May 23, 2025 • 50 mins
Episode 211 from December 6, 2024
Fluency is a crucial aspect of reading. It involves automaticity and the ability to connect different aspects of word knowledge.
In this episode, Maryanne Wolf and Melissa Orkin discuss:
- the importance of fluency in reading
- the factors that contribute to fluent reading
- the need for an integrative approach to fluency instruction
- the POSSUM approach to building word knowledge
Big Takeaway: Fluency is essential for comprehension and has social-emotional implications for struggling readers. The POSSUM approach can help students make the needed connections to be able to read fluently.
Want to Learn More?
- The More You Know: How Teaching Multiple Aspects of Word Knowledge
Builds Fluency Skills by Melissa Orkin, Kirk Vanacore, Laura Rhinehart,
Rebecca Gotlieb, and Maryanne Wolf - Building Fluency with POSSUM
- Downloadable lessons featuring the POSSUM approach:
- Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect: Repeated Reading Is No More Effective Than Continuous Reading for Improving Fluency and Comprehension in School-Age Struggling Readers by Elizabeth S. Norton
- RAN and the reading brain with Elizabeth Norton (youtube video)
- Word Finder wordfinder.yourdictionary.com - find words with similar patterns!
- Crafting Minds Group
- NIDO Learning
We answer your questions about teaching reading in The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night.
Grab free resources and episode alerts! Sign up for our email list at literacypodcast.com.
Join our community on Facebook, and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, & Twitter.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Teaching all of the different aspects of reading can
feel overwhelming.
Juggling phonemic awareness,phonics, fluency, vocabulary and
comprehension is all so much todo every single day.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Well, good news because in this episode,
researchers Marianne Wolfe andMelissa Orkin will share an
explicit instructional approachthat brings all of these pieces
together in a meaningful waythat helps students build word
knowledge, bridge phonics andcomprehension, and increase
fluency.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Hi teacher friends.
I'm Lori and I'm Melissa.
We are two educators who wantthe best for all kids, and we
know you do too.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
We worked together in Baltimore when the district
adopted a new literacycurriculum.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
We realized there was so much more to learn about how
to teach reading and writing.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you
today.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Hi everyone.
Today we are talking about howyou can help your students build
fluency skills, and our gueststoday are amazing and have
created a super cool approach toincreasing reading fluency.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah, amazing guests is right.
We have Marianne Wolfe, who youmay know as the author of books
such as Proust and the Squidand Reader Come Home, both
excellent books if you haven'tread them.
She also directs the Center forDyslexia, Diverse Learners and
Social Justice at the Universityof California, Los Angeles.
And then, also joining Marianne, we have Melissa Orkin, and
(01:32):
Melissa is a former teacher,developmental psychologist and
director of Crafting Minds,which is an educational
consulting practice.
So welcome Marianne and Melissa.
Thank you, Our pleasure.
All right, so we're talking allabout fluency today and we
(01:52):
wanted to just first set thestage here and just define what
we mean when we talk aboutfluency.
And I actually wanted to quoteone of your articles, if that's
okay, where you said somethingthat really blew my mind.
You said within 280milliseconds of encountering a
word, a fluent reader not onlyrecognizes the sounds of letters
and matches them to theirvisual symbols, they also
activate all associated wordmeanings and knowledge of text
(02:15):
structure.
So can you all just start withdefining for us, or describing a
fluent reader in terms of whatI just shared and all the things
that go into becoming a fluentreader?
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Sure, yeah, I can start.
So, yeah, I mean, I think thatwhat you're pointing out,
melissa, is so amazing andreally miraculous, especially
because we are not born to read.
But reading becomes this reallyautomatic subconscious process,
and the automaticity with whichwe read is really key to our
(02:50):
development as humans, asliterate humans and as thinkers.
And you know, oftentimes.
So I have a chance to be out inthe field with teachers on an
almost daily basis.
Influency is something thatwe're all talking about and I
know that you have done a numberof episodes about fluency and
(03:10):
there are so many greatstrategies that we can use and
it's something that I'm oftenkind of exploring with different
educators and I'll say to themyou know, how would you define
fluency?
And usually you know they'llthink for a moment and they'll
jot down some ideas and it willbe something about you know that
readers are reading withaccuracy and good rate and that
(03:33):
they demonstrate prosody, andthese are all totally true.
And so when I then say, well,how would you build fluency
among your readers, they wouldsay, well, we would improve
accuracy, we would improve rateand we would kind of model
prosody, prosody being, like youknow, reading naturally.
And again, it's all true, but Ithink what you know so much of
(03:58):
the research around theneuroscience of reading and
that's you know part of thesource from which you got that
information about how long doesit take our brain to read that's
you know part of the sourcefrom which you got that
information about how long doesit take our brain to read.
That's all done through kind ofneuroimaging research.
Some of the research fromneuroscience has indicated that
fluency.
What you're seeing when you'resitting next to a reader is that
(04:18):
they're reading accurately andthey have a good rate and
they're reading with good sortof tone to their language.
But what's happening in thebrain is that the brain is
automatically connecting all ofthese different aspects of word
knowledge.
So instead of just looking atthe letter patterns and saying
(04:40):
the sounds, the brain isautomatically, within
milliseconds, connecting letterpatterns to word meaning, to the
job the word's playing in asentence, to if there is an
ending, thinking about what theending is doing, to the meaning
of the words or the phrase andthen putting it all together in
comprehension.
(05:01):
It's connecting these differentaspects of word knowledge and I
think that when we think aboutfluency from that perspective,
that really fluency indicatesthat the reader is able to
connect the multiple aspects ofword knowledge.
That shifts how we teachfluency.
We teach to buildingautomaticity across these
(05:25):
aspects of word knowledge,whether it's letter patterns and
sounds and word meanings andparts of speech, and then we
also use activities that aregoing to allow students to
practice the connection acrossthese different aspects of word
knowledge.
So I would say that's thedefinition that I find is
helpful for educators inthinking about how to plan
(05:48):
fluency activities for students.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yep, Along with that, Melissa.
You guys, you all talked aboutretrieval and I'm wondering if
you wanted to add in what?
How is retrieval related tofluency?
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Yeah, so I mean Marianne.
So much of Marianne's work isabout retrieval related to
fluency.
Yeah, so I mean Marianne.
So much of Marianne's work isabout retrieval.
And you know, just to give youan idea of how important you
know retrieval is when I firststarted working with Marianne so
I'm a former student ofMarianne's and we worked
together for about 15 years at auniversity outside of Boston
called Tufts University, at auniversity outside of Boston
(06:26):
called Tufts University.
She had a center for reading andlanguage development there and
I came to Marianne being trainedin a number of different
programs.
I was Orton Gillingham trainedand I wore these trainings like
a badge.
I thought I knew everythingbasically, and I was kind of
coming to just get Marianne'sstamp of approval.
I thought she was just going torubber stamp me and walk away.
But instead she said tell memore about your students'
(06:50):
fluency that you've been workingwith.
And whereas Orton-Gillinghamand other phonics programs had
been sufficient for somestudents to become fluent, I had
a whole subset of students thatwere not becoming fluent with
these really strong phonicsprograms, and that is where I
(07:11):
started to understand theimportance of retrieval in our
reading circuit.
So Marianne, I'm sure will bemuch more eloquent in describing
this, so I will defer to her.
But but it is a key piece ofthis puzzle for many students.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
I will add a few things.
The reality is an unusual onebecause years and years ago
there was only one agreed uponarea of, let's say, deficit or
weakness, and it was thephonological, and that we really
(07:51):
wanted to figure out how totreat.
Phoneme awareness andphonological skills and phonics
made all kinds of good sense andalways will, because that is an
issue.
But with another researchernamed Pat Bowers from Canada, we
did something that wasconsidered at the time
(08:13):
subversive.
We disagreed.
We said our children that wesee in clinics every day have
more than just a phonologicalweakness as manifested as
phoneme awareness.
And I had been working with aneurologist named Martha Denkla
(08:34):
and her former colleague RitaRiddell on how can we understand
another weakness that seems tobe related to fluency.
But we weren't sure what that Xfactor was, and it turned out
to be the speed with which thebrain connected visual and
(08:58):
language processes and retrievedwhatever the label was, whether
it was for a letter, a number,a color object or a picture, so
the name of an object.
And what we ultimately foundacross time and this goes all
the way into recent work, fairlyrecent work with well, at John
(09:20):
Gabrielli's lab and my lab withOla Ozonoff-Palachuk, we studied
all these children and we hadbeen studying them for 20 years
and finding this what we callthe RAN indexed deficit.
That was why, originally, wetalked about a double deficit,
not that there were ever onlytwo, but that this area was
(09:43):
beyond and different from aphonological weakness.
So by now all this research hascome together and we see that,
you know, about 20% of ourchildren only have, let's say, a
more pure phonological weakness, phonological weakness.
Another 20, 25 have only afluency-based RAN-indexed
(10:11):
weakness, but that the majorityof our children, like 70% of the
kids who are struggling withdyslexia or other forms of
struggle, have both a phonemeawareness indexed and a
fluency-based weakness.
Now, it was retrieval that cuedus into that.
(10:35):
What would become a fluencyweakness?
