I had a student last night. We were working on a science text, and one of the words we had was streak.
And he wasn't quite sure about that word, and so we were I'm sorry.
I know. That is a multiple meaning word.
Hi.
And welcome back to the Smarter Literacy Podcast from Ascend Smarter Intervention, where we simplify effective literacy interventions so every student gets what they need and every educator gets to breathe a little easier.
I'm Lindsey. And I'm Corey. And in our last episode, we introduced the idea of those students who are in what we call the messy middle.
Yes. Those kiddos, students who haven't quite gotten the point of classroom expectations, but who don't necessarily need the intensive literacy intervention, and so they're kind of stuck in the middle.
Yes. And so today, we wanna dig more into the how we started bridging the gap for those students who are stuck in the messy middle.
And I really cannot wait to dive into this conversation. So let's start with a question here. Corey, why do students who are in the messy middle need a different type of intervention?
Yeah. So this is a great question. And honestly, for so much of my time as a literacy specialist, I didn't use a different type of intervention for students who were in this kind of what we call messy middle. So I either kept them in a highly structured systematic literacy intervention program because that's what I knew.
Right? And that's really where I came from and and how I was trained. Or I just didn't see those students at all because I was pretty clear that they didn't need the level of instruction that I was going to provide. And I felt that they would be better served just staying in the classroom and just having that classroom instruction all the time, quite frankly.
And so those students just got nothing.
And that is so common. I know, you know, in the school that I I taught at too, if they did not meet certain criteria, it was kind of like, they'll just be fine in the classroom. They'll get it eventually. It'll just come to them.
And it didn't feel great, but that's kind of where we were. And even the beginning of my career, I remember it was really tough at this school. We, as a building, really had to work together. So we were middle school, and we really wanted to figure out how to meet our students' needs because more and more each year we were recognizing we've got a lot of kids with lots of differing needs.
How do we do this? So I would say, really honestly, our school was full of the messy middle kids, and what we came up with first was nowhere close to perfect. We did have a tier two and a tier three intervention, but even still there, we were kind of figuring out what did those look like. And with our buildings, time constraints, the structure of our day, and also the lack of materials, especially being a secondary school, we did the best we could.
It was not perfect. And it just felt like, honestly, we were winging it and hoping for the best. And meanwhile, there was plenty of students who just weren't getting anything. Yeah.
And I think it's just a difficult thing that so many people are trying to solve, whether you are in a school system and you're trying to figure out how do we support this.
Does that look like more tier one general education instruction? Do we have a separate tier two for these kids who are in that middle space? What does that look like? And then that tier three where it's more of that ongoing intensive support.
And so the reality is is that these students who are in the messy middle, they do need something a little bit different. And what we have really started to call that or lean into is that that is a bridge intervention. And so this bridge intervention really is perfect for those students that we're talking about who can't quite keep up with those classroom expectations. So we think about our classroom curriculum, and it's just like, no, they're not quite there.
There's something that they're missing, but they also don't need multi month long, year long, highly intensive literacy support.
And so I think that middle spot, it can feel really difficult, but we can start to build a program or an approach for them that still follows the same structured systematic literacy principles that we know are evidence based that potentially can happen, whether that be in the classroom or in a tier two pullout space or even, you know, as a bridge for some of our students like we talked about before who were in that tier three or were in that very intensive literacy intervention that are ready to start coming out of that and that they aren't gonna need that anymore. And so it's that that bridge space. And so when we think about these kids, these messy middle kids, we say this just lovingly more from a messy middle for ourselves, not that the students are in this messy middle, but it's this messy middle ground for us as educators trying to figure out how to serve them.
But these might be students who are classified as needing MTSS or response to intervention, tier two support. Right? Like, those might be some of the the terms that are being used for them. And sometimes these are students who don't qualify for support at all, but they're still a little bit behind kind of that grade level standards or seem to be the ones that they always kind of figure it out by the end of the year.
But then at the beginning of the year, it's like this constant kind of like, oh, they're at the bottom. Oh, nope. They figured it out. Oh, nope.
They're at the bottom. Oh, nope. They figured it out. And, again, sometimes these are those students who have completed that highly structured kind of intensive literacy intervention.
We're like, great. You know your phonogram patterns. You're doing a nice job with that. Now we just need to see you transition that ability into the general education curriculum.
Okay. So what does a bridge intervention actually look like?
