Bridging the Gap: From Three Cueing to Structured Literacy

Episode Notes

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Narrator 0:03
Welcome to Literacy Talks, the podcast for literacy leaders and champions everywhere, brought to you by Reading Horizons. Literacy talks is the place to discover new ideas, trends, insights and practical strategies for helping all learners reach reading proficiency. Our hosts are Stacey Hurst, a professor at Southern Utah University and Chief Academic Advisor for Reading Horizons. Donnell Pons, a recognized expert and advocate in literacy, dyslexia and special education, and Lindsay Kemeny, an elementary classroom teacher, author and speaker. Now let’s talk literacy.

Stacy Hurst 0:48
Welcome to this episode of literacy Talks. My name is Stacy Hurst, and I’m joined by Donell pons and Lindsay Kemeny, and for those of you who been listening this season, you know that we are highlighting the idea perspectives journal that is celebrating the 75th anniversary. And today we have a very special guest.

Lindsay Kemeny 1:10
I’m so excited to have Margaret Goldberg here with us. Welcome Margaret. So glad to be with you guys, and we are going to be talking about her article that she wrote with Reed lion scientific research and classroom practice, how structured literacy spans the divide. I love this article, and you start right off talking about how a lot of the content in this article is the result of a partnership you forged in 2020 and I to better understand how the experiences of a scientist and a teacher could be melded and used to guide the application of the science of reading. So I just thought, Margaret, we could start off by you telling us a little bit about this partnership.

Speaker 1 2:00
So it started when I was teaching first grade during the pandemic, and it was nuts, right? You’re teaching on Zoom, and then you’re trying to figure out how to teach, and then also, like getting the opportunity to meet with people from all over the world, because this zoom world opened up where you could have meetings and get to know people in a way that really hadn’t been available to us before. So at that time, I was working on a paper with Claude Goldenberg, and I don’t remember this at all, but apparently, while we were discussing what we were seeing happening with the science of reading movement, apparently I said, Well, we don’t want another reading first. And he was like, Really, why not? And started probing and asking me questions about it and Claude being Claude, he decided to find the contact information for read lion and to put us on a zoom together, where the three of us were talking about what had been learned from reading first and no child left behind. And so I was in this zoom conversation with Reid, who was, at one point in time, the most influential person in the science of reading, before it was ever called that, for a good span of American current education. And so I was really floored by the conversation, because he wasn’t the arrogant jerk that I thought he was gonna be. He was actually really nice and humble and asked good questions and listened to me and like seemed to get a lot of out of the conversation. And I was completely surprised by this, and so we ended up forming a partnership to work on another article that we did together, and then we were working on a presentation for Ida, which we did recently, like we’ve done a few things since then, and I think I’ve kind of realized that he is the exemplar of what I most want researchers to be able to do, which is to have productive conversations with teachers as equals.

Lindsay Kemeny 4:04
Oh, yeah, totally. And, I mean, I so agree, and I think that is that’s the problem, right? Is this gap, and so we need to listen to each other. So I think that’s huge. So I love that you started, you know, this relationship with him years ago.

Speaker 1 4:21
I think part of it is, yes, we have a gap, definitely, but some of the efforts to span the gaps have felt a little unequal in footing, where it might be, like the researchers are the experts, and they’re going to tell the information to teachers, and teachers need to figure out what to do with it, and this felt really different, because this was teachers have questions and want to know things from researchers who can help answer those questions, that we can talk about how to refine instruction. And felt like Reed really cared about what was actually happening in my classroom and the logistics of it, the real life, kinds of things that get in the way of the best. Its plans. So in that way, it felt a little bit different.

Donell Pons 5:05
So Margaret, you’ve said some really interesting things that I hope people caught on to. One was this, this zoom. There’s one of these positive things that can happen with zoom as you get to meet people you maybe never would be able to before. So I love hearing a positive out of zoom, because there’s a lot of challenges. The other piece that I think is really interesting. You mentioned a few movements or things that people might remember about reading, and one of those, No Child Left Behind, and some others, and I remember getting profiled, for lack of a better word as a parent, because I had a child with dyslexia who was quickly picked up in preschool, and using funds from No Child Left Behind, I had home visits, but the on the ground piece, this piece that was missing, somebody somewhere had made a decision, maybe in good faith, but on the ground, it wasn’t working, because I had someone come visit who didn’t have a clue what they were seeing, because there were indicators I didn’t know I was looking for help, but they didn’t have the answers for me either. So you’ve hit on some really key pieces there, Margaret and that piece about we might have good intentions, but then there can be folks on the ground, like yourself and others who can help inform and say, but here’s what it really looks like. I love that explain that a little bit better, because you said Reed was willing to listen. Well, it started

