So I think what we started to realize was, oh, hold on. What if instead of focusing on each of these individual discrete skills, we can start to think about the routine that helps house all of those skills.
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 today we're going to discuss something so important.
Why reading scores don't seem to be moving even though we know more than ever about effective literacy instruction.
So according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the NAEP, only thirty one percent of fourth grade students performed at or above the proficient level on their twenty twenty four reading assessment, which was two percentage points lower compared to twenty twenty two and four percentage points lower than twenty nineteen. And honestly, this can be so frustrating as educators because we all want to do the right thing. We want to do right by the research. And most importantly, we want to do right by our students.
I've had several conversations with educators lately. And we all know that the stakes are so high. Literacy is one of the major ways in which we participate in the world, right? It's how we take information in.
It's how we share information out. So we want students to be growing in their ability to do this effectively.
Again, just like you said, we have the science. We have the research. So why are our scores keep going down? We finally felt like, hey, we're heading in the right direction.
And then we just have this data that is telling us otherwise. And for anyone sitting in education who cares about their students, which hopefully is everyone, right? For sure. That's really disheartening.
It is. It is.
And I think it's one of those things of like, we're putting in the work.
We're doing the things. We're listening. We're following the research. We're trying to put initiatives in place to make sure that this shifts.
So I think seeing that happen year over year, you know, it was one thing when we felt like, oh, COVID happened. Like, maybe that was part of the dip, but it just keeps Going. Keeps happening. Yes.
So recently, I was scrolling through Instagram like I do, and I saw so many posts that were saying things like, well, now we've been sold a story on phonemic awareness and why Hagerty missed the mark and what curriculum publishers need to be doing to be held accountable.
Or I saw another one that said, why I'm not teaching syllable types and what you should do instead. Or how we're teaching authors purpose all wrong and the new approach that changes everything.
And honestly, I understand why those conversations are getting attention. Right? It definitely stopped me in my tracks of like, wait, hold on. And I had to step back for a second.
And I think the frustrating thing for so many of us is that we want to do everything in our power, again, to do the right thing in our day to day instruction. We do not want to feel like we're going to be on the wrong side of a Soul to Story feature. Yep. Scary, right? Oh my gosh. I mean, honestly, and I think it did a good job of highlighting some things that we really needed to address in our instruction. But also, think it led to a lot of fear.
Oh, yeah.
And just wanting to make sure that we're doing the right thing. And so I think some of these posts that make us feel like, oh my gosh, but I'm using Hegarty or I thought that was the right thing. I think that can be disheartening too because you're like, I'm doing all the things that I'm being told to do.
And I think at the same time, we can look to those posts because the national reading data continues to show us that the majority of our students are not reading proficiently. So if we know more than ever about literacy instruction and the research, why aren't we seeing the movement that we expected? Has us leaning into some of these headlines or Instagram posts with full attention because honestly, we might be seeing the same thing in our own instructional settings of, wait, hold on. Is this actually connecting?
Yeah. You know, it's so funny that you mentioned those posts because I was seeing the same thing this weekend in my own social media. And I saw these posts, and it was basically the same thing you were saying. This is why this isn't working. So you need to do this, you know, or like, have you been doing this and it's not working? I'll show you the new way to do it and everything.
Immediately I like and this was just kind of glancing through this post, but I immediately brought back this feeling of that. Okay, crap, what I'm doing is not right. So now I have to do one more thing or learn one more thing. And then I was able to like take a step back. Well, no, I'm not in that place anymore. I know what I'm doing is working.
This is just it is. It's like a scare tactic almost, and it does. It builds a lot of fear into you and you have that immediate reaction that for me as a teacher was just so automatic because that's all I felt throughout my career.
And it was immediately exhausting. Immediately, my brain was like, woah. And again, I took a step back. I was like, I'm not in that space anymore. I'm free from that. I know what I'm doing is working.