Yes. So another really great question. A bridge intervention is really designed to help students pull the same concepts from a highly structured systematic literacy intervention program into what would align with those classroom based concepts. So for example, that content might look like a science topic or a biography or a brief history lesson.
And then what we're doing is we're providing the structure that aligns with that evidence based literacy instruction around that. So for example, we're taking that science topic, that brief biography or history lesson, and we're going to pair that with a phonological awareness drill that specifically aligns to that particular topic. Then you could have a word list arranged by the different syllable types that are also aligned to the topic. So words that perhaps are gonna come up in the passage or words just generally that would align with that same topic.
Then you choose your vocabulary words from the passage that you could apply the vocabulary framework to. So we're still using those structured literacy routines, but we're using words directly from the passage. Your fluency is going to align to that passage, and then your comprehension process or your comprehension framework will also utilize that particular passage.
And what I love about these kind of lessons is that it really does allow our students to spend a little bit more time on those application pieces, which is what we're talking about that a lot of, again, these messy middle kids are sometimes missing.
They don't need the pattern work necessarily as much, but they do need to know how do I apply this to my reading, to my writing, to my comprehension work.
And I love that they also get to spend a little bit more time even with vocabulary, thinking about words and their meaning, not just how we sound them out.
And so it's just it's so much more practice for them.
Yeah. Absolutely. And it helps them start to see almost the bridge Yeah. Themselves. Yeah. So especially if you are working with students who have had some of that exposure before to the phonogram patterns and the syllable types and the vocabulary frameworks and working through decodable passages and things like that, starting to see, oh.
Yeah. Oh, that's what that looks like over here Creates a little bit of that moment because a lot of times we think they've made that connection. We think, okay, we've gotten you to this point in the bridge. There's where you go to get to the classroom.
Go. Yeah. They don't go. Right? I know, like, they didn't, you know, they missed the memo there.
Yeah. And it's even too, it's like they can sit there like, oh, this is why I learned all this stuff before.
Oh, it has meaning elsewhere.
And that's what I love too because, again, sometimes we do have to spell it out for kids.
Absolutely. And then on the flip side, it's also good for students who maybe do not need that significant level of intervention to at least get a view into that and a view into here's the structured framework that we can follow to make all of this come together. Because I think sometimes when I think about students in the classroom, a lot of times when we look at our state standards or the standards that we're hitting and the things that we need to teach, a lot of times some of those things are getting very specific, thinking back to even like your ELA when you were teaching in the classroom.
Okay, if we're trying to talk about different genres and we're trying to talk about the structure of a sentence in a very complex way, we might just need to have an opportunity to see that from a slightly pulled back picture where they can see that big picture a little bit more clearly. So, again, just even thinking about whether that be the vocabulary framework or, like, for us, one of the frameworks for fluency is phrasing. Who or what? Did what?
When, where, why, or how? You can use that as a bridge for so many of the other things that you're doing in the classroom.
So much so. Okay, Corey, so if I wanted to build a bridge intervention, what would that look like?
Yeah. So I think there's a few ways that you can do this, but one of the ways that we like to do this is, like I mentioned, you can take one meaningful passage. So that could be a brief textbook chapter, that could be an article, that could be just something brief that you've written up about the topic. Doesn't have to be complex, but it can just be something that you're already utilizing or something that aligns with the content that you are going to be teaching.
So ideally, this is content rich. So, again, we're thinking this should be something aligning to science, social studies, whatever is going on in the classroom. Right? Yes.
That's how we're creating that bridge. So you're using that one passage, and that's becoming the anchor for everything else that you are doing. So you'll take that passage, and then from that, you can create phonological awareness questions. So we like to use a ten part drill our phonological awareness, and that's what we use in our structured, systematic, highly intensive literacy intervention is these ten questions, and they are designed to help support students' ability to blend sounds and syllables, to segment sounds and syllables, to differentiate between sounds, to manipulate sounds and words.
But essentially, you're just taking some of the words that they would have had in the passage and you're asking them, okay. If you're doing something about volcanoes, for example, you might say, alright. I'm gonna tell you a word in small parts. Vol, k, no.
What's the word? Volcano. Right? Alright. I'm gonna tell you a word, and I want you to guess what it is.
L, a, v, a. It's the word. Lava. Right? You're using kind of context words, but you're still tying back in that foundational skill of phonological awareness, helping students to think about, okay.