Speaker 1 6:10
with us talking about three healing because I think part of the thing I was trying to pull out of him was, Is it possible that all of No Child Left Behind and reading first was actually intended to uproot three kiwi, and I had just had no idea that was when I was getting my credential, it was the start of my teaching career. And he said, Yes. And I was like, whoa. Because, like, a lot of people have thought like Emily hanford’s podcast was the first time they had ever heard about this. And that’s true for a lot of veteran teachers who had been teaching during No Child Left Behind and reading first. And I was like, Wait, so that’s what this was all about. And he’s like, Yeah, I said something along the lines. Well, then why didn’t you just tell us, like, why didn’t you just come out and say there’s some stuff that you’re doing that doesn’t work to teach kids how to read. Here’s what the research shows, and like, get us to where we are now faster. And his answer totally floored me. It was, I didn’t want to be disrespectful to teachers. You guys know so much you know about your students, you know about your classroom, you know about the parameters that you’re working in. You understand your context. Who am I as an outsider to come in and start a conversation with this is what you’re doing wrong? And he talked about how His hope was that if he just helped teachers understand more effective methods of teaching, then we would pick up those methods, use them, see they were working, and let the less effective stuff go. And obviously it didn’t work out that way, but realizing that that was the intention completely caught me off guard.

Lindsay Kemeny 7:55
I love that that was the intention. Did you know? No,

Stacy Hurst 8:02
and I live very through it. Yeah, weird. It

Lindsay Kemeny 8:05
reminds me of when, like, I was taking a class with my sister, who was a teacher at the time too, and she was like, teachers need explicit instruction too. Like, just tell us. Like, tell us. So it kind of makes me think of that, Stacy, were you going to say something? I was

Stacy Hurst 8:21
just going to say I lived through that as well. We actually had a reading first district in southeastern Utah that ended up with amazing results from the of course, they literally had Louisa Moats coming and training the teachers as well. But I remember hearing about that and thinking, Well, that sounds interesting. I wonder what they’re doing. And I had this really. I did have access to the National Reading Panel, so I was actually teaching phonics was my focus at the time, but I had all these other messaging about three cueing and balanced literacy that we should have been doing, right? And so I don’t think at the time, for me, there wasn’t enough cognitive dissonance, frankly. And I think having that been explicitly stated would have created it, and so we would have probably worked a little more efficiently to figure that out. So I wish as you were talking, I’m like, oh, did we have access to that? Was Was somebody saying that somewhere? And we just didn’t know.

Lindsay Kemeny 9:28
So I want to talk more about with three cueing. So, you know, three cueing is this idea, if you’re listening in and not sure, three cueing is this idea that readers use various cues to figure out the words as they’re reading, and so it’s using context or the sin or syntax most popular the pictures. Look at the picture. Does it give you a clue? And well, I would just love for you to kind of share how you came to understand the problem with three cueing, because I think. Was really interesting.

Speaker 1 10:00
I’ll try to tell it concisely, because I feel like people may have already heard me talk about this before in more detail, but basically, I was hired as a balanced literacy coach and interventionist, and I had been teaching for probably close to 10 years as a fourth grade teacher, and I had felt really successful with balanced literacy. So I went into a school where only between two and 3% of the kids were reading proficiently, and my job was to roll out the kind of instruction that had worked at my high performing school. And it didn’t take long before I realized that was not going to work for a variety of different reasons, including one time a teacher was teaching a lesson where she was talking about, like, we’re all good readers, some of the kids called out, no, we’re not like. The cultural divide was inherent, and so the intervention program that had been purchased for me to teach was lli just grounded in the three cueing system. We were supposed to be doing the Fontes and Pinel benchmark assessment system grounded in three cueing. We’re supposed to roll out units of study grounded in three cueing like it was everything our district was all about at that time. And as I was teaching, and as I was testing kids and talking with teachers, what I realized was that when we talked with students, what they would say is, the hard part of reading is the words, and we weren’t doing very much to help them with that hard part of reading. And I realized I really had no clue how to help a kid with the words, because I would say things like, sound it out or try it, and they’d look at me and be like, I don’t know, and you didn’t teach me how. And so I ended up realizing I needed to learn phonics, and I needed to learn how to teach phonics. Luckily, there was a structured phonics program that was on the shelves of the school had been purchased with a grant and never implemented, because we, the teachers, had never received training in it. So I started teaching some groups of students explicitly and systematically, and I kept my ll groups going. So I had two parallel tracks of instruction going on in my intervention room. And what I realized was with the kids that I was teaching guided reading and through cueing, what was happening was they were becoming more and more dependent on me. They would get to a word they didn’t know, and they were trying so many different strategies all at once, it was overwhelming, and they would look at me and just pray that I would help them and tell them what the word was. And what happened with the kids that I was teaching the sound out words is they were becoming those capable, confident readers who wanted to take their books and go find some place to cuddle up and read their books. And I realized the kids in the groups, they were all similar to each other. What was different was me and what I was explaining to them about how to approach reading. So I started doing a whole lot of research, trying to find out, like, Why does, why do some methods seem to be working better than others? What’s known about how many kids I should expect to be successful readers by the end of first grade? Because that was the focus of my intervention. How do we read words? Is the sounding out thing? A reliable strategy? All sorts of questions like that, and it was before all of the stuff related to making the science of reading accessible, accessible to teachers, had come to light. So this is before the reading Lake. This is before any of the conferences that most of us go to now. It was before the Facebook groups, all of that. And so I was reading these really tense scientific articles, and like trying to make sense of it, and what I realized was there was this language that I hadn’t been taught like, I didn’t actually know terms that were being used in the scientific literature. I didn’t know how to understand, like even the kinds of studies that were being described. So I started studying really hard every single night, trying to figure stuff out, and talking with the teachers I worked with, which was really helpful. It meant I had to summarize, I had to explain, I had to develop my own PDS, to try to describe, like, this is how fluency is developed. This is how I’m understanding it. And I feel like, when I look back on that, it was probably the hardest route on to understanding this stuff, but it did make me really passionate about trying to explain it more clearly and excessively to teachers.

