Heartland AEA Literacy Newsletter

Welcome back to the new year. There are several important updates below. Please take time to check this out and make sure your colleagues are also aware of these topics.

FAST updates

• FastBridge has a number of important updates. Read about them here. FastBridge Summer 2022 Release Summary.pdf Key points are:
• New and improved PM setup interface is coming soon and requires district opt in
• New scoring directions for EarlyMath Number Sequence
• New training and certification for some tests
• aMath 9-12 out of lab status
• New benchmarks for CBMmath CAP, COMPefficiency and aMath 9-12

• The "opt in" for the new PM setup interface in FastBridge is not currently accessible for Iowa schools. FastBridge is working on a method for district managers to request the opt in and we will communicate when this is available. See: Iowa News! for more information.
  
  
• Do not wait to set up your PM. Go ahead and set up PM using the current PM setup interface, even if your district intends to opt in for using the new interface when available. The PM plans will function exactly, only the look of the screens used to set up the PM changes with the new interface. See: What Next? Setting up PM and Interventions
  
  
• Remember: Student Success is where interventions need to be entered for state reporting, healthy indicators, and ELI. You can skip the intervention part of the PM setup in FastBridge and log interventions directly in Student Success. See the link above for more information.
  
  
• FastBridge’s Word Segmentation Certification #2 has an error in the scoring. Use the first certification and the practice tests for now. Please make sure all of your staff who might be certifying on this test are aware and skip certification #2.
  
  
• The screening window opens Monday. Please pace yourselves and understand that there could be issues that interfere with rosters, especially early in the year. See: Iowa: Planning for the screening window
  
  
• Seeing ‘extra’ students in the system? Ensure they have been exited in your district SIS and they should resolve within a couple of weeks. Please don't ask us to remove extra students now. Visit Iowa Resources - Rosters and Student Data
  
  
• New staff using FastBridge this year? Please share FastBridge for Iowa: A newbie (& veteran) guide to system and process differences for Iowa with them to help avoid confusion when using FastBridge.
  
  
• Bookmark the System Status page to check for known system outages. Check there first if you encounter a problem with one of the data systems.

Sign up for Early Warning System email updates.- share this link with others to join this email list. We use this list to send out emails like this one to people working with MTSS/Early Warning Systems tasks in FAST and Student Success.

Connor Hood

Tina Wahlert

ELI Requirements

ELI requirements have not changed but here’s a very brief version of the big ideas, followed by a link to the full ELI guidance and support documentation, as well as some frequently asked questions:

• ALL students with a literacy status of At Risk are required to have weekly PM. Parent/family communication and intervention during this time are strongly encouraged, but not required by law.
• Students with a literacy status of Persistently At Risk are required to have intervention, progress monitoring and parent/family communications about the child’s needs and school efforts to address those needs.
• Click here to access all of the ELI support documents, guidance and legal requirements: https://educateiowa.gov/pk-12/instruction/literacy/early-literacy-implementation-eli

What about parent/family communications?

Put your parent hat on for a moment and play out what you’d like to know if your child was found to have an emerging or ongoing concern with literacy. You’d probably like to know that there is a concern, what the school is going to do about it, what can be done about it at home, and how everyone will know if the interventions are working. You would want periodic updates.

When you frame the communication this way, you will meet the requirements for most ELI elements:

1. Communicate the literacy status and the data used to make that determination.
2. Describe what the school is going to do about it.
3. Share ideas for things the parent/family can do at home to support literacy improvement.
4. Plan for regular periodic progress monitoring updates to check on the effectiveness of the intervention activities and share these with parents and families at least as often as you share report card information.

What should we do about intervention and progress monitoring?

It is true that ELI says you are not REQUIRED to provide intervention until the child is below benchmark twice in a row, but we've always strongly encouraged everyone to go ahead and intervene now, rather than wait and possibly let the gap grow wider for the child between now and the next screening window. For At-Risk students who don’t REQUIRE intervention yet, you might support them by tightening universal instruction or by applying specific interventions right away. The key is that early intervention while problems are smaller means that gaps are easier to close. Waiting may mean larger gaps to close later. If the team chooses to not intervene, watch the progress monitoring data to see if the child is closing the gap or falling further behind and act if needed.

