Heartland AEA Literacy Newsletter

Last Friday the winter screening window closed for gathering data on students. Starting this week the focus needs to be on what does the screening data tell us about the reading health of our students. It is critical to respond to the data with urgency - not "hair-on-fire" urgency, but an instructional plan urgency. There are still 18 weeks of instruction to accelerate students' literacy learning. We still have time. Dr. Hosp shared these big ideas in a blog to help frame our thinking.

Data is our friend, not our enemy. Just because we don’t like what the data says doesn’t mean it is wrong or bad. In fact, data is needed now more than ever so we understand where we are and where we need to go.

Are students reaching benchmarks? Universal screening data for reading is vital as it tells us about the reading health of our students. It doesn’t tell us what to teach, we need additional data for this, but it does tell us if our students are reaching benchmarks, meaning they are on track to becoming successful readers. Start by determining the number of students who have reached the winter benchmarks.

What are we looking for in our universal screening data from fall to winter? It is important to track students’ reading growth over time. We want to see more students reaching benchmark and fewer students at risk as we move from beginning to middle to end of year. If we don’t see a bump in our data, we need to ask what we are doing for ALL students (Tier 1):

• Are we focusing on high-priority skills that support decoding and language comprehension (Simple View of Reading, Gough & Tunmer, 1986)?
• Does our teaching follow the Science of Reading? Our instruction should be explicit and systematic, providing students with lots of opportunities to respond with immediate corrective feedback to support their learning.
• Have we incorporated enough practice for students to achieve automaticity and mastery? Students should have access to practice material in and out of school to help them learn critical reading skills to mastery.

Tier 1 instruction is the primary solution for addressing missed opportunities to learn and for filling in skill gaps due to disrupted instruction. Within our Tier 1 instruction, we need to incorporate ways to support students both in whole group and during small-group differentiated instruction.

What about our students who are at risk? What can we do for them? Our universal screening data tells us who needs additional help, but we still need to know what specific skills they need help with and how to help them.

Easy? Well, no. It requires time, energy, and thought. As a wise colleague once said, “Thinking is required.”

Reading groups for students who are at risk: What to teach at Tier 2. Some students will require additional reading support beyond what is provided in Tier 1. We need to spend intervention time wisely so that every minute is focused on teaching skills that lead to reading success. Therefore, before we jump into teaching, we should conduct further assessments on foundational skills like phonemic awareness and phonics to determine which specific skills students know and still need to learn.

Once we know what to teach, we need to know how to teach it. As we noted above, the Science of Reading informs what our instruction should look like. This is true across tiers of instruction. The science tells us our instruction should be explicit and systematic, providing students with lots of opportunities to respond with immediate corrective feedback to support their learning. More on this below.

Small-group Tier 2 instruction is often about intensity. Students who are at risk need more focused instruction, and small intervention groups can provide this by including the following instructional features:

• Explicit: Provide additional modeling so students can see, hear, and observe what you are asking of them. This increases their chances of doing it right the first time.
• Systematic: Use the same instructional language and routines and only change the skills being taught. This allows students to have a schema of how the lesson will go so they can focus on the skills being taught. Use a structured scope and sequence that systematically moves from easier to more difficult skills.
• Lots of opportunities to respond: Have students respond multiple times, spaced over time, and using various activities. When learning words, typical learners may need up to 12 practice opportunities, while students at risk may require up to 25 opportunities (Lemoine, Levy, & Hutchison, 1993).
• Immediate feedback: Letting students know they got it wrong right away is more important than letting them know they got it right. Practicing a skill incorrectly makes it harder to learn the correct way.
  • For example, have you ever called people by the wrong name, and they did not correct you until after you said it incorrectly a few times? What happened the next time you went to say their name? I bet you faltered because you first retrieved the incorrect name. To recall the correct name, you now must override your first response and work harder to remember their correct name. This happens every time we let students practice a skill incorrectly! We make it harder for them to learn the correct response.

We know reading is hard, it does not come naturally, it’s hard for many students to learn, and it takes hard work on the teacher’s part. The good news is we have universal screening tools to help us identify those students who are at risk and diagnostic tools to help us determine what to teach. We also know if we use our knowledge about the Science of Reading, we can help all students become readers.

Want to learn more about practical solutions for Tier 2? Watch the on-demand webinar with me and my colleagues, Carrie Thomas Beck from CORE and Monica Ng from Pivot, during which we will provide practical solutions for using data to intensify instruction in Tier 2.

Heartland AEA literacy consultants can help with both data-based decision making and making instructional plans to accelerate student literacy learning.

References

Gough, P.B., & Tunmer, W.E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6–10.

Lemoine, H. E., Levy, B. A., & Hutchinson, A. (1993). Increase the naming speed of poor readers: Representations formed across repetitions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 55(3), 297-328.

McKinsey and Company., (July, 2021). COVID-19 and education: The lingering effects of unfinished learning. New York: McKinsey & Co.