Lindsay Kemeny 14:28
I’m curious why in the first place, you decided to do the two tracks with your students, like, why didn’t you just jump all in to the, you know, the systematic phonics? Or were you not sure and try. And

Speaker 1 14:42
I had people. This was a balanced literacy district. I as a coach and interventionist. I had a coach who was an administrator who came in to watch me teach. We were supposed to do Lesson Study. It was kind of like a Reading Recovery experience, but using lli, it was in my job description. The curriculum I was supposed to teach and train teachers in was written into the job description, so you

Lindsay Kemeny 15:05
kind of did it in secret. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 15:07
It wasn’t until, at some point, I was talking with the other first grade teachers at my school, and they were like, the only kids in this school who are learning how to read are the ones that you’re singing, and it’s only some of the kids that you’re teaching, students had that teachers, oh, a teacher. So they were like, gonna change the way we’re teaching, and you need to stop teaching lli. And I was like, Oh, now I have a cover, because coaches are supposed to be responsive to teachers needs, right? If teachers are asking something from you, you can’t say no. So now I had my cover for the administrators

Lindsay Kemeny 15:44
who were watching me. Wow. Well, how powerful that the teachers realized that you know and you know, and then wanted to change. Well, what’s

Speaker 1 15:54
funny is this ties back to the earlier conversation we were having about read that is exactly what he thought would happen is that if teachers saw more effective instruction, we would let the other strategies go. Right?

Lindsay Kemeny 16:06
Yeah, wow. So what advice would you give someone who is in a situation where they are, hey, they’re supposed to be teaching in a way that they know is not aligned with research? What would you say to them.

Speaker 1 16:21
I mean, it’s trickier than like, obviously what I want to say is, do what I did and be defiant and teach the way that you know about closer to or teach the way you know about like, obviously that’s, that’s the thing that I want to say. But I actually know it’s a lot more complicated than that. I know that alignment across a school is one of the most important things to ensure student success. So if one teacher closes their door and was like, I’m using a different scope and sequence, I’m using different teaching methods, the chances of the kids actually having a really great experience of kindergarten, followed by first grade, followed by second grade, that’s going to be consistent and ensure that they’re mastering the foundational skills that they need. It’s not as great if we go rogue. And so I think now I kind of look at it as how can we make those kinds of changes together at a pace that allows the adults to make sense of what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and to be in step with each other so that no kid ends up having a different experience at the school because of the lottery of who your particular teacher was at any particular year. I don’t know. I kind of never thought I would say that, but it’s where I’m at now. Does that make you think you do disagree?

Lindsay Kemeny 17:39
Well, I know it’s hard because I’m like, because I am a teacher, and I’m just thinking, you know, if the whole system, if their whole school, is like that, I still would be like, I’m closing my door and I’m gonna try to make changes, but I’m not gonna keep teaching this, you know, because I know it’s not helpful. So wouldn’t anything be but it’s hard because, like you said, the alignment is going to be huge, but if you’re aligned to something that doesn’t work, that’s not going to work either. So

Stacy Hurst 18:07
yeah, and Margaret, I saw you and your principal present was at the reading league conference. I think that we went to that whole session was so fascinating to me, because together, you guys really highlighted those challenges at the very specific junctures that everybody experiences them. What I think I loved most about how you were talking about the change that you systemically were helping to make together was the amount of time that it takes, and you were very candid about that. And I feel like sometimes, systemically, we’re looking for silver bullets or and the quick answer is, close your door and do what you know is best, right? But it’s not sustainable. What advice would you give? And Lindsay just highlighted this too, and I know I went from teaching first grade as well to being a literacy coach, and it wasn’t until I was responsible, in a sense, for that school wide data that I started really seeing those patterns. They may leave my class doing well, but then in second and third grade, is that sustainable? What advice would you give to people working within that system who are trying to make changes that are aligned.