Well, how many syllables do you hear in this word? How many sounds do you hear? What if we change the first sound or the last sound? And that way, it's not just this random drill Which I think is what everybody kinda hates sometimes about the really structured literacy is that it just feels like one more thing that you're just trying to weave into your instruction.
It doesn't fit. It's almost like you have this beautiful recipe and somebody's like, okay. Now you must use cardamom. You're like, that's a great flavor, but it doesn't go with this dish at all, so I don't wanna do that.
Yeah. This is allowing you to kind of pick, alright, we're gonna flavor this with some seasoning, but it's gonna align to the meal that I'm making here. Right? So it's aligning to the passage.
And essentially, that's what that first piece will look like. So first, you're pulling your content passage, and then the first step would be pulling that phonological awareness drill into the passage.
And I love that. The more that we can align our instruction to what it is we're teaching versus everything being isolated, the more it's just gonna help those kids click things into place. I keep thinking of their brains almost like puzzle pieces, and maybe they have most of the puzzle put together, and maybe there's a few pieces that are they almost are fit in, but they they're not quite clicked in yet. It's just gonna help everything click into place, and it's like, oh, now I know what the next puzzle piece is gonna be like. I know what I have to look for now.
Right. And one of the things that we do too, especially with the phonological awareness piece, knowing that that's such a critical puzzle piece Is that we might say the reason that we're doing this is that's how we sound out unfamiliar words. Yeah. And that's how when we're trying to spell words.
Like, if I'm gonna ask you to write sentences about this passage at the end and you need to think about how to spell the word, I want you to break it into syllables, and I want you to break it into sounds. So we're just priming ourselves and continuing to work that drill in. It's I know we've talked about this before, but it's also, like, in sports. Yes, just because I've learned to do a jumping jack at one point in the past doesn't mean that I shouldn't continue doing that even as I get older and more advanced.
And so these are strategies that will help take your very foundational work that was done kinder, first, second grade, and carry it through for you. Exactly.
So then after you do the phonological awareness, then we're gonna pull in the phonics instruction piece. So typically what we're gonna do here is we're going to take words directly from the passage and we're going to really organize those or sort those into the different syllable types so that students can start to see, oh, these are closed syllables, these are vowel consonant e, these are our control. We want them to see that patterns exist in the language so that they can start hunting for those patterns in the rest of their reading. And so it's also just a great way, again, a bridge between students who have had all of that exposure to remember those different syllable types and those patterns, but also a good way for students who have not had that instruction to be introduced into that way of finding patterns.
Again, that is so important for our kids to be able to recognize and be able to do and to be able to apply in these lessons.
And I I I just cannot emphasize how much I love the practice that they're getting and that, again, they're just building those connections all the way across.
And you just wanna make sure too, it's also bringing back that k one too. Right? Like, what are they getting in kinder for a second? And so I know a lot of the schools that we have worked with are using UFly and things like that in those younger grades, and that's great.
And so if that's the foundation, then this is the way that you continue to help them see, oh, yeah, I remember that or I've seen that, or start to recognize patterns that are more complex that they may not have been taught at that point. So I think that's typically what that piece would look like for that bridge intervention. So, again, we start with the passage, then we build the phonological awareness, then we build the word list that is pulling directly from the passage, and then we move into vocabulary. And so from this, we're just choosing two, three words Yeah.
From the passage that you feel like, okay, these would be words that maybe they wouldn't know or that are just important, right, that they're gonna see again.
And you can use the vocabulary framework with that so you can have them think about, all right, what's the category? What's the function? What's the synonym? What's the antonym? Let's talk about some of these words.
Yes, absolutely.
And even from there, let's say it is a word that they don't know, that we are choosing maybe an unfamiliar word, but we know it's going be an important word, especially in the context like it's a science article that we're looking at. Even pulling the sentence that it's being used in and even kind of sitting down and going through that category piece. Okay, well, how is it being used? Where is it falling within the sentence?
Is it in the subject? Is it in the predicate, the adverbial phrase? And then within that, how is it being used? Is it a noun?
Is it, you know and just getting them to see I had a student last night. We were working on a science text, and one of the words we had was streak.
And he wasn't quite sure about that word, and so we were I'm sorry.
I know. Is the multiple meaning word.
It is a streak. A streak of light was the we were talking about muterate.
Sorry about that, guys.
Okay. See, your students hopefully would not have just gotten to my list. As an educator as an educator, think we immediately worry about the Oh, we yeah. Every day.
Every day where I'm like, Yeah.
