindsay, what were you
gonna say? Oh, I'm just, I'mexcited to hear about it. You
know, we're like, livingvicariously through you guys.
Stacy, I have to say, I was alittle disappointed that you
didn't have the live Google Docand that you were typing notes
(02:12):
while we could watch, which iswhat happened if you guys listen
to our, our episode about thereading league Summit. Donnell
was there, and she was like,live posting for us in just a
private document. It was so fun.
So anyway, I'm excited to tohear, you know, your takeaways.
Both of you. Yeah, it was fun. Iremember accessing that during
(02:32):
class, even because I wanted tohear and I did fail miserably,
but in my defense and Jake, Idon't know if you know this
about Donnell, but her firstcareer, she was actually a news
reporter. I do not have thatmuscle, so I was just soaking it
all in and and loving what I washearing. I really wasn't
reporting anything out.
(02:55):
So next year, we'll do abreaking news you know, this
just in for yeah, good
Stacy Hurst (03:02):
plan. Okay, I'm gonna remember that Jake, just
to kind of set our listeners upwho may not know about the
organization or the conference.
How would you say it differsfrom other conferences that most
educators attend?
Unknown (03:19):
Yeah, I think the major difference here for Triple S R
is that it is a researchconference, and so the folks
that are presenting there are,you know, almost exclusively,
researchers at institutions ofhigher education or, you know,
like, You know, other relatedorganizations. So it isn't
(03:42):
the type of,I wouldn't say it's not, it's
not practitioner friendly, butit's researchers talking to
researchers. So you have to beable to code switch a little bit
and be able to think, Okay,well, what does this mean for
practice? And there definitelyis stuff there for
practitioners. And this yearthey had a their first ever
practitioner day, which was theday before the regular
(04:03):
conference, which they said waslike 10 years in the making.
They've wanted to do it for along time. Finally, we're able
to do it so that that's excitingto see it going forward. But I
would say that the differenceis, is that it's researchers
talking to researchers, ratherthan researchers or reading
experts talking to teachers,practitioners, you know, those
types of stakeholders. Yeah,that's a that's a great
(04:26):
description of it. I also
Stacy Hurst (04:32):
had the thought while I was listening to some
sessions. This is where whatends up being presented in other
conferences. This is where itstarts, right. You can see the
the research that leads into thepractice. And so I bet we could
have a window into the future.
We could probably name a fewsessions that we would be
attending at other conferencesbased on the research that was
(04:53):
shared here. So yeah, it wasreally great. And Jake.
You and I have both beenpractitioners. You taught
elementary school as well,right? And Jake is also teaching
at the university level. So Ifelt like that practitioner day
was it was very impactful forthe educators that were there,
(05:18):
and I was really tapping into mypractitioner
lens there. I thought was reallygood, any takeaways that you
think were very applicable forclassroom teachers from that
day,
Unknown (05:32):
you know, from the from the practitioner day, I really
enjoyed Dr Matt burns hispresentation.
It was on, it was on assessment,but it was on thinking about
aligning assessment withinstruction. And he basically
made the point and, and I hope,and this is a caveat throughout
the whole podcast, I hope thatI'm not putting words in any of
(05:53):
the people we talk so, you knowthat we talk about, you know,
putting words in their mouth.
But what I might take away fromit was that he basically said
something along the lines of,you know, without assessment,
everything else is lessimportant that it's assessment
is what really decides whatmakes it into prime time
instruction, what is secondpriority and what is a we'll get
to that if we, if we can. Andthat was just such a, I think, a
(06:16):
relevant, you know, it's it'seasy to assess students. It's
easy to over assess students,but being able to curate the the
right configuration ofassessments that can work
together to really identify whatyour students needs are, and of
course, like triangulate thatwith classroom observation and
such, but being able to useassessment to make the
(06:39):
instructional time very lean,because minutes are limited. So
I thought that was I had so manynotes I took from that, that
presentation, yeah, andsomething that he said that
stood out to me. I've heard himsay this in other places too,
that if you are perplexed abouta student and the way they are
(07:00):
not progressing, then youactually just haven't found the
right assessment. Because withthe right assessment, you will
be able to target what thestudent needs and see that
progress forward. He alsomentioned, and I thought this
was a great piece of practicaladvice that he just kind of said
As an aside, but I noticed hejust published a paper about
(07:21):
curricular programs that peopleuse, and he he mentioned it in
there too, but he said, You needat least 12 data points when
you're progress monitoring toreally make any really informed
decisions. And that made methink we progress matters,
sometimes weekly, but notalways, right? So even that
(07:44):
little tidbit of how we look atthe data was important, and
Stacy was the practitioner day,and Jake or Stacy other one of
you can answer. And I'm outsidethe Bozeman library, by the way,
so I'm a little I'm on location,as you might say, if you see my
background, and I'm proud to saythe Bozeman library is very
busy. They didn't have any spacethis morning for a conference
(08:05):
room. So I'm pleased with thatpeople are accessing their
library in Bozeman. But thequestion I had was about the
practitioner day. Was thematerial practitioner focused?
And did they also speak aboutthe challenges practitioners
have in implementation. Or wasit just that the material was
more focused on practitioners,or were they also trying to
address how difficult it is toimplement some of these things?