When students experience difficulty learning to read, they often require intervention to target the specific areas of need (Carnine et al., 2006; Gersten et al., 2008). Dynamic and responsive data-based individualization is necessary to improve overall reading performance and close the gap between students receiving intervention and their grade level peers. When students are not making desired progress despite receiving data-based individualization, like what often happens during Tier 3 intervention in an MTSS framework, further intensification of the intervention is necessary (Austin et al., 2017; Vaughn et al., 2012; Wanzek & Vaughn, 2010). School personnel must identify ways the instruction can be intensified to increase student progress. This brief and infographic show multiple areas to consider when intensifying support.

Getting young children ready to read is one of the most important and rewarding things
a parent or caregiver can do. Reading is an essential life skill that not only determines success throughout the school years, but also later in life. The world that today’s young children will inherit revolves more and more around information and the printed word, and because of this, the importance of being a proficient reader cannot be understated. While most of the formal aspects of

teaching a child to read can and should rest with educators, there is much that parents/ caregivers can do to build on and support the work of schools. Many parents/caregivers today are keenly aware of the importance of reading to their children from an incredibly young age. Much has been written about early exposure to books. Many also understand the value of talking to and with their child. However, they may feel less able to help their child learn the sounds of speech and to connect these sounds to letters and words on paper. Reading Ready is made possible by the Benedict Silverman Foundation whose mission is to promote equity and excellence in public schools by supporting research-based literacy instruction. This parent/caregiver guide is one way the foundation fulfills its mission to make every child a reader. Written by early reading expert Dr. Katharine Pace Miles, Asst. Professor of Early Childhood Education at Brooklyn College, CUNY, the goal of this guide is to give parents/caregivers a toolbox of easy to implement strategies that can be used to help children in Kindergarten and First Grade lay a solid foundation of word analysis and word reading skills that will lead to overall proficient reading.

The activities are organized in two parts. Part One: Sound Practice, includes activities 1-7 that focus on building children’s knowledge of spoken sounds, and Part Two: Word Practice, includes activities 8-11 that help children read simple words and sentences. All the materials and activities are included in the guide.

Daily Activities

Five minutes of sound practice
Pick 2-3 different sound activities and
complete 2-3 sets per activity.

Ten minutes of word practice
Do at least one set of word chains
and one set of word writing/mapping.
Read a set of decodable sentences
or read a decodable book.

This research article discusses the impact of reading difficulties on students, focusing on two key areas: word recognition and language comprehension, associated with dyslexia and developmental language disorder (DLD). The author emphasizes the role of educators in accelerating students' development in these areas, highlighting the power of general education teachers, special education teachers, and multi-tiered support teams in schools.

The article covers why teachers should feel empowered to support students with dyslexia and DLD, provides explanations of these disabilities, addresses misconceptions, and outlines instructional strategies to enhance word recognition and language comprehension. It stresses the critical role of educators in providing effective intervention, as psychologists and neuropsychologists may diagnose dyslexia but lack the training for optimal word recognition instruction.

Furthermore, the article underscores the potential for schools to improve equity by implementing effective multi-tiered support systems, preventing the need for intensive interventions later on. It also challenges the misconception that only a small percentage of students have dyslexia or DLD, asserting that many students in an average classroom may benefit from explicit instruction in these areas.

The article discusses the underdiagnosis of DLD, highlighting that only about 20% of affected students are identified, and emphasizes the need to debunk stigmatizing beliefs that students with learning disabilities cannot learn or are lazy.

The research distinguishes dyslexia and DLD from other students, placing them earlier in their developmental trajectory, and provides a visual representation of the continua of word recognition and language comprehension development. It aims to raise awareness about these learning disabilities, promote early screening, and provide support to under-identified students.

The article further explores the definitions of dyslexia and DLD, emphasizing their neurobiological origins and the importance of accurate instructional support. It addresses the confusion surrounding terminology and encourages educators to use the preferred term "dyslexia" to combat social stigma.

Finally, the research delves into the challenges of identifying dyslexia and DLD in schools, advocating for universal screening and emphasizing the differences between reading screening and learning disability identification processes. The article concludes by discussing effective instructional practices for word recognition and language comprehension, citing specific intervention programs and assessments backed by research. It encourages continued implementation research to understand the consequences of instructional approaches and provides resources for educators to enhance their understanding and practice.

Here is a link to the complete article:

New and Not-Well Known Research about Reading Disabilities: Teachers Want To Know

This presentation shares the most recent research about effective writing instruction—and what that means for literacy learning. Presenter Dr. Leslie Laud has led multimillion dollar federal research grants designed to find the lightest lift and highest yield approaches for raising not just writing outcomes but overall ELA proficiency.

Dr. Laud will share how prioritizing writing offers the greatest promise in improving the writing and reading skills of our students who struggle the most. She will explain recent findings while illustrating how educators can give writing additional attention in everyday lessons, drawing examples from districts that saw significant gains after using the approaches she will share.

Dr. Laud will discuss:

1. High-impact strategies with the strongest evidence of effectiveness
2. Tips for how to strengthen the impact of curricular materials you may already have in place
3. Encouraging stories of success
4. Ways to align writing instruction horizontally and vertically
5. Methods that can be applied immediately

Registration Link to Webinar