Speaker 1 19:23
It depends on what the issue is. I feel like, if the issue is that you don’t have a good scope and sequence for foundational skills, like, that’s the perfect kind of professional learning opportunity to all get together and all look at it and be like, Okay, what’s missing? Why is it missing? Where are we, you know progress monitoring to make sure that kids are mastering these skills. What’s our school wide system for making sure that we can ensure that every single kid is we know where they are on the scope and sequence, and we know where they need to go, like those kinds of problems you can solve together as a team. I feel like when it comes down to you’re looking at the individual lesson plan. Hands, and they’re not super strong. That’s a different question, where you’re trying to figure out, well, what exactly is missing from our program, and sometimes you don’t know that until you’ve taught it with fidelity for a year. And like, I never thought I would say that, like, you actually need to try it, and you need to give it a whole hearted attempt in order to be able to know where the gaps really are. I say that as somebody who refused to do that a few times in my life, because I was like, I know better. I’m looking at this. I don’t like it. I’m gonna make those changes. And then, like, a couple of times I was like, Oh man, that’s why they had us do that. Like, I never did it. Now I’m gonna have to back up and put that back. You know, just looking at it and being like I probably should have given it a more wholehearted try and then have the conversation of how these lesson plans need to be supplemented or augmented in a way that’s coherent. You don’t know that when you’re new

Donell Pons 20:55
to it. Well, I appreciate that one. Margaret, thank you so much for saying that one is the time that’s needed often, right. In order to do this kind of work, we want quick results, we feel the pressure. We want to be able to show something, and yet it does take some time to get this right. I really appreciate that.

Lindsay Kemeny 21:13
What about someone that’s holding on to those beliefs? How do you interact with them most

Speaker 1 21:17
of the time? I acknowledge how much sense. A lot of those make right, like if you actually think about it, there’s a reason why those beliefs were generated. They were generated because people were operating just with their own experience of what reading feels like for them, and their observations of what they were seeing and the kids in front of them. And so they make sense. We know differently because we know of things that were discovered through the brain scans and through the research that was not done in classrooms in some instances, or was done in classrooms, right? Like a good portion of that kind of clinical research was interventions that were done in classrooms, but in a way with greater intensity than a classroom teacher usually is able to provide. So usually, what I try to do is acknowledge why those things make sense and admit that I used to think them. So, for example, the belief that good readers don’t process every letter and every word. Like, yeah, I totally thought that, because as I read, it doesn’t feel like I’m making, you know, like the cognitive connection between individual letters and words, it feels like I’m just watching a story unfolds. And if you ask me to find where something happened in a book, I’m gonna go back and it’s gonna feel like I’m skimming and scanning and trying to find the section of the text, like that idea that that reading is skimming is it makes sense based on our own experience. I’m trying to think of some of the other ones. Like there are all sorts of beliefs that people have that aren’t actually true about how good skilled readers read, because we underestimate the amount of automaticity that we have with some of those foundational lower level skills. But I feel like one of the things I most often do is say, like, Oh yeah, totally. I thought that too. It made sense to me. Here’s what I thought. Is that what you’re thinking and be like, and then actually I learned something different. This is the thing that I learned, and this is how I think about it. Now, does that come up for you guys? Yeah, yeah.

Lindsay Kemeny 23:22
And the thing with three cueing is that for some students, it really doesn’t matter. You can do three cueing and they’ll learn because, because they’re gonna learn no matter what. Yep, right? Yep. And so I think that’s where sometimes they hold on to that, because they’re thinking, Well, I’ve done this, and it worked, and you might not even realize it. It didn’t work for most of your students, if you’re, like, in K and one, because if they’re just using those predictable, repetitive texts, it works. It sounds like they’re reading. So you really have to, like, look closer, or once they have, you know, harder texts, then you realize they’ve been relying on those and they’re not reading. Yeah.

Speaker 1 24:03
Or even worse than that, you have the experience like me, which was it didn’t get uncovered in third and fourth and fifth grade, right? Like I was the product of whole language. I was never taught how to read using phonics. I was never taught how to spell. I read a ton, a ton, a ton, and I figured out through statistical learning quite a lot about how our written language works. But then when I was an adult, and I had been teaching for 10 years, and I was trying to figure out about how skilled reading works, and I’m reading all of these scientific articles that had words that I had never seen before, I had no idea how to tackle those words. I started realizing that I could not retain the names of the researchers. I couldn’t retain the vocabulary that I had never encountered before. I was having a hard time being able to spell some of the words that I had seen in print, but I like, just, I was like, I have no idea. What the order of the letters are. I think these letters are in the word, but like how to put them in place. And it wasn’t until I started reading about three cueing and how we use context to predict words, and how we’re going to draw from the words that we know and put them in the place of what the unfamiliar word is, that I started realizing, oh my gosh, that’s how I read. And when I started teaching my first graders, systematically and explicitly how to decode words, I started realizing that there weren’t all these science like silent letters in English. Like, oh my gosh, I G, H is a way to spell, yeah. Like, I had no idea. I just thought G and H were usually silent, like in a word, like ghosts, you know, I had no clue, no clue. And so I was learning along with them. And there was a period of time where, like, I got all up in my head and I could not read without paying attention to the spelling patterns that were in the text that I was reading. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I’ve killed the joy of reading for myself, like how I was afraid I was gonna do for my kids. And thankfully, automaticity, it’s real. And once you’ve got it, you can go back to the experience of, like, just getting lost in the in a text. But to say more concisely, I think there are a lot of adults who think that three cueing was effective for them, and if they look instead at how well they spell and what they do when they encounter unfamiliar words, they’ll realize I don’t have a problem with memory. It’s not that other people are just smarter than me, or that they know things that I don’t know. I’m actually not drawing out as much meaning from the text, because I’m relying on these pretty laborious strategies of predicting and guessing and confirming my guesses. And if you can actually unlearn those habits, which you can, it took me a little while, but you can, then all of a sudden, you can read as well as those people who seem to have really great memories.