Lindsay Kemeny (08:30):
Yeah. I mean, I think it definitely was focused
on practitioners and applicationfor classroom setting, I would
say that it varied by speakertalking about implementation,
but overall, you know, my mytakeaway was that there was an
emphasis on, and this is what itmeans for implementation, rather
than just here's theoreticalconstructs, right? Like this is
(08:52):
what, this is what you can doabout it. But I think it did
vary a little bit by speaker,yeah, I think it's very fitting
that they had Dr burns speakingand that on that practitioner
focused day, because that's justsomething I love about him, is I
feel like he really helps us,like, with the research. He's
like, I just, I admire him,because I think he's pretty
(09:14):
passionate and very helpful withhelping teachers, talking to
teachers, and trying to help usaccess this information. But
Stacy, that's reallyinteresting. What you said about
needing 12 data points in yourprogress monitoring, and you
think about, gosh, if I wasprogress monitoring every other
week, then that's like 24 weeksbefore you really see that clear
(09:36):
pattern. That's a littleconcerning, right before you
pivot, make a pivot. Sosomething to think about is
that, for some of our students,can we get that progress
monitoring data quicker and andweekly, like you said,
Stacy Hurst (09:52):
and then Dr Kerns also presented and that day. And
as most if you if you'refamiliar with his research.
He mostly talks about, well, hehas many things that he shares,
but one thing that was thesubject was how to break a word
into syllables. And I know hereally feels like it's important
(10:14):
for students to simplify thattask, and so that I thought that
was useful for people to bethere too, and Jake, some of our
side conversations were aboutthat, you remember, because
Jake, some of your research hasto do with you. Actually did a
study, didn't you about the waythat is it, every syllable has a
(10:35):
vowel. What's the acronym? He
Unknown (10:39):
shot lob? I think is how okay. I'm sure
pronunciations vary, right setfor variability there, but I
think Isha, love is, is whatI've heard it as. I don't know,
echelon, I don't know. I don'tknow I saw it. And I thought, is
that a Hebrew word? Like, whatdoes that mean? And I realized,
Lindsay Kemeny (10:56):
what was he suggesting for how to break it
up?
Unknown (11:01):
Well, I think the idea here was a he was saying that
what something that's superimportant for learning the code
and learning it well isrepetition and volume of
practice. And so sometimes wepush in metalinguistic things
with our word instruction thatmight not be as super
(11:23):
productive, like, if I remember,and I hope I'm not putting words
in his mouth, but, you know, hesaid that, well, students don't
really need to know thedifference of, like, a digraph.
What like the actual dictionarydefinition of digraph, tri
graph, you know, quadrigraph.
He's like, just call themconsonant teams. And the same
thing. It's like, you know, witha vowel team or a diphthong,
just call them Val teams, youknow, for students, like being
(11:44):
able to strip away some of themetalinguistic stuff and get it
to be very as few functionalrules as possible, because that
will allow time for a highervolume of practice. I think that
was the, one of the major thingsI remember. And then the second
thing being, you know, talkingabout, especially with, like,
multi syllabic reading, that,you know, syllables is actually
(12:09):
a feature of the sound of ourlanguage. It's not a feature of
the orthography. And so that'swhy, like doing syllable types.
And you know, the longer a wordgets, the more likely it is to
be irregular, essentially. Sosometimes that starts to fall
apart. Once we get beyond veryorthographically transparent
basic compound two syllablewords, it starts to get bit more
(12:32):
complicated in the upper gradesand so with the Echelon strategy
saying that, well, really whatmatters is, how can we, how can
we group, how, like differentgroupings are a Okay, when we're
splitting apart a long word, wejust want to group it around the
syllables in a way that thatmakes sense. And he had some
really great, great examples.
(12:55):
But, you know, like, I don'thave any off the top of my head.
This is, you know, poorpreparation on my part. But, you
know, like with some words,well, it doesn't matter if the L
sound is coming at the end ofthe first syllable or at the
beginning of the secondsyllable. Like, we shouldn't be
too super nitpicky about wherethe syllables are divided,
because that's actually inservice of being able to
(13:17):
actually read the long wordaccurately, which is where we
want to get to, and then beingable to coach students on
changing vowel sounds. So if theshort vowel sound doesn't work,
try a long vowel sound. If thelong vowel sound doesn't work,
try, you know, a schwa sound,and teaching them to be flexible
with reading multi syllabicwords to help them get to the
(13:38):
accuracy part to map it Stacy.
Is there anything that you wouldadd on to that, or any
additional context? Yeah, whichwas my question going into it,
because he was very adamantabout, we over complicate this
for students. And I agree,actually. And so I was like, but
what are you recommending inplace of that, kind of like
Lindsay's question was alludingto, so you did talk about that,
(13:58):
and the peeling off strategy,where we look at morphemes, like
prefixes and suffixes, and goingthat route too. Yeah, I thought
it was very interesting.
Stacy Hurst (14:11):
And a lot, I think there was a lot of buzz about
that, as he was talking aboutit, from the teachers in the
room.
So it was great. And that wasday one, that was the
practitioner day. And thenthere, there were some people, a
few that I recognized thatstayed for the rest of the
conference. And a couple of themhad mentioned to me that the
(14:32):
tone of the conference was verydifferent after that, right?
Because then it wasn't focusedon practitioners, it was more
about research. And some of themfelt very overwhelmed to be
there for the research parts.
But I so I think thepractitioner day definitely was
successful for the intention ofit, and I was really happy that
I was able to be there. So yeah,for the first one ever, there we
(14:56):
are.
Unknown (14:59):
And.
