Hi, and welcome back to the Smarter Literacy podcast from Ascend Smarter Intervention, where we simplify effective literacy instruction so every student gets what they need and every educator gets to breathe a little easier. I'm Lindsey.
And I'm Corey. And last week, we opened up a conversation about overwhelm in literacy instruction.
And honestly, it stirred something up for me a little bit, and I thought it would be helpful for us to get deeper into this here on the podcast.
And I think so many educators have likely had the experience of overwhelm in their instruction, so I'm really excited to dive into this conversation.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's important to say that this feeling of overwhelm comes up so often. And I also wanna be clear that this really comes as a response to fear. So it has nothing to do with incompetence. I think for a long time, I felt like if I was overwhelmed, it was because I just didn't know enough.
And when I first started out in my literacy intervention journey, I noticed this feeling of overwhelm creeping in often when I had fears that I was doing it wrong or that I was failing my students or that I wasn't delivering my instruction perfectly.
And I know I felt the same way. There were times that I would leave work in literal tears because I had felt like I was a failure. I would be so hard on myself, then I would push myself to do more work, more training, more everything.
And rather than that actually helping, it only made the overwhelm worse because then there was so much that I was like, I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this. And so I felt like I was moving farther and farther away from that perfection that I was seeking, and I was only feeling worse about myself. Absolutely.
And I think it's both, you know, a blessing and a curse that there's so much information available now because we have so much information at our fingertips. It feels like we're constantly searching for that, and there's always differing views of how to do things or the right way to do things. And so I think sometimes that can just contribute to a lot of that. And, you know, I think for me, one of my initial struggles really came from my background in research science. So when I was working toward my graduate degree in clinical psych, I was working in a research lab, which I absolutely loved. It was so fun. I learned so much in that setting.
But within that research lab, you really need to have this extreme level of structure.
And so we would actually have what we would call fidelity meetings with our clinic director. And, essentially, what you were doing during those fidelity meetings is you were watching a video of an interaction between a student and a teacher, and you were scoring or coding that particular interaction.
And so when we were doing that, the clinic director was going to be looking at how did she rate that interaction versus how did we rate that interaction. And so we were actually creating a little bit of a mathematical calculation.
However, what we have to recognize is that it wasn't a simple yes, no. So a lot of times these behaviors would be things like, is the teacher, you know, engaging the student or is the student themselves connected to the teacher? And sometimes some of those things are a little bit subjective or it would be like, well, based on what what does connected actually mean? Like, yeah, they look like they're connected, but are they actually connected?
And so I think that that became a big challenge for me because as I then transitioned into my future work, I often felt like, okay, there's a very clear right or wrong way to do things because in that research lab, if you didn't match the gold standard of the clinic director, you were wrong. Whether or not you had reason to back up why you rated something the way that you did, it was just this is the right way and that's the wrong way. And so I think I took a lot of that into my literacy instruction with me, especially as we start to think about what research based reading instruction or literacy instruction looks like.
So oh my gosh. Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that's important there is what I started to realize is that when you work with real students in different settings, our classroom, our instructional setting, it's not a research lab. And so I think that's where I'm starting to kind of have that shift of, oh, we don't have these perfectly structured settings in which everything is done in the exact same way.
Our students will throw us for loops. Things just look different with with real kids, real students in real settings.
Right. That's such a great way to put it because, yeah, when you think of, like, scientists doing experiments, yes, it's a very controlled situation so they can run these tests and get the right kind of results that they need. But we're working with kids. Right? Yeah.
Like, you're always for loops all the time.
Right? I mean, how many times are you like, where did that come from? And you have to roll with it.
Yeah. You're like, oh, okay. Like, sure. I was not expecting today to be like this, but here we go. Yeah. Absolutely.
And I think too, you know, one of the things that we have to recognize is that your own experience in your own classroom has become research for so long, right, about this is how my particular students are going to react, and this is what's going to work for me in my setting. And so I think a lot of times we're doing a lot of that research as educators, and we don't actually realize that that's valuable too.
Absolutely. And the first time I was told there is no one right way to do something, that was such a load off my shoulders because I have been told throughout so many different trainings that you must do something this way. And that was even before my literacy, when I moved to being a literacy teacher, when I was an English teacher, and we had certain trainings on how to teach that curriculum, it was, you must teach it this way. You must do it this way.