So I took that deep breath. I was like, I do have confidence in myself, but I was immediately thinking of all the other people who were seeing this and being like, Oh my gosh, I must do this. I must do this. I must invest more money. I must invest more time. It's like.
Deep breaths, everyone.
You know? Absolutely. It just It always feels like, Oh, my goodness. And I think like we were saying, I don't want to be on the wrong side of this whole story.
I don't want to feel like I'm doing it wrong. And so I think it does when we fear that we're not doing it right. We know that the stakes are so high. We care so much about our work, about our kids, about the future Yeah.
That it's easy to really fall into these traps of, oh my gosh, I'm doing it all wrong. I knew I was gonna be doing it all wrong, and and you're not. And so I think if you take nothing else from this conversation away, which we have lots to share, you're doing so many things right. The things that you're doing likely are right.
Yes. We just need to make sure that we're framing it and that we have confidence in what we're doing, like you mentioned. Once you can step back and say, oh, no. I have confidence in what I'm doing.
That's what we're looking for. Exactly.
And so I think the challenge is that these type of conversations, so things like should we even be focusing on phonological awareness? Should we be teaching syllable types? Do we need to worry about author's purpose?
Have us questioning the research or questioning our proficiency standards. Those might be Common Core standards, district, state, province standards. Whatever the standards are, we start coming back to, well, hold on. Do we even need to be doing this?
But here's what we know. The decades of research that leads to what we call the science of reading, body of evidence, have helped us to understand the cognitive neuroscience, how the brain is gaining those literacy skills, what needs to come together, and the importance of each of these skills, the importance of these standards that have been put into place. The science has brought so much clarity, and we are clearer now than we've ever been about what students need and the specific skills that we need to make sure that we are addressing.
And as educators, whenever we're told that what we're doing isn't working either by ourselves or by others, we immediately lose that confidence.
And then the structure of everything that we're doing feels really shaky because we just don't have that stable ground beneath our feet. So we immediately go into this panic mode, kind like what I was just talking about, and tell ourselves we need the next best thing or we need to throw out so much of what we're doing rather than taking that step back and having that reflection and actually evaluating what is working.
What do I need to fix? What am I seeing that gets me results versus what can I tweak? And this is why people are always saying that that pendulum is constantly swinging from one side to the other. And honestly, we just don't need to shift the pendulum, right? We need to trust the process.
We need to trust the research. We need to trust ourselves. And in order to do that, we need to make sure, one, yes, do have the understanding. We have that actual scientific cognitive neuroscience understanding, But then we also need to have patience.
Absolutely.
And I think the problem is that it's not about the skills being wrong. It's that we honestly, we need to move past that debate. I like how you said that. The pendulum's got to stop shifting. To do that, we need to elevate the conversation. And so it's not about the skills. We've identified the skills.
And then when the reading scores didn't quite move, we got stuck questioning whether the skills were wrong. But that's not the conversation. Those skills are solid. And when we think about the cognitive neuroscience, it comes back to what we always talk about the literacy processing triangle.
We need to connect sounds to visual print, the letters, and then we need to be able to pull that to meaning. That's it. That is the cognitive neuroscience. That is the complete underpinning.
So I come back to that triangle all the time to think about, okay, let me think about my instruction, and let me think about how it's connecting those pieces.
And so the skills are important. We've identified those skills, and we need to keep teaching them. But we can't keep viewing these skills as a checklist that we need to work through mastered. Yep, I've checked that one off.
So we're done and we're moving on to the next one. I think that is where we're actually running into difficulty. So it's not that the skills that we're teaching are wrong. It's just that we are viewing this as a I teach it once, they learn it, I've hit that proficiency standard, and I move on.
And that's not actually how the brain or the cognitive neuroscience works. That neural connection keeps happening over and over and over as we grow, as we get older. That's continuing to happen. So we need to make sure that we're continuing to support that ongoing development forever.