Narrator 27:05
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Donell Pons 27:47
know, Margaret, I have, gosh, I appreciate so many things you’ve said. I hope our listeners are catching every bit of this, and we’ll listen to it, because I’m going to. But you also mentioned in your article a group of people that we kind of touched on but haven’t talked about much, and I loved what you said. And it’s parents and guardians of children who are struggling with reading and some of the shame and blame that goes on when we’re not teaching appropriately because we can’t get there. And so then it this kind of dialog shifts to well, what are you doing at home? What aren’t you doing? What could you be doing more of tell us a little bit about that. Because, boy, I really appreciated that.

Speaker 1 28:20
Um, I think that that tends to happen because teachers are working as hard as we can, like there is no way to work harder than you are when you are trying to manage 25, six year olds, especially on a day like today, where we have Rainy Day recess like it could not you can’t work any harder. So you can work smarter. You can work in concert with the other teachers at your grade level and with the teachers above and below you. You can work with good leadership. You can be part of a team like there are all sorts of things that we can do to be able to make the job that we’re trying to do more manageable so we’re able to focus on the good stuff, on the right stuff that’s going to make a difference for kids, but I feel like a lot of times the blame happens because teachers feel like we have tried as hard as we can, and we’re at our wits end, and you’re like, I need help. And it’s true, you need help, but the help you need isn’t necessarily just for the parents to read out loud to their kids more often, or for like parents to provide more support with homework or whatever it is, sometimes what you need is from your colleagues to try to figure out is the method of instruction that we’re using working and if so great, how do we know? And if not, what are we going to do about it?

Lindsay Kemeny 29:34
Yeah, I always think of it as like I as the teacher. I’m going to do the heavy lifting, I’m going to do the heavy lifting, I’m going to do the instruction, and I would love parent support, because they’re going to need more support practice reading, so if you can listen to them as they’re reading, like, that’s wonderful, but it’s more it’s on me. Like, I feel like it’s more on me. And sometimes I think it gets shifted the. Reason this child is having a hard time is because the parents won’t fill in the blank. You know what I mean? And it’s just like, it’s got to be and it’s hard because we do have a lot on our plate, but it’s like, okay, it’s, it’s my job, and I’m not going to shift the blame to someone else, which sometimes gets and I can. I’ve experienced this as like, a parent too, right? With a son with dyslexia, where and myself, like, I really was like, Oh my gosh, like, what I I’m doing all the same things I did with my older boys, and he’s not learning, whereas I kind of before incorrectly thought, I guess, you know, if students struggled, I kind of thought, Well, if the parent was working with them, you know. And I mean, I feel sad that I think that. And then it took me doing all the stuff, probably working with my son, you know, more than anyone else, and he still struggled. So it really like,

Speaker 1 30:56
yeah, and I think part of it too is if we understand what we’re asking the parents for like, asking a parent to teach their child how to read. For me as a public school teacher, I don’t think that that’s appropriate. I think it’s my job to do that at school, but where I really appreciate parent support is when it comes down to that kind of distributed practice that we need where, like, we only have between my school between 830 and three o’clock to be able to provide instruction. But for some kids, they need more opportunities to practice, and it would be really great if they can get it distributed in those later hours, three o’clock to bed time, a few sprinkled reads of the text that we were doing in school. Or some, you know, for our little ones, like more opportunities to practice saying the names of our letters or whatever it is that we need, but that’s different than teaching, like when what we’re asking for is help with additional opportunities to practice. That’s different than your asking a parent to take on the primary responsibility to teach kids what to do with the words that are in the text, or any of the other tasks that might come up.

Lindsay Kemeny 32:00
And that’s why, like, I do those take home decodable books, because if I just say, hey, practice at home, they’re not going to have the kind of text for a first grader that they need to be practicing, because you go to the library and all those beginning texts are repetitive, predictable texts where they have to use the three cueing system. So set those parents up for success by, you know, sending home something that they can practice.