Even when we're sounding out nonsense words, I'm like, that sounds like another word. But they don't go there.
We as educators Yeah.
Gotta do things to keep us engaged. I'm sorry.
Okay. Anyway No. You're good. But we were talking about shooting stars, and we were able to look at that and being like, well, okay.
Well, how is this used in the sentence? What are we talking about here? And even though he at first, he was like, I don't know. I don't know.
And I was like, well, let's look. Let's look further into this. He was like, oh, okay. And even if he wasn't able to give me a full definition, he got close enough where I'm like, okay, so what you're talking about is it's being used as a noun in this case instead of an adjective or something.
And he was like, oh. And this is a newer student. This is a student who I have. We're still learning our vocabulary framework.
For him to start walking through that process and making those connections, that is truly I do love our vocabulary section for this very reason where kids are really we're asking them, we're kind of putting it on their toes. Let's do the work together, but let's see what you can come up with.
And when they actually can come up with something, they're like, Oh, that's pretty good.
Yeah. That was pretty good.
Like, Oh, I can do this.
Absolutely. And I think especially in a time where there's so much available at your fingertips when you just Google things, and so you're just trying to Google the definition and you don't fully take ownership of it, this is an opportunity to take ownership of those words And so, and the other benefit is that in a classroom setting or in a group setting, you can also benefit off of different students' perspectives and understanding and build kind of a shared language and understanding of the words. And so that can be really helpful too, especially if you've got English language learners or just students whose vocabulary is maybe a little bit less developed for whatever reason, and they can start to hear what their peers are saying, so helpful.
Yes. I love that example. That's so funny. I was gonna say one of the strategies that I often use for students is just tell them, you know, and my kids, my own kids, like my sons will do this too, but they'll say, you know, Google, show me images of okay, so for that one, don't show me images of.
However, I do like to pull it in a sentence, right? Show me images of streaking through the sky, and you might wanna check that ahead of time. But that can be a way too when you've got students whose vocabulary is a little bit weak, to pull up an image so that they can see it and then say, okay, now let's use the vocabulary framework given this picture. You've got a picture as an anchor.
You can use that picture now to create the vocabulary framework.
And I will say, luckily, our article did include a picture Oh, that's perfect. Of the shooting star through the sky. I'm like, alright. Well, look. It's this line in the sky. That's perfect. So I did not have to look up anything.
Oh, you know, again, just keeping keeping teaching interesting.
Oh, yeah.
All the things, again, that we don't think about until you're actually in it with your students. Oh, yeah. Oh my goodness. So, yeah, so that's that's what that looks like.
And then we move on to the fluency where we'll practice phrasing or repeated reads of specific sentences that students will see. So we might take that exact sentence Yep. That you just used for vocabulary and then have them practice identifying who or what, did what, when, where, why, or how. And that way, they're doing two things.
One, they're starting to break that down so that they're gonna get meaning from it. Yes. Fluency is meant to help build meaning. It builds prosody too because you should have some natural kind of intonation and phrasing at those points.
But also, they're getting repeated read opportunities. Yes. So repeated read is a huge evidence based practice, but it can sometimes be really boring for kids to read the same thing over and over again. Sometimes when they're doing it in this way, they don't even really realize that you're asking them to read the same thing over and over.
So you're kind of sneaking in some repeated read practice there.
Yeah. Even my students now, when we do sentence phrasing like that, they'll even read the whole sentence first and then they read it in their parts. I don't even ask them. They just do it. And so I'm like, great. Look at all this repeated reading you're getting.
Exactly. And it's gonna build fluency once they get into the passage itself too because they've had that previous exposure, so it starts to feel more fluent once they get into the full passage, which then once we get to that point, we're really focused on comprehension, right? And so the other benefit to some of this phrasing work is that it's building some of that who, what, when, where, why. It's the five W's that we are looking for students to be able to start to recall as they are reading, like in their during reading process.
And so essentially, the benefit to following this framework is that you are building that before reading, during reading, after reading. Because before reading, you're talking about the words, you're talking about some sentences, you're building some background knowledge and all of that. And then as you get into the comprehension piece of the lesson, it's more about reading the passage, identifying, are there words that I don't know in here that I could use the vocabulary framework for? Do I find the five Ws?
Yeah. And then the after reading process where then we can start to answer the comprehension questions, thinking about those five levels of comprehension. So working from recall to organizing the information, connecting the information, making leaps, and then finally that kind of analysis and synthesis of ideas. Yeah.