And when I wasn't doing it that one way, even no matter how much I tried to do it that one way, life just didn't go in that direction. Again, I had kids who were coming in with multiple backgrounds and difficulties and just even just their daily lives and my daily life. So that one way was not working, and I felt like such a failure. But, again, when someone said there is no one right way to do something, I was like, oh my god, I did not know I needed to hear that as much as I did.
And I think I literally remember my shoulders just going down. I could, like, take a deep breath, I was like, finally, oh my god, Thank you. And that following school year, I felt so much better as a teacher. I felt so more confident because I had taken the summer to be like, okay.
I have some experience behind me now. I have three, four years behind me now. I know what I want my students to do. What do I want it to look like in a very loose, how do I wanna do this?
And I kinda created an outline loosely so that way I'd have wiggle room, and I felt so much better about that school year than I had about any of the previous school years.
Yeah. And I think it's so important to recognize that because if we take a step back, what we can do is we can recognize that structured literacy and evidence based practice gives us this starting point. Right? And there is the research and it does help us to see when we follow this structure and when we follow this system, that can absolutely be the answer.
That can absolutely help our students to close the gap and get to where they need to be. And that can feel good. Right? That can feel grounding of having at least an answer.
Right? Because sometimes when it's too vague and you're like, well, I don't know at all. I don't know where to start. That doesn't feel good.
But when you do know, okay, I know the direction that we're going. I understand the intention behind the system, and I understand the intention behind, for example, the importance of word recognition instruction and language comprehension instruction, I understand why that that is important, then we can start to say, okay, now let me think about how I can get to that end point or that end goal using that as a guide without saying, okay, this is how I have to do every single piece. And I think one of the analogies that I think about is it's almost like when you think about fidelity, right, and I think that word has been very much moralized.
We hear that all the time. Implementation fidelity. Implementation fidelity. And we'll see that too. When you follow things with fidelity, then you're gonna get the results.
But we need to be careful about what fidelity means. So, again, coming back to the analogy that I was alluding to, it's almost like if you knew your end direction in a GPS, you know where you're going. So this is this is essentially the place that we are trying to get to, and the GPS is gonna give you a very specific way in which to get there. And if you follow that perfectly, you know I'm going to get there.
However, there may be times in which there is a block in the road And your GPS doesn't know it, and it keeps telling you to go that way even though there's a block in the road and you can see it and you can feel it and you can say, this doesn't feel right. This isn't right. This road looks closed. And your GPS is saying, no.
Keep going this way. That's sometimes what just following with perfect fidelity is. And so what we can start to do is we can start to say, well, I've been in this area before or I know some of these roads and I know kind of another way that we might be able to just take this slight little curve around here to still get to the endpoint. So what we wanna be clear about is we wanna be clear that this is the endpoint.
This is a way in which we can get there.
However, to the point of there's no one right way, we could say, yes, there are a few other ways that we can still get to that endpoint, making sure that we are following the general direction. We're not ending up somewhere completely different. Right? That's what the research should provide us is, like, that general direction, the general map.
We don't wanna, you know, if we're trying to head to New York, we don't wanna end up in California, obviously, or we don't even wanna end up in New Jersey necessarily. Right? Right. So we we wanna make sure that we're getting to where we need to go.
But we need to be careful about that kind of fidelity to the point of, okay, I'm really not even paying attention to the students around me or the situation around me right now.
I I love that analogy. One, because I I do take multiple routes that my GPS is not telling me, I said, no, I'm gonna go this way. So I live that on a daily basis. But two, because it's so true that there are multiple roads to get to the end goal.
And again, just kind of going back to that idea that there is no fidelity when it comes to being a human being. Right? Right. You are going to have to roll with the punches.
And if you are so inflexible that you can't, then everything is gonna fall apart around you and you won't reach that end destination.
Yeah, absolutely. And so one of the things that we've told a lot of the educators that we work with is when we talk about implementation fidelity, and I'm putting that in air quotes, what we really mean is are we following the general structures that are put in place? So we know that evidence based research needs to have structure to it. So we're not just flying all willy nilly, but we know that we're targeting phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, writing within our lessons.