For the students who were Persistently At Risk after the previous screening (last spring) but scored above benchmark in the current screening (this fall), intervention is not required but progress monitoring is required. Monitoring allows you to make sure they don't fall behind again after the intervention is removed. If a student does begin to falter, the intervention can be reinstated to prevent regression.

How often do we need to monitor progress?

The ELI requirement is weekly progress monitoring for grades K-3, with frequent monitoring encouraged in grades 4-6. The benefit for the child is that weekly data using measures sensitive to improvement on the general reading skill will provide feedback within a few weeks to tell whether or not the intervention is working.

Can we monitor progress off of the student’s grade level?

Yes, but… the practice of monitoring students off grade level has some limitations and quirks. The FAST CBMR measures were intentionally designed to minimize the need to measure off-level. FastBridge developed the progress monitoring passages to be a bit more “readable” in order to get a larger sample of reading out of lower-performing students. A larger sample of reading on easier passages means better sensitivity to growth. As long as the student can read 10 or more words correct per minute on the grade level passage, there should be limited need to use an off-level measure. Generally, about 98% of students should be able to have their reading growth monitored using grade level materials.

Also, be aware that off-grade level progress monitoring goals are based on the grade level of the measure, not the child’s actual grade level expectations. This may produce a false sense that the student is making good progress towards an end of year benchmark that was actually intended for younger children, while actually not closing the gap on the appropriate grade level measure. Even though monitoring on grade level at a lower frequency can help keep an eye on the grade level target, fewer data points means a longer time before it is clear that the intervention is (or is not) working.

There are 5 million English learners attending public schools today. Every educator must therefore understand how to design and implement Structured Literacy among this diverse population of students. This session will address the evidence-based practices for incorporating intentional oral language strategies within Structured Literacy lessons. Participants will learn the cross-linguistic features of several languages and how to design reading instruction which integrates first and second language knowledge. Strategies will be modeled and practiced for ease of implementation.

Here the links to the hour long webinar and the slide deck to accompany the webinar:

The Science of Reading and English Learners

Slide Deck

"Reading Comprehension is not a skill someone learns and can then apply in different reading contexts."

The Comprehension as Skill Myth

How have we come to think of comprehension as a skill? I believe a major reason this has occurred is because we have talked and written about comprehension in the context of related skill-like abilities. Discussions about reading often include the topics of phonics, fluency, and related skills, such as phonemic awareness, together with comprehension.

A More and Accurate and Complex Model

Several lines of of inquiry have recognized the true complexity of reading comprehension for some time. Nearly 20 years ago, this complexity was captured by the RAND Reading Study Group. As part of their 2002 report, they conceptualized reading comprehension as a combination of factors within three different categories: the reader, the text, and activity of reading.

Importantly, the RAND Reading Study Group viewed these various elements interacting within a a sociocultural context that involves factors such as where the reading occurs (e.g.school or home), how much support there is (e.g. individual, teacher-caregiver-led or group activity) and what cultural value is placed on reading by students' families, peers, racial and ethnic groups and other groups that are central to the students' identities.

Taken together, it is easy to see how any one individual may have multiple levels of comprehension ability depending upon what they are reading and why they are reading it. As a result, comprehension cannot be reduced to a single notion because it is not a single ability.

The Role of Knowledge

Chief among the factors influencing reading comprehension is background knowledge. Research clearly shows that how much readers understand about the text's topic before they read it is a major factor in how much they understand while and after they read it. Unfortunately, much of the efforts directed toward improving reading comprehension have neglected building background knowledge. There are widely used strategies for "activating" background knowledge, but they do not necessary develop new knowledge.

