Heartland AEA Literacy Newsletter
May 2023
In the April Heartland AEA Literacy Newsletter Maximizing Small Group Reading Instruction was highlighted with a focus on the following big ideas from the article:
- Small Group Instruction is Expensive
- Differentiation by Text Level Likely Does Not Work
- Small Group Instruction Does Have a Research Base
This month the following big idea will be a focus of the article.
The ABCs of Small CGroup Reading - A: Assessment (Know What Your Students Need and Group Them Accordingly).
Assessment: The article discusses the importance of differentiated small group instruction to address the varied needs of students in a classroom. The authors recommend using reliable and informative assessment data, such as CBMs, to form these groups efficiently. They provide a list of potential assessments for beginning readers and transitional or proficient readers, including fluency measures and decoding inventories. The authors emphasize the need for progress monitoring and flexible grouping. For students who perform well on fluency screeners, observational data can provide insight into their comprehension skills, such as making sense of text or summarizing. Differentiation for groups of fluent readers may depend on factors such as vocabulary or motivation.
Assessment: Putting it All Together "We've stressed the importance of using assessment data to guide the formation of groups, but what does it look like in practice? We suggest teachers form groups based on one of three instructional foci: (1) decoding, (2) fluency, and (3) comprehension. How this looks in the classroom will vary based on the class composition and level. One teacher might have two groups targeting decoding and two on fluency, whereas another teacher might have one group in fluency and two groups in comprehension. To keep things manageable, we suggest keeping the number of groups to three or four. Moreover, once students are able to access grade-level text fluently, we suggest using the same text for the different groups."
Basics: The article highlights the importance of targeted small-group instruction for effective teaching. The authors reference a meta-analysis of small-group interventions, which found that groups focusing on specific skills were more effective than those with a more general approach. The article provides examples of how teachers can design small groups based on the essential needs of their students, such as decoding or fluency skills. The authors emphasize the importance of actual reading in small groups and urge teachers to ensure that students receive constructive feedback and support while reading.
Books: The authors emphasize the importance of selecting appropriate books for students to read in addition to considering their phonics and fluency skills. It recommends choosing books that are interesting and informative, serve the purpose of instruction, and meet the needs of students. For beginning readers, decodable books are recommended, while rich, grade-level texts are recommended for fluent readers. It is also important to update bookshelves with diverse and newer books, and to consider coherence across texts to solidify knowledge and vocabulary. Lastly, comprehension instruction should be deliberate and come from the book's content, and teachers should explicitly teach strategies and provide feedback to students.
Clear Direction and Feedback: Small group reading provides teachers with the opportunity to observe and support students' reading progress, as well as address their individual needs. Setting a clear purpose for each lesson with students and providing consistent feedback centered on the purpose of the lesson are important for accelerating reading development. Teachers can use post-it notes to provide specific feedback to students and celebrate their growth to foster a growth mindset.
Here are some additional reflective questions and resources shared by the authors of the article:
Take Action!
1. Revisit the assessments you use to form your small groups for reading instruction. What’s valuable? What’s missing?
2. Do your students need basic decoding skills? If so, decide what skill needs to be taught, deliver your instruction explicitly, and provide practice related to the skill.
3. If your students are working on fluency or comprehension, use grade level texts. Be sure to provide instruction informed by, and responsive to, assessment data.
4. List some of your favorite grade-level books. Reread them and consider the comprehension demands of each. Plan your questions and think aloud based on what strategies are needed by the reader to comprehend the text.
5. Print out some of our recommended language frames to help you provide explicit and supportive feedback to students.
More to Explore
1. http://www.textproject.org/teacher-educators/frankly-freddy/a-new-kind-of-leveled-text-meeting-the- needs-of-challenged-readers/
2. http://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/what-should-small-group-reading-instruction-look-like3.
3. https://www.readingrockets.org/article/differentiated-instruction-reading
4. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/turn-small-reading-groups-into-big-wins
5. https://readingsimplified.com/small-group-guided-reading-structure/
Schools are required to engage in evidence-based activities, strategies, or interventions across a variety of different programs, funding sources, and improvement efforts, including but not limited to the Individuals with Disability Education Act, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), and the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund. This resource is intended to support schools in selecting evidence-based approaches that best meet their school and student needs. Approaches in this guide primarily support Universal, Supplemental and Intensive Tiers. In some cases action steps for Leadership, Infrastructure, Assessment, and Data-Based Decision-Making are included in select resources.
While evidence-based approaches in ESSA, IDEA, and ESSER go by different names (scientifically-based, research-based, peer-reviewed, evidence-based), they refer back to the same definition as outlined in ESSA.Evidence-based activities, strategies, or interventions are those that demonstrate a statistically significant effect on improving student outcomes or other relevant outcomes based on the listed criteria. This guide by the Iowa Department of Education
ESSA Levels of Evidence
ESSA’s definition requires schools to select activities/strategies or interventions that have the best evidence that they will impact student outcomes. Interventions can be selected as long as they have evidence that falls into one of the following categories.
