Expert Insights with Dr. Louise Spear-Swerling: Prioritizing the “How” in Literacy Instruction

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 Stacy 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 0:49
Welcome to this episode of Literacy Talks. For those of you who’ve been listening this season, you know that we are highlighting the perspectives 75th anniversary issue of that publication, and exciting news today, we have a very awesome guest, and I’m going to turn the time over to Donnell to introduce her, because Donell, you are the one that made the connection for so

Donell Pons 1:12
great. Yes, we are just so pleased to have Dr Louise Spear-Swerling with us today on the podcast. And obviously, if you’ve been following along and looking at the perspectives publication, the one Stacy said, is the 75th anniversary edition, and there’s a free download at the IDA website, the International Dyslexia Association website, so if you haven’t looked at it and you would like to you can for free. You don’t have to subscribe. And then if you have been following along, then you’ll be delighted, because you’ve either read the article, or you were aware that she is one of the authors of an article. So this will be a fun discussion today, and I’m just going to put a personal thing in there. I’ve listened to you for years, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the way that you break things down, and I know that other educators feel the same way. I’m not the only one. You do a really good job of helping things that seem rather overwhelming, maybe a little difficult, lots of moving parts. You make them very approachable and understandable. And that’s one of the things I think is just so good about your work among many here. Thank you. You bet you do a great job with that. And so you know, Louise, I think we just like to start off by having you tell us a little bit about about your background. You’ve been around a while, but they might be new to some people and some of us might not understand your whole background. Tell us how you got into this field, and give us a little bit of that story, sure.

Speaker 1 2:25
Well, my father was a special educator, and so that kind of gave me exposure to the field. The field was very different in his day, and his specialty was not learning disabilities, but I saw how committed he was to his work, how important his work was to him, and that, you know, when I was casting about in my in my early 20s for something that I wanted to do as a career, that had a big influence on me, and then I was very fortunate. I’ve been a really lucky woman in lots of ways. So I went to a teacher prep program that was in my area, and this was a really long time ago, like the late 70s, and I was prepared to teach what we would now call structured literacy, which was very unusual for its time, but the woman that headed the program, Elizabeth gallistel, was very familiar with the Haskins laboratories, researchers like Isabel Liberman and Donald Schenck Wheeler. You know, she knew a lot of the early icons of what we would now call science of reading, and that really shaped the program. So I was very fortunate to have that preparation, and then I went into public schools to teach. I taught at an elementary level. And then when I decided to go into a doctoral program, I decided to go into a cognitive psychology program because I wanted a broader background. And at the time I started my program, there was really was just pure serendipity. All of this research on the importance of phonemic awareness and reading, but also cognitive strategies in comprehension, all of that was coming out, and along the way, I was really fortunate to have some great mentors. Not only Betty, but my my doctoral advisor, Bob Sternberg, Louisa Moats, was a really important mentor to me early in my career, Hollis Scarborough, so you know, I was really fortunate that I think back sometimes to think, Boy, you know, the career could have gone a completely different way if I had had a different teacher prep program, and didn’t have the mentoring I had, or had different people influencing

Donell Pons 4:58
me. So. Yeah, well, that’s so great. I love hearing that history, and I appreciate even more now that because you did, as you say, You got lucky with serendipity that you ended up with these folks who had such good information for you, put you on the right path. So to speak, on the science of reading, that you’ve been generous to share it with us, because that’s what we’re relying on, right? Is, if we haven’t heard, others will help,

Speaker 1 5:19
right, right? That’s right, that’s right. Absolutely pitch in and help

Donell Pons 5:24
each other out. So, Louise, this edition has been fantastic. Give us a little overview of your article, because you’re in the section of it’s the you know, how do we do this? And so tell us a little bit about what you wanted to accomplish with the article, and then we’ll get into some of the aspects, sure.