Stacy Hurst (15:00):
Then day two, we started with the research
studies. And to be honest, outof the gate, the very first
session I attended, I was justso happy to be there. It was
great research. They weretalking about Jake. Were we in
the same session that first? Idon't think so. I actually I
(15:20):
skipped the first sessionbecause I had slides that I was
finishing up. Oh yeah, that'sright. Don't tell anyone. No,
no, I already gave Jake a hardtime about that,
Unknown (15:29):
and I did attend his presentation, which was
fantastic. So I hope we can talkabout that too. Actually, do you
mind Jake just talking aboutwhat you presented on? Yeah, I
can just briefly, you know, my Ipresented on data that we're
we're kind of framing it aslike, this was just a natural
experiment where there was aschool district that had adopted
(15:54):
a particular reading curriculumduring the reading first era,
you know, 20 plus years ago, andthey've really used and refined
that decoding curriculum, youknow, over the course of those
years,and then during this current,
like science of reading era andlegislation that they were like
heavily encouraged to updatetheir curriculum and to use a
new curriculum. So it was justcomparing, you know, in the
(16:16):
first half year ofimplementation, how did one
group of students in thedistrict do with the new
curriculum versus, you know, howstudents did in the regular
curriculum that they've youknow, that they've used? So kind
of comparing, and these are bothfairly large curriculum from
each of those areas. So, youknow, like I framed it as
(16:38):
comparing a curriculum from areading first era versus a
science of reading era.
And it wasn't, it wasn't theReading Horizons curriculum, so
sorry, you know, but it wasanyway so, but that's what I was
presenting on. And you know,there, there were a lot of
outcomes that were similar, buton the decoding measure we had,
(17:00):
so we used the core phonicssurvey that the the
newer curriculum outperformed,and
more the more complex skills onin that phonics inventory, the
students in the new curriculumdid better on so
more, more to come. There I'mworking on, like, doing like, a
really formal analysis andwriting it up, etc, but that's,
(17:23):
that's, that's the brief of it.
But I,
Stacy Hurst (17:26):
you know, it was kind of meant to be us, like a
snapshot of this is one schooldistricts experience, but with
signs of reading legislation andthe era that we're in, similar
things are happening, you know,in how many school districts
across across the country. So itwas kind of framed as like a
current, you know, slice ofreality. And here's some data to
(17:47):
talk about trade offs ofimplementation. I really loved
it because it's rare that you dohear the focus on the curriculum
right? Usually it's on teachingpractices or aspects of it, but
I really liked the comparison,and you did, your time was well
spent on the slides. You didknock those out of the park.
(18:10):
Also something to note about thethese presentations, they can be
very research heavy, and Iwouldn't go right to
entertaining, although I viewresearch as a story. Every study
is a story that I get reallyinvested in. But I will tell
you, Jake had everybodylaughing. They were all engaged.
(18:30):
It was just a really engagingpresentation, too, and some
really great questions at theend as well. So Jake, I did have
a question. It sounds superinteresting. Are you going to
follow those students to seewhat the outcome is a few years
down the road as well? I'mintrigued.
Unknown (18:47):
You know, I haven't, I haven't talked with the school
district to partner on anythinglike that.
It just would get really tricky,of because it's not that each
group stayed in that specificcurriculum. This was at the end.
This was the last half of firstgrade. So it's like tracking
them through into second gradeand beyond. I think there just
(19:10):
would be too much noise in thedata to pull, to pull anything
out long term, especially,you know, the sample size, I
think it'd be, I think it'd bepretty, pretty messy, because
they might have been usingeither of the curriculum in the
next year. Okay, you can't keepit pure, but, boy, you're asking
a really interesting question.
(19:31):
Because, like you say, this is ajuncture at which a lot of
people are at, is okay? So if wemake the changes, you need to
show how much better, or ifright? Yeah, and those changes,
so, gosh, this is greatresearch. And I think it's, this
is where, you know, sometimesresearchers are interested in
slightly different things thanpractitioners. So if I'm setting
(19:51):
up, like a quasi experimentalstudy or a randomized control
trial, you know that the controlgroup, you know, I'm just really
looking to set up a controlgroup.
That's going to be an accuratecomparison to see, you know, did
my treatment, you know, improve?
Basically, you know, theequivalent of being like against
a placebo and active. You know,control groups vary widely, but
typically, like practitionersare more interested in, well,
(20:14):
which, which curriculum is goingto do better, you know. And so
this one was more of, sometimesyou hear them called race horse
studies, of like, well, let'sjust give to curriculum rock and
roll and see what happens. Andthere's, there's a lot less of
that in the reading researchworld, but I think there's room
for for more. And I even had, Imean, there were a couple of the
(20:35):
researchers that people Irespect, that I think are
important in the field that cameup to me after and and told me,
Hey, we need more, we need moreracehorse studies like this that
are published in peer reviewjournals,
you know, to help researcherskind of keep their finger on the
pulse, but also to help, youknow, practitioners, people that
are selecting curriculum to havean evidence base to make
(20:58):
decisions off of, I really helpsme. We talk so much about
bridging research to practice. Ithink of it more like, ideally
it should be a swinging door,right? We're not quite there
yet, but that's one study that,one type of study that will
really help with that. I mean,it's very front lines, right? I
(21:19):
really appreciated that. It wasgreat. Thank you. Yeah, it was,
it was my first trip SRpresentation, and my first time
presenting statistics in frontof people that understand
statistics better than I do. SoI was, I was nervous, but I was,
I was pleased with how it went.
You could not tell. You couldnot tell. I wanted you to say,
I'll be here all week, folkslike, he really was,
Stacy Hurst (21:42):
it was great, informative and entertaining.
You can't get better than that.
Like, it was really awesome. Andthat kind of helps me pivot a
little bit. Some of the sessionsI went to that I think stood out
a lot to me, and I'll ask youthe same question a minute,
Jake, were about teacherknowledge, and that very first
session, talked about, what isthe difference, you know, that
(22:03):
teachers knowledge makes fortheir students. And I thought
there were some reallyinteresting outcomes that were
reported. One that was aparticular interest to me, and
nobody will be surprised by thiswas, and I think this was a
Texas University. They also givea test that's about the
Foundations of Reading, and theywere measuring they gave the
(22:26):
teacher knowledge of basiclanguage construct survey to
their pre service teachers, andthen compared results from that
to how they did on that statetest to get their license. And
they saw high correlationsbetween students who knew those
who did well on the first surveyand how they did on the testing.