Strong evidence: Interventions that impact outcomes as evidenced by at least 1 well designed and well implemented experimental study.
Moderate evidence: Interventions that impact outcomes as evidenced by at least 1 well designed and well implemented quasi-experimental study.
Promising evidence: Interventions that impact outcomes as evidenced by at least 1 well designed and well implemented correlational study with statistical controls for selection bias.
Meaningful Impact on Student Outcomes
Not only is the level of evidence important, but it is also important that interventions have a meaningful impact on student outcomes. This impact is often referred to as effect size. Effect size is a simple way of comparing two groups: one group who received the intervention and one who did not. While a significance test tells you if the effect was due to chance, effect size gives you the best estimate of how much the intervention will impact student outcomes. Well established interventions typically have an effect size for each well designed study and with information about the effects on various student groups. Therefore, it's important to understand the range of effect sizes, average effect sizes, and effect sizes for groups of students similar to your own (e.g., FRL, IEP, EL, etc.). While there is some debate about meaningful effect sizes, this graphic shows general agreed upon meaningful effect sizes.
The Best Evidence
While schools should aim to select evidence-based approaches that have Strong (I) evidence and the largest effect sizes, this may not always be possible.As a best practice, it is recommended that schools engage in activities, strategies, or interventions that have the best evidence available for the problem they are trying to solve.
At the end of the guide are the following Appendices:
Appendix A Matching Evidence-Based Practices to Your School/District Needs
Appendix B Evidence-Based Practice Briefs
Appendix C Cross-Content Evidence-Based Practices
Appendix D Social-Emotional-Behavioral Health - Learning Concepts
Appendix E Literacy - Learning Concepts
All of the reviewed learning concepts in the following table effectively improve student learning outcomes for literacy. The learning concepts are also effective as part of universal instruction and intervention supports across various grades unless indicated otherwise. Critical learning strategies for comprehension and vocabulary also have evidence for application and student outcomes when implemented as part of content-area courses. Deep knowledge of the science of reading is necessary to teach the skills needed to master the fundamentals of reading instruction: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, writing, and language. Schools are encouraged to support teachers in learning about the science of reading. Educators are more likely to turn knowledge into practice that impacts student outcomes when they have sufficient practice, including coaching/feedback during practical experience. Districts can contact the local AEA for possible professional learning offerings focused on the science of reading.
Appendix F Mathematics - Learning Concepts
Appendix G Mathematics - Major Work of the Grade
What is Dysgraphia?
Dysgraphia is a specific learning disability that affects how easily children acquire written language and how well they use written language to express their thoughts. Dysgraphia is a Greek word. The base word graph refers both to the hand’s function in writing and to the letters formed by the hand. The prefix dys indicates that there is impairment. Graph refers to producing letter forms by hand. The suffix ia refers to having a condition. Thus, dysgraphia is the condition of impaired letter writing by hand, that is, disabled handwriting and sometimes spelling. Impaired handwriting can interfere with learning to spell words in writing. Occasionally, but not very often, children have just spelling problems and not handwriting or reading problems.
What causes Dysgraphia?
Research to date has shown orthographic coding in working memory is related to handwriting. Orthographic coding refers to the ability to store unfamiliar written words in working memory while the letters in the word are analyzed during word learning or the ability to create permanent memory of written words linked to their pronunciation and meaning. Children with dysgraphia do not have primary developmental motor disorder, another cause of poor handwriting, but they may have difficulty planning sequential finger movements such as the touching of the thumb to successive fingers on the same hand.
Signs of Dysgraphia
One of the main signs of dysgraphia is messy handwriting. Here are some of the key handwriting skills people with dysgraphia may struggle with:
Forming letters
Writing grammatically correct sentences
Spacing letters correctly
Writing in a straight line
Holding and controlling a writing tool
Writing clearly enough to read back later
Writing complete words without skipping letters
Do children with dysgraphia make reversals or other letter production errors?
What kind of instructional activities improve the handwriting of students with dysgraphia?
Instructional activities that can improve the handwriting of children with dysgraphia. Initial activities focus on learning to form letters, such as playing with clay to strengthen hand muscles, connecting dots to create complete letter forms, and copying letters from models. Once legible letters are formed, students benefit from instruction that helps them develop automatic letter writing, including studying numbered arrow cues, covering the letter with a card and imagining it in the mind's eye, and writing letters from memory. The article also recommends explicit instruction in spelling and strategies for composing. Some children with dysgraphia may make reversals, inversions, or transpositions, but these errors are symptoms rather than causes of handwriting problems. The automatic letter writing instruction has been shown to reduce reversals. If children have both handwriting and spelling problems, the kinds of handwriting instruction described earlier should be included along with the spelling instruction.
What is sentence combining?
We’ve all read pieces of student writing that go something like: “I walked to the park. I went down the slide. I played on the swing. I heard the ice cream truck. I ran to get in line …” Inexperienced authors tend to write a series of short, choppy sentences that follow a similar — or even identical — sentence structure.