And we know that we are doing this in a building and systematic way so that we're starting with the most basic concepts and working our way up and that we are using data and observation to guide our instructional decisions. And that's where evidence based practice really comes from. We're following explicit routines so that kids have an opportunity to really internalize those routines and make them theirs. So I know we've talked about, like, the vocabulary framework or things like that.
We're gonna incorporate that over and over and over again so they can internalize it. But it may look a little bit different when we're doing it for a science term than it does in our reading lesson, and that's okay. And so I think that's when we talk about fidelity, that's what we mean. It's not you must do things and you must say it this particular way or it must be presented in this exact perfect way.
Yep. That's just that's for the research lab, which, again, I come from a place of of loving research in that background, but it has its place. Yes. And it's not in the classroom or your instructional setting necessarily.
Yes. And so one of the things that I think I really started to think about was this idea that, honestly, evidence based practice and structured literacy is as much an art as it is a science. And so I think when we can start to see it that way, I think we can start to take our power back as educators Yes. And that professional judgment and and to take the art and the creativity back into teaching.
And I think that's something that we have lost Yeah. A little bit. And I think that's where we're seeing a lot of burnout. We're seeing a lot of just teachers feeling like, oh, my professionalism is under question, when it really shouldn't be because it's the science and the art.
And so the science is providing that structure that we're talking about, where we need to have that structure so that we make sure that all of the kids are, in fact, getting what they need. But the art is that opportunity to have responsiveness to our students or to be able to make it ours, to be able to feel like we're connecting actually with our students instead of just the book and the words that we're supposed to be reading. And so I think I think that's where the joy in teaching lives, and that's where we get to experiment with things, and that's where we get to see some of those moments.
I know I've done some trainings recently with educators, and one of the things that I always ask about is, what do you love about teaching? And a lot of times what I will hear is, I love that moment, and I love hunting for the strategy that's going to give me that moment. I love finding it. It's that exploration.
And so I think I think that's, again, where that professional judgment, that expertise as educators comes back is in the art. Yes.
So we can't let go of the art with the science.
I agree so much. And I have to say that exploration piece is one of my favorite pieces of being an educator as well.
And, you know, I think we often forget how creative teachers are, especially when we start putting scripts in front of them. And so many people become teachers because they have a passion for education. They have a passion for learning, probably because they loved learning at some point in their life, and there was kind of a creative way that they were able to learn, and they want to be able to do that with their own students. And even when I think back to my own experiences, personally, I think my students have even been some of my greatest teachers as far as when it came to learning how to adjust my instruction, how to be more creative, and they are the ones who kind of made me fall in love with the art of that teaching because when I found something that worked for a student, and I was like, oh my gosh.
This worked so well. And so a lot of times, honestly, it just came naturally because it was born in the moment of teaching with my kid. And I was like, okay. This is not working.
Let me try it this way or let me explain it this way. And when that worked and I saw that light bulb go off, I was like, oh my gosh. And then I would try it with my next class or my next student to see if it would work. And a lot of times it did, sometimes it didn't, and I would have to find a different way for that kid.
But that's when I was like, this is amazing. This is so much fun. And they walked away feeling really good too. Actually, a lot of times they went home like, you know, told my mom and dad what we did in class today and stuff.
And I was like, oh my gosh, it's working.
Yes.
Oh my gosh, yes. And that's where the joy, again, comes in, and that's where the spark comes in, and I think that's where we can just find that fulfillment in teaching again. And so I think, again, it's that balance of having that structure because I also understand we can't just let every classroom look completely different. We need to make sure that students have a structure so that they come out of each grade or class or intervention group or whatever that is, having a common language, having some of that the pieces that need to be in place, but what that looks like can look a little bit different.
So when we have our instructor manuals and things like that, we always say, look, this is a guide for you. This is not meant to be an absolute script for you. This is meant for you to be able to get an idea of what it is that you're supposed to teach and then do it in a way that feels beautiful Yes. To you, that feels in alignment with you.
And as long as, again, we're still following what we would say is the scope, yes, we need to hit all of the key pieces. We need to hit those five core components of reading plus the reciprocal writing process. We need to make sure that we're not starting with the most complex topics first, that we are doing this, right, in a building progression, and that we do have those routines, right? But but what that looks like may look different from classroom to classroom or teacher to teacher, and so I think that's just an important recognition.