Stacy Hurst 32:25
Yeah, I think it’s for parents and for teachers too, right? When you get in a situation where you’re kind of mystified, why isn’t this student progressing? I’m working as hard as I can, and whether or not they think the parents have something to do with it, just the resources they have access to as a teacher to help get to the bottom of how to help that student, and let alone provide the parents with, like Lindsay was just saying, adequate and and the appropriate resources as well. I teach in higher ed now. I’m teaching pre service teachers, and I very quickly realized there are some things I can literally pontificate about, but I have to back it up with something like that, because I realized that I was telling my students, telling is not teaching. I realized the this is on you. You’re the teacher. You need to, like Lindsay was saying, do the heavy lifting. The second you have a student who’s struggling, you need to look at what you’re doing your practices. But then I realized very quickly, I need to help them to know the resources to go to. And Marga, I know you have talked a lot about systems you’ve worked in, and I feel like you really are like an ideal literacy coach. I was not an ideal literacy coach, but I do remember there were teachers who were willing to reach out to me and say, what, you know, help me figure this out, and others who were maybe too prideful to do that right, like I’m the teacher, I can figure this out. And so I guess my question for you would be, I’m trying to teach my students early on, go to your literacy coach. You need to be friends with them and the speech and language pathologist and use your resources. But what do you do as a coach, or anyone who’s in a coaching position with those teachers who might feel a little reticent to reach out?

Speaker 1 34:20
I feel like there’s a couple of different models that happen for coaching, and the one that I was first taught doesn’t work. And that model is you just work with the willing, and it’s kind of like therapy, like you ask the teacher, what’s the thing that you’re really wanting to explore in their practice? And then they tell you, and then you’re like, the person who listens to them and helps them, like, work on this thing that they were wanting to work on. And the reason why that doesn’t work is because everybody is trying the best that they can, and most people don’t actually know the thing that they need. If they knew the thing that they would need, they probably would have done it already, like ask the colleague next door to them to help them with that thing. So the. Idea that we’re supposed to all figure out our own improvement plan. Actually, it just doesn’t work. The other reason why it doesn’t work is because some people are already maxed out, and they’re like, I don’t actually want to talk to you, like, how is this going to be useful to me or something? And so that doesn’t work either, because then you’re only coaching the support some of the kids in the school and some of the kids are not actually going to receive the help that you have to give because the teacher is not feeling open to it or up for and so I’ve had experience with that method of coaching. I know it’s really popular, and I definitely don’t recommend it. Am I

Stacy Hurst 35:35
doing that was the one i Yes, yeah. It was training, yeah.

Speaker 1 35:39
So that kind of inquiry, best inquiry, first kind of approach. Then there’s another kind of coaching, which is implementation coaching, or student focused coaching. And both of those are like, we have a thing we’re trying to do school wide. So we’re trying to implement this curriculum school wide, or we’re trying to improve our student data school wide. And so then you actually have a project that has been determined for you by school leadership, hopefully the principal and the instructional leadership team. And that makes it so everybody is in need of coaching, and it makes it so that it just becomes a normal part of the school day to have help. It’s a normal part of conversation and the lunch room or after school or whatever it is. I was talking with a first grade teacher who was meeting with her mentor teacher who’s helping her clear her credential, and she was saying, like, I feel kind of nervous because you’re going to come in and you’re going to watch me while I’m teaching. And I overheard this, and I was like, I was in your room yesterday. What do you mean? Nervous? Just like you don’t count that point where you’re like, everybody expects you to be in their room. Everybody expects that you’re either waiting for them to ask for help, or you’re gonna, like, jump in where it’s needed, or you’re circulating and listening to kids, and you’re gonna talk to them afterwards about what you noticed in the students, like, it’s just normal.

Stacy Hurst 37:08
Yeah, that’s great, and that is assuming administrative support too,

Speaker 1 37:15
so yes, and collegial respect and trust and a shared vision for trying to get better like I think that’s one of the things that I have noticed now. I’ve worked at a variety of different schools, it feels like the most important thing for a school to be able to get better is to be humble, and when the principal is humble, when the instructional leadership team is wanting to learn together, when all of the teachers in the school are part of a culture that’s grounded in we are always trying to get better because our kids deserve that, it makes it much more conducive to coaching.

Stacy Hurst 37:51
Yes, Margaret, I

Lindsay Kemeny 37:53
wish you were my coach. Oh, fun. Okay, so in the article, towards the end, you say, or you end read lion together say. That brings us back to our an important goal of this article to demonstrate that collaboration between scientists and classroom teachers is non negotiable if the successful implementation of evidence based reading approaches such as structured literacy is to be achieved. So what do you think that collaboration should look like?

Speaker 1 38:31
I’m still figuring it out in collaboration with researchers. So for example, my school has a partnership with the sail lab out of Massachusetts General Hospital and our primary researcher there is Tiffany Hogan, and her team is really helpful because they have an understanding of implementation science, like that’s one of her areas of interest. And what I notice in our conversations is that it’s quite different than when I’ve talked with other scientists. So sometimes, when you talk with a scientist and they tell you, like, this is how you should do it. It’s going to be an intervention like this. It’s going to be you and the kid, one on one, and this is what you’re going to do, or something like that. And you’re like, what about the other 24 kids? They don’t have an answer for it. Or they’re like, hi, I don’t really think about that. Or, like, is there some way that someone else in your school could do, you know, like, they’ll and you’re like, No, like, that’s actually just that’s not how it works here. Whereas, when I talk with Tiffany or the people that are part of this project with us, they look at things instead of being problems, like, there are a barrier to implementation. What can we do to help you figure out how to get over that barrier? And so some of the things are like, how do we make sure that tier one instruction is as strong as it possibly can be, so that then we’re reducing the needs for tier two instruction? How do we make it so that tier two instruction is really easy? To implement it. What do we need and what do teachers need in terms of, like, really clear lesson plans in order to understand exactly what’s necessary? Like, those kinds of solutions are much easier to find when you have researchers who don’t see the real life of a school as an inconvenience, and instead, they see it as the place where the work needs to take root.