Speaker 1 5:39
So a lot of the discussion about, you know, like science of reading, and concerns that people have about reading instruction, a lot of those concerns have focused on what the article, what the issue, frames as the what. So the idea that it’s important to teach phonemic awareness and phonics, or there’s not enough emphasis on spelling or written expression, but, but how you teach is just as important. The what is really important? It is important that we address those areas, but if you teach ample phonics, but you do it in an ineffective way, that’s not so good. So how you teach is also important. So that was the focus of my article, yeah, and I

Donell Pons 6:28
think you do such a good job, we’ll dive right into that. And I think it’s important as you as you know. So if you’re reading this perspectives publication, make sure you do hit all those areas, because, as you’ve pointed out, they give you a different viewpoint as to why something is important, but you need everything right to have a full understanding. So your article in particular was, was titled the how of structured literacy just as important as a what, like you’ve just said, and it is fantastic. It gives us a snapshot of really, how you make this all come together. But what I loved is how you start the article. It was really great, because very, very approachable. And you said at the beginning, you recounted an experience at a conference, which I’m sure is not unusual, where a teacher educator was learning about the implementation of structured literacy, and they asked, I think this is something we’ve all probably heard. How is this new? We already prepared candidates to teach phonics and then tell us what your response was.

Speaker 1 7:19
So yeah, that teacher educator that had happened like the week before I sat down to write the article, so it was fresh in my mind, although, as you say, it’s not an unusual experience. And the and she was, you know, obviously not like, not one of the most persuadable people in the audience, but she was really focused on the what you know, that they already do this. We already teach phonics, and what’s the big deal? And she was probably right. I think most you know teacher prep programs do teach at least some phonics, but how it’s taught is also really important, and that was the point I tried to make in my response. So you know, our children being taught phonics in an explicit, systematic way, or is the teaching kind of incidental and haphazard? Is the is the teaching, is the phonics teaching well integrated with spelling and the books that children have to read? Or is it kind of a, you know, separate carve out in literacy, but it’s not really integrated? A big problem I see with a lot of phonics teaching is that many teachers have not been trained to give good feedback when children are reading text, so even if phonics is being taught, if when children are reading texts, if the teacher just gives them the word or encourages them to guess based on pictures, based on sentence context, it kind of undermines the phonics teaching. So all of those, you know, those were points that I tried to make in my response to this person. I’m not sure I won her over, but, but I tried. You

Donell Pons 9:17
know, I think I really appreciate that too about the articles, because as you’re hitting on these touch points, you speak to each one of these in the article. So if there are people listening and they’re saying, oh gosh, I wish I could, yeah, it’s in the article. So we encourage you, even after this conversation, you’re going to want to go back and review, and it’s nice to have a little roadmap to remind you of the conversation that we’ve had today. That’s really great and structured literacy is interesting because often it’s emphasizing the explicit, systematic instruction. And your article explores that really well for us, the systematic and sometimes even when you say it, I’m not sure people really understand what that means. Can you help us with that a little bit? Sure. So,

Speaker 1 9:53
um, so explicit means the skills are being taught directly by the. Teacher, children are not expected to infer them only from exposure with, you know, careful choice of examples, clear modeling and guided practice. Systematic means that within a domain of literacy, like phonics, comprehension, composition, you’re building from simple to complex. So it is important to make the point that these different domains of literacy are being taught in tandem with each other. We’re not expecting children to map totally master phonics before they get to work on comprehension, right? But within the domain you’re building from simple words decoding simple words to increasingly complex words, within the domain of comprehension, you’d be building from, you know, easier to comprehend types of texts, maybe easier vocabulary and concepts and then sort of building gradually over time. And the same thing with composition, we don’t expect children to write, you know, a lengthy, complex piece of writing, if they can’t even write a paragraph yet. So that’s really what systematic means.

Donell Pons 11:19
Yeah, I think that’s interesting, because Louise, you’re talking about, and if this feels like it’s makes a lot of sense to a lot of people who teach in different fields, it does make a lot of sense, because it’s really a good practice, isn’t it? Sure at heart, sure, right, yes, yes, yeah. So there, I think oftentimes I can start a conversation with someone who’s maybe reluctant and maybe what’s the structure of literacy you speak of? And sometimes you can build a bridge right there, because that speaks to people who have an understanding of how you might teach, a concept if you want

Speaker 1 11:49
to teach as well. And sometimes people you know do have misconceptions, which I think is probably true of the the story about the teacher educator that I began the article with. You know, they have the misconception that, oh, you’re saying all we need to teach is phonics, or we have to drill phonics, and children don’t get to work on anything else in literacy. That’s not true, but within a particular component or domain you do want to build from simple to complex, because otherwise, many children, you know, there’s always children that, no matter how you teach, they learn right? They’re resilient to the teaching approach, probably because they come into the classroom with those skills already in place. But for the children who have any sort of vulnerability, they’re not if you throw things at them that involve prerequisite skills that they don’t have, it’s very overwhelming and really increases the odds of failure. So I think of structured literacy as an approach that tries really hard to avoid unintentionally confusing children, and that also teaches in a way that’s efficient as well as effective. So you know some of these skills, like spelling or phonics skills, yeah, children might infer it from exposure, if you just wait long enough, but it’s not a very efficient way to learn important skills. And efficiency is really important if a child is already behind and you have to catch them up, right? Yeah. So