It kinda even makes me think of, like, a painter. The painter has to still use certain rules.
You go to art school so that you can learn the technique.
You learn the techniques. You learn how to make the colors you want, right, whatever it is, the form that you're using, whether you're painting on canvas. So there are still parameters that an artist has to work in in order to create their art. Yes.
So it's it's really a very similar idea for teaching.
Yep. And so I think I think an important thing to come back here to, just coming back to that fidelity conversation, is that when we follow fidelity too rigidly and it's only following the structure and not allowing that room for art, we lose that opportunity to connect deeply with our students, and that connection is so key and so important. And so really, I think what I want to leave everybody with on the fidelity note there is that fidelity without your judgment, professional judgment, as an educator is not evidence based practice. Yes. So, again, just gonna leave leave that there.
But I think, you know, one of the things that that I wanted to chat about too is that one of the ways that this showed up for us as an intervention team was that we kept having these students who just didn't seem to fit into our kind of traditional literacy intervention model. So our typical intervention model is highly intensive. It is highly structured, and we use an intensive systematic phonics based instruction, and it's worked so well for us for a decade. So we use what's called Delivering Smarter Intervention, and we love it. And it's, again, it's worked so well for a decade.
And at the same time, we realized we had a few students who it was like they were ready to graduate from that highly intensive intervention. So it was like, they are ready to move back into the classroom from this Delivering Smarter Intervention approach, But they weren't always consistently generalizing and applying their skills to other content areas. So they could demonstrate all the skills in isolation. They could even do it in connected text within the context of the lesson, but they just were not always making the leap to what that looked like to a science article Or a history topic, for example.
So they just weren't quite making that leap consistently. And so we were trying to figure out, like, what do we do for them? Or also, sometimes we had students who would come to us and we felt conflicted about their needs because it didn't seem like they needed that high level of intensive support that Delivering Smarter Intervention would provide. So we were looking at them thinking, yeah, you're not quite where you need to be to reach those classroom expectations, but we also don't need you working for several months on those kind of systematic phonics based patterns.
And even though those phonics based patterns were going to connect to vocabulary and fluency and comprehension, we're like, ah, do we really need to talk about a specific phonogram pattern or a specific phonics pattern to get them back to that classroom Yeah. Expectation.
So that's kind of how some of this just thinking about fidelity where we were like, okay, are we gonna force kids into this model of fidelity because we know this is evidence based, we know this is what works, even though it feels a little bit off.
Right. Yeah. No, and I obviously have experienced that as we work here in our clinic. But even again, previously when I was a tier three intervention specialist, we would have kids who had been recognized in the classroom of having literacy needs because they just weren't able to get it.
However, with the testing and the data we did, we're looking at them, well, we don't really fit here either. And it's like, okay. But where do they fit? Are we gonna take again, because we had limited seats for the kids who did need high intensity intervention and they need to be working with one of the tier three specialists, so we take a seat away from one of those kids to give something that maybe doesn't feel quite right to this other kid, or do we just kinda let them sit there in their ELA and history and science classes not getting it?
So it's just like we we're like, what do we do?
What do we do? And I think we've all faced that. I mean, I know we hear that from educators that we've worked with a lot. And so typically when we think about these students, we're gonna classify them as tier two.
Again, I'm putting that kind of in air quotes because I know everybody classifies that a little bit differently. But these are students who, again, probably don't qualify for that intensive support, but they're still struggling just a little bit. Like you said, they're not quite meeting those classroom expectations. Yeah.
And so that's gonna be those students who, ah, they're just not quite they shouldn't take that tier three spot from the student who really needs it. Or these could also be students who they did have that tier three support. They they got that intensive intervention, but they just need a little bit of kind of a bridge almost to get them back to the classroom expectations. Like, okay, we're good.
We don't need to keep going with this intensive intervention, but we need a little bit of a bridge here so that they can get the support that they need.
Yeah. And, again, like I said, we we had many of those. And just because I think some kids do just need that extra bit of practice, like you said, some of them were intervention kids. They had received intervention early on, but just we're never taught how do I do this in the classroom and just needing a little bit more formal instruction on here's how I apply this knowledge.
