And I'm so sorry to that Corey is letting me announce this, but we have some exciting news.
We are going to be dropping our Hi, and welcome back to the smarter literacy podcast from a Sun Smarter intervention where we simplify effective literacy instruction so that every teacher has the tools they need.
I'm Lindsey.
And I'm Corey.
And today, we are diving into one of the trickiest areas of intervention, secondary literacy intervention.
And we're so excited to share more about this because it does not seem to get a lot of airtime.
No.
It does not.
We know that secondary teachers really truly get the short end of the stick.
There doesn't really feel like there's any curriculum for them.
PD isn't really there.
Many times you'll go to a literacy conference, and secondary teachers just don't really hear much that applies to them.
And they're often left scrambling, having to do it all, put things together from scratch, and not feeling like they're really meeting their students' needs.
Absolutely.
And what we know is that secondary teachers are balancing a lot.
You're thinking about content standards.
At this point, you potentially have more student disengagement.
You have really complex schedules that you are trying to manage.
And then the skill gaps are potentially pretty big at this point.
And it's tricky because it feels like in this space, everybody's really focusing on, you know, k two or really early intervention.
But a lot of these students didn't get that early intervention, and it's almost like, oh, well, they're a lost cause at this point.
And so I think it's really hard.
Absolutely.
And it's not just about what to teach.
It's how to teach it in a way that feels age appropriate and meaningful, especially when your students are reading far below that grade level.
Exactly.
It really is both a science and an art at this point.
And one of the things that I often talk about is that when you are working with secondary students, a lot of it almost feels like marketing a little bit or kind of wrapping it up of trying to help them understand, like, why is this important and why should we be doing it and how we are positioning it? And so it is challenge for sure.
Absolutely.
So let's walk through the different ways we support secondary students and talk about what each looks like in practice.
So we have a few different ways that we support secondary students.
The first way that we might support secondary students who are struggling with reading could be through word recognition support.
And this would be best for students who are still struggling with decoding or phonics gaps.
Sometimes this is really gonna show up in their spelling ability.
And so if you have students who they are, you know, struggling with some of those words or their spelling is just atrocious.
This would be the type of support that we would provide to them.
And in that instruction, we are going to break each lesson down into specific components.
The first thing that we would be working on would be a warm up and review.
So similar to what we talked about in our elementary lesson planning and what our structured literacy looks like for elementary, we're still doing the same thing.
So we are still doing a warm up and review where we're gonna be focusing on a phonological awareness drill.
So we have not let it go at that point.
I think a lot of people assume that by secondary, we do not need to work on phonological awareness, but we do And we also are still working on that phonogram drill or that sound drill.
So we're still going through the sound patterns and saying, you know, what does this one say? What does this one say? Then we'll go through our decoding review and potentially a pattern sort where we're asking them, alright, let's take a look and let's group this into the different syllable types or that kind of thing.
It's a great way for them to practice categorizing and thinking about information.
Yeah.
And you had kinda mentioned with secondary, you kinda have to be like that marketing and that sales pitch.
It can be done.
You can get your secondary students to understand that this is important.
You can start this as that warm up, that routine.
And they just once it becomes routine for them, they know, okay, this is what we're doing first.
And it just it becomes part of your lesson, and they they go with it.
Absolutely.
And again, it's just how you position it.
And I think, again, like we said with the elementary, it is.
It's just, hey, this is like doing jumping jacks.
This is like doing lunges.
This is like just doing something that you would do before you really get into something.
So again, it's not that we're saying you don't know how to do this.
We're just activating and making sure that everything is firing as it should before we get into the work.
Yep.
Then the next piece of that instruction after we do that warm up and the review of previous concepts would be, again, the direct instruction of a decoding skill.
This could be a specific pattern introduction.
So maybe we are working on t I o n, or maybe we're working on a specific ethics pattern that we're going to talk about.
This is where we're going to bring that pattern over into our single word decoding.
So we might start at the single syllable level and then immediately bring that into multi elabic words so that they can see, hey, this does show up in your everyday reading.
And this is also where we can do the same thing.
So while we're focusing on the sound pattern, and the words where we can also be thinking about vocabulary.
And are these words that we know we have nonsense words here? Are these words that we might rate a one or a two on that vocabulary rating scale of I don't really know this word or I do know it, but I couldn't really tell much about it.
And again, this is taking fifteen to twenty five minutes.
It's a really good kind of chunk of your instructional time.
Yeah.
And the goal here is that we are rebuilding decoding from the group up in a systematic age appropriate way.
This can be done in a really engaging way for secondary students.