What Knowledge Does For Comprehension

Why is knowledge so critical for comprehension? To begin with, it provides a framework for organizing incoming information and guides us as we read through a text. We better understand what the topic is and have expectations about where a passage may be going. By doing so, knowledge keeps us on track and prevents us from going down “blind alleys” in our under- standing. This framework also gives us a place to anchor new information in memory and associate it with past knowledge. We use these building blocks of the new and the old to con-struct an initial understanding of what we are reading and then continuously revise and add to it as we move through a text. It is this integration of the new information in the text with what we already know that brings meaning to what we read.

Background knowledge also allows us to make inferences and fill in information that is not explicitly provided. Authors rarely tell us all we need to know in order to under- stand a text, so we need to fill in some of the details with our back ground knowledge. Knowledge also enables us to more easily recognize which of the multiple meanings of a word is appropriate for the context. For example, when reading a passage about baseball, knowing that the word pitcher refers to a person rather than an object could be critical for comprehension

Implications for Instruction

It should be evident from my comments that improving reading comprehension is a complex process that requires multiple levels of instruction and practice. Clearly, building background knowledge that is both deep and broad is needed to lay the foundation for comprehension and for further knowledge acquisition. However, students also need high-quality reading knowledge acquisition with literacy in ELA instruction.14 In these more integrated approaches, students build knowledge at the same time they are learning reading-related skills. This involves a concentrated effort to build rich and connected ideas about social studies, science, and other subjects during ELA lessons. Such instruction does not necessarily replace the science and social studies instruction that may be taking place at other times but rather supplements it. As with other content instruction, reading materials in an integrated ELA program are selected to build knowledge. Instead of reading, for example, about volcanoes one day and Rosa Parks the next, which has often been the case in ELA instruction, reading materials are arranged by topic in a logical and sequential manner and form an integrated, content-rich curriculum. In this way, knowledge is acquired and accumulated over time.

Implications for Assessment

The multidimensional nature of reading comprehension presents a significant challenge for assessment. Because of the numerous factors in play, a reader’s comprehension ability is more fluid than often thought. In other words, any one individual will have different levels of ability depending on what is read and for what purpose.

Maybe the problem is not only the instructional practices teachers have been encouraged to use but also the way we are assessing comprehension. An alternative approach would be to teach children using an integrated literacy and content-rich curriculum and to test their ability to read and comprehend passages covered in that curriculum. In other words, offer a better match between instruction and assessment. Don’t just test the skills and strategies that have been taught; test the specific content-area topics that have been taught. Such an approach would be fairer and more equitable for all involved. Teachers would have a clear idea of what content within which to imbed their literacy instruc- tion. Students would have the opportunity to learn from progress they are making.

Here are Heartland literacy staff you can contact for support and resources:

Region 1 Christine Esser

Districts: Adair-Casey, Audubon, Carroll, Coon Rapids-Bayard, Earlham, Exira-EHK, Glidden Ralston, Guthrie Center, Panorama, West Central Valley, Winterset

Region 2 Barb Shutt

Districts: Adel-DeSoto-Minburn, Dallas Center-Grimes, Perry, Van Meter, Waukee, Woodward-Granger

Region 3 Jodi Cross

Districts: Carlisle, Indianola, Knoxville, Martsensdale-St. Marys, Melcher-Dallas, Norwalk, Pella, Pleasantville, S.E. Warren, Twin Cedars, Interstate 35

Region 4 Jenny Sumner, Robin Koskovich, Lynn Bowen, Destiny Eldridge, Angie Lorenz

Districts: Des Moines

Region 5 Janelle Thompson

Districts: Johnston, West Des Moines

Region 6 Emily Reynolds

Districts: Ankeny, Saydel, Urbandale

Region 7 Judy Zeka

Districts: Ames, Ballard, Boone, Collins-Maxwell, Colo-Nesco, Gilbert, Nevada, Ogden, Roland-Story, United

Region 8 Becky Hinze

Districts: Baxter, Bondurant-Farrar, Colfax-Mingo, Lynnville-Sully, Newton, North Polk, PCM, S.E. Polk