(22:47):
And that is interesting to me,because my master's thesis was
that basic was on the teacherknowledge survey, and I continue
to give it to my students everysemester. And we also have a
test, so I have all this datathat made me think, now I need
to start making comparisons andsee what I'm learning with that.
I even mentioned to Jake at onepoint like I think I've designed
(23:11):
15 different studies in my head,just going to all these, these
sessions. But anotherinteresting thing from that
particular session, and I thinkthis will resonate especially
Donnell with you, but they did,and this, I think, was Middle
Tennessee State, they cited someresearch about teacher knowledge
(23:31):
and who was working with themost striving readers. And they
learned that they surveyedteachers, classroom teachers,
reading specialists and specialeducation teachers. And
significantly, the people thathad the least amount of
(23:52):
knowledge were the specialeducation teachers. And
frequently, those are the verypersonnel that are working with
the students who have thegreatest need. So their research
concluded that we really need toensure that pre service
teachers, especially who aregetting a degree in special
education, are equipped with thesame information that a
(24:13):
classroom teacher readingspecialist would even have. That
was, I can't say that wassurprising to me, but it was
impactful,
Unknown (24:27):
yeah, and I think that's where, you know, you
mentioned the swinging dooranalogy, and I really like that
analogy. I'm going to keep it,but that I do see the field
being responsive to things thatare happening in the
practitioner world as well. AndI think that's one, there's been
a lot of talk the last few yearsaround teacher knowledge, and
it's important, there's been alot of professional development
(24:49):
initiatives to promote teacherknowledge. And so, you know,
there are, there is a decent setof researchers that are going
out. And you know how.
How, like, what, what is thevalue of research? How does
research or what is the value ofknowledge? How does knowledge
read to practice lead topractice, lead to student
outcomes? And trying to untangleall that, because it is, it is
(25:11):
really complex.
Coaching would be like anothersimilar area, area i i haven't
seen a ton of like coachingresearch in the last few years,
and maybe that's, you know, justthe silos that I'm in, but I
haven't, at least readingspecific coaching. There hasn't
been a ton, but I felt likethere was quite a bit, you know,
at Triple S, R and so, and Ihope these are things that
(25:35):
presentations that turn intopublications that can get pushed
out there, because there was alot of really interesting stuff
on thinking about the role ofcoaches and how coaches can
support instruction.
Stacy Hurst (25:49):
Yeah, I noticed that too, and they all, they all
stated, what I know to be trueis that just because you have a
coach at one school in the samedistrict, their job actually may
be very different than somebodyelse, so there was a call to
kind of institutionalize thatcoaching in a way, make it more
Unknown (26:11):
consistent. I think, yeah, and even in the research,
I think this was a comment inthe one session that we were
sitting next to each other in.
But you know that, you know sowhen you look at the like,
systematic reviews, or, youknow, where they've kind of
looked at studies of coaching,like across studies, and kind of
summarize them that there's alot of very the results vary a
(26:32):
lot across coaching studies. Andthe point was made was that it's
not just in practice that itvaries, but it's even in even in
the in the research literature,you know what the coach was
doing in this study, versus thisstudy versus this study, you
know Can, can vary widely. Sothat was, that was a something
(26:53):
that I've been munching on on alittle bit, is,
Stacy Hurst (26:59):
I don't think anyone's going to argue that
coaches are invaluable, right?
But there's definitely a rangeof practices that coaches are
engaging in, which thereforemeans there's a range of what's
going to be more or lesseffective. And so a need to kind
of hone in on what are thebiggest rocks that coaches can
attend to, especially when we'retalking, you know, reading,
(27:20):
reading achievement, and beingable to hone in on that. Yeah,
and I think we were in the samesession together where Dr
Washburn was talking about thestudy they did on teachers who
had completed the letterstraining and how that had
impacted their practice, andthey watched hours and hours of
videos, and the conclusion wasthat it did impact their
(27:45):
declarative knowledge and theirprocedural knowledge, but not
their conditional knowledge. Sotheir recommendation was
coaching to help them toactually explain why, like they
were modeling they were doingthat, but maybe not explaining
why they were modeling in theway they were, or being very
transparent about their thoughtprocess to their students as
(28:06):
they were doing that. And thatwas one suggestion that coaching
would be able to help with.
Unknown (28:13):
Yeah, super interesting, super interesting
stuff. I want, I like, want morecoaching research. Like, let's,
let's do this, like, let's getmore out there. Yeah, you know,
it makes me think about stay,you know, having a practitioner
day, that's fantastic, but italmost as if we need a decision
maker day. Do you know what Imean? So it's like, how do you,
how do you get this to filterinto the places where it needs
(28:36):
to go in order to impactdecisions that are being made
that directly affect students?
That, to me, is another level tothis. Yeah, like a stakeholder,
a stakeholder date, right? So,yeah, principals, district,
literacy, admin, you know, etc,etc, yeah, this is your data
Interesting. Yeah,
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Stacy Hurst (29:33):
Yeah, that's a really good point. And I'm
thinking of teachers likeLindsay, because Lindsay You
don't, you didn't attend thisconference. What do you do to
get research? You apply researchreally well in your classroom.
How do you do that? How do youknow what your I dive into
topics that I'm interested in,right? But there is
Lindsay Kemeny (29:55):
a research like and I will, you know, it's so
weird. But like.
You can get a lot of PD throughsocial media, and especially if
you're following researchers andthings. And one researcher that
I follow, Shane piasta, was atTriple S R I was curious if any
of you, either of you, went toany of her sessions.
Stacy Hurst (30:18):
I love her research, and I did not. I
didn't go to hers. Did you Jake?
