Because I think sometimes we'll also have this place where we feel like I can't move on because we haven't reached 90% mastery, and I stay stuck on a skill forever.
Hi, and welcome back to the smarter literacy podcast from a Send smarter intervention, where we simplify effective literacy instructions so every student gets what they need, and every educator gets to breathe a little easier.
I'm Lindsay, and And I'm Corey.
And in our last episode, we talked about why progress monitoring matters and how to set up lessons so data collection is simple and consistent.
And today, we're getting into the harder conversation.
What to do when you've been tracking data faithfully, but the scores just aren't moving.
And let's be honest, it happens for all of us.
Absolutely.
So, Corey, you and I track data with our own intervention students every week.
And sometimes we see numbers that just don't budge.
Yep.
They certainly can do that.
It's very frustrating, and I can think of times when I've worked with a student for weeks on a specific skill, taken the data and realized nothing had changed.
And again, it's super frustrating, but two things.
One, it doesn't mean that the student can't learn, and it also doesn't mean that I'm failing.
It just means that the plan isn't working yet, and so I may need to adjust.
And I've had the same experience And I'll be honest, my first reaction is often disappointment or even self doubt, but progress monitoring isn't personal.
It's information.
And when we reframe it that way, it becomes really empowering.
Exactly.
So, uh, like we said before, the data is our compass, and it keeps us from going months in the wrong direction, and it gives us a chance to redirect earlier.
So let's say you're looking at your data scores and they aren't moving.
Where do we start? The first thing I always ask is are we looking at a true trend or just an off day? So kids have rough sessions all the time.
They're tired.
They're distracted.
They're maybe sick.
And that one session may not reflect their actual growth.
I've definitely seen that.
I remember one of my students had a miserable week.
He was exhausted, barely engaged, and his score is dipped.
But the next week, he bounced right back.
If I had panicked based on that one data point, I would have changed things unnecessarily.
Yes.
I've definitely had students with zigzaggy progress graphs.
In fact, it's pretty normal.
So you're gonna have students that go up and down all the time.
And really what we're looking for is over time with even those zigzaggy graphs, are they generally moving in the right direction? I know that we see this all the time, and we work with students after school.
And so sometimes just depending on how school went that day.
We're like, man, like, why is this so hard? Or you might even get, like, we were saying, we often will measure reading fluency on a specific passage And you might have one passage that was just hard for students.
So I know even in our ongoing baseline midpoint final assessments, we have, you know, some passages that some students just really struggle with because they just don't have the background knowledge to be able to do well.
And so it looks like things have dipped when really it's like, oh, that was just because that particular passage was harder for them because they either weren't interested in the content or they just, again, didn't have the background knowledge they needed.
So I think that's the important thing and why we want to encourage teachers to step back and look for patterns across multiple weeks.
So if you're starting to see the same thing consistently, that's when it's gonna be time to dig deeper.
Okay.
So if it is a true trend and data shows that the student isn't progressing, how do we figure out what's going on? Yeah.
So this is where I want to make sure that the instruction that I'm providing actually matches what they need.
So I had a group once with four girls.
I loved this group so much.
And at that time, I was using a systematic phonics based program, and I was measuring progress consistently.
And one of my students in the group just wasn't moving.
So her scores were not moving.
And I kept thinking, okay, well, I'm just gonna give it a little time because I'm sure this will work eventually, and that can be true.
Right? We can have times where we just need to be a little patient and trust the process.
But long story short, it didn't work.
And I had that feeling in my gut that this isn't going to change, right? But I I kept going with it because I was like, I'm I'm trusting the process.
I'm trusting the process.
And what I really realized too late was that while the intervention I was giving was good, it was a gold standard curriculum approach, at least from my understanding, this was going to work.
It just didn't align with what this particular student needed.
Absolutely.
I had a student that was very similar to that case, and, you know, working with him over a period of time.
And, again, just thinking, eventually, it'll kick in, eventually, it'll kick in, and realizing, no.
There really need to be a change that happened in order for the growth that I needed to happen.
Yeah.
So what I do now is I lean on the simple view of reading.
So this is gonna remind us that effective reading is the product of word recognition and language comprehension skills.
So if scores aren't moving, I, first and foremost, want to ask, is this a word recognition issue, or is this a language comprehension issue, or is it both? So, Corey, can you walk us through what it looks like in practice? Yeah.
Sure.
So you wanna think of four groups.
So we actually put this into a quadrant, but what we'll have is group a where you have no difficulties.
Students are moving forward.
They're meeting their goals.
Great.
Let's just keep on going.
Everything is looking good for them.
Group b is your students who really struggle with word recognition.
So they're students who need more support in decoding, phonics, and fluency, specifically.