So when you think of thechildren who are most seriously
impaired, you have to realizethat about 70% of them have
these issues.
Now what Melissa described wasthe next stage what are all the
contributors to that weaknessthat we call RAND index fluency
(11:02):
issues?
And that's when, let's say, mycap, as not just a cognitive
neuroscientist but as a linguist, was coming together and we
realized, by studying thereading brain, that there are
all these different contributorsto the rapid retrieval.
(11:24):
Now the implication for Melissaand all of us was that that
means if we're only working onphonics and phoneme awareness,
we are neglecting the othercontributors to this weakness
that will manifest itself.
(11:44):
Usually we can find it outthrough a RAN-RAS, which is
simply a naming speed test thatbecomes automatic right Letters
and numbers.
That tells us that things arenot working well underneath the
hood.
And so when people talk about aRAND deficit or fluency deficit
(12:09):
, we lift the hood up, we say itcould be phonological, only
unlikely it could beorthographic.
And here's where the firstpossum comes.
I'm getting ahead of thequestion.
I'm sorry, but it's reallywhere we were at that point.
(12:30):
There were phonological, therewere prosodic, there were
orthographic connections.
Were those letters representedwell in those visual areas?
The semantic system this iswhere retrieval is so important
in two ways.
Not only is the semantic let'ssee processing contribution
(12:54):
important just for vocabulary,but it's so important for those
kids and so many of our studentswith dyslexia and other issues,
and here I'll add bilingual,multilingual kids.
They're accessing all thesedifferent things.
You see, working on semanticsis not just about vocabulary and
(13:17):
I really have to insist thatpeople remember that.
It's wonderful for vocabularybut it gives those who have a
retrieval issue alternatives sothat when they can't find one
word, they can find one that'srelated to it.
So we work on semantic networksand we also work on what's
(13:39):
called polysemy, another P, butwe put it under the S, where the
same word can have multiplemeanings, it's more than one.
And then you think sem, s-e-m,semantics, poly, semi, and then
of course the Y, but here you'removing ahead to the M, which is
morphology.
(14:02):
Knowledge of morphology helpseverything.
It's our secret sauce becauseit is a unit that's
orthographically easy.
It's a chunk, and it is givingus syntactic information.
Is that a verb or a noun?
But anyway, the U is more forwritten language, understanding
(14:23):
the alphabetic principle or, ifit's a different language,
understanding the localsyllabary principle.
Whatever the language is,that's what the U, the
understanding, is.
And then the M is formorphology.
But back to I mean, if you putall that together, we used this
acronym that Melissa and I useall the time because people can
(14:46):
remember that when you'reworking with fluency, posm is
what you are really insisting,is part of what you're doing in
instruction and intervention toincrease fluency, basically in
different ways.
We used possum as at the heartof an intervention that included
(15:11):
work on phonics and phonemeawareness always and porosity,
but that is so much wider.
And then you have to actuallystep back and you think what are
the foundational skills thatthe reading brain has?
And you come to the not sosurprising conclusion this is
(15:34):
what the foundational skills are, and so many people have
narrowly defined both thefoundational skills and the
science of reading as the P, thephonics and the phoneme
awareness, and not realizingthat the reading brain has if
(15:54):
you just think of it as a wheelwith the, you know the middle is
being influenced by all ofthese spokes.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Lori and I are always also talking about fluency as,
like the I don't know missinglink, or people aren't talking
about it enough or it's nothappening enough.
I'm wondering if you I'd loveto just hear from you both of
you know why, why is fluency soimportant and why should
everyone care about it more?
Speaker 4 (16:20):
So the importance of fluency is that without it, you
don't think you have to have alevel of speed.
Just think of how the brainworks.
If it can't get all of thiswork done in possum, it has no
(16:41):
time to allocate to thinkingwhat it means, allocate to
thinking what it means.
So fluency is the bridge, themultifaceted bridge, to
comprehension, and for me,comprehension we can talk about
that later is not just one bigterm.
Just as foundational skillshave multiple influences,
(17:04):
comprehension has multipleaspects, which I call deep
reading.
That's in the Melissa youmentioned, reader come home, the
reading brain in a digitalworld.
Well, the bridge is fluency andit is not by repeated reading
that you're going to get to theability to allocate time and
(17:24):
attention to the thinking skillsthat we call comprehension.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Yeah, no, I agree.
I mean I think that you knowyou captured it really nicely.
I mean, I'm sure as educatorsyou know, melissa and Laura,
you've sat with children andyou've seen them, you know
really labor over text and youknow that when you ask them
afterwards, you know tell mewhat that was about.
You know what was the problemthere, you know how did it get
(17:50):
resolved.
You can see just, first of all,how exhausted they are and,
second of all, that they weren'table to hold onto that
information.
And I know when I read withstudents who are disfluent,
they're more likely to guess,they're more likely to start to
become avoidant with tasks.
They're more likely to, youknow, engage me in like off-task
conversations because they'rejust exhausted.
(18:11):
They clearly don't have thestamina or the automaticity to
get through the passage and it'stotally labored for them.
So I think that's what it lookslike in a reading behavior and
I think what Marianne ispointing out is just like the
cognitive processes that areinvolved.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
But you know what Melissa always reminds me and
this is what she said is soimportant If you ask all these
kids what's wrong, they will sayit, they will, they will use
words that mean it's toolaborious, and then that
translates.
And I want to say that Melissaand another person who's worked
(18:54):
with me, rebecca Gottlieb, hasunderscored what I knew as a
mother but never included as aresearcher, and that's the
affective component.
When you are so laborious andyou just can't read faster, it
makes the whole process seemimpossible, which then is like
(19:17):
the social emotional aspect thatcan either help you soar and
persevere or stymie you and youget arrested.
So fluency is a major aspectcognitively, but it also affects
the social emotional.
Really, it's so much more thanthe word fluency.
(19:41):
It's so much more.
Okay, I think we can dig alittle deeper now into what we
can do to help students becomefluent readers.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
I know you developed this a little deeper now into
what we can do to help studentsbecome fluent readers.
I know you developed thisframework, posm, and I'm just
going to repeat it for everyonelistening.
So the POSM approach to buildword knowledge is phonology,
orthography, syntax, semantics,understanding, morphology.
You all are going to tell us alittle bit more about each
(20:08):
element than you already have.
I think you could probably talkall day about each one,
probably right, but I also wouldlove to hear at some point.
I want to go back to that ideaof repeated readings, because I
want to make sure that we arenot leaving teachers hanging
here who are listening to this.
If I'm a teacher listening, I'mthinking, okay, possum sounds
(20:29):
awesome and it sounds reallyimportant, and it's probably a
lot of what I'm doing.
Maybe there are some tweaks Ican make, right To like go even
deeper and to be even morepossum-y in my classroom with my
students.
But what about this repeatedreading thing?
Is it something that should?
We be doing repeated readingsand possibly not doing them?
(20:50):
Like what?
Is there a hard and fast rule?
And I'm really just asking for,you know, teachers listening
who are sitting there thinking,okay, well, I've been doing some
repeated readings, I've beendoing some paragraph shrinking
Like what does all this mean?
Speaker 3 (21:04):
Yeah, I mean, I completely understand
(21:29):
no-transcript and thatoverlearning requires an
exponential number of exposurescompared to a typical student,
whereas a typical student mightbe able to, you know, recognize,
you know a word or a letterpattern or you know, ending with
(21:52):
10 exposures.
You know a student who isdyslexic might need like 100 or
150 exposures.
So how do you do that?
You know there is some level ofrepetition.
I think that where you knowthere are some concerns that are
being raised.
I think that where you knowthere are some concerns that are
being raised, and I knowanother colleague of ours,
(22:14):
elizabeth Norton at NorthwesternUniversity, just wrote an
article for the Reading LeagueJournal about repeated reading
and you know, really looking atthe effect sizes of studies that
had used repeated readinginterventions versus just
reading interventions, like whatis the specific benefit of
repetition?
And and I would really say youknow, lori, like for whom?
(22:35):
I think there are those kids wholove to practice a passage and
it helps build their sense ofconfidence and they really enjoy
seeing.
You know there I know so manydifferent programs that will,
like time you and they'll giveyou, you know, incentives and
they'll they'll show you howyour time's going down and and
that helps build theirconfidence.
So that could be one tool.
But I think that, whereMarianne and I and others are
(22:58):
concerned, is that if it's theonly tool that you're using,
then there isn't really astrategy that students can use
that they can generalize topassages that they haven't
repeated, that students can use,that they can generalize to
passages that they haven'trepeated.
So part of the reason that weare, you know, taking our show
on the road and talking aboutpossum so much and really trying
to help, you know, teachersunderstand the multiple aspects
(23:19):
of word knowledge, is so thatthey have strategies that they
can, you know, use to accompanyrepetition or practice, because
that certainly is a piece, but Ithink to caution teachers as
using that as their wholeapproach to fluency.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Thank you, that's so helpful.
Okay, so if there's nothingelse that we want to say about
that, marianne, if you feel likeMelissa covered it, then we can
roll into the.
I'd love to hear an overview ofeach one, like anything that
you didn't say yet that you'dlike to share.
About possum, cause I know wealready started talking about it
(23:57):
how can you not and I'm really,I'm really again kind of
digging it as this integrated,this integrated model, this,
what is it?