Yes. Yes. And so much of that checklist model is based still very much on the Industrial Revolution format of education where it's like, I went through this check and I went through this check. So by the time you go through all these checks, you'll have a perfect model. At the end, it's like, no, it's a lot more complicated than that. Absolutely.
And it takes a lot of repetitiveness practice, patience, maturity to be able to build those strategies, those skills, and to get to the point where we want kids to be reading and thinking and comprehending and doing all the things that we want them to do.
Exactly, exactly. And so I think that's the biggest piece that we really need to think about. And hey, I love a good checklist. I am here for a good checklist.
And I think it's still helpful for us to be able to think about if we look at the proficiency standards, great, we want to make sure that we're addressing those within our instruction. But we can start to take a step back and broaden that view a little bit. Think about it. Hegarty, as an example, was never meant to be a checklist of phonological awareness skills without application.
That's not how they designed that. That's not what their intention was. The purpose of developing those phonological awareness skills is that we want students to understand that sounds connect to letters and visual patterns, and that does support decoding and encoding. But what it also does is it also helps us to gain mental flexibility.
Right? So when you start flipping phonemes and thinking about what happens if this sound changes, what happens if that sound changes, You are moving into cognitive flexibility. You are working on working memory development. If I'm gonna give you these sounds and not pair the letters with the sounds, I'm developing working memory right there.
And that's a really important executive functioning skill. We're also focusing on attention and attention to detail. Switch the first sound, not the last sound. So I think sometimes we actually need to take a little bit of a step back and think about, wait, hold on.
What if this is more than what I'm actually seeing right in front of me? I think sometimes it can be, oh, we were sold a story because they didn't tell us that we were supposed to pair it with the letters. Well, the cognitive neuroscience is clear that we are developing that sound level awareness in order to connect to the visual patterns. But that doesn't mean we have to connect it every single time for it to still be valuable.
You know, when I think about the syllable types, and that's another kind of big one that's coming up right now of like, oh, that requires a lot of mental load for students and maybe that's not the best way to teach decoding. It's not necessarily just about the decoding. When you teach syllable types, you are helping give students the ability to infer or predict what a vowel sound is going to do. So you're actually teaching some higher level inferences and predictions.
Or you're helping them to create categories, which is something that we think about from a vocabulary perspective of how are we categorizing information. It's almost like having animal taxonomy where it's like, oh, within the animal kingdom, where does this fit? That's what syllable types will do for words. And so when we can start to do that, we're showing kids that, oh, words actually do make sense.
And there is some rhyme and reason. And does every single syllable type fit perfectly and fit the rule exactly? No. No.
No, it doesn't.
Nothing fits perfectly in English.
Yeah, right? Exactly. But what we are doing is we are giving some sense of reason so that we can make an inference or a prediction. And our inferences or predictions always perfectly right?
No. But that's something to learn too. There's an executive functioning skill there. Oh, well, didn't work.
Let me try a different strategy. But it is a very effective strategy.
Same thing. The purpose of determining the author's purpose in a story is not necessarily just to be able to check the box that, oh, we've talked about author's purpose. But it's to understand that when we go into reading, we can think about what was somebody's intention behind this. Do we agree with that intention?
Do we disagree? Do we take what we think we were supposed to take or did we take something else? It's really high level. It's not just a, oh, we did an author's purpose worksheet and because we hit that, like, good, we're good to go.
It's it's more about the analysis and synthesis Yes. Of reading comprehension. Right? So it's so much deeper than just the individual skills.
And so all that to say, yes, those individual skills, those proficiency standards that we're talking about, one hundred percent necessary. And instead of debating each of those individual skills and kind of getting stuck and I see a lot of times people asking for, can you provide specific research article or evidence that this one very specific strategy is going to be effective?