It may seem like it would come across babiest to them, right, especially if you're using patterns like a CK pattern.
But you can really have students start to play with language and get them, again, kind of interested at our summit.
Actually, one of our teachers talked about how she would go on a word walk with her students.
Around their building.
And if they were practicing a pattern, let's say it was CK, they'd be walking around the building, looking through trophy cases, looking through different signs in the building, and they would have to find words in the building that contain the pattern that they were practicing.
They might also kind of look through even their textbooks that they were doing.
So open up their social studies or science textbook, and they have to find words in there that are that they're seeing that have that pattern so that they know, oh, this pattern is popping up in my life every single day, and I just maybe wasn't paying attention to it.
But it's not babyish because here it is right in front of me.
Exactly.
And I love that.
And I love the idea of seeing it and really applying it.
And that's a huge piece of that instruction as well.
So once we move out of that direct instruction, is moving into that application and seeing, alright, where do I see this? What does this look like in the sentences that I'm reading? Again, thinking about that across the different content areas, for sure, what does that look like at the paragraph level? And then again, like we talked about, also making sure that we're hitting that encoding piece as well.
So making sure that they then see, oh, and this is how that applies in my spelling Mhmm.
Because so often students are really relying on that visual recognition at that point.
So by the time we're at secondary, they've they have a large kind of I will say like a rolodex, I'm dating myself here, but like a rolodex of all of these different words that they've memorized over time.
And so when we can start to apply that into the encoding, all of a sudden, that's gonna say, alright.
Great.
Well, how are we spelling this? What does it look like? What does that look like when we are spelling at the single word level sentence rating? And so altogether that word recognition lesson is taking probably sixty to ninety minutes per lesson.
Now, again, we know that that may not be realistic obviously in one time that you have your students, but you can absolutely break this up into one session, two, three, four, five.
So it's just dependent on what are your blocks look like, and that just tells you kind of how fast you'll be able to go through all of that.
So that's That's the first one.
That's that's word recognition.
So that's one way that you could support students, again, depending on their needs.
So we've talked a lot about, make sure you know what your students' needs are.
That's the important thing is to make sure it's the right type of instruction, but that would be one category.
Then we could move into the next category, which would be more of the language comprehension lessons.
And this would be best for students who their decoding skills are good, but they actually have weak comprehension or their vocabulary is not quite there or they're struggling with syntax and how do we put sentences together? Mhmm.
And in this case, we would follow a lesson structure that would really break it down into, you know, before reading, during reading and after reading.
And so the way that we do that is in our before reading section, we are going to really provide in-depth vocabulary support.
So we have a passage that we're gonna be working through, and we really wanna think about, alright, What are a few of the words that are in this passage? How comfortable do we feel with these words? Can we interact with these words? Can we put the words into categories? Can we think about synonyms or words that are similar and how they might be different? So either antonyms or shades of meaning, we can think about the definition framework that we've talked about.
We can think about applying those different words and the different sentences that might be coming up in our passage.
And then we can start thinking about eliciting background knowledge or whatever the passage is.
Right? So, like, if we were reading about bats and echolocation, which was the one that I just did yesterday, I think, really thinking about what do we already know about bats and what do we already know about echolocation and what are things that we can pull before we get into this passage? The next piece would be during reading.
So as we are actually reading the passage, we're gonna be taking notes, so really thinking about, you know, who and what and when and where and why and starting to really just highlight those things out so we can note those things down.
And that's gonna really help to support our after reading process, which is where we can start to get into our comprehension support.
And this is where we can really start to focus on the different types of comprehension.
So starting with things like direct recall, which again, go back to your notes from the annotation, but then starting to think about, alright, well, how are we organizing that information into sequence or a main idea? And how are we connecting with that information either to ourselves or to other information in the text or as an effect relationships, thinking about inferences and predictions, and then thinking about text analysis.
And so, again, we're breaking that down into those three different sections, and it takes a while.
Right? Because the way that we break this out, that before reading can take up to an hour, which I know feels like a lot, but it's really an opportunity to really dig in pretty deep with what they're gonna experience.
And then the actual reading is only ten to fifteen minutes to actually read through the passage.
But then after reading, it kinda just depends.
Right? It could take ten to fifteen minutes if they're just cruising through.
But if there are certain aspects that you need to stop and say don't cause an effect, we're gonna spend a little bit more time here.
That could potentially take longer.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And, again, the goal here is that we're strengthening that language processing, inferencing, and retention with, like, engaging text.
Right? And, again, especially with our secondary students and for all of our students, but definitely it's secondary.
Comprehension is our overall goal when it comes to reading.