Cog and wheel.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Yeah, multi-competential yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
I'm going to begin by saying that in the very
beginning of our understandingof the richness of retrieval,
the obvious is that the questionbecomes what do you do about it
?
And that's where I thinkMelissa and I are going to move
(24:32):
into that.
Our first efforts because ofRead Lion who, with Robin Morris
and Maureen Lovett, encouragedus to go after a research grant
to prepare us for writinginterventions.
So Reed said try to get thisaward, if you will, for research
(24:57):
that will prove this isimportant for increasing fluency
, increasing reading in our mostimpaired readers.
So that began what was reallyalmost 15 years of research on
different interventions andMelissa used the word
multi-component, ormulti-componential interventions
(25:19):
that never neglect phonics andphoneme awareness but go beyond
it.
And so what we did was createthe first program which we have,
I guess you might say, some ofthe best evidence for from
randomized control treatmentstudies showing that the
(25:42):
multi-component approach isbetter than phonics, which is
better than just normalclassroom.
So what is that multi-component?
We tried two different forms ofit.
One is called Empower, by mycolleague, maureen Lovett, and
that goes after metacognitivestrategies for phonology,
(26:03):
orthography and morphology,orthography and morphology.
We tried a somewhat morecomprehensive approach, which is
what POSIM really is, and thatis to go with an approach in
(26:23):
intervention that wouldsystematically and here's where
it gets really important tothink not am I doing phonics or
phoneme awareness, but am Iconnecting it to the rest of
possum?
So we eventually built a programcalled REVO in which it's all
about taking words in all ofthese spokes.
(26:47):
So we looked at it in terms ofthe semantic knowledge, the
polysemous knowledge of whichwas only polysemous words
actually and then we connectedit to the orthographic patterns.
We can always connecting it tothe how the phonemes and the
letters you know work together.
So that's never a neglect ofphonics, but it's always
(27:10):
connecting it to orthographicpatterns that they learn and
acquire over time through,basically, some strategies,
rhyme and starter strategies.
So we use both, if you want touse technical terms, analytic
phonics and synthetic phonics ifyou want to use the technical
(27:30):
terms.
But we're always connectingthose same words with those same
patterns to their meanings andtheir grammatical uses.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Marian, really quick, I'm sorry.
Can you just?
I know that our guests orlisteners are probably thinking
about the analytic and syntheticphonics that you just mentioned
.
Can you just talk about how itaddresses both?
Speaker 4 (27:51):
So we want to be sure that they have the concept.
This is part of understandingthe alphabetic principles.
Is the U?
Oh, look at these letters, whatletters can be?
They turn words we can say intowords we can see.
So we're teaching them thealphabetic principle that a word
(28:15):
has sounds and then they workon, let's say, bat, and they see
the bat and then ever fasteruntil they literally put the
sounds together.
But they've analyzed the soundsand the words.
But the synthetic is that we useanother strategy of basketball
(28:37):
basically, where we teach themafter they know these sounds and
the letters that representthose sounds, we teach them to
spy the rhyme pattern and theylearn so with bat.
They spy the at and they jam ittogether.
(28:58):
They jam the A-T, synthesizethose sounds in a rhyme and then
synthesize the starter, so thebat, but at slam dunk.
So we teach them both analytic,because that's that really is a
key piece and that's.
Janine Heron really talks aboutencoding and all of that in
(29:23):
before kids ever come to school.
She's really taught me a greatdeal about that.
Kids ever come to school, she'sreally taught me a great deal
about that.
But that it's a part of a pieceand so we add the more
synthetic through strategiesthat go after rhyme patterns.
And we want to know, we wantthe kids to know, oh, and
Melissa says something that isso important, something that is
(29:52):
so important Our kids the kidsthat are mine really have the
most struggles, and so when werepresent rhyme, it has to have
a lot of exposure.
So you know I've said thisprobably a thousand times One of
the three worst words ever usedin education were R, kill and
drill.
That is not what we are doing.
(30:13):
We are giving them multipleexposures because they're so
needed.
Now, some kids only need 10,but our kids need many.
So part of this work on possumis to give them multiple
exposures in all kinds of ways.
Awesome is to give themmultiple exposures in all kinds
of ways.
(30:36):
And then, of course, we teach.
You know, I guess it's sort offunny, but I may be one of the
few people left who missdiagramming.
Nobody is teaching that, andokay, fine, but we're going to
teach them nouns and verbs andhow they work, and how a word
can be a noun, like a bat that'syour bat, or a noun can be a
(30:59):
verb a bat that you bat.
And so we teach this otheraspect of both syntax and
polysemy.
And then we teach more themesthat add the endings so that
batting, batted, there's morethan you know, more than meets
(31:19):
the eye.
There they are learning theunit, they're learning that
that's a verb, they're learningthat it can, depending on the
word, the rhyme, need a doubletrouble letter, like bat and
batting.
So all these are part andparcel of connection.
(31:44):
And for me one of the realmissing aspects of fluency
training is that and this ishappening across the country you
do a little phoneme awareness.
You say, oh, check, oh, we do alittle vocabulary on Friday
Check.
Oh well, they get morphology inthird grade, they're lucky.
(32:07):
Oh well, they get morphology inthird grade if they're lucky.
Instead of really thinkingseriously about how the brain is
this wheel with a spokes andwe're making those spokes so
firmly in there the wheel canturn and turn, and turn.
I hadn't thought of that, lori.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
I love that.
Yeah, I think it's sochallenging too, because what
you're saying, marianne, isn'teasy.
It's much easier to think about, like, okay, vocabulary is a
compartmentalized thing, right?
Or I do vocabulary when I havethis book, when my students
respond in this book, but reallyeverything that you're speaking
(32:46):
up is just so the wordintegrated keeps coming to mind
and I think that's why that, um,the Coggin wheel is really
resonating with me, because it'sjust thinking about the brain
in the middle and then all ofthese feeders, and it's just
it's not happening when like,okay, I'm teaching vocabulary
here, no, I'm teaching this text, I'm teaching this concept, and
(33:06):
then all of these things happenall the time, like, and it's
just so integrated, it's sonatural with how we learn all
the time and every day.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
You know, as I said, we're out working with teachers
all the time.
Everybody has questions aboutfluency.
People have decodable texts butthey didn't quite know.
You know, beyond repeatedreading, how can you build
fluency in a strategic way?
So what we do with teachers andwe've just created a resource
for this is we show them how toapply possum to the text that
(33:37):
they have.
So the sounds, the phonology is,you know, the sounds in words.
So what we do is we start by.
So Marianne's program, ravo, isvery top down.
So it's like she started with aword, because that is a word
that has multiple meanings.
Multiple meaning words aregreat because we know that the
(33:59):
more you know about a word, themore associations.
The faster you read a word andthis is some really exciting
work by Penny Paxman and othersabout you know, the more
memories you have with a word,the more features it has, the
more associations it has, thefaster you read it, and so it's
(34:19):
not just about the letterpatterns, it's also about sort
of how robustly stored that wordis in your brain.
So Marianne starts with theword, uses the word for the
meanings and the rhyme patternsand then builds the word into
sentences, what we did inCrafting Minds with our series
Decoding Duo is we started withthe book and we pulled the
(34:43):
sentences and the words out ofthe book and so that we kind of
worked from the bottom up andshe worked from the top down.
I mean, if you have teacherswho just have any decodable,
they can use this strategy.
They can use this strategy witha curriculum.
They don't have to invest inanother program.
And so what we did was wepulled sentences out that have
(35:06):
the concept that we want to workon and, as Marianne said, we
love rhyme patterns.
Rhyme patterns are such a greatorthographic concept for
building automaticity becauseit's a chunk of the word and the
rhyme pattern will reliablyhelp the reader pronounce the
vowel sound.
So think of a word like best orbeast.
(35:28):
What is cuing you in to how topronounce the E?
Are the letters that follow itE-A-S-T or E-S-T?
So that rhyme pattern is sohelpful and there have been a
number of studies done on thevalue of recognizing rhyme
patterns and there also has justbeen some research on how
(35:49):
frequent rhyme patterns are inEnglish.
Like there was some research Iwas reading that said like
17,000 words that are part oflike kind of our common lexicon
in English are made up out ofjust 400 rhyme patterns that
have been kind of used indifferent combinations, so that
real, you know automaticity.
(36:10):
If you want to work onautomaticity instead of working
on it on a single letter likedrilling, just single letter
cards, work on it with a rhymepattern.
The same could be said for someof our consonant blends that
function as like our startersounds, like SP or STR or SL,
like being able to see that as aunit and recognize it and
(36:33):
pronounce it automaticallyreally speeds up that word
recognition.
We want kids to go from readinga word like trick you know being
able to isolate and identifyeach sound to seeing it as
ter-ick and then to just seeingit and saying it trick.
Some kids can make that kind ofjump that they can do that
(36:56):
orthographic mapping.
Others need that kind ofintermediary step where they're
able to recognize the TR andthey're able to recognize the
ICK and if they know trick, asMarianne says in RAVO, then they
know sick, then they know flick, then they know slick.
There's even a lot of practicewith reading words by rhyme
(37:18):
pattern first.