I think we need to step a little bit back from that. Because having come from a research background, the first thing that I can say is there are so few studies that are actually going to isolate the two variables that you're looking at at that level. There has not been peer reviewed evidence based research that's going to support whether syllable types or teaching phonological awareness in this very specific way or teaching an executive functioning strategy in this very specific way are going to yield results. That's not really what the research is necessarily designed to do anyway. But what the research does tell us is it does tell us that, hey, this neural connection is happening between the sound structure, the visual structure, the meaning structure, and executive functioning is kind of overlaying all of that. So if we can take a step back to our individual skills and think about, okay, how do those fit into that conversation?
That's what we're really trying to do.
Exactly. And I love how you said it is. It's deeper than those individual skills because mastering a skill in isolation does not automatically mean it's going to show up in that reading, the authentic reading or writing.
What we really need to do is be explicit in our instruction and not just about the what or the how of this particular skill or pattern or whatever, but the why. Having our kids understand the why are we even doing this? Why are we going through and learning our PA and our phonics? Showing them the big picture.
And again, we also need to know what the big picture is as well. And like you said, it's not just the literacy skills, it's the mental flexibility, it's the stamina, it's all of those things. If you think about it, like you could create the most beautiful, perfect lesson, but if we don't demonstrate how that lesson applies to their authentic reading and writing, then we really aren't leading our students to the end of their literacy journey. We're just kind of giving them, here's your first stop, and then they're left to wander on their own.
And they're like, well, this is silly. I guess I don't really need to know this, or like, I'm done. And so they never make those connections of being like, Oh, this is why I was given this strategy or this tool or whatever to be able to metaphorically cross this bridge. Yeah.
I love that. And you saying that makes me think of the whole, you know, kids doing the, why? But why? But why?
And I'm like, yes. That's a really good question. And I know from my own work with students, but also just my own kids, so often they'll be like, well, I'm never going to use this in my real life. So I don't care about it.
And I hear that from my own kids all the time. And I'm like, no, no, no. But you're missing the point. What you're actually learning is this.
Maybe you're not going to use that very specific skill. They might be like, I could care less about what a closed syllable is. But what you're actually learning is how to put things into effective groups, how to make an inference, how to make a prediction. Like it's actually bigger than that.
And you think as soon as I can start to help them understand, oh, the whole point of this in this case is so that we have a model for our reading and our writing and reading and writing are important because that's how we participate with and engage in the world.
Then all of a sudden they're like, oh, Okay, cool. But I think as educators, you make a good point. We need to know the why too. And I think when we can know the why as opposed to just having a curriculum handed to us and just dropped in front of us to say, all right, these are the skills, these are the standards, go. Then it makes it more clear.
And so it's like you said, it's just a step not even a step back, it's a step up.
Yeah. Right? Like we're elevating this conversation. We're not saying that what we've been talking about isn't important, it is. Right. But let's move on to the next step of this conversation.
Rather than getting the next best thing, I'm putting that in quotation marks, or like the next new thing, again, take that time to evaluate maybe how can I make this deeper instead of so surface level? Because I think that's where really this conversation is headed. Yeah, absolutely.
And I think one of the ways that we started to see that come together is when we work with students, we are always working to root our instruction in those five core components of reading.
So the National Reading Panel did this huge meta analysis in the year two thousand. So it's been a minute at this point that this research has been around.
But we really started to think about, okay, so we know we need to hit phonological awareness. We know that we need to hit phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension. And then more recently, we've really recognized that there's a reciprocal writing process there. So we need to make sure coming back to the cognitive neuroscience that that neural connection is happening bidirectionally. So it's supporting both reading and writing. And then also, were like, oh, yeah, executive functioning, super important. So we're thinking about all of those things.
But I think when I first started, it was very much thinking about all of the individual discrete skills. So it was very much like, Okay, I'm going to teach kids how to blend phonemes. Check done. Okay, now I'm going to teach them how to define this specific word or use this specific comprehension strategy.
Right? Okay, great. Check, done. I taught compare and contrast. Check, done. That's not exactly it.