So these are gonna be important skills that we're teaching our students.
So for example, I have a student right now who is a is a language comprehension student And we've had to really work on background knowledge because we're working through a book where the setting is England during World War II.
And she has not yet really experienced World War II in school in her history class.
She's heard of it, she doesn't really know much more about that.
So, like you said, that before reading, we're doing a lot of work there, building the vocabulary, talking about kind of what's at play, and even using some of the colloquial, uh, language of the the time and the place that she's at, the character, I should say.
And that's making the during reading go so much more effortlessly.
There is less times that we have to stop, like, wait, what's going on? She's getting it quicker.
And then when we get to the after reading, we're digging into the text analysis.
We're really looking more at the characters, emotions, hurt, what drives the characters, which is really what I want her to be kinda doing to be understanding what's motivating this character because, yes, the war is happening around the character, but that's not what the theme of the book is about.
And she's doing a beautiful job.
Um, we've really come a long way because we've really practiced those skills.
Absolutely.
And like you said, that background knowledge is so important.
I always use the analogy of without background knowledge.
It's almost like I went to a class once in college.
I was in the wrong class, and it was absolutely a upper level engineering class, and it was very clear very quickly that I was in the wrong place because I had no background knowledge.
So even though they were speaking English, it basically felt like they were not because I just didn't have the vocabulary.
I didn't have any of the background that I would have needed to be able to make sense of the rest of the reading and what was happening in that particular class.
So that's what we're doing.
And I think the beautiful thing is is when you're in a group setting, you can build from others background knowledge as well.
So you can start building from, if you've got a group of students, okay, maybe one student doesn't have the background, but another does.
And so you can start to build that way too.
But all that said, this is just a really important framework for students, and it's really good for students who have that language comprehension need.
And again, these lessons are typically taking sixty to ninety minutes, and we're breaking it up again into the timing that we have available.
So if we have students for an hour, great.
If we have them for less time than that, then we just stop wherever we were.
So it's almost like it's almost like you're reading a book and you're like, oh, I need to go to bed now.
Like, I'm gonna have to put my bookmark here.
It's the same thing.
Yes.
Right? Well, you're in your lesson and you're like, alright, we're gonna have to kind of cap it here.
We'll just pick back up where we left off.
So you just fit it into the timing that you have available.
So that's the first two ways that we work with secondary students.
One more way that we might work with secondary students is through what we call an intro to literacy strategies framework.
So we have a specific set of lessons that we use for this.
So we have eight lessons in our framework.
But sometimes we might use a book club style of lesson in this exact same framework, but the goal of the intro to literacy strategies is to provide all of the explicit instruction that students would need in those different different strategies for both word recognition and comprehension.
So we'll start by we're gonna frame out the six syllable types because the six syllable types are going to create a container or a bucket, if you will, for all of the word recognition less sins that we are going to be working through, or it's providing the explicit instruction for comprehension where we're explicitly walking through.
How do you pick out the facts for direct recall? How do you sequence? How do you create a main idea? And so that's a really good opportunity for students perhaps who have had no background in structured literacy at all that are coming in new or as just an opportunity to frame out, hey, this is what we're going to be working through as we continue our instruction.
And so that can be a good way too to just create, like, a benchmark, where you can then start to drive instruction afterward once you see, oh, when I explained all of these concepts, these were the specific ones.
That my students seem to have a lot of difficulty with.
So with those particular lessons, we are breaking that up into a word recognition warm up.
So that's gonna take about fifteen to twenty five minutes.
We're kinda doing those same thing where we have those warm up skills and we're teaching phonics skills, then we're gonna move into the language comprehension concept introduction, again, fifteen to twenty five minutes.
So that way, we're hit both.
Right? We hit the word recognition.
We hit the language comprehension.
Then we move into our pre reading skills.
So just like we talked about that background knowledge and starting to build that usually takes about ten to fifteen minutes.
Then we'll move into our during reading skills, which often takes about fifteen to twenty five minutes here because our messages are a little bit longer for these ones so that we have a little bit more time to kind of dig in.
Then we usually do a reflection and written response.
So we'll ask a question about the passage and we'll start to see, alright, what is their reflection? What does their writing look like to respond to that? And then we'll usually have a writing skills section of those intro to literacy strategies as well that also usually takes about thirty to forty five minutes to get through.
And so, altogether, each of those lessons takes about an hour and a half to three hours.
So, obviously, we're breaking that we're not doing that all at once.
But because there's only eight, they're pretty finite, right? They have a very clear beginning and ending point.
It allows us to really know, alright, this is about how long it's gonna take in my instruction.