That can be a great tool, whichis called backwards decoding
because again it helps youretrieve the information in your
auditory memory, so rhymepatterns are just great for all
of these reasons.
Then, in terms of the semanticwe talked about using, you know
thinking of multiple meanings ofwords and eliciting from
(37:41):
students their associations tothe word.
So staying with that word trick, trick is a multiple meaning
word, right?
So, melissa, what's one meaningof the word trick that you
think of?
Like a magic trick, like amagic trick.
Or, lori, what's one meaning ofthe word trick that you think
of?
Speaker 1 (37:59):
I was thinking like playing a game on someone, like
a trick, yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
To like, you know, maybe to fool them or something
like that right To fool them.
Yes, like to play it so it'sfool them, or something like
that right.
Like to play it so it's like averb or a noun right.
And so I might start with you,lori, and I might say so tell me
, is there a time when you'veplayed a trick on someone?
What was that like?
How does that feel?
Because what I'm doing is I'mactivating your whole semantic
neighborhood around the wordtrick and I'm helping with the
(38:27):
retrieval.
So the more robust thoseactivations, the better able
you'll be, lori, when you seethat word trick in print, to
retrieve it.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Melissa, real quick, is this where I think you all
gave an example about the wordslion and lime and I was my mind
was blown.
I was like, oh my gosh, this isso cool.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
Yeah, yeah, so that was.
I think that was a researchstudy done by Paxman, but I have
, look, don't quote me on that,Let me double check the research
.
There was a Hargraves.
It's really old.
It is old, it's like 2002.
I mean, it's relatively old,but okay, I'll describe that
quickly.
So, basically, the researcherswere really thoughtful.
(39:07):
I love these like very cleverresearch studies.
They were very thoughtful indesigning the study.
They were trying to figure out,like, what contributes to the
speed with which we visuallyrecognize words.
That's the big question, right.
Like, how do we more quicklyand automatically recognize
words?
So they took pairs of words andthey paired them together
because there would be thesesimilarities.
So lion and lime were pairedbecause they both start with L-I
(39:32):
.
They both are four letters, butactually one of them has a very
common spelling pattern I-M-E,vowel consonant E, i-n, i-o-n.
Like how many words can youthink of with I-O-N?
Very few, right?
So then what they did was theywould be.
You know, they have this likevery elaborate contraption and
they can tell how quickly ittakes a participant to read the
(39:52):
word.
And then afterwards, for all ofthe pairs of words, they had
them write down all of theirassociations for those words in
like 60 seconds or something.
They gave them a time limit.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
And with the associations, just to kind of
clarify for the listeners likelime fruit Exactly.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
Yeah, citrus, right.
Yeah, peel tree, that sort ofthing, yeah, yeah.
So it turns out that lion hasthree times the number of
associations compared to lime.
So even though lion is a lesscommon letter pattern, lion is
read more quickly because thatsemantic neighborhood is chock
full of all of theseassociations, and so I think
(40:39):
that really so well illustratesthis idea that certainly you
know.
Patterns, orthographic spellingpatterns, are a big piece of the
puzzle, but it's not everything, and, as Marianne said,
retrieval of word meanings helpsus sometimes compensate or
support the whole readingcircuit, and so the more that we
(41:00):
can look for theseopportunities to build this work
into our instruction, the morerobust the student's retrieval
will be.
So we talked about phonologyand orthography and semantics.
Syntax is parts of speech, sothinking about the parts of
speech and giving kids anopportunity to scoop sentences I
(41:23):
actually just watched a fluencypresentation that you both did,
melissa and Lori I know this isyour show, but I'm going to
highlight your work and youtalked about the importance of
breaking up sentences intophrases.
Right, and why did you decideto highlight that strategy?
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Well, I think we decided to highlight it because
it's a really tangible thingthat both teachers and students
can see and do.
In order to help track, so thatit's not word by word reading,
we're helping students put thosewords in phrases so that they
can read them more fluently,more cohesively and build
understanding through thephrasing.
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
It breaks it up into its syntactic structures, right,
like who or what is a sentenceabout?
What are they doing?
Where or how are they doing it?
It's the subject phrase, thepredicate phrase, the
prepositional phrase, and that'ssuch a beautiful strategy that
really helps kids with, I think,their pacing as they're reading
, so that they breathe Everytime you finish a scoop.
(42:23):
The child takes a breath, thereader takes a breath, and
that's such a nice way to makesure that kids have that
opportunity to see the wordsgrouped together but to also not
feel overwhelmed by it.
And then the last part, themorphology.
I mean, as Marianne said, it'sthe secret sauce.
So being able to play withprefixes and suffixes, even if
(42:47):
you're doing phonics work, withprefixes and suffixes, even if
you're doing phonics work,playing with.
How does this change the endingIn Revo, marianne has coined
this amazing term for suffixesand prefixes, but I think you
only talk about suffixes.
But it would work for either.
And they're called enderbendersand teachers were training in
Revo always say but they'rebeing taught the term suffixes.
(43:07):
And I said but suffix doesn'tanchor them with anything,
whereas Ender Bender is a niceanchor about language.
This is a part of language thatcomes at the end of a base word
and it bends the meaning.
It changes the meaning and youget that bonus of not only
recognizing a pattern of letterslike F-U-L or N-E-S-S or E-S-T,
(43:32):
but it also helps you thinkabout how does this change the
meaning of the base word?
How does it support my overallunderstanding of this sentence
or text?
So looking for that integrativeopportunity is so powerful for
kids.
Speaker 4 (43:50):
In the old Revolve we hadn't understood or I hadn't
begun the research on deepreading, and over the last years
that has become so important tome.
And deep reading includesempathy, background knowledge,
critical analysis, criticalthinking, and you think, well,
(44:14):
what can first and second andthird graders do with deep
reading?
You can begin it, and so thenew E in RAVO is going to be
empathy and it's going to all.
I'm rewriting all the stories,the little decodable text, and
new stories that promote, inthis troubled world of ours,
(44:38):
more empathy and more criticalthinking, like mysteries, and
(45:03):
also and here I really will saythat Melissa's work on the
social, emotional aspects of ourstruggling readers and my
colleague, rebecca Gottlieb havereally influenced me to do more
on perseverance and persistenceand even having a character
named Sammy the Slug who willpersevere till the end, a
character named Sammy the Slugwho will persevere till the end.
And I want you to know that.
As we talk about fluency and youask me, melissa and Lori, and
you've asked us, why is it soimportant?
It is important so that ournext generation, our kids, many
(45:27):
of whom are so creative and it'snot released because they
aren't fluent enough to get tothe point where they can think
for themselves.
And I want you to know we havenew strategies, if you will, for
insisting.
Our kids can persevere andreach their own thinking, their
(45:47):
own thoughts, and that's whatfluency is about.
Fluency is about releasing themfrom the laboriousness, not
that they're fast, but that theyare fast enough to think at a
different level, a level inwhich empathy and critical
(46:08):
thinking and even new thoughts,new insights, can happen.
For them.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
You know, I think that probably when we think
about fluency instruction forstudents and we think about, you
know, the different practicesthat you can use, I think what
Marianne and I are hoping isthat this multi-competential
approach offers teachers aframework and understanding that
students might need varyingdegrees of intensity with this
instruction.
Some, as we said, might need,you know, a few exposures.
(46:44):
Others might need moresystematic kind of small group
or tier three intensive work.
But the idea of moving awayfrom word work and isolation and
moving towards a moreconnective approach and using
Possum as that way, like, okay,I'm going to work on this
(47:06):
concept, maybe starting withphonics concept, because that's
kind of the easiest sometimes itand then how can I build in a
little vocabulary activity?
Are there any multiple meaningwords that have this pattern in
it?
Actually, I have this greatresource that gives you words
and like it's a word finder andso if you type in a letter
(47:27):
pattern, it'll find all thewords with that pattern in it.
So if you're looking for, like,ik words or you're looking for
app words, so it'll give youlots of opportunities to think
of words.
And I think something like 70%of English words are multiple
meaning words, so there's somany.
Speaker 1 (47:45):
Can you share what it is or can you ask for the show
notes?
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Yeah, it's wordfinderyourdictionarycom and
I'll just send you the link.
Okay, thank you, we'll put itin the show notes.
Yeah, yeah, so that's a greatresource.
So I think, moving towards thatmulti-competential piece, or if
you're doing a vocabularyroutine with the students, can
you then break up that word intobase word or onset and rhyme
(48:09):
and can you think of other wordswith that rhyme pattern and can
you then practice with addingsuffixes or prefixes onto that
rhyme pattern.
Doing this more integrativeinstruction will help students
make those connections,particularly those students who
need a greater level ofunfolding with that process.
Speaker 2 (48:31):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, I think.
I love thinking about it thatway, that where you would
normally just touch on maybe oneof the aspects of POSM, think
about how you can bring in moreaspects, all of them, if you can
.
Well, melissa, is thereanything else you wanted to
share with us?
Speaker 3 (48:46):
I mean, you know, we have some free samples of
lessons.
As I said, we have someresources for common decodable
texts and we have some freesamples of lessons on our
website, so feel free to visitus there.
It's craftingmindsgroupcom.
Speaker 2 (49:01):
Yep, we'll add those to our show notes too, so
everyone has those and yeah, Ithink just.