Donell Pons 13:35
you could play a base in which to do that. So Louise, you put up something interesting that I’d like to touch on, because it was a really good way of putting it, and that is the integration. So like you’re saying, we’re not expecting a student to be a master of one of these domains, but rather integrating as we go is a good way in order to teach, right? The best way to teach. And I’m just thinking about the work of other researchers like Linnea Erie and others, with developmental information that would be useful and helpful, right to inform?

Speaker 1 14:03
Oh, absolutely yes, yes. Well, all of the people that you know were in the CO contributors to the to the issue. I mean, many of them were really important influences on me in my own career. You know Linnaeus, model of word reading was one of the things I wrote about really early in my work, and that really shaped my thinking about reading problems. You know, read Lyon, Kate Cain. I mean, there were so many wonderful people, and also the editors were fabulous, Barbara Wilson and Jessica Hammond. So those were all people that were big influences on me, and I think you can see when you look at the articles, if you look at the issue as a whole, there’s commonalities that sort of run through so the abilities that are important. We’re in and learning to read, people are emphasizing different abilities because that’s what they’re writing about. But everybody has an agreement on what kinds of abilities are important in learning to read. Nobody’s writing about word configuration cues or word shapes or, you know, things like that, because the research does not support that that’s important in learning to read. And I think another thing, another commonality, is a shared belief in the power of instruction to help children who have reading difficulties. You know, there’s, there’s no question that there are children who come to school with a certain vulnerability that might come from lack of experience or an intrinsic disability. But we know a lot now about how to help these children, and all of the writers of for the issue, I think, have a shared belief in in in that the power of that to help children? Yeah, I think that’s really

Donell Pons 16:04
interesting. I’m glad you brought that up. I remember we had the opportunity to speak with Dr modes once, and she said, when there’s understanding, then there you all get behind and the work goes easily because you have a shared understanding. And so for a first grade teacher listening right now, and Lindsay, you are a first grade teacher,

Speaker 1 16:24
yeah, what would be something to take away from the article? Yeah, Lindsay, sounds like she’s, you know, a great teacher. So she, she probably doesn’t need this advice. But I think for many teachers, if they they don’t have a strong background in reading, looking at certain assessments to help target instruction. So for example, for you mentioned a first grade teacher, for a first grade teacher looking at criterion reference types of phonics measures like the core phonics survey, the GE test. There’s other measures too, but the kind of measures where words are organized into different phonics categories. So you have, you know, and they’re and they’re ordered in in complexity. So you have the simplest word type, CVC words and then short vowel words with digraph, short vowel words with blends, and then kind of building up to long words, like words of two syllables or more. So that’s one way that a teacher could get a handle on okay, what are the specific phonics skills that I need to teach? And then another example of a good assessment for first grade are CBM measures of oral reading fluency, like DIBELS or aims web or Acadian some of these measures are available for free download from the web. And for a first grader, you wouldn’t usually start the ORF assessment, the oral reading fluency assessment, until the middle of first grade, but in the second half of first grade, that type of assessment these measures. So for people that aren’t might not be familiar with the measure, what children are asked to do is read a passage aloud and the and it turns out that that’s a really good predictor of overall reading competence at the elementary level about up through grade five or so, and the teacher scores both the percentage of words read correctly and also words correct per minute. And ideally look for a CBM that gives you separate benchmarks for those two things. So if you have a student who meets the benchmark for accuracy, but not for for rate for words correct per minute, then that’s a student who just needs to work on fluency, and that would be very common at a first grade level, so having the student get more practice reading text, reading connected text, like short stories and passages and things like that. But if you have a child who’s not reading the bench, meeting the benchmark for accuracy, then you want to work on that first, because you can’t build fluency until the student is accurate. So again, these are the kinds of measures that are useful because they help the teacher target instruction. You can have great, you know, instructional programs or teaching methods, but if it’s not really targeted to what the student needs, it’s not going to be helpful? Yeah, and I can answer your question too. Donnell, for something I think is important to take away from this article for first grade teachers, there was a part I highlighted and starred, and it says students do not need to master the foundational skills of word recognition before developing their comp. Attention abilities. And I think that’s really important for us lower grade teachers, because, of course, we have so much focus now on that, you know, phonics and building those foundational skills, but we can still be working on the other ones right from the beginning, and a lot of that is with read aloud and building vocabulary and discussions and oral language and all of that. Absolutely, I think, for teachers to, you know, a lot of the teachers I’ve met, they have the idea that read alouds with young children, that that’s, you know, kind of a warm, fuzzy thing you do to motivate reading and it and it is partly, but also especially if it’s combined with explicit teaching about the meanings of words and, you know, other areas of language, it’s also got an important instructional purpose. Yeah, I loved that you called that out so nicely in there. Oh, good. I’m glad.