And it's, I mean, fair because honestly, yeah, we're teaching them these patterns. We're showing them in, but we're never telling them outright, this is what you should be doing when you're in history class or when you're in ELA class. They're not putting that together themselves. Yeah.
And so I think what we really realized is that we have what we started calling this messy middle here, where we are trying to follow the structure so rigidly.
And when we're not open to this idea of science and art in evidence based practice, we start forcing these kids into either interventions that don't fully work for them or we're not necessarily giving them the support that they need because we're feeling like, oh, they don't really they don't really need that.
And so what we started to do when we saw this is we started to open ourselves up to, alright, what if there is an art here? Okay. So what if we can step keep the science, but if we can create a little bit of art and a little bit of flexibility in what we're doing here, what we started to do is we put together what we have started to call a bridge intervention. So it's like I was saying, this is kind of that bridge between that high structure and also the classroom based instruction. So we don't necessarily fully yet need that highly intensive structure, or maybe we will, but we're just not quite there yet or we're not quite sure that we need that yet and we need to kind of see, and again, those classroom expectations. So it's really that bridge in between those two places of what's going on in the classroom and what's going on in that highly structured intervention. And we've got that bridge space in there.
Yeah. And I know we've talked about it, but the beautiful thing about a bridge is it can go in either direction.
So these kids who are the messy middle, who are on this bridge, we can if we create more of that art, that more of that flexibility, we can really make sure that these kids are going in whatever direction that they need to go in.
Absolutely. And so I think big picture here, I know we've talked about a lot of different things on this particular episode, but but what we want to leave you with is that if you are feeling like your structure or implementing your instruction is starting to feel overwhelming because you almost feel like you have to kind of white knuckle onto this there's only one way, you don't have to do that. Right? You don't have to do that.
There can be other ways. And so even for us, we are kind of white knuckling our own program, which we love. It's been so successful for so long of thinking about, alright, what if we could reduce some of the overwhelm by allowing ourselves to have some of that creativity, to lean into some of that messy middle, to lean into the idea that what if there can be a bridge? What might that look like?
How can we step out of this must be done in this one way to, okay, we know what the science says. So we know what a structured, effective literacy lesson needs to look like. How might we be creative and use our art to create something different? And so in our next episode, we'll talk more about exactly what that looks like to create that intervention or how you can do that for your students in the messy middle.
But I think for today, we really just wanted to leave you with sometimes you might be feeling overwhelmed because you feel like you're stuck in this place of fidelity or it needs to be only classroom based intervention or only this highly structured and like, no. Yeah. There's this beautiful messiness in the middle that feels so uncomfortable. Yep.
But it can actually be a little bit less overwhelming when you just kind of let go of this need for everything to be this perfectly scripted thing.
Yes. Embrace the mess. That's exactly it, right?
I mean, those that that space is is beautiful and uncomfortable and all of the things, and I think especially coming from evidence based, must be like this, we may be missing that opportunity. And I think, again, broader picture, where are there those other opportunities of some of that messy, messy middle in your teaching that's not bad? Yeah. And we can let go of that idea of overwhelm because there is no one right perfect way to do it. And so I think that's, if nothing else, that's that's what we want you to leave with today is just embracing some of that messiness of the art and the creative process of Just thinking back to your art studio, you know, like, think about the sort of messiness of all of that, but then how beautiful Yeah.
The outcome is. Absolutely.
And if you have students that are also falling in that messy middle, we'd love to invite you to our training, how to support students in the messy middle, because this is definitely an area that I know so many educators are working through, we'll share exactly what a bridging process can look like to help those students who aren't quite meeting classroom standards for literacy but don't necessarily need a high intensive literacy intervention approach either.
Yes, I am so excited for this training. So we'll be talking again all about that kind of bridge intervention. We'll talk about it more on our next episode as well, but we would love to see you there. I think it'll be so helpful, especially if you felt kind of overwhelmed in that middle space, if you've got kids also that you're like, I don't know what to do with these.
We would love to see you there, and hopefully, this episode gave you a little bit of a grounding moment. Again, just think about your classroom as that art studio. I know that can feel a little bit messy and uncomfortable, but the more I've embraced that, I think, the the more free I felt in my teaching. Me too.
And we're so grateful that you're here, and we're excited to see you in our next episode.
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Thanks for listening. Until next time. Happy teaching.