Lindsay Kemeny 40:21
It’s exciting. We talked about Dr Tiffany Hogan and how she said at Big Sky, you know, teachers are the ultimate implementation scientists. And I was just really, I don’t know, excited by that, and it’s true, like implementation science is where it’s at, and so neat when you are, you know, working right there with the scientists in the classroom. I mean, I just think that’s where we’re going to really help a lot of teachers, educators. Yeah,

Speaker 1 40:50
one of the things that Reid said, he said so many things that kind of blew my mind, and this one I’m still recuperating from, it was in the science, in the controls experience of a scientific study, they will find out that something is hugely impactful. And this is the thing, whether it’s the medicine, whether it’s the intervention, whether it’s the habit, whatever it is like there is the innovation that is going to make a difference for the problem you’re trying to fix, and then when it’s released to people to do in the normal way of life, whether that’s out of school or it’s just like, you know, it’s a something to help you with your health. So something that you’re supposed to just take at home or do on your own, efficacy drops down to 40% and so when you think about that, like, it makes so much sense, and like, a controlled medical trial when it comes down to taking a prescription, for example, like how people it’s not going to run exactly how it did when it was in the controlled experience of like, someone disseminating the medication to the person at the exact same time every single day, in the confines. That’s actually also true for reading interventions, that when they are implemented by the researcher or the person who is trained by the researcher, and it’s happening in a contained environment, like a quiet room, and it is happening with a great deal of intensity, and there aren’t any interruptions, and it’s for this many weeks, for this many minutes, it’s all like all of that is going to have a huge impact. And then when you hand over the same thing to a classroom teacher who has assemblies and has Rainy Day recess and has the other kids who are trying to, like, need attention, or like someone stubbed their toe, or whatever it is, like, all those things are actually going to make it so that the intervention declines in its impact, and for us to be able to acknowledge then it’s gonna have to be, not only created in the lab experience, but also we need help in the implementation in the real life context of the school in order to ensure that it actually is an intervention that’s worth doing and is gonna be possible To get good effects with

Donell Pons 43:01
Wow, that is so important. I kind of want to pause a minute and say, did we all get that? Did we catch it? That’s really your heartbreak

Speaker 1 43:09
is frustrating, and it’s also pretty exciting when you start realizing, like, Okay, so there’s lots of things that we know in theory ought to work, but if what our focus is now is on in the the implementation in the classroom or school building, what do we need to do in order to ensure that it’s effective? Yeah,

Donell Pons 43:27
and also, Margaret makes all those touch points we’ve talked about throughout this conversation that much more important that we’ve attended to those moments where we can have a good interaction between parent and educator. They have a relationship in that classroom. They’re getting appropriate support as parents at home as well. You’re getting what you need in the classroom, your colleagues. That makes all of that so much more important, doesn’t

Lindsay Kemeny 43:48
it? Something else I love. You’re talking about science in this article, and how it doesn’t take sides, but rather illuminates a path. I love that phrase, and then the next part, I think, is so important for all of us, if new data confront and overturn long held assumptions and beliefs even about structured literacy, we need to make changes that reflect this new information, not succumb to confirmation bias. Yeah,

Speaker 1 44:16
yeah. So I think this kind of connects to I can’t remember if it made the cut in the article. At some point we had something. It either made it or didn’t make it. We were talking about the difference between the science of reading lower case s, lower case r, versus the SOR movement. And the SOR movement is pretty narrow, and if we instead look at this as a huge shift that’s happening in the education profession, and we’re looking at teaching differently, and we’re looking at the role of the teacher being different, like that. We are getting ongoing support and training. We are adjusting practice based on new findings, where research practice partnerships are guiding the work. Together. Like, that’s a very different job than the job that used to exist. Of you go, you get your credential, you get trained, then you get curriculum, you implement that, and you close your door unless they make you come out for a staff meeting. Like, this is a very different way of us seeing our job. And I think one of the things that Reid did a really good job of explaining to me is that we have to stop thinking we’ve got it all figured out right right now. There are lots of people who want to say, like, I was doing some things wrong, maybe, or I’m brand new teaching and I have have men no mistakes, but what I’m doing right now, this is the thing, and the chances of what we’re doing right now actually being the thing that will ensure all kids in our country become skilled readers. It’s not great. So that means we’re going to have to focus on getting better and better for decades to come, long past the science of reading movement fading.