Sentence combining is a technique for “smoothing out” choppy writing by varying sentence structure and making a piece of writing more engaging for the reader. In the “I went to the park” example, simply joining pairs of sentences by adding a conjunction (“I went down the slide and played on the swing. I heard the ice cream truck and ran to get in line.”) makes the piece more readable. Over time, students can progress from joining two short sentences to more sophisticated sentence combining strategies.
Why teach sentence combining?
- It helps students make their writing more readable and engaging.
- It creates opportunities to teach grammar and punctuation in a meaningful context.
- It shows students how and why to revise their writing.
- The process encourages interesting word choices and transition words.
How to teach sentence combining
Experienced writers know when to combine choppy sentences — and break up run-on sentences, too — without giving it much thought. Beginning writers, on the other hand, need to be explicitly taught. Since the most straightforward way to combine sentences is to merge two simple sentences into a compound sentence using a connector word, that’s a good place to begin instruction.
Once students are comfortable using connector words to combine sentences, they can be introduced to more sophisticated types of sentence combining, like pulling key words and concepts from an otherwise unnecessary sentence and embedding them in a base sentence.
Teacher modeling, discussion, and guided practice will help students internalize these strategies and begin to use them in revising their own writing and providing constructive feedback to other writers.
Below is a sampling of different kinds of sentence combining, including examples:
Producing compound sentences using conjunctions (e.g.: and, but)
Example:
The weather was perfect.
The girls were playing soccer.
The weather was perfect, and the girls were playing soccer.
See “conjunction ... junction” example
Producing compound subjects and objects
Example:
The book was good.
The movie was good.
The book and the movie were good.
Inserting adjectives and adverbs
Example:
The girl drank lemonade.
The girl was thirsty.
The thirsty girl drank lemonade.
After several modeled and shared lessons, encourage students to combine sentences as a part of revising their own writing. Give students an opportunity to share sentences they combined. Discuss ways the revision improved the quality of the writing.
Watch a classroom example: using pronouns and conjunctions to combine sentences (grade 2, whole-class) The teacher guides students through combining and revising a series of sentence pairs using techniques such as inserting connector words and substituting pronouns for nouns that appear more than once. Watch video ›
Watch a demonstration: 3 different ways to combine sentences
This video explains the grammar behind several kinds of connector words that can be used to combine sentences.
Collect resourcesA FANBOYS (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so) anchor chart can help students remember coordinating conjunctions they can use to combine sentences.
This Right to Read Project blog post outlines a lesson plan for teaching sentence combining using leveled, predictable books.
These Sentence Combining Cards and this Sentence Combining: Basics worksheet show some possible formats for guided and independent practice combining sentences.
Differentiate instruction
- Begin sentence combining lessons with oral practice. If writing is challenging for some students, intentionally pair them with strong writers for cooperative work so they have peer support as they transition from speaking to writing their sentences.
- Make sure students have the vocabulary and background knowledge they need to understand the sentences that will be combined.
- Use sentences from familiar books and stories for modeling and practice.
- Provide extra support by underlining critical words in the sentences being combined. For example, “The cake was delicious. The cake was chocolate.”
- Vary the number and complexity of sentences being combined depending on students’ ability and experience with the strategy.
Related strategies
Our instructions for using sentence combining encourage a more explicit approach to using the strategy than what is included in some of the research listed below.
Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing next: Effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high schools — A report to Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, DC Alliance for Excellent Education.
Robinson, L. K., & Howell, K. W. (2008). Best practices in curriculum-based evaluation & written expression. In A. Thomas & J. Grimes (Eds.), Best Practices in School Psychology V (pp. 439-452). Bethesda, MD: National Association of School Psychologists.
Saddler, B. (2005). Sentence combining: A sentence-level writing intervention. Reading Teacher, 58, 468-471.
Strong, W. (1986). Creative approaches to sentence combining. Urbana, IL: ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills & National Council of Teachers of English.
Registration is open for the June training Teaching for Impact to be held June 13-14 at the Iowa Events Center in Des Moines. Sponsored by the Iowa Department of Education and the Iowa Area Education Agencies, the training is for all educators supporting learners with disabilities. There is no cost to attend. The purpose of the training is for educators to develop and expand knowledge and skills related to the education of learners with disabilities from birth to age 21. Emphasis will be placed on integrating information into practice across a variety of educational settings in these content areas: college and career readiness, mathematics, literacy, early childhood, leadership and positive learning environments.
Three dynamic speakers have been invited to headline Teaching for Impact including Jennifer Wolfsheimer, Hedy Chang and Clay Cook. They bring a wealth of personal and professional experience to the field of education.
Educators and providers from early childhood to high school, school administrators, AEA professionals and higher education faculty supporting pre-service educators and providers will all benefit from the training. Learn more on the Teaching for Impact registration site.
We are excited to share the following literacy courses to deepen your understanding of evidence-based instructional practices to impact student learning in the areas of reading and writing. We will continue to add courses through the spring for summer and will update this list.