Narrator 20:57
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Donell Pons 21:52
and you know, Louise, you also did another thing. You give great profiles. You will take a student, you’ll give a profile of a student, and then give some strategies, which I think is always so helpful, but you do, it’s some of the best that I’ve seen when you break it down, because you’re really able to picture this student. So talk to us a little bit about you, and you did some within the article, which were great. You can choose those two two to highlight, if you’d like, but you give some sort of differences between just a student who might be having a general challenge with some things and just need support, and probably tier one, and how you approach your teaching, there will be just enough, versus a student who does have some real challenges with reading, and what you might do.

Speaker 1 22:27
So I would say there’s a kind of two, two concepts here that are important. So one has to do with the poor readers profile. So that’s something I’ve been really interested in in my work, and I keep trying to get it into education more. But my my success is, you know, not as great as I would like, but the for your listeners that are many of them are probably familiar with the simple view of reading right, which says that good reading comprehension depends on two broad types of abilities, being able to read the words and having good language comprehension. So the profiles kind of flow out of that. The poor reader profiles are basically three different profiles. There’s the student who has trouble only with reading the words, but language comprehension is good. Or the student who only has trouble with language comprehension, which in turn will affect reading comprehension, but their word reading is at, you know, at grade level or better. And then the student that has trouble with both types of things, right? And any of these students could be a student with a disability. The profile is not about whether or not a student has a disability, it’s about their pattern of strengths and weaknesses. So for instance, in the type of profile that’s called a specific reading comprehension difficulty, a student could have limitations in their language comprehension because they have a language disability, but they could also just lack exposure. Like many English learners have difficult have that kind of profile, not because they have a disability, necessarily, but because they haven’t had exposure to English vocabulary and academic language. So what I would encourage teachers to do is first think about the profile, and this is other people certainly have written a lot about this, like Hugh Katz, is one of the people that’s written about this a lot in his research. Don Compton a book that I just published called the structured literacy planner is built around poor reader profiles,

Donell Pons 24:46
which I’m just gonna say is great. I’m just gonna give you a plug.

Speaker 1 24:52
Thank you. So think about the profile first, and then, as you know, a researchers. Like Jack Fletcher have pointed out what really works best, instead of having a test then teach model in identification of disabilities, first teach, then do more of the testing. So you know the initial testing should focus on, how do you understand the student’s strengths and weaknesses? The profile, because that tells you, Well, do I need to teach decoding? Do I need to teach comprehension? You know, do I need to intervene in those areas? And then the student’s responsiveness to the intervention tells you whether there might be a disability. So students with disabilities typically need much more intensity than students who don’t have disabilities. Students who have disabilities will will learn too, but they often need a smaller group size, you know, more opportunities for practice, more opportunities to respond. So if your school has, you know, a tiered intervention type of model, the children who respond to initial, you know, to tier two are probably students. If they’re showing evidence that they’re on a trajectory to catch up, they’re probably not, the students who have disabilities, the students who really need something more, who just don’t, it’s just not enough intensity for them. Or they keep forgetting, or they keep falling back behind other students that that’s more likely to be a student who has some sort of disability, if it’s you know, if the profile is difficulty with decoding and phonological skills, that’s more like a student with dyslexia. If they have a broader pattern of difficulty, but that is resistant to intervention, then that might be a student with a developmental language disorder or a mixed reading disability, that type of profile. So, so sort of, you know two, two broad concepts, what’s the student’s profile, and then how responsive is the student to initial levels of intervention.