Thank you so much for sharingall of this amazing information
with us today and all of yourtime and Marianne's.
Make sure you tell her, thankyou for us.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
She had to hop off early.
Thanks for the opportunity,melissa and Lori.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
It's been great to stay connected with us, sign up
for our email list atliteracypodcastcom, join our
Facebook group and follow us onInstagram and Twitter.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
If this episode resonated with you, take a
moment to share with a teacherfriend or leave us a five-star
rating and review on ApplePodcasts.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions
expressed by the hosts andguests of the Melissa and Lori
Love Literacy Podcast are notnecessarily the opinions of
Great Minds PBC or its employees.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're
here to learn with us.
Teaching all of the different aspects of reading can
feel overwhelming.
Juggling phonemic awareness,phonics, fluency, vocabulary and
comprehension is all so much todo every single day.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Well, good news because in this episode,
researchers Marianne Wolfe andMelissa Orkin will share an
explicit instructional approachthat brings all of these pieces
together in a meaningful waythat helps students build word
knowledge, bridge phonics andcomprehension, and increase
fluency.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Hi teacher friends.
I'm Lori and I'm Melissa.
We are two educators who wantthe best for all kids, and we
know you do too.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
We worked together in Baltimore when the district
adopted a new literacycurriculum.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
We realized there was so much more to learn about how
to teach reading and writing.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you
today.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Hi everyone.
Today we are talking about howyou can help your students build
fluency skills, and our gueststoday are amazing and have
created a super cool approach toincreasing reading fluency.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah, amazing guests is right.
We have Marianne Wolfe, who youmay know as the author of books
such as Proust and the Squidand Reader Come Home, both
excellent books if you haven'tread them.
She also directs the Center forDyslexia, Diverse Learners and
Social Justice at the Universityof California, Los Angeles.
And then, also joining Marianne, we have Melissa Orkin, and
(01:32):
Melissa is a former teacher,developmental psychologist and
director of Crafting Minds,which is an educational
consulting practice.
So welcome Marianne and Melissa.
Thank you, Our pleasure.
All right, so we're talking allabout fluency today and we
(01:52):
wanted to just first set thestage here and just define what
we mean when we talk aboutfluency.
And I actually wanted to quoteone of your articles, if that's
okay, where you said somethingthat really blew my mind.
You said within 280milliseconds of encountering a
word, a fluent reader not onlyrecognizes the sounds of letters
and matches them to theirvisual symbols, they also
activate all associated wordmeanings and knowledge of text
(02:15):
structure.
So can you all just start withdefining for us, or describing a
fluent reader in terms of whatI just shared and all the things
that go into becoming a fluentreader?
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Sure, yeah, I can start.
So, yeah, I mean, I think thatwhat you're pointing out,
melissa, is so amazing andreally miraculous, especially
because we are not born to read.
But reading becomes this reallyautomatic subconscious process,
and the automaticity with whichwe read is really key to our
(02:50):
development as humans, asliterate humans and as thinkers.
And you know, oftentimes.
So I have a chance to be out inthe field with teachers on an
almost daily basis.
Influency is something thatwe're all talking about and I
know that you have done a numberof episodes about fluency and
(03:10):
there are so many greatstrategies that we can use and
it's something that I'm oftenkind of exploring with different
educators and I'll say to themyou know, how would you define
fluency?
And usually you know they'llthink for a moment and they'll
jot down some ideas and it willbe something about you know that
readers are reading withaccuracy and good rate and that
(03:33):
they demonstrate prosody, andthese are all totally true.
And so when I then say, well,how would you build fluency
among your readers, they wouldsay, well, we would improve
accuracy, we would improve rateand we would kind of model
prosody, prosody being, like youknow, reading naturally.
And again, it's all true, but Ithink what you know so much of
(03:58):
the research around theneuroscience of reading and
that's you know part of thesource from which you got that
information about how long doesit take our brain to read that's
you know part of the sourcefrom which you got that
information about how long doesit take our brain to read.
That's all done through kind ofneuroimaging research.
Some of the research fromneuroscience has indicated that
fluency.
What you're seeing when you'resitting next to a reader is that
(04:18):
they're reading accurately andthey have a good rate and
they're reading with good sortof tone to their language.
But what's happening in thebrain is that the brain is
automatically connecting all ofthese different aspects of word
knowledge.
So instead of just looking atthe letter patterns and saying
(04:40):
the sounds, the brain isautomatically, within
milliseconds, connecting letterpatterns to word meaning, to the
job the word's playing in asentence, to if there is an
ending, thinking about what theending is doing, to the meaning
of the words or the phrase andthen putting it all together in
comprehension.
(05:01):
It's connecting these differentaspects of word knowledge and I
think that when we think aboutfluency from that perspective,
that really fluency indicatesthat the reader is able to
connect the multiple aspects ofword knowledge.
That shifts how we teachfluency.
We teach to buildingautomaticity across these
(05:25):
aspects of word knowledge,whether it's letter patterns and
sounds and word meanings andparts of speech, and then we
also use activities that aregoing to allow students to
practice the connection acrossthese different aspects of word
knowledge.
So I would say that's thedefinition that I find is
helpful for educators inthinking about how to plan
(05:48):
fluency activities for students.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yep, Along with that, Melissa.
You guys, you all talked aboutretrieval and I'm wondering if
you wanted to add in what?
How is retrieval related tofluency?
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Yeah, so I mean Marianne.
So much of Marianne's work isabout retrieval related to
fluency.
Yeah, so I mean Marianne.
So much of Marianne's work isabout retrieval.
And you know, just to give youan idea of how important you
know retrieval is when I firststarted working with Marianne so
I'm a former student ofMarianne's and we worked
together for about 15 years at auniversity outside of Boston
called Tufts University, at auniversity outside of Boston
(06:26):
called Tufts University.
She had a center for reading andlanguage development there and
I came to Marianne being trainedin a number of different
programs.
I was Orton Gillingham trainedand I wore these trainings like
a badge.
I thought I knew everythingbasically, and I was kind of
coming to just get Marianne'sstamp of approval.
I thought she was just going torubber stamp me and walk away.
But instead she said tell memore about your students'
(06:50):
fluency that you've been workingwith.
And whereas Orton-Gillinghamand other phonics programs had
been sufficient for somestudents to become fluent, I had
a whole subset of students thatwere not becoming fluent with
these really strong phonicsprograms, and that is where I
(07:11):
started to understand theimportance of retrieval in our
reading circuit.
So Marianne, I'm sure will bemuch more eloquent in describing
this, so I will defer to her.
But but it is a key piece ofthis puzzle for many students.
Speaker 4 (07:29):
I will add a few things.
The reality is an unusual onebecause years and years ago
there was only one agreed uponarea of, let's say, deficit or
weakness, and it was thephonological, and that we really
(07:51):
wanted to figure out how totreat.
Phoneme awareness andphonological skills and phonics
made all kinds of good sense andalways will, because that is an
issue.
But with another researchernamed Pat Bowers from Canada, we
did something that wasconsidered at the time
(08:13):
subversive.
We disagreed.
We said our children that wesee in clinics every day have
more than just a phonologicalweakness as manifested as
phoneme awareness.
And I had been working with aneurologist named Martha Denkla
(08:34):
and her former colleague RitaRiddell on how can we understand
another weakness that seems tobe related to fluency.
But we weren't sure what that Xfactor was, and it turned out
to be the speed with which thebrain connected visual and
(08:58):
language processes and retrievedwhatever the label was, whether
it was for a letter, a number,a color object or a picture, so
the name of an object.
And what we ultimately foundacross time and this goes all
the way into recent work, fairlyrecent work with well, at John
(09:20):
Gabrielli's lab and my lab withOla Ozonoff-Palachuk, we studied
all these children and we hadbeen studying them for 20 years
and finding this what we callthe RAN indexed deficit.
That was why, originally, wetalked about a double deficit,
not that there were ever onlytwo, but that this area was
(09:43):
beyond and different from aphonological weakness.
So by now all this research hascome together and we see that,
you know, about 20% of ourchildren only have, let's say, a
more pure phonological weakness, phonological weakness.
Another 20, 25 have only afluency-based RAN-indexed
(10:11):
weakness, but that the majorityof our children, like 70% of the
kids who are struggling withdyslexia or other forms of
struggle, have both a phonemeawareness indexed and a
fluency-based weakness.
Now, it was retrieval that cuedus into that.
(10:35):
What would become a fluencyweakness?
So when you think of thechildren who are most seriously
impaired, you have to realizethat about 70% of them have
these issues.
Now what Melissa described wasthe next stage what are all the
contributors to that weaknessthat we call RAND index fluency
(11:02):
issues?
And that's when, let's say, mycap, as not just a cognitive
neuroscientist but as a linguist, was coming together and we
realized, by studying thereading brain, that there are
all these different contributorsto the rapid retrieval.
(11:24):
Now the implication for Melissaand all of us was that that
means if we're only working onphonics and phoneme awareness,
we are neglecting the othercontributors to this weakness
that will manifest itself.
(11:44):
Usually we can find it outthrough a RAN-RAS, which is
simply a naming speed test thatbecomes automatic right Letters
and numbers.