I'm gonna bring back an old school buzzword. I feel like it's old school now. I feel like people don't mention it as much as they did, but in college, this was the buzzword. It was scaffolding.
All of this is just scaffolding that knowledge and having the kids practice over and over again and come back to it to the point where we're sure that they're kind of walking away with a full understanding of the content we were just talking about and they're getting that practice so that way, hopefully, when they go off on their own and they have to read, like I said, a chapter from their textbook or they're assigned a scholastic article, they're starting to do some of those things a little bit more on their own. And if they're not right now, that's fine. Like, that's continued practice that you're going to work with them.
But even in that time, you're you're building up that knowledge, which is ultimately what we want. Exactly. Exactly.
And this is really where that structure of that systematic structured literacy intervention starts to meet that flexibility, right, where we're starting to say, all right, we need a little bit of art here.
We need to be able to take this very structured approach and start to see what that looks like and applying that to more of, yeah, like you said, a Scholastic article or something like that, where they can start to apply those things on their own. And the more that we can do that over and over and over again, it's the same routine. Yeah. Same routine.
Same routine. So it starts to feel like brushing your teeth or tying your shoes. You almost don't have to think about it anymore, and that's the goal for students is that they really internalize all of that. And so once we started to put that together and stepped away from this idea that effective evidence based literacy instruction had to look like our Delivering Smarter Intervention program, which, again, fantastic.
It's amazing results for students for so long, but you had those students where it was like, Oh, they're ready. They're ready for pull off of that, or they just don't quite need This is what can be a great support for those students.
Exactly. And if anyone's kind of thinking that with this routine student engagement, they'll get bored or anything like that, I found it to be the exact opposite. I have found that the more that they have that structured routine, the more confident they feel, the more ready they are to jump into a lesson. And honestly, if we think about it when they're practicing for sports and they're learning drills in basketball or any other sport, they're doing the same thing over and over again.
And yet they're not bored of that because they know that that's building skill that they'll need to be able to run faster, to catch, to throw, to do whatever. That's our whole sports program is built around routine and practice. And, yeah, it's repetitive, but it's because, like you said, when we we build these routines, like brushing our teeth, tying our shoes, it just becomes so natural. We don't have to think about it.
Which is amazing because then you have that bandwidth left for more of that creativity. I'm thinking about what you're saying. Yes. We see that in sports.
We also see that in music, You have the same, you're warming up the same kind of routines and things like that, and what's changing is that maybe you have a different song, right? Or you're doing something, and that's what's changing here is that you have a different passage, that you can apply all of these different things to, And when students can start to feel like they have ownership over that, like you said, it's so much confidence for them that they have room for more of that strategic problem solving and critical thinking Right now, feels like if every time we're learning something new and a different way to do something and a new kind of like, oh, and we're just stacking and stacking, you never feel like you have mastery over it.
Exactly. And then you just don't have room for that higher level processing. Yes.
Exactly.
So there it is. And if you wanna see what this looks like with an actual lesson, we have created an entire library of what we call fast five literacy lessons. So these are fast five because they're hitting the phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and writing. And you can grab one of those to get an idea of exactly what that looks like.
So we'll make sure to drop that into the notes you can see exactly what that looks like. We have a number of them that span all the way from k all the way up. You can use them depending on your students. Honestly, I use these with my students who are in high school as well.
Totally. Just to build that background knowledge and that kind of thing. But that way you can get an idea of what that looks like and how that's structured so that if you want to build your own, that's awesome. If you want to jump into our Fast Five library, that's also awesome because then they're all done for you.
So especially in those days where, I don't have time to create literally anything. It's a great grab that can be used in many settings. You could use this as a tier one. The classroom teacher can use this in small groups or as a full group lesson.
Can use this in tier two or in tier three. It's kind of a, again, it's a great bridge, but the good thing about it is that you can use it across all of those settings.
Yes. Exactly. And so much fun.
Honestly, so much fun. So much fun. And and honestly, it's, again, just giving a little bit of that background knowledge and that kind of thing. So definitely try it out.
I mean, we've got yeah. Try out the free one. I think it's about polar bears. So cute.
Alright.
Well, we can't wait to hear all about your guys' experiences and what you guys think about, again, even teaching these kids in the messy middle and using lessons like our fast fives. So we really hope that you guys enjoy this episode, and stay with us for next time. See you then.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Smarter Literacy Podcast.
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