Yeah. I went to,
Unknown (30:26):
yeah. I went to the language symposium that I think
had two of her for sure, one,but I think two of the
presentations she was a coauthor on, and then our CO
presenter, I guess. And thenthere was a poster session
Lindsay Kemeny (30:41):
by Alita Hudson that she was also a co co author
on. But, yeah, I think, I thinkDr PIAs is doing just really
great stuff. And like herLinkedIn, like she's doing good
on the social media side to,like, push stuff out to those
that are interested. And that'swhat I was watching. I was
watching her conference recap,and I was particularly
interested in one of herresearch studies, it's called
(31:02):
patterns of preschoolphonological awareness,
development and later literacyoutcomes really interesting
because one of the majortakeaways is that and they were
studying over 300 preschoolstudents, and They found that
focusing solely on phonemicawareness might be insufficient.
(31:24):
Focusing on phonologicalsensitivity instruction is also
important, especially for atrisk children. So my question
was, is that specific to pre K,or, you know, is that also the
take the takeaway forkindergarten? Because that's, I
mean, that's huge right there,because we've been having this
(31:45):
shift where phonemic awarenessis most critical. Don't get
stuck with the larger units,which is true, phonemic
awareness is very critical. Butdo we need to be training some
of that phonological sensitivityin kindergarten as well? And she
told me, well, she's presentingat the reading league
conference, just like in Octoberon this. And so I'm really
(32:06):
excited to go and listen to hearwhat she has to say. But Jake,
do you have any thoughts onthat? Yeah, so that was Aleta
Hudson's poster, which I I'mjust throwing this out to the
universe. I think thepractitioner conferences should
do poster sessions. So it's,it's a big room. Researchers
have posters, and you can go up,and it's just a lot more
(32:27):
interactive than like a sit andget anyway, I'm just throwing
that out there, right? Becauseteachers don't have time, we
don't have time to read all theresearch studies. Just tell me
what I need.
Unknown (32:38):
So I, I talked with Alita about this,
about her poster, for probably,like, 20 minutes, and it was
really interesting. Yeah, thedate, and I'm, you know, Alita
would be the one, and Shanewould be the ones to really talk
about it. But, you know, fromwhat I recall, it was a it was a
profile analysis. So they werekind of looking so profile
(32:59):
analysis is where you group. Youhave different variables, and
you group students by thosevariables. It's a statistical
technique of like, oh, like,these were people that started
off, you know, with highphonological sensitivity, but
they had low growth. And hereare people that start off with
low but they had medium growth.
And so they had a chart that hadall sorts of lines, you know,
going across to show thedifferent profiles. And I can't
(33:19):
remember, you know, the thespecifics, but I, but I, yeah, I
do remember the takeaway beingthat phonological sense. So
training phonological awarenessalongside phonemic awareness,
that that those students thathad both of those produced the
most, or, you know, grew themost or had the best reading
(33:40):
outcomes. I think it was at theend of first grade. But see,
you're really astute. Lindsay toask like, well, is that, is that
feature of the pre K population,or does that transfer to
kindergarten? And first,I don't, I don't feel qualified.
(34:01):
I mean, that's not my line ofresearch. So I, I'll give a
couple hypotheses. And, youknow, we could maybe have some,
some some capital E expertschime in their thoughts. But,
you know, okay, Option A is, itcould be, yeah, attacking both
on is going to be beneficial,because it's a way of getting,
you know, additional volumethat, yes, we know that phonemic
(34:22):
awareness is really important,especially blending and
segmenting, but evenphonological work is is going to
be exercising those muscles. Andso maybe we don't need to think
of it as this linear path, butwe we need to think of it as a
bit more like hierarchical thatwe can be doing all of those
things with an emphasis onblending and segmentation, and
that's going to have good, goodresults, because it's exercising
(34:44):
that flexibility part that'sreally important for future
reading. B there could beceiling effects, right? That
phonological awareness, phonemicawareness, it is a constrained
skill there. There is a ceilingwhere.
More phonemic awareness is notnecessarily going to have the
same downstream benefits, youknow. So it could be that with
(35:07):
preschoolers, you know, they'reparticularly primed to need
phonological awareness work,because that's going to lead
into more productive phonemicawareness work. So it could be a
feature of preschoolers that,because they are starting out
at, you know, ground that theground floor, they are starting
out from the beginning, that itwould make sense that those
(35:28):
students would be particularlyprimed to benefit from, you
know, receiving both that we'regoing to be start with the
basics of where they're at, butwe're also going to sprinkle in
some where they're headed at theedge of their current Proximal
Development,those, those would be my two
theories. And this was thestudy. It wasn't like a control
trial. It was sort of take likethere wasn't a, here's treatment
(35:49):
a, here's treatment B. Let's seewhat happens. It was sort of
taking existing data and thentriangling That with
instructional practices thatteachers reported were
happening, or maybe they wereobserved. I can't remember, but
so that's kind of like somethingto remember as well.
But whether it's a, you know,Route A that I talked about,
(36:10):
route B that I talked about, orsome other route, you know, I I
don't know.
Stacy Hurst (36:16):
I don't feel, I don't feel expert enough to,
like, make a supposition, butthose would be my guesses. Yeah,
great thoughts. It's superinteresting. And I'm just like,
even more, like, looking forwardto attending her session at the
reading league this October, tohear more, yeah, and you know, I
will say I heard more um,research studies on pre in
(36:42):
preschool, then I feel like Ihave for a while. I know they've
been happening, but maybe theywere just emphasized here. One
of them had to do with contentarea instruction in preschool
and having basically having alanguage objective at the same
time, and the impact that thathad on students. And I thought
that was really interesting,being more dialogic in those
(37:05):
subject areas.