That tells us that things arenot working well underneath the
hood.
And so when people talk about aRAND deficit or fluency deficit
(12:09):
, we lift the hood up, we say itcould be phonological, only
unlikely it could beorthographic.
And here's where the firstpossum comes.
I'm getting ahead of thequestion.
I'm sorry, but it's reallywhere we were at that point.
(12:30):
There were phonological, therewere prosodic, there were
orthographic connections.
Were those letters representedwell in those visual areas?
The semantic system this iswhere retrieval is so important
in two ways.
Not only is the semantic let'ssee processing contribution
(12:54):
important just for vocabulary,but it's so important for those
kids and so many of our studentswith dyslexia and other issues,
and here I'll add bilingual,multilingual kids.
They're accessing all thesedifferent things.
You see, working on semanticsis not just about vocabulary and
(13:17):
I really have to insist thatpeople remember that.
It's wonderful for vocabularybut it gives those who have a
retrieval issue alternatives sothat when they can't find one
word, they can find one that'srelated to it.
So we work on semantic networksand we also work on what's
(13:39):
called polysemy, another P, butwe put it under the S, where the
same word can have multiplemeanings, it's more than one.
And then you think sem, s-e-m,semantics, poly, semi, and then
of course the Y, but here you'removing ahead to the M, which is
morphology.
(14:02):
Knowledge of morphology helpseverything.
It's our secret sauce becauseit is a unit that's
orthographically easy.
It's a chunk, and it is givingus syntactic information.
Is that a verb or a noun?
But anyway, the U is more forwritten language, understanding
(14:23):
the alphabetic principle or, ifit's a different language,
understanding the localsyllabary principle.
Whatever the language is,that's what the U, the
understanding, is.
And then the M is formorphology.
But back to I mean, if you putall that together, we used this
acronym that Melissa and I useall the time because people can
(14:46):
remember that when you'reworking with fluency, posm is
what you are really insisting,is part of what you're doing in
instruction and intervention toincrease fluency, basically in
different ways.
We used possum as at the heartof an intervention that included
(15:11):
work on phonics and phonemeawareness always and porosity,
but that is so much wider.
And then you have to actuallystep back and you think what are
the foundational skills thatthe reading brain has?
And you come to the not sosurprising conclusion this is
(15:34):
what the foundational skills are, and so many people have
narrowly defined both thefoundational skills and the
science of reading as the P, thephonics and the phoneme
awareness, and not realizingthat the reading brain has if
(15:54):
you just think of it as a wheelwith the, you know the middle is
being influenced by all ofthese spokes.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Lori and I are always also talking about fluency as,
like the I don't know missinglink, or people aren't talking
about it enough or it's nothappening enough.
I'm wondering if you I'd loveto just hear from you both of
you know why, why is fluency soimportant and why should
everyone care about it more?
Speaker 4 (16:20):
So the importance of fluency is that without it, you
don't think you have to have alevel of speed.
Just think of how the brainworks.
If it can't get all of thiswork done in possum, it has no
(16:41):
time to allocate to thinkingwhat it means, allocate to
thinking what it means.
So fluency is the bridge, themultifaceted bridge, to
comprehension, and for me,comprehension we can talk about
that later is not just one bigterm.
Just as foundational skillshave multiple influences,
(17:04):
comprehension has multipleaspects, which I call deep
reading.
That's in the Melissa youmentioned, reader come home, the
reading brain in a digitalworld.
Well, the bridge is fluency andit is not by repeated reading
that you're going to get to theability to allocate time and
(17:24):
attention to the thinking skillsthat we call comprehension.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Yeah, no, I agree.
I mean I think that you knowyou captured it really nicely.
I mean, I'm sure as educatorsyou know, melissa and Laura,
you've sat with children andyou've seen them, you know
really labor over text and youknow that when you ask them
afterwards, you know tell mewhat that was about.
You know what was the problemthere, you know how did it get
(17:50):
resolved.
You can see just, first of all,how exhausted they are and,
second of all, that they weren'table to hold onto that
information.
And I know when I read withstudents who are disfluent,
they're more likely to guess,they're more likely to start to
become avoidant with tasks.
They're more likely to, youknow, engage me in like off-task
conversations because they'rejust exhausted.
(18:11):
They clearly don't have thestamina or the automaticity to
get through the passage and it'stotally labored for them.
So I think that's what it lookslike in a reading behavior and
I think what Marianne ispointing out is just like the
cognitive processes that areinvolved.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
But you know what Melissa always reminds me and
this is what she said is soimportant If you ask all these
kids what's wrong, they will sayit, they will, they will use
words that mean it's toolaborious, and then that
translates.
And I want to say that Melissaand another person who's worked
(18:54):
with me, rebecca Gottlieb, hasunderscored what I knew as a
mother but never included as aresearcher, and that's the
affective component.
When you are so laborious andyou just can't read faster, it
makes the whole process seemimpossible, which then is like
(19:17):
the social emotional aspect thatcan either help you soar and
persevere or stymie you and youget arrested.
So fluency is a major aspectcognitively, but it also affects
the social emotional.
Really, it's so much more thanthe word fluency.
(19:41):
It's so much more.
Okay, I think we can dig alittle deeper now into what we
can do to help students becomefluent readers.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
I know you developed this a little deeper now into
what we can do to help studentsbecome fluent readers.
I know you developed thisframework, posm, and I'm just
going to repeat it for everyonelistening.
So the POSM approach to buildword knowledge is phonology,
orthography, syntax, semantics,understanding, morphology.
You all are going to tell us alittle bit more about each
(20:08):
element than you already have.
I think you could probably talkall day about each one,
probably right, but I also wouldlove to hear at some point.
I want to go back to that ideaof repeated readings, because I
want to make sure that we arenot leaving teachers hanging
here who are listening to this.
If I'm a teacher listening, I'mthinking, okay, possum sounds
(20:29):
awesome and it sounds reallyimportant, and it's probably a
lot of what I'm doing.
Maybe there are some tweaks Ican make, right To like go even
deeper and to be even morepossum-y in my classroom with my
students.
But what about this repeatedreading thing?
Is it something that should?
We be doing repeated readingsand possibly not doing them?
(20:50):
Like what?
Is there a hard and fast rule?
And I'm really just asking for,you know, teachers listening
who are sitting there thinking,okay, well, I've been doing some
repeated readings, I've beendoing some paragraph shrinking
Like what does all this mean?
Speaker 3 (21:04):
Yeah, I mean, I completely understand
(21:29):
no-transcript and thatoverlearning requires an
exponential number of exposurescompared to a typical student,
whereas a typical student mightbe able to, you know, recognize,
you know a word or a letterpattern or you know, ending with
(21:52):
10 exposures.
You know a student who isdyslexic might need like 100 or
150 exposures.
So how do you do that?
You know there is some level ofrepetition.
I think that where you knowthere are some concerns that are
being raised.
I think that where you knowthere are some concerns that are
being raised, and I knowanother colleague of ours,
(22:14):
elizabeth Norton at NorthwesternUniversity, just wrote an
article for the Reading LeagueJournal about repeated reading
and you know, really looking atthe effect sizes of studies that
had used repeated readinginterventions versus just
reading interventions, like whatis the specific benefit of
repetition?
And and I would really say youknow, lori, like for whom?
(22:35):
I think there are those kids wholove to practice a passage and
it helps build their sense ofconfidence and they really enjoy
seeing.
You know there I know so manydifferent programs that will,
like time you and they'll giveyou, you know, incentives and
they'll they'll show you howyour time's going down and and
that helps build theirconfidence.
So that could be one tool.
But I think that, whereMarianne and I and others are
(22:58):
concerned, is that if it's theonly tool that you're using,
then there isn't really astrategy that students can use
that they can generalize topassages that they haven't
repeated, that students can use,that they can generalize to
passages that they haven'trepeated.
So part of the reason that weare, you know, taking our show
on the road and talking aboutpossum so much and really trying
to help, you know, teachersunderstand the multiple aspects
(23:19):
of word knowledge, is so thatthey have strategies that they
can, you know, use to accompanyrepetition or practice, because
that certainly is a piece, but Ithink to caution teachers as
using that as their wholeapproach to fluency.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Thank you, that's so helpful.
Okay, so if there's nothingelse that we want to say about
that, marianne, if you feel likeMelissa covered it, then we can
roll into the.
I'd love to hear an overview ofeach one, like anything that
you didn't say yet that you'dlike to share.
About possum, cause I know wealready started talking about it
(23:57):
how can you not and I'm really,I'm really again kind of
digging it as this integrated,this integrated model, this,
what is it?
Cog and wheel.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Yeah, multi-competential yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
I'm going to begin by saying that in the very
beginning of our understandingof the richness of retrieval,
the obvious is that the questionbecomes what do you do about it
?
And that's where I thinkMelissa and I are going to move
(24:32):
into that.
Our first efforts because ofRead Lion who, with Robin Morris
and Maureen Lovett, encouragedus to go after a research grant
to prepare us for writinginterventions.
So Reed said try to get thisaward, if you will, for research
(24:57):
that will prove this isimportant for increasing fluency
, increasing reading in our mostimpaired readers.
So that began what was reallyalmost 15 years of research on
different interventions andMelissa used the word
multi-component, ormulti-componential interventions
(25:19):
that never neglect phonics andphoneme awareness but go beyond
it.