Group c are students who have weak language comprehension.
So this is where we wanna be targeting vocabulary, syntax, building background knowledge, oral language skills.
And then group d would be students who have difficulty in both word recognition and language comprehension.
So they're gonna need more integrated systematic support, and they might need that at a slower pace.
So in the case of my group of the four girls, I was providing a group b intervention So this was really a systematic phonics based instruction designed to build word recognition skills.
But this particular student who just wasn't moving, really looking back on it now would have fallen into group d And so because I wasn't tying in any oral language, I wasn't tying in any vocabulary work.
I wasn't tying in any comprehension support.
The intervention was kind of falling flat for her.
And I'll be honest, because it seemed like it was working pretty well for the other girls, I just assumed that it was just this particular student.
So let's just it's just her.
She's not getting it.
I didn't necessarily take the step back to say, okay, I need to change something up or something's not working for her.
I just sort of felt like, oh, well, which I feel terrible saying now, but I think that was just the reality of of that.
Yeah.
And for my particular student, it was that I actually had them working in a group b those weak word recognition skills, but really he was a group c student.
He had the weak language comprehension skills that I really need to work on.
So that way, as he was reading, he was building the stronger background knowledge and the syntax and the vocabulary, and we just weren't hitting that enough in our lessons.
And that was what the problem was.
Absolutely.
And I think there are a lot of students in which that is the case.
And I think that there has been a narrative, which is partially true, but not entirely true, that if students are not comprehending, it's because of weak word recognition skills.
Right? Like once they can read, then they will comprehend.
And for some students, for your group b, students, that the case.
That's generally true.
And usually, we would know that because their listening comprehension skills are really solid.
And so as soon as they can access print, they'll do really well.
However, you'll have some students, for example, like the student you just mentioned, where listening comprehension may have also potentially been a little bit weak.
And so this thought or idea of, well, once we can get you reading, you will comprehend falls a little short.
And I think in my initial training, I was just so convinced that it's a word reading issue.
And when we can get kids reading words, they will then be able to comprehend, and it's just not the case.
And so I think being aware of that and being able to think about that of Alright.
Well, what other data do I have around language comprehension or listening comprehension skills to help understand if that is in fact the case? And again, sometimes it's tricky because you do have those group d kids.
Where it can be both.
Mhmm.
And those ones I think are the ones where you're especially at risk of, oh, well, they do need word recognition.
So I'm just gonna give them the word recognition and then we can work on comprehension later.
Mhmm.
And at that point, you've already missed the boat a little bit because I've tried that approach too where you sort of stack it where it's like, alright.
Well, let me get them reading first.
Mhmm.
And then once I get them reading, then we can move into more comprehension And they're just they're not connecting the dots at all.
And so you're really missing the mark with even the word recognition because they don't see why it matters or why they should care.
Exactly.
Okay.
So once you thought about where students fall in this model, then what? Yeah.
So first thing is if students are meeting their goals, that's amazing.
You wanna celebrate that.
So you do wanna be tracking and looking at things, and I know I've got a number of students who love tracking their goals and seeing where am I at? And how did I do today? And how did that compare to where I've been in the past? And so if you do have students that are making progress towards their goals or meeting those goals, make sure to celebrate that.
It is so important that they see that because that will keep them engaged and bought into the process of intervention.
But if they're not meeting goals, then we can start to ask a few questions.
So coming back, the first one is I wanna make sure that my intervention is matching what they really need.
Am I aligned, again, thinking back to group a, b, c, d, is my intervention aligned with their true needs.
And then I can start to get more granular.
So if they're struggling with a specific phonological awareness skill, I can make sure to incorporate more practice and more opportunities with that specific skill moving forward.
So I know I have some students, for example, who really struggle with phoneme segmenting.
So they can't pull apart the individual sounds in a word So I'm gonna provide more practice opportunities every time we do a spelling word, how many syllables, how many sounds, and that's going to provide more of those practice opportunities within the lesson I already have.
It doesn't necessarily mean I have to read a whole separate lesson.
It just means in the lesson I'm already doing, where can I find more opportunities to do that? If they're reading a word list, I can say, great.
How many syllables in that word? How many sounds in that word? So I'm trying to figure out where I can add that in.
And if I need to, can definitely reteach or scaffold this skill in a new way.
So if I am realizing, okay, this isn't making sense for them, where can I add in more visuals sometimes students just really struggle with the language of some of the things that we're asking them to do? And so, for example, I have students all the time who struggle with syllables versus sounds, how many syllables are in the word versus how many sounds are in the word.
And so that might be one where, okay, we need to add visuals to this so that they can see what I mean when I say syllable versus what I mean when I say sound.
And so a lot of times I'll use the scoop for a syllable.