Donell Pons 27:20
And I know you and Stacy were chatting a little bit before I jumped into this podcast. I know you guys are probably talking about pre service experiences, because you both have taught teachers to be teachers and how to do this work in classrooms. And what are some of the challenges that you face when you have a new teacher, a new group of teachers, and you’re giving them all of this information. So I’m just thinking and Stacy, you probably want to have this little conversation too. You guys, little conversation too. You guys can have a sidebar about how you prioritize for those educators, and what should be their expectation going to that classroom their first year, because I can’t imagine how overwhelming it must

Speaker 1 27:52
be, right? I love the word you just said prioritizing, because that was one of the most important things I found, both in my work as a teacher educator and also in different policy work, especially here in my state. So I was on a number of panels on, you know, how should teachers teach reading and what kind of test licensure exam should the teachers take and I, after a while, I realized it was pretty easy that Connecticut likes to bring in people with diverse viewpoints and try to get them to, you know, hold hands and sing Kumbaya by the end of the panel’s work, which didn’t, didn’t always work out too well, but thinking back, it was relatively easy to get people to agree that a certain skill was important. So even even the people that were kind of Die Hard whole language people, they would agree that, yeah, you have to teach some phonics. And certainly even people that were strong advocates of phonics would agree, yes, it’s important to teach comprehension. The hard part is prioritization. You know, there’s only so many hours in a school day, right? And then, by extension, if you take it to the teacher prep classroom at the university level, you know, what are the things that are really important for that first year teacher to know, walking, you know, walking into the classroom for the first time. And it does mean you have to make some you’re not going to do everything equally well. There’s going to be, you know, a domain of things that you really want to make sure people are prepared. I would argue that’s things like formative assessment, you know, using assessment to improve instruction and intervention, understanding things like basic components of reading and how to teach them. And also, you know, of writing, being able to teach spelling. And written expression. And you know, that’s not an exhaustive list, but those are some of the things that would be on my must do list. And then there’s some things that, you know, if I’m able to do them great, like technology, okay, some of what’s out there in terms of technology, I don’t want to make all the tech people mad at me, but is it the number one? You know the technology is only useful if the teachers understanding how you use it, and to understand that, you have to understand, have a broader understanding of what abilities are important and how to teach it if you’re going to select among good programs. So I think it’s, you know, a desirable thing for teachers to learn about, but it’s not going to be at the top of my priority list. So, but it’s hard. It’s a very hard thing. And I remember one time my department chair, you know, my department chair, who was really, a really, really nice person. She would read books, education, relevant books, not textbooks, but things that were, you know, popular books about education. And she would say, oh, you know, you’ve got to cover this in the 435 which was the course where I taught all of the reading stuff, and I would think like, Well, I’m not going to cover this book because I there’s no time. There’s literally no time. And after a while, I just learned to say to her, if you want me to add something new, you have to tell me what I’m taking out. Am I taking out spelling? Am I taking out assessment? You know, I just can’t it. I can’t add one more thing. And so the prioritization issue is huge. So I’m glad you mentioned that.

Donell Pons 31:53
And so I want to ask, and you know, Stacy can probably speak to this too, and take a little moment here, because I know it’s one of the challenges, and that is, Louise, do you see things improving at the pre service level in terms of giving enough attention to how you teach reading to be able to teach our educators who are going to be in classrooms? Is that improving? From your perspective?

Speaker 1 32:13
I think, I do think there’s improvement. And I’m glad you asked that question, because I think it’s very important. So you know, the you might have seen the NCTQ does these reviews of teacher prep programs, about around teaching of elementary level reading, and they did see improvement that was very encouraging. It’s not like there’s not room for more improvement, but at least in relation to what they had measured previously, there were signs that programs were improving. You know, we’ve seen, we’ve seen efforts in certain states like Mississippi, for example, that really focused on improving teacher prep. We’ve seen that bear fruit. So I do think that there is improvement. We still, you know, have a long way to go to make it more systemic, so that you can assume that your child will get a good grounding in reading in the earliest grades, but it’s better than it was.