And so what we did was createthe first program which we have,
I guess you might say, some ofthe best evidence for from
randomized control treatmentstudies showing that the
(25:42):
multi-component approach isbetter than phonics, which is
better than just normalclassroom.
So what is that multi-component?
We tried two different forms ofit.
One is called Empower, by mycolleague, maureen Lovett, and
that goes after metacognitivestrategies for phonology,
(26:03):
orthography and morphology,orthography and morphology.
We tried a somewhat morecomprehensive approach, which is
what POSIM really is, and thatis to go with an approach in
(26:23):
intervention that wouldsystematically and here's where
it gets really important tothink not am I doing phonics or
phoneme awareness, but am Iconnecting it to the rest of
possum?
So we eventually built a programcalled REVO in which it's all
about taking words in all ofthese spokes.
(26:47):
So we looked at it in terms ofthe semantic knowledge, the
polysemous knowledge of whichwas only polysemous words
actually and then we connectedit to the orthographic patterns.
We can always connecting it tothe how the phonemes and the
letters you know work together.
So that's never a neglect ofphonics, but it's always
(27:10):
connecting it to orthographicpatterns that they learn and
acquire over time through,basically, some strategies,
rhyme and starter strategies.
So we use both, if you want touse technical terms, analytic
phonics and synthetic phonics ifyou want to use the technical
(27:30):
terms.
But we're always connectingthose same words with those same
patterns to their meanings andtheir grammatical uses.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Marian, really quick, I'm sorry.
Can you just?
I know that our guests orlisteners are probably thinking
about the analytic and syntheticphonics that you just mentioned
.
Can you just talk about how itaddresses both?
Speaker 4 (27:51):
So we want to be sure that they have the concept.
This is part of understandingthe alphabetic principles.
Is the U?
Oh, look at these letters, whatletters can be?
They turn words we can say intowords we can see.
So we're teaching them thealphabetic principle that a word
(28:15):
has sounds and then they workon, let's say, bat, and they see
the bat and then ever fasteruntil they literally put the
sounds together.
But they've analyzed the soundsand the words.
But the synthetic is that we useanother strategy of basketball
(28:37):
basically, where we teach themafter they know these sounds and
the letters that representthose sounds, we teach them to
spy the rhyme pattern and theylearn so with bat.
They spy the at and they jam ittogether.
(28:58):
They jam the A-T, synthesizethose sounds in a rhyme and then
synthesize the starter, so thebat, but at slam dunk.
So we teach them both analytic,because that's that really is a
key piece and that's.
Janine Heron really talks aboutencoding and all of that in
(29:23):
before kids ever come to school.
She's really taught me a greatdeal about that.
Kids ever come to school, she'sreally taught me a great deal
about that.
But that it's a part of a pieceand so we add the more
synthetic through strategiesthat go after rhyme patterns.
And we want to know, we wantthe kids to know, oh, and
Melissa says something that isso important, something that is
(29:52):
so important Our kids the kidsthat are mine really have the
most struggles, and so when werepresent rhyme, it has to have
a lot of exposure.
So you know I've said thisprobably a thousand times One of
the three worst words ever usedin education were R, kill and
drill.
That is not what we are doing.
(30:13):
We are giving them multipleexposures because they're so
needed.
Now, some kids only need 10,but our kids need many.
So part of this work on possumis to give them multiple
exposures in all kinds of ways.
Awesome is to give themmultiple exposures in all kinds
of ways.
(30:36):
And then, of course, we teach.
You know, I guess it's sort offunny, but I may be one of the
few people left who missdiagramming.
Nobody is teaching that, andokay, fine, but we're going to
teach them nouns and verbs andhow they work, and how a word
can be a noun, like a bat that'syour bat, or a noun can be a
(30:59):
verb a bat that you bat.
And so we teach this otheraspect of both syntax and
polysemy.
And then we teach more themesthat add the endings so that
batting, batted, there's morethan you know, more than meets
(31:19):
the eye.
There they are learning theunit, they're learning that
that's a verb, they're learningthat it can, depending on the
word, the rhyme, need a doubletrouble letter, like bat and
batting.
So all these are part andparcel of connection.
(31:44):
And for me one of the realmissing aspects of fluency
training is that and this ishappening across the country you
do a little phoneme awareness.
You say, oh, check, oh, we do alittle vocabulary on Friday
Check.
Oh well, they get morphology inthird grade, they're lucky.
(32:07):
Oh well, they get morphology inthird grade if they're lucky.
Instead of really thinkingseriously about how the brain is
this wheel with a spokes andwe're making those spokes so
firmly in there the wheel canturn and turn, and turn.
I hadn't thought of that, lori.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
I love that.
Yeah, I think it's sochallenging too, because what
you're saying, marianne, isn'teasy.
It's much easier to think about, like, okay, vocabulary is a
compartmentalized thing, right?
Or I do vocabulary when I havethis book, when my students
respond in this book, but reallyeverything that you're speaking
(32:46):
up is just so the wordintegrated keeps coming to mind
and I think that's why that, um,the Coggin wheel is really
resonating with me, because it'sjust thinking about the brain
in the middle and then all ofthese feeders, and it's just
it's not happening when like,okay, I'm teaching vocabulary
here, no, I'm teaching this text, I'm teaching this concept, and
(33:06):
then all of these things happenall the time, like, and it's
just so integrated, it's sonatural with how we learn all
the time and every day.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
You know, as I said, we're out working with teachers
all the time.
Everybody has questions aboutfluency.
People have decodable texts butthey didn't quite know.
You know, beyond repeatedreading, how can you build
fluency in a strategic way?
So what we do with teachers andwe've just created a resource
for this is we show them how toapply possum to the text that
(33:37):
they have.
So the sounds, the phonology is,you know, the sounds in words.
So what we do is we start by.
So Marianne's program, ravo, isvery top down.
So it's like she started with aword, because that is a word
that has multiple meanings.
Multiple meaning words aregreat because we know that the
(33:59):
more you know about a word, themore associations.
The faster you read a word andthis is some really exciting
work by Penny Paxman and othersabout you know, the more
memories you have with a word,the more features it has, the
more associations it has, thefaster you read it, and so it's
(34:19):
not just about the letterpatterns, it's also about sort
of how robustly stored that wordis in your brain.
So Marianne starts with theword, uses the word for the
meanings and the rhyme patternsand then builds the word into
sentences, what we did inCrafting Minds with our series
Decoding Duo is we started withthe book and we pulled the
(34:43):
sentences and the words out ofthe book and so that we kind of
worked from the bottom up andshe worked from the top down.
I mean, if you have teacherswho just have any decodable,
they can use this strategy.
They can use this strategy witha curriculum.
They don't have to invest inanother program.
And so what we did was wepulled sentences out that have
(35:06):
the concept that we want to workon and, as Marianne said, we
love rhyme patterns.
Rhyme patterns are such a greatorthographic concept for
building automaticity becauseit's a chunk of the word and the
rhyme pattern will reliablyhelp the reader pronounce the
vowel sound.
So think of a word like best orbeast.
(35:28):
What is cuing you in to how topronounce the E?
Are the letters that follow itE-A-S-T or E-S-T?
So that rhyme pattern is sohelpful and there have been a
number of studies done on thevalue of recognizing rhyme
patterns and there also has justbeen some research on how
(35:49):
frequent rhyme patterns are inEnglish.
Like there was some research Iwas reading that said like
17,000 words that are part oflike kind of our common lexicon
in English are made up out ofjust 400 rhyme patterns that
have been kind of used indifferent combinations, so that
real, you know automaticity.
(36:10):
If you want to work onautomaticity instead of working
on it on a single letter likedrilling, just single letter
cards, work on it with a rhymepattern.
The same could be said for someof our consonant blends that
function as like our startersounds, like SP or STR or SL,
like being able to see that as aunit and recognize it and
(36:33):
pronounce it automaticallyreally speeds up that word
recognition.
We want kids to go from readinga word like trick you know being
able to isolate and identifyeach sound to seeing it as
ter-ick and then to just seeingit and saying it trick.
Some kids can make that kind ofjump that they can do that
(36:56):
orthographic mapping.
Others need that kind ofintermediary step where they're
able to recognize the TR andthey're able to recognize the
ICK and if they know trick, asMarianne says in RAVO, then they
know sick, then they know flick, then they know slick.
There's even a lot of practicewith reading words by rhyme
(37:18):
pattern first.
That can be a great tool, whichis called backwards decoding
because again it helps youretrieve the information in your
auditory memory, so rhymepatterns are just great for all
of these reasons.
Then, in terms of the semanticwe talked about using, you know
thinking of multiple meanings ofwords and eliciting from
(37:41):
students their associations tothe word.
So staying with that word trick, trick is a multiple meaning
word, right?
So, melissa, what's one meaningof the word trick that you
think of?
Like a magic trick, like amagic trick.
Or, lori, what's one meaning ofthe word trick that you think
of?
Speaker 1 (37:59):
I was thinking like playing a game on someone, like
a trick, yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
To like, you know, maybe to fool them or something
like that right To fool them.
Yes, like to play it so it'sfool them, or something like
that right.