And I even have some hand motions that I will use where it's kind of like, okay, I'm gonna give them a whole fist of like, okay, a syllable is kinda when we're like clapping out or pounding out that sound.
Whereas as an individual sound, I might just be putting my four finger and my thumb together where I'm pinching it out.
So it's like a smaller, um, sound there.
And so, anyway, those would be things that I might want to think about as I'm considering what's going on here.
I can also ask myself if the goals that I've set are realistic and measurable.
Right? Sometimes I'm just realizing I'm not really making progress because I don't have a clear goal, and I know we talked about that last time, but that can be important is just making sure that I'm measuring this in a way that makes sense.
Mhmm.
But sometimes it's also wow, I set the bar very high and that just might not be realistic.
So sometimes that might be a fluency goal that I'm realizing, alright, that was a bit of a stretch, and we're just not getting there.
And so those are things that I wanna think about too, not that I want to lower the bar.
I never wanna lower the bar without thinking, or there are other things going on here, but there are times where that might be appropriate.
That is so helpful.
I remember in my classroom, I used to feel pressured to just keep moving forward even when students weren't ready.
But, you know, sometimes the right move is is like you said, slowing down, giving more practice, or breaking the skill into similar steps.
Yep.
Absolutely.
Anything to, you know, it's thinking about that from both angles of one, we don't wanna just keep moving.
We wanna give students more opportunities when they need them.
But also I know that we've had educators that we've worked with, and I know even in the past, this is something that I've struggled with too, is also not moving forward fast enough.
So sometimes when I was in my initial training, my trainer said we want to go as fast as we can, but as slow as we must.
And I think that there's really a science and an art there in really figuring out the right pacing because I think sometimes we'll also have this place where we feel like I can't move on because we haven't reached 90% mastery and I say stuck on a skill forever.
Uh, we don't wanna do that either.
We do wanna make sure that we're continuing to make that incremental forward progress.
But just knowing that you can always review if you have students that are not making progress toward their goals, just make sure the review sections of your lesson are incorporating those particular skills.
We use games for this all the time because we have some students it's like, oh my gosh, we have gone over digraphs.
I don't know how many times, and it's just not landing.
Mhmm.
And so I'm gonna keep pulling in a game to hit digraphs every time I have a review section available in my lesson.
So what that allows is it allows you to kind of keep going.
While still hitting that systematic review inside of your lessons.
I love that.
So, again, the bottom line is scores that aren't moving ahead aren't a dead end.
Yeah.
Exactly.
They're not a failure.
It's just feedback, and it's a signal that something in our instruction needs to shift.
And that's the whole reason that we're progress monitoring so that we can get that signal sooner rather than later.
And when we see the story behind the numbers, that's when we can keep intervention effective for every student.
Absolutely.
And I think, you know, one of the things too, just I know we keep saying this, but I do think that it's important is that when we are progress monitoring, it often feels like this is how I prove that I'm effective in what I'm doing.
And so I do think we just want to remove that away from that progress monitoring discussion so that we can again just be saying, yeah, this is changing things.
And so even if we're having a meeting with a colleague or a team lead or a parent, and we need to be discussing progress monitoring of just saying this is what the data shows.
This is what we're seeing.
Maybe there's some variability in scores from week to week, and here's what I'm doing about it.
And that's all it is.
It's not, oh, my gosh.
Like, we said that we were going to improve this particular skill, and it's not moving.
Okay.
Well, this is what we're seeing.
And so because this is what we're seeing, this is what we're doing next.
Just like if you realize you made a left turn when you were supposed to make a right with your GPS, okay, great.
We just got information from our, you know, GPS, whoever's speaking to us.
Out of our phone here that we need to turn around.
Great.
This is what happened.
This is what we're seeing.
And so we're gonna make a right turn at this next light, and that's fine.
And that's really what that conversation should be.
So Anyway, I think all that being said to recap, don't panic over a single data point, make sure that you're looking for trends.
You can use that quadrant model.
So thinking about whether students fall into group a, b, c, or d, to diagnose what's really going on, make sure that if students are making growth in their progress monitoring, that you are celebrating that and taking time to pause and recognize and reflect on that.
And then what goals aren't met, just make sure that you're adjusting that you're thinking about it, that you're nothing else having a conversation in your own head about, what's going on here? You can get curious about it.
Absolutely.
And if you want a simple way to start, grab our free data tracking printable in the show notes.
It's designed to help you track consistently without adding stress.
And if you're ready for the next step, keep an eye out for upcoming spotlight PD, which is all about how to create soar aligned goals and track data.
And that's where we'll dive even deeper into these tools and strategies.
Thanks so much for joining us today.
We'll see you next time.
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