And I think what I started to realize like we were talking about is, wait a minute, hold on. That neural connection has to keep happening as kids get older, as they engage with higher level texts. And so even coming back to the proficiency standards, a lot of them they are stacking. And what you start to see is, oh, yeah, we've learned these things.
We've been practicing these things. Right? They didn't just start like, oh, this was a fifth grade standard that's never existed anywhere previous. They're stacking too.
And so, I think what we started to realize was, oh, hold on. What if instead of focusing on each of these individual discrete skills, we can start to think about the routine that's almost creating a container, if you will, that helps house all of those skills. So for us, that might look like phonological awareness. Okay, there's a lot of phonological awareness skills that we want students to have.
Right now, it looks like a lot of the standards say, great, you teach that in K one, maybe grade two. But then you're done. Okay, great.
What we're realizing is, okay, awesome. If we need to provide explicit instruction there, that's great. But we want to contain. We want to keep that container and we want to keep coming back to it so that students remember, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is why I do it.
And same thing, I don't just do it so that I can check off the I did my PA block. I'm doing it because I recognize, oh, this is building the ability to sound out unfamiliar words as I'm reading or as I'm spelling. If I don't know how to spell it, it's gonna give me that strategy to break it down, or it's gonna give me that working memory kind of development and that kind of thing. It's all good.
I even love to think of when we talk about the, like, mineral pathways, think of it as a literal path. If you walk down a path once that has It's not really a real path. It's going to be a path someday, but you're just walking down it. You probably like, if you wouldn't walk down it again, like, oh, yeah, like, I maybe remember it, but like, you might still get lost and everything.
I need that pathway to be a trench. I needed to have been walked so many different times that now there's actually like a rut in the the path so everyone can follow it very clearly. I that's what I need the pathway to be. I love that.
I think that's such a great visual. And I as you were saying that was just thinking about hiking. You know, I know you and I hike often. And so, yeah, we're not just gonna go trudging up through the mountains.
If we do it once, we're gonna be lost for sure. Yep. But if we can go somewhere that somebody has made a literal trench, an actual pathway, then we're like, okay, I'm not going be lost because I'm just going to follow this path. Right?
But if you're just out in the middle of the mountain, I'm lost. I'm lost.
Good luck.
So for again, kind of going along with that. So for example, if we have that executive function routine and we have a part drill, a specific way we work through phonics instruction, a vocabulary routine, fluency routine, comprehension routine and a writing routine, each of these individual skills that we are supporting live inside each one of these routines.
Yeah, exactly. And so for example, if we're thinking about a phonemic awareness skill, it's living inside of that repeated phonological processing routine with an understanding of how it connects to the bigger picture. So we keep coming back and telling students we're doing this because I want you to use this strategy when you come to an unknown word. And look, here's the thing.
You don't just come to unknown words when you're just learning to read. Yep. You will come to unknown words your entire reading career. I have to think about how to spell words sometimes when I'm writing something.
I have to be like, wait. Okay. Hold on. Let me break it into syllables. Let me break it into sounds.
That's what we're trying to do. It's not something that gets fully mastered by the time we finish first grade. Same thing if we're thinking about author's purpose. Like, it's not this one single lesson.
It's that, oh, Okay. If I have a comprehension routine that has really helped me to develop more of a thinking pattern, I know when and how I should be thinking about kind of the author's purpose or where that actually comes in. Because I remember even as I mean, think I was in tenth or eleventh grade. We had to do this author's purpose as part of our English class.
And I remember hating that because I remember feeling like there's a right answer and there's a wrong answer. And I took the wrong answer for what I thought the author's purpose was. And that wasn't whatever the teacher had from whether that was their perspective of the author's purpose or that's what the curriculum said the author's purpose was. But it was wrong.
And I was like, I hate this. This is dumb.
And that same experience.
Isn't it dumb? I mean, I don't hate to say that because I think there can definitely be different perspectives on that. And there are some times where your students are just wrong. What they took away from the text is not what was there.