Unknown (37:08):
That connects to another one of Shane PIOs
presentations. We're talkingabout language as a vehicle.
You know that typically whenteachers are using language
practices, they're not using itjust for language sake, although
that is an important benefit,but they're using it to Drive
content based, you know,learning and understanding. And
(37:29):
so thinking about, how do we,how do we support content
learning via oral language inthose early grades was that was
a big takeaway for me. But Ithink, you know, I'm, you know,
my line of research is more withupper elementary that's more my
background. I really care about,okay, after kids have, like, the
basic code down, what next? Youknow, what is the net? What are
(37:50):
the next thresholds? And I thinkthat same analogy applies really
well to reading comprehension,that, you know, various
strategies or standards, the, Icall it, you know, the quote,
unquote comprehension, thingsthat we're doing, they're not
productive in a vacuum, right?
They're they're productive whenwe're using them to learn
content. And I think sometimesthe last few years, like
(38:11):
knowledge learning, you know,learning for knowledge versus
learning for strategies likethat, those have kind of pitted
against each other, but it'sactually like the strategies are
the verb in the sentence thatare getting you to the noun or
the outcome or the comprehensionthat's happening. And, you know,
models of comprehension aresimilar to models of language,
because it's, you know,comprehension is language via
(38:32):
orthography, right? So it wouldmake sense that those two to
apply, but, yeah, yeah. Superinteresting stuff on oral
language in early elementary andpre K stuff happening out there,
yeah, what were some memorablepresentations or speakers for
you, or takeaways, or what weresome of the things that, yeah,
(38:58):
you know, one, that one thatreally stuck out to me. Well,
there, there were, there was asymposium. So symposium, being
that, it's a group ofresearchers all presenting on
the same thing, that's organizedby a specific person, so it kind
of has like a theme was, wasFreddie Hebert's symposium,
which, you know, I, I alwaysfind Freddie's stuff so
(39:19):
interesting. But there was,there was one presentation by Dr
Matthew Borken Hagen from theFlorida Center of reading
research. And it was sort ofshowing models of how, like AI
can be used to simulate theorthographic mapping process,
which was really interesting,because if you think about, you
(39:40):
know, like, how many, okay, youknow, a student is learning,
you know, ch that ch says,Sorry, I shouldn't have it,
right? It says, you know, howmany interactions does it take
for that specific letter soundcombination to be on?
Automatic. Okay. Well, then howlong does it take for, you know,
(40:03):
words that are having ch to beautomatic? And then, okay, in a
corpus of text, they had acorpus of text that was, you
know, from a couple popular corereading programs that they were
seeing, like, how often thosewords were present that had
those, those sound letter soundcombinations. And it was really
interesting. I mean, they playedsome, like, simulations of, I
(40:23):
mean, I can't remember, but itwas like 10s of 1000s of
interactions showing howautomatic the sound and the
words would become over time.
I'm, I'm sure, I'm, like,butchering what the presentation
was actually about. Because itwas like, you know,
I yeah, it just was really overmy head, right? But, but that
(40:43):
was, like, super interesting.
And it is just like, you know,we know that word learning,
there's more to it than just thethe phonologic and orthographic
connection. And that's, I think,a major limitation right now the
AI models. It's not taking in,you know, semantic or syntactic
stuff or other things thatmatter, but that is a huge part
of it. And so kind ofunderstanding how many
(41:04):
repetitions it takes, and thenwhat are the how many
repetitions are they likely toget with the text that teachers
are commonly using? I mean, thatwas, that was really
interesting, you know, that wasreally interesting to me
in a different session, DrDeborah Reed, the whole, her
whole presentation was, wasgreat,
(41:25):
but, you know, she just, she hadone slide that opened her her
presentation where she talkedabout different cut offs that
are used to determine if astudent has characteristics of
dyslexia or not. And she wasreally careful to point out that
talking about, you know,typically in schools like we're
we're not diagnosing studentswith dyslexia, but we're trying
(41:46):
to say, you know, what are thecharacteristics that they might,
you know, that they could haveso but looking at the cut offs
being and some of these were cutoffs from studies, some of these
were cut offs from stateagencies, but the fifth
percentile of reading, the 10thpercentile, of reading the 15th
percentile, the 25th percentile,you know, all those being
different, cut offs of readingachievement, where student might
(42:10):
have characteristics ofdyslexia. And you know, that
was, that was just reallyinteresting to me, because, you
know, if I'm in a state, or, youknow, whatever, in my contact
text, if they say it's the 20thpercentile, let's say,
are the reading needs of the kidat the 19th percentile that
different than the kid at the21st or even the 30th, you know,
(42:33):
probably, probably not like Iit's still the same game plan
for me As a teacher, I'm just,you know, trying to be more
strategic, more diagnostic, moreprescriptive. You know, as
students have lower, you know,levels of achievement, but
(42:54):
you know heranyway, her point kind of being
with that is there really isvery inconsistent in research
and in practice of, well, what,what cut offs are we going to
accept? And that's, I think, anarea where, you know, we could
do better at as a field ofresearchers and a field of
practitioners, you know, but,but at the end of the day, I
(43:16):
it's not that the 15th versusthe 25th and maybe, maybe I'm
wrong here, but it's not thatthey need completely different
stuff. It's just that the needto be more intentional with
screening, more intentional withdiagnostic, more strategic, with
instruction, more responsive todata, is where that primary
difference is going to be. Butthe orthographic mapping process
(43:37):
being able to go from non readerto reader to automatic reader.
You know that that cognitively,like the very there is, there's
just not a lot of variation, andin how that, like that sequence
of things,it just matters in our
instruction of how well we canaccelerate students along along
that. So that was a reallydiluted conversation for a
(43:58):
single slide, but that that wassomething I've thought about a
lot as as well.