Donell Pons 45:58
Gosh, Mark, that’s okay. Again, another powerful one. You’re full of them. Today, it’s made me think of holding my grandchild. So my one of my children, we’ve had our first grandchild. It’s amazing. We have dyslexia in our family. Profile as I’m holding that little one, first thing that comes to mind when I’m looking at him as I’m thinking, what can I learn that will make his experience learning to read be different, even after all the effort I put into helping my child learn to read, helping my husband recover and receive reading instruction, I’m still thinking about, how can I make his experience even better? So it is that don’t hold on to those ideas. I’m hoping there is something that’s going to blow my mind. I’m going to say, Wow, this is amazing. We have to have that in us every day, right? Be excited about what could be Yeah?

Speaker 1 46:38
And if anyone’s telling you they’ve got it all figured out. They’re wrong

Stacy Hurst 46:44
well, and that’s the nature, and that’s the nature of the scientific method, or science. It’s never done. We are always going to be refining our knowledge and hopefully not upending it every decade. But,

Speaker 1 47:01
yeah, definitely asking more questions, getting those questions answered in ways that are useful. And then hopefully there will be a time when we get curriculum that is more effective, and so then we’re able to see what happens when we implement at scale, and then find out the things that we still have questions about and need to refine, and then send into this iterative cycle.

Lindsay Kemeny 47:24
Margaret, I just think you are a gift to education, so I am just like you, and you are just the epitome of what we’re talking about, where you’re always learning and always sharing and and I don’t know, I feel so lucky. I met you back in 2018 and it was like the first time I was on a plane for a long time. And you remember our flights were arriving at the same time in Philadelphia, and you we met up, and I was like, so thankful for that. And I’m just, I just, I just so admire you. I think when I first met you, you were coaching, and then you decided during COVID To go back to the classroom and and that just makes you an even better, you know, even better at what you do, at coaching and sharing. And do you want to share a little bit about, you know, the right to read and maybe your lunch and lit or anything else where our listeners can find you. Well,

Speaker 1 48:20
I think what’s funny is you’re reminding me that Lindsay referencing a time when she and I were on a panel that Emily Hanford was facilitating. And I think it was right after, at a loss for words, came out, if I remember right. But anyway, it was right before my life had exploded. I was like, doing my thing in Oakland, unified coaching, coaching coaches actually, and like, working on a pilot project trying to uproot the balanced literacy initiative in our district. And when the podcast came out, leadership is not and so what happened was I ended up in this tricky position of needing to, like, continue working on the grant that I was working on that was focused on evidence based practices, and then also deal with a district that really needed me, or wanted me to, like, stay on message with the district implementation of balanced literacy. And so what ended up happening was I started feeling like I needed to write a lot about what was happening. I was blogging about what my students were doing and how they were responding to instruction and stuff, and I felt like I needed to do it anonymously, which is where the right to read project started. And then Anonymous was impossible anymore, and so it ended up being that there was, like, this new national conversation about how reading gets taught, and teachers trying to find each other and trying to share information. And like, I just really got excited about the teacher to teacher communication, because that felt like what had been different from previous. Waves of school improvement initiatives. So that’s how the start of the right to read project happens. I still write for it, and one of my favorite things to do is on Fridays, I get to run the lunch and let which is a group that assembles every Friday. It’s pretty flexible, so whoever is available and interested will do the reading before the session and then come and listen to the researcher present and ask questions, and it’s exactly what I feel like has been missing for a long time. I’ve felt like there hasn’t been the space for researchers and practitioners and advocates people are trying to help teachers, professional development providers, curriculum developers, like, I feel like we’re not in the same room often enough to be able to help each other out. And coming back to the beauties of zoom, like it’s possible now with Zoom. So that was lunch and night you were asking about, well,

Lindsay Kemeny 50:56
thank you. Thank you so much for being here. Margaret. It’s fun to talk with

Unknown Speaker 50:59
you. Time flies.

Stacy Hurst 51:00
We say this a lot on this podcast, but I really mean it. Today, I could carry on this conversation for another hour or two. I feel like we always have a lot to learn from each other. And Lindsay was correct, we have already learned so much from you, Margaret, just from you being transparent and reporting about your experiences in education, I think that’s been very illuminating for many people, and definitely inspiring the messages today that I’m going to take into my own professional practice and transfer to my students, that humility is key, and that as teachers, we’ve said this many times on Our podcast, we are learners first, and learning requires humility where and like you said, We’re never done. We’re never done. So thank you so much for spending time on indoor, rainy recess day to talk to us. We really appreciate it, and to our listeners, we want to thank you for joining us today, and I know you got as much or more than we did out of this conversation, so thank you, and we hope you’ll join us for our next episode of literacy talks.

Narrator 52:09
Thanks for joining us today. Literacy talks comes to you from Reading Horizons, where literacy momentum begins. Visit Reading horizons.com/literacy talks to access episodes and resources to support your journey in the science of reading.