Stacy Hurst 33:19
I appreciate that question. And again, the word prioritize comes to mind. I’ll just take a minute here to brag about my university. We were one of the universities featured in the last NCTQ report, because we did get all the points on all the things. But that being said, it’s definitely not a Oh, good. We’ve We’ve got it going on. We’re great. I am keenly aware of all of the things that we still need to add and the time we need to spend on certain things. So, yeah, there’s prioritize. That’s the important word for me to remember. And as we’re talking about this too, I and as I read your article, and I mentioned before we started the podcast, I have read your research for decades. Thank you, and I think I am getting I need to be more explicit in my pre service with my pre service teachers about integrating pedagogy, knowledge of language and also how somebody learns to read like we need to integrate all of that in our teaching, added like you’re saying, that knowledge of assessment and how we use that and give feedback. I have a question, and I will say in one of my courses, we are using the assess, teach, assess model, and we only have 15 weeks. We’re doing our best, and we do use the assessments in the the core phonics survey for one in the assessing reading multiple measures book, which is amazing, if anybody agreed, I recommend it. But one thing that I know I have given my students guidance on this, in fact, you may. Hugh Katz, we did a podcast episode where he mentioned how to notice if somebody is struggling with oral language of young student, but we don’t often see assessments that are ubiquitous for oral language with every student. What do you do? You have something that you recommend? Or how can I prepare my students to sort of assess that and quantify it? Right now, their assessment is very qualitative.

Speaker 1 35:27
I don’t have a particular assessment of oral vocabulary. I think assessment of of these skills orally is really important because otherwise it’s contaminated with decoding, right? So you can’t, so you can’t tell if the student is gets a low score. Is it because they didn’t know the meaning of the word, or they couldn’t read the Word? When I do, I do a lot of formal evaluations for schools, like independent evaluations, so I will always give like, sub tests from the Woodcock Johnson or the Wyatt or something like that. And it’s, and it’s usually like 10 minutes. I mean, it’s really quick to do something like a Wyatt, you know, receptive vocabulary and oral discourse comprehension, but maybe more than 10 minutes, but not that bad. It’s not that long. But these are not the kind of tests you use in screening of large numbers of kids. For one thing, I think, just too expensive for schools to purchase. I believe I have read about is there? I’m not sure if I’m right about this, but maybe the cubed assessment, there was an assessment I read about recently, but I have not given it myself. So not, you know, not really familiar with it, but I would do, I would scout around and see if you can find something online, because I believe there is something that tests oral vocabulary and like listening comprehension. You know, those are the two things to me that are most important in a screen. And then if you see signs that the child is weak in one or both, then you could always follow up with more in depth testing of the type that usually a speech pathologist would do. Yeah,

Stacy Hurst 37:23
thank you. That’s very helpful. I know we have had some introduction to Ox ed that is out of England, of course, but they have a screener. I don’t know how accessible it is to the mass. Actually,

Speaker 1 37:36
I’ve read, I’ve read about that too, and it looks good. And I mean, the people who developed it are wonderful. So that might, that actually might be the one I was thinking of.

Stacy Hurst 37:45
Okay, yeah, I’ll have to see what we can do about getting my students at least exposed to that. And then I do, we do teach dialogic reading, which, as I read your article too, I thought all, all the important things can come together in that moment, right when you’re doing a read aloud. And like you said, it can be a warm, fuzzy moment, but let’s make it really intentional as well. And I think in those situations, I at least I’ve noticed from my students, they’re more aware of how their students respond and what their where their oral language may or may not be. So just teaching them great assessing,

Speaker 1 38:23
yeah, yeah, absolutely right. I mean, well informed observation by a teacher with the teacher knows what kind of things to look for that could be really powerful, especially as an initial screen. The other thing I always used to tell my students to do, and here in Connecticut, we do emphasize this in terms of, you know, guidelines for identification, for intervention and for learning disabilities, eligibility is to look at whether the student has a history of early language delay, like kids who have gotten you know, have qualified for Birth to Three because of speech language problems. Many teachers are not aware that even if the children no longer qualify for services when they enter kindergarten, they’re still at increased risk of reading problems. So it bears monitoring. You know, it’s really worthwhile to monitor those kids more carefully to make sure that you catch any they won’t all, of course, go on to have reading problems, but a significant percentage do, and you can catch them early if you’re monitoring more carefully. I really

Donell Pons 39:37
appreciate that, because the parent of a child who was picked up early. It was never brought up again when we entered the school system, and it was one of those signs, right, right,