Stacy Hurst (44:05):
Stacy, what were your most important like, what
were your sessions that you hadmost interesting takeaways from
so many? One that was anunexpected takeaway. It was
another symposium, and Iactually don't remember what the
type the subject was, but oneresearch study that I remember
looking at the studies that werelisted in this symposium and
thinking, I'm not as interestedin this study. It was very
(44:26):
interesting to me, and it was aChinese researcher, and they've
actually created robots to be inclassrooms that used AI to help
students during literacy and allkinds of learning, right? And so
I was right away like, oh, theyshowed pictures of the robots.
And I thought, oh my gosh, firstgraders would love this, you
(44:46):
know. But the findings weresurprising to me and somewhat
comforting to be honest, becauseI think the question was, are
these robots ready to replaceteachers? And resoundingly, the
answer was.
Know, because those robots werekind of powered by AI, and AI,
as we know, currently stillmakes mistakes, mistakes that
(45:08):
the first graders noticed. Andso they were less likely to
trust those robots in theirclassrooms. And so they saw them
more as a teaching assistant ora friend that was learning along
with them, but definitely notsomebody that had the knowledge
to help them out. So I thoughtthat was an interesting finding
that is happening that was inChina, like I said,
Unknown (45:31):
and so I'm interested to see where that goes. I don't
know. I thought that was in thesession that I presented, and it
was kind of like, oh boy. It's abrave new world out there. Yeah,
I think, like, let's use AI tograde and give feedback, and
then let's use, like, teachersto teach. That's kind of my
that's, that's where I'm at withthings, but I don't know. I
(45:53):
mean, we'll see where things areat in a year or two years
before. Yeah, things can changeso rapidly. But yeah, that was
kind of a oh boy, yeah, what'son the horizon? No, I was like,
Oh, wow. And then the otherthing, you know, as you were
talking about that session of DrHubert,
Stacy Hurst (46:12):
I was so comforted, because it was probably the
furthest away from swinging doorpractitioners, because it was
very I mean, if you think it wasover Jake's head, it was double
over mine. But somebody thereasked a very sophisticated
question that I maybe understood30% of the question. And Jake
turned to me and said, That'sexactly what I was gonna ask. Of
(46:34):
course, he was kidding, but itmade me feel like, okay, I'm not
the only one that's like,feeling like, this is but I
think there's a there, there,right? That eventually it'll get
to the point and where we'retalking about applying these
things, I think of Dr Hebertalmost in the same category, not
quite as Dr Aries research,because that research is very
(46:55):
robust. It has not historicallybeen translated into practice as
much as I think it should be,and I think Dr Hubert is closer
to that. I mean, definitely, butthere's so much more that goes
into what she studies that Ithink those of us who are
practitioners, we still don'thave the tip of the iceberg on
(47:17):
that, and I know you workclosely with her, so you
probably have a greaterunderstanding than most. Yeah,
I've been, I've been luckyenough to have a fellowship with
Freddie Hubert from the, fromthe reading Hall of Fame as an
Emerging Scholar thing. But, youknow, I mean, I think a lot of
like, I gravitated towardsFreddie stuff when I was a
practitioner. I know a lot ofpractitioners that do, and I
(47:39):
think her main contention is, Imean, her website is called Text
project, right? So her maincontention being that, well,
reading is always a function oflike the text, like, if we are
reading, by definition, there isa text that's being read. And
so, you know, her work issaying, Well, what do we know
about texts that are being read?
What do we know about the textwe're putting in front of of
students? And she has a verystrong vocabulary thread in
(48:01):
there of, well, how do we whatdo we know about the vocabulary
that's being used and itsorthographic properties and how
easy or hard it is to decode,and, you know, but what about,
you know, using text forproductive purposes? So, you
know, she's kind of like theother she's the other side of
the coin, right? Like we'realways talking about
instructional practices andwhat's happening in the brain,
(48:23):
and all those are importantthings. And then Freddie saying,
Yeah, but let's also rememberthat there's an interaction with
the text that's happening thatwe also can't ignore, because
that helps us understand how tobe responsive with instruction
and how to understand how theprocesses are happening in the
brain. Yeah, I'm looking forwardto more people really
understanding that and how thatwill improve their practice,
(48:46):
honestly. And speaking of that,Kate, would you come our also
presented her research talkingabout comprehension. And she's
also, in my opinion, always veryrefreshing to hear, because
she's very blunt a lot ofthings, no guessing what she's
saying. But I've also beenreally impressed with her
(49:07):
outcomes of her studieson text, right? Her main idea
there is to teach students thestructure of text to get to all
the things you need to do tounderstand and learn from it.
Unknown (49:23):
Did you attend any of her sessions or I'm sure? Yeah,
I so good, so good. I reallythink the field owes a debt
to Kay wajikumar and hercolleagues, of like, what
they've been able to do, youknow, and what they've been able
to do has been a has pushed,like, the reading research field
(49:44):
forward, you know? I mean, she'sjust been involved on just some
really good meta analysis, somereally good papers that are just
trying to untangle everything weknow about comprehension and
kind of like, make it fit, youknow. But in the practitioner
world, what what she's doing is.
As well, is really impressive.
So, you know that Texas A and Mmachine that she has going is a
(50:08):
great thing, but, yeah, she, shewill call it like it is, you
know, one of the studies, youknow, that she presented on they
talked about the importance of,you know, in a lot of the
practitioner stuff they've done,they've just trained the
teachers. And this one, Theybroadened out, and they included
coaches and principals. And theywere actually like, teaching the
coaches and principals how towrite summaries and things like
(50:30):
that. And, you know, they weretalking about the, you know, the
Peter Principle of, if you don'thave it, you can't give it. And
so if the coach doesn't have theskill to write a summary, it's
gonna be really hard for them togive that to the teacher, for
the teacher to then give it tothe to the students. And I hope
I'm remembering that correctly,because it's been a couple of
weeks, but really interestingstuff there. Yeah, I was in that
(50:52):
session too. I do remember thatI was so back to your you're
noticing about coaching, right?