However, I think if you can start to think about that a deeper way as part of a routine of when we're thinking about comprehension, this is what we're doing. And there's a place in which it's like, oh, I want to consider what the author's purpose may have been so that I can make my own thinking deeper here, that's where students will start to engage better and they'll start to hold on to some of those skills that maybe right now they're just losing. They're not retaining them. They're not thinking about them in the right way.
Exactly. And this is all coming back to our students getting the whole picture, understanding the what, the how, the why.
So the question isn't so much, should I be teaching this skill? But it's where does the skill live in the bigger picture? It's like you said, author's purpose teaching that so that way further down the road when maybe they're getting to higher level high school classes or even college, you're in Socratic seminars asking you, and it is a kind of a question, what was the author's purpose? And the whole class is having a very large conversation on why they think the author's purpose was this.
Here are the details that they are pulling that give them this idea. It's that deeper level of all the work we're teaching them.
Yes. It's that's that's where we wanna be. And honestly, I think that's where so many of us as teachers, educators wanted our students to be. We want them to be able to interact in the world.
That's the end goal. So we're really thinking about how do each of these individual skills that I'm teaching get us there. And so I think if you can look and take that way down, you can start to feel like, okay, okay, this is what we're trying to do. And so I think if that literacy growth is just not there, if we are feeling like I am doing all the things that I have been told to do and yet these reading scores are not moving, it's not because we need to add more skills, right?
It's not because, oh, we need to teach different skills or, oh, we need a new curriculum. It's not about that. It's about really thinking about how does the research actually support what it is that we are doing and how do the skills that we're already teaching really connect to that true endpoint like you were talking about, that metaphorical bridge. And it's not just checking off this long list of skills that need to be addressed and then being like, great, checked that, moving on.
That's not really what it is. But I think because of the way that our proficiency standards or Common Core standards or whatever standards it is that we're using almost feel like a check, check, check. Even some of our scope and sequences that we use are like an actual check, check, check.
Right.
And it makes sense. I mean, again, creating a checklist is kind of like step one. It helps you figure out where you need to go, what you need to do. Like you're saying, it's not that we hate checklists. It's not that we're but if we just do a checklist model, our students are going to be such surface level learners.
They're not gonna be applying all of these skills that we want together, and they're not really ever gonna be that independent learner that we want them to be. And again, the end goal is independent learner with deeper thoughts and reflections on their literacy lessons and being able to really, as educators, have the time and space and that reflection of, am I really hitting all these goals with my students? How is that looking? And is it all coming together?
Oh, I love that so much. So I mean, think we always like to keep this actionable if we can. And if you want to see what we're doing, we put together some core literacy routines just that really model what this looks like in our instruction. And so we have this free guide that you can download at smarterintervention dot com slash guide.
And that just helps to provide a little bit of a model of, okay, when I'm thinking about each of these individual skills, where does it fit in? How does it fit into this particular routine? I think that's our next step is really thinking about how do the skills that we're already teaching really fit in. We know that these routines or just overall the five core components of reading plus the reciprocal writing process and executive functioning, that aligns with the research.
We know that. We know that. That's clear. We've got decades of research proving that that's true.
So how do the things that I'm already doing, how does that fit in? And how can I make sure that I maintain that routine, that I hold that routine not just as a checklist but something that keeps happening? So if you wanna check that out, grab that smarterintervention dot com slash guide.
And in our next episodes, we will be sharing more about these routines and how you can incorporate them into your setting.
We can't wait to hear your thoughts and how these routines can start shifting some of these isolated skills into something even bigger for your students.
Absolutely. And so again, if you leave with nothing else, know that you are doing the right things. You are already doing it. Right? You don't need to add anything else. I also want you to know these routines aren't about adding something else. They are about helping to create that container, to create that next step, that through line for all the work that you're already putting in.
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