Speaker 1 39:46
right. Yeah, there’s some my colleague, a former colleague of mine, from Southern institution where I taught full time, Richard zipply, has written a lot. He’s a speech path who has a strong interest in reading, and he’s done some great work in this area on, you know, identification of reading problems early, using these signs of, you know, from like early language delay and things like that. Another thing that’s kind of a predictor is if there’s a history of reading problems in the family, close relatives, you know, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles. And I once did a consultation on a student who had four siblings who had all been diagnosed with dyslexia, and the parent was extremely aggressive about making sure that he was identified early, so he was actually identified in kindergarten. And he because of the parents advocacy, he got a lot of intervention very early, and I was called in to evaluate him when he was in third grade, to decide whether he needed special ed services anymore. And I’ll tell you what I expected to find. I expected to find a student who was a grade level decoder, maybe grade level phonological skills, but lingering problems, maybe in spelling or rate of reading, because that would be a common profile. Well, this student, he was like, Great in everything he was. And then I thought, Well, maybe he never really had a problem to begin with, but the school, I had all his data from the time he was in kindergarten, he really did show signs of phonological, you know, precursors of dyslexia. And at the PPT, when I said he, you know, technically, he did not meet eligibility criteria, and the parents said to me, Well, what do you mean? He had dyslexia, and it just went away. And I said, Look, what I’m telling you is he looks like a child who really had a strong vulnerability to dyslexia. He got very appropriate intensive intervention right away, and he had a great response to that intervention, and he should be monitored, because we know he had this vulnerability. So it’s very important to continue close monitoring, and kind of know that he might need more services in the future. But it it says something about the power of early intervention. I think the thing that’s hard for schools is he got a lot of intensity very early. And it’s not feasible for public schools, really, to do that with every child who has a you know, he was getting, like, an hour a day for years, one to one with a teacher. And if we and I know there is research in this area, more research that lets us predict, you know, the level of intensity that a student might need to kind of make it more feasible for schools to to meet the needs of a wider range of students. But he always he was an amazing student. He could spell better than my undergrad. He was, yeah, fantastic.

Donell Pons 43:25
Like you say, power of good intervention, that’s right,

Speaker 1 43:28
right. Done, done early, yes, done with a sufficient level of intensity. So

Donell Pons 43:34
you’ve really got me thinking about something as I know we need to wrap up, because we’ve had you for a while. We can go on all day, by the way. Fantastic. We are aware. You have other things to do, but I was just going to say, what are some of the challenges that are facing us now that we have a lot of this good information. You know, a lot of a lot of states now have legislation that is very helpful as well. There’s more information, more people understand what you mean when you say structured literacy. But what are some of the challenges we face in the future, moving forward, we should be aware of, you know,

Speaker 1 44:03
I think that maybe this is partly just, you know, my the fact that I’ve had this long term interest in teacher prep, I still think teacher prep is a major challenge, particularly in relation to pre service, and particularly in relation to general educators, who are more often have kind of a, you know, constructivist, you know, don’t, you know explicit teaching is bad. You know, that kind of orientation and making good, although I, as I said earlier, I do think there’s been improvement making those good teacher prep practices more systemic, so that wherever you go to get your teacher training, just like if you’re a doctor, you know, whatever medical school you go to, they’re not going to teach you that bad humors in the body cause disease. They’re going to teach you about, you know, antiseptic techniques. Germs and that sort of thing. I think that, you know, doing that is really important, and I think, you know, to kind of credit my my teacher prep colleagues, because teacher preparation can be a really challenging job. I found it really rewarding, and I I never, ever regretted going into the field. But there’s a lot of challenges in terms of things like, like, my article for perspectives was on the how well doing the how is really requires demonstration modeling, you know, having candidates work with children under supervision, and there need to be supports for that. And also, you know, ideally, you really need teachers in the field who’ve been well trained, because you don’t want the teacher candidate seeing a teacher who’s modeling, you know, guessing at words or word shapes or something like that. So

Donell Pons 46:02
Louise, this has been delightful. Thank you so much. Oh, my

Speaker 1 46:05
pleasure. I had a great time. It was great talking with you.

Stacy Hurst 46:08
Yes, thank you. Thank you. And thank you to those of you who’ve been listening to our podcast, and I know that you will especially love this one, so please join us next time for the next episode of literacy talks.

Narrator 46:25
Thanks for joining us today. Literacy talks comes to you from Reading Horizons, where literacy momentum begins. Visit readinghorizons.com/literacytalks to access episodes and resources to support your journey in the science of reading.