Like to play it so it's like averb or a noun right.
And so I might start with you,lori, and I might say so tell me
, is there a time when you'veplayed a trick on someone?
What was that like?
How does that feel?
Because what I'm doing is I'mactivating your whole semantic
neighborhood around the wordtrick and I'm helping with the
(38:27):
retrieval.
So the more robust thoseactivations, the better able
you'll be, lori, when you seethat word trick in print, to
retrieve it.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Melissa, real quick, is this where I think you all
gave an example about the wordslion and lime and I was my mind
was blown.
I was like, oh my gosh, this isso cool.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
Yeah, yeah, so that was.
I think that was a researchstudy done by Paxman, but I have
, look, don't quote me on that,Let me double check the research
.
There was a Hargraves.
It's really old.
It is old, it's like 2002.
I mean, it's relatively old,but okay, I'll describe that
quickly.
So, basically, the researcherswere really thoughtful.
(39:07):
I love these like very cleverresearch studies.
They were very thoughtful indesigning the study.
They were trying to figure out,like, what contributes to the
speed with which we visuallyrecognize words.
That's the big question, right.
Like, how do we more quicklyand automatically recognize
words?
So they took pairs of words andthey paired them together
because there would be thesesimilarities.
So lion and lime were pairedbecause they both start with L-I
(39:32):
.
They both are four letters, butactually one of them has a very
common spelling pattern I-M-E,vowel consonant E, i-n, i-o-n.
Like how many words can youthink of with I-O-N?
Very few, right?
So then what they did was theywould be.
You know, they have this likevery elaborate contraption and
they can tell how quickly ittakes a participant to read the
(39:52):
word.
And then afterwards, for all ofthe pairs of words, they had
them write down all of theirassociations for those words in
like 60 seconds or something.
They gave them a time limit.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
And with the associations, just to kind of
clarify for the listeners likelime fruit Exactly.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
Yeah, citrus, right.
Yeah, peel tree, that sort ofthing, yeah, yeah.
So it turns out that lion hasthree times the number of
associations compared to lime.
So even though lion is a lesscommon letter pattern, lion is
read more quickly because thatsemantic neighborhood is chock
full of all of theseassociations, and so I think
(40:39):
that really so well illustratesthis idea that certainly you
know.
Patterns, orthographic spellingpatterns, are a big piece of the
puzzle, but it's not everything, and, as Marianne said,
retrieval of word meanings helpsus sometimes compensate or
support the whole readingcircuit, and so the more that we
(41:00):
can look for theseopportunities to build this work
into our instruction, the morerobust the student's retrieval
will be.
So we talked about phonologyand orthography and semantics.
Syntax is parts of speech, sothinking about the parts of
speech and giving kids anopportunity to scoop sentences I
(41:23):
actually just watched a fluencypresentation that you both did,
melissa and Lori I know this isyour show, but I'm going to
highlight your work and youtalked about the importance of
breaking up sentences intophrases.
Right, and why did you decideto highlight that strategy?
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Well, I think we decided to highlight it because
it's a really tangible thingthat both teachers and students
can see and do.
In order to help track, so thatit's not word by word reading,
we're helping students put thosewords in phrases so that they
can read them more fluently,more cohesively and build
understanding through thephrasing.
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
It breaks it up into its syntactic structures, right,
like who or what is a sentenceabout?
What are they doing?
Where or how are they doing it?
It's the subject phrase, thepredicate phrase, the
prepositional phrase, and that'ssuch a beautiful strategy that
really helps kids with, I think,their pacing as they're reading
, so that they breathe Everytime you finish a scoop.
(42:23):
The child takes a breath, thereader takes a breath, and
that's such a nice way to makesure that kids have that
opportunity to see the wordsgrouped together but to also not
feel overwhelmed by it.
And then the last part, themorphology.
I mean, as Marianne said, it'sthe secret sauce.
So being able to play withprefixes and suffixes, even if
(42:47):
you're doing phonics work, withprefixes and suffixes, even if
you're doing phonics work,playing with.
How does this change the endingIn Revo, marianne has coined
this amazing term for suffixesand prefixes, but I think you
only talk about suffixes.
But it would work for either.
And they're called enderbendersand teachers were training in
Revo always say but they'rebeing taught the term suffixes.
(43:07):
And I said but suffix doesn'tanchor them with anything,
whereas Ender Bender is a niceanchor about language.
This is a part of language thatcomes at the end of a base word
and it bends the meaning.
It changes the meaning and youget that bonus of not only
recognizing a pattern of letterslike F-U-L or N-E-S-S or E-S-T,
(43:32):
but it also helps you thinkabout how does this change the
meaning of the base word?
How does it support my overallunderstanding of this sentence
or text?
So looking for that integrativeopportunity is so powerful for
kids.
Speaker 4 (43:50):
In the old Revolve we hadn't understood or I hadn't
begun the research on deepreading, and over the last years
that has become so important tome.
And deep reading includesempathy, background knowledge,
critical analysis, criticalthinking, and you think, well,
(44:14):
what can first and second andthird graders do with deep
reading?
You can begin it, and so thenew E in RAVO is going to be
empathy and it's going to all.
I'm rewriting all the stories,the little decodable text, and
new stories that promote, inthis troubled world of ours,
(44:38):
more empathy and more criticalthinking, like mysteries, and
(45:03):
also and here I really will saythat Melissa's work on the
social, emotional aspects of ourstruggling readers and my
colleague, rebecca Gottlieb havereally influenced me to do more
on perseverance and persistenceand even having a character
named Sammy the Slug who willpersevere till the end, a
character named Sammy the Slugwho will persevere till the end.
And I want you to know that.
As we talk about fluency and youask me, melissa and Lori, and
you've asked us, why is it soimportant?
It is important so that ournext generation, our kids, many
(45:27):
of whom are so creative and it'snot released because they
aren't fluent enough to get tothe point where they can think
for themselves.
And I want you to know we havenew strategies, if you will, for
insisting.
Our kids can persevere andreach their own thinking, their
(45:47):
own thoughts, and that's whatfluency is about.
Fluency is about releasing themfrom the laboriousness, not
that they're fast, but that theyare fast enough to think at a
different level, a level inwhich empathy and critical
(46:08):
thinking and even new thoughts,new insights, can happen.
For them.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
You know, I think that probably when we think
about fluency instruction forstudents and we think about, you
know, the different practicesthat you can use, I think what
Marianne and I are hoping isthat this multi-competential
approach offers teachers aframework and understanding that
students might need varyingdegrees of intensity with this
instruction.
Some, as we said, might need,you know, a few exposures.
(46:44):
Others might need moresystematic kind of small group
or tier three intensive work.
But the idea of moving awayfrom word work and isolation and
moving towards a moreconnective approach and using
Possum as that way, like, okay,I'm going to work on this
(47:06):
concept, maybe starting withphonics concept, because that's
kind of the easiest sometimes itand then how can I build in a
little vocabulary activity?
Are there any multiple meaningwords that have this pattern in
it?
Actually, I have this greatresource that gives you words
and like it's a word finder andso if you type in a letter
(47:27):
pattern, it'll find all thewords with that pattern in it.
So if you're looking for, like,ik words or you're looking for
app words, so it'll give youlots of opportunities to think
of words.
And I think something like 70%of English words are multiple
meaning words, so there's somany.
Speaker 1 (47:45):
Can you share what it is or can you ask for the show
notes?
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Yeah, it's wordfinderyourdictionarycom and
I'll just send you the link.
Okay, thank you, we'll put itin the show notes.
Yeah, yeah, so that's a greatresource.
So I think, moving towards thatmulti-competential piece, or if
you're doing a vocabularyroutine with the students, can
you then break up that word intobase word or onset and rhyme
(48:09):
and can you think of other wordswith that rhyme pattern and can
you then practice with addingsuffixes or prefixes onto that
rhyme pattern.
Doing this more integrativeinstruction will help students
make those connections,particularly those students who
need a greater level ofunfolding with that process.
Speaker 2 (48:31):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, I think.
I love thinking about it thatway, that where you would
normally just touch on maybe oneof the aspects of POSM, think
about how you can bring in moreaspects, all of them, if you can
.
Well, melissa, is thereanything else you wanted to
share with us?
Speaker 3 (48:46):
I mean, you know, we have some free samples of
lessons.
As I said, we have someresources for common decodable
texts and we have some freesamples of lessons on our
website, so feel free to visitus there.
It's craftingmindsgroupcom.
Speaker 2 (49:01):
Yep, we'll add those to our show notes too, so
everyone has those and yeah, Ithink just.
Thank you so much for sharingall of this amazing information
with us today and all of yourtime and Marianne's.
Make sure you tell her, thankyou for us.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
She had to hop off early.
Thanks for the opportunity,melissa and Lori.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
It's been great to stay connected with us, sign up
for our email list atliteracypodcastcom, join our
Facebook group and follow us onInstagram and Twitter.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
If this episode resonated with you, take a
moment to share with a teacherfriend or leave us a five-star
rating and review on ApplePodcasts.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions
expressed by the hosts andguests of the Melissa and Lori
Love Literacy Podcast are notnecessarily the opinions of
Great Minds PBC or its employees.
Speaker 1 (49:54):
We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're
here to learn with us.
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