And how important that can be.
Yeah, that's really cool.
Stacy Hurst (51:04):
Anything else that stood out to you or that that
you feel like will really impactyour work going forward.
Unknown (51:12):
You know, as far as like, stuff I'm interested in,
I've kind of been munching onword difficulty lately. And
Laura tortorelli and LaurieBrunner had a session in
Freddie's symposium that wasthat was talking about that,
but, you know, thinking about,like, what text factors make a
word easier or harder to read?
(51:35):
You know, like, we know that,okay, like, orthographic
regularities can be part of it,but there's also, you know,
length, there's morphologicalstructure, but there's other
things we don't think about asmuch so, like how
concrete or how abstract theword is. Like, abstract words
tend to be have a lowerlikelihood of being read, you
know, accurately. And the onethat's kind of cropped up in a
(51:56):
couple studies that that Lauratortorelli has done now is
actually age of acquisition. Sowords that are acquired later
have a greater likelihood ofbeing read incorrectly. And some
of that's like, Okay, well, youknow if, if words are, you know,
there's a length co varyingthere as well, right? But even
(52:17):
when they controlled for length,like on this study, they
present. I believe age ofacquisition was still like,
controlling for, like all someof those variables I just
mentioned, and others, but ageof acquisition, you know, was
there, and kind of thinkingabout that as you know, there is
anyway. There's a lot of factorsthat contribute to how easy or
hard a word is to readaccurately.
(52:38):
The Age of acquisition, youknow, that might be an a
repetition effect, right? Thatif a if a word has a higher age
of acquisition, then it's lesslikely to be encountered in
text, so therefore it's lesslikely to be, you know,
orthographically map. Well, whatdoes that mean for, you know,
the books we give students, youknow, in it for instruction,
(52:59):
right? Does it mean that we givekids books with higher age of
acquisition with lower age ofacquisition. Like, and the
difference here is on thefringes, right? We're thinking
about like a money ball approachof like, well, if we can make
texts 2% more efficient, youknow, for orthographic mapping,
like, what kind of output does,you know? How does that change
things longitudinally? You know?
So these types of things arestarting to play at the margins,
(53:21):
but I think we have enough ofthe big rocks in place. You
know, the margins are what's,what's really important. So that
was something I was reallyinterested in, especially, like,
you know, thinking about multisyllabic reading, reading long
words. How to do that withconnected, challenging text? So
there, there was, there. I mean,I had a ton of takeaways, but
that's something I've reallybeen munching on since the
(53:42):
conference. Yeah, and how toscaffold for those things. Just
in conclusion, too, I will sayit was so good to be exposed to
those researchers who are doingthe research that I consume. But
we had it was her misfortune,but our good luck that we were
on the same flight home as youngSook Kim, she had, yeah, that's
(54:04):
a whole other story, but we wereable to talk to her about her
model, her dire model of ofreading, and how that's evolved
over the years. Yeah, dear, howthey say it, how it's evolved
over the years. And having her,she was into many of the
sessions that I attended, andthe questions she asked were so
Stacy Hurst (54:27):
astute. I thought, oh, man, I want to have that
ease with research that shedoes. So it was really, it's a
small enough conference, youknow, back to how it differs
from other conferences we mightgo to that you do? You get to
see these researchers and hearfrom them face to face. Also,
there was absolutely no merch
Unknown (54:50):
being sold. Yeah, there's, there's no vendor Hall.
There's no merch. I didn't even,I didn't even get a pen from it,
right? I actually took one fromthe hotel. But.
It that? Okay, that's different,yeah.
Hotel. Do you know where it willbe next year? Where will it be
held?
Netherlands. Oh, neat. Okay,it's in, not Amsterdam. It's a
(55:14):
just south of Amsterdam. Andthen the after that, it's in
Santiago, Chile. So, I mean, itis an international conference.
I ate dinner with someone fromRussia. You know, there are
presenters from China there.
Australia has a strongcontingent. So, but they do kind
of alternate between, you know,northern hemisphere, like, you
know, they all, they just, theyswitch, they switch locations,
yeah. And one of the researchersthat shared her research said,
(55:36):
This is my first presentation inEnglish. So yeah, you get to
have a lot of exposure to whatis happening research wise in
other countries, it's reallygreat.
Stacy Hurst (55:50):
Well, thank you so much, Jake for this
conversation. I Jake and I wereon the same flight to the
conference too, and probablyright after I said, Hey Jake,
the next question out of mymouth was, do you want to join
us for the rehab?
And I'm so glad you did. Thankyou so much. Thanks for the
invite. It was a this is a greattime chatting. And it was, it
(56:11):
was great to hang out with you abit in Canada as well. Yeah,
likewise, and all of you who arelistening to our podcast also
listen to Jake's. It's a littlebit different than ours, but you
will learn a lot from listening,so it's really good. Recommend
it.
Donnell Lindsay, any other finalquestions or Well, thanks you
(56:31):
guys. Thanks for joining us.
It's been great. Yeah, thankyou. Thanks for the
conversation. Thanks again,Jake, and thank you to our
listeners, and hopefully you'lljoin us for the next episode of
literacy talks.
Narrator (56:47):
Thanks for joining us today. Literacy talks comes to
you from Reading Horizons, whereliteracy momentum begins. Visit
reading horizons.com/literacytalks to access episodes and
resources to support yourjourney in the science of
reading you.
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