And it's the same thing for book clubs.
Our book clubs are usually 10 lessons long, and so we have a pretty clear picture of k.
This is a really finite process that we'll need to work through.
The goal here of these lessons is diagnostic and instructional.
This helps determine future placement while building foundational strategies, and they work.
Right? They really help kids kinda get over that hump that they might need, right, that I've used them with students and they've really kinda come out on the other side being like, oh, I get it now.
Right? It just really helps them clear the path.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Anytime that we're doing something like an intro literacy strategies, again, it's just that umbrella of what's Let's take a step back and let's put everything in a structured order because a lot of times they've heard some of these concepts.
They've worked on compare and contrast.
They've worked on these different things, but they haven't necessarily seen how all of it comes together.
And so it's almost like taking a step back and seeing it from a whole picture view.
And so I think that's where it can be so helpful.
Yes.
Anything we can do to help them apply these strategies and make it clear how to apply these strategies is is, like, gold, obvious gets.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Because I think they've gone for so long to just feeling like, gosh, like, maybe I just don't get it.
And it's like, no.
Let's just take a step back and let's let's think about this from a different lens.
And so that can be so helpful for sure.
Yeah.
And so when we're working with secondary students, again, we always start with an assessment because we want to understand what's the root cause of the breakdown.
Right? Is it decoding? Is it that word recognition instruction that we need? Or is it comprehension? Or you might have students where it's both.
And then from there, we can start making really strong decisional decisions about where we place them.
Right? So if we recognize, oh, it's a word recognition difficulty, well, then we're gonna put them in that path.
Right? But if it's if it's a language comp, then, oh, we're gonna put them in the language comprehension path, or if we're like, oh, it's a little bit of both, or this student just hasn't had any background in structured literacy.
Okay.
Then let's start with an intro to the literacy strategies and just get a really big picture view of what what we're gonna be doing.
Yes.
And the important thing to recognize here is that you don't need sixty minute periods every day to make this work.
You just need to fit the lessons into the time you do have, which may mean breaking them up over a course of your week even if you only have fifteen minutes a day.
It will just take more of those fifteen minute blocks to get through the full lesson.
Like reading a book.
Right? You said Corey, like, just pick it back up where you left off.
One page at a time.
You'll get there.
Exactly.
I think so often we're like, oh, but I don't have time to get through all of this.
Well, just you do.
Just it might take a while.
Yep.
That's fine.
Yeah.
There's no.
There's no time limit.
Like, you you don't have to finish it by this time.
Yeah.
So if we wanna keep this actionable, what is one key takeaway or action item listeners can leave with? Yeah.
Absolutely.
So if you're planning your week with secondary students, focus on these three questions.
Do they need word recognition support? Do they need language comprehension supports? And have they had explicit structured literacy instruction in the past? So think about your students.
And think about what is it that they need? So one, do they need word recognition support? Two, do they need language comprehension support? And three, have they had explicit literacy instruction in the past? That will really help you understand what should that instruction look like? And then from there, you can start to think about the structure of your lessons and what that will look like.
So based off of what we had kind of talked about, you can start to structure it in that way.
Yes.
And I'm so excited that Corey is letting me announce this, but we have some exciting news.
We are going to be dropping our new secondary program here.
It is something that we have been putting our heart blood sweat, tears, soul into.
Soul.
Yes.
Into.
And this new program that we have coming out is what I as a former secondary literacy specialist truly believe is a dream come true for all secondary literacy specialists out there.
If you are someone who is so tired of cobbling lessons together and you have really resonated what we've said through this episode, please, please, please, just take a look at what we have because I am I I really believe you will love what we have created, and it will help make your teaching that much easier.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
And in fact, we have a free spotlight PD training that we'll be dropping here shortly, and we would love for you to jump in.
We're gonna talk all about secondary literacy and what it looks like.
So you can see a little bit more in action of just a behind the scenes of what those lessons actually look like so that you can get an idea for yourself just seeing what are we doing with our students and how is that working? And just to see if that might be a fit for you or not, but regardless, it will really give you a clear picture of how you can structure your lessons so that you can feel really confident in them.
Right.
Alright.
Well, in our next episode, we'll be pulling back the curtain even more.
We'll walk through how to know exactly what your students need and keep instruction responsive without starting from scratch every time.
Absolutely.
And until then, remember that secondary students still deserve that clear, consistent literacy support And if you've ever felt alone in this space before, know that you don't have to do it alone.
We're right here beside you.
We get it.
We understand what it feels like to try and support secondary students without necessarily having the support.
So do not feel like you are alone because you are not.
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Until next time.
Happy teaching
