The Magical Intersection: Where Structured Literacy Meets Tiered 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. Donell 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 0:46
Hello and welcome to this episode of literacy Talks. My name is Stacy Hurst, and I’m joined by Donell Pons and Lindsay Kemeny, and this season, we are focusing on the perspectives of language and literacy. 75th anniversary issue, we’ve had some fantastic guests. We’ve talked about a lot of the articles in that publication, and this week is no different. Today we’re going to be talking about the who and the article that we’ll be discussing is titled structured literacy, the backbone of a robust literacy ecosystem. And this article is by Timothy Odegard that as many of you know, he is a professor of psychology at Middle Tennessee State University. His background is in developmental cognitive psychology. I think you can tell that from the article, and also he does a lot of research, and is well known for his research on reading difficulties and dyslexia. And I know Donell and Lindsay, you and I have, we have all seen him in person, in conferences. What are some of the things that stand out to you about his background or his presentations, anything in general, for our listeners who may not be familiar with

Lindsay Kemeny 2:07
Well, I love that He has dyslexia himself, so he really comes at it with that perspective of having it himself as well as I think he has a son with it as Well, right? So I think that’s always really interesting to hear his side of things.

Donell Pons 2:25
And I think I mentioned his presentation at playing talk, because it was very impactful. I think he’s always really good, but it was a very impactful discussion and presentation, and he does a very thorough job. And I remember the first time I actually heard him speak was a long time ago. I’m going to date myself here. And he was very young at the time. He was very new, and I hadn’t seen him anywhere before, and it was at an International Dyslexia Association Conference. And this one happened to be in Portland, and I was there with my husband, who comes with me often to those things, and we’ve talked about how we send him around to different places, and he texts us and tells us what’s going on. It’s fantastic. Well, he popped in on on something that he was doing as a presentation. He said, You’ve got to come down here right now. This guy is on fire. And he never really sends me those. And so I did. I’d never heard of him before, and I ran down and popped my head in, and he was right. He was he was on fire. So that’s what I when I hear Tim Odegard, we’re gonna, we’re gonna learn some good stuff. Yeah,

Stacy Hurst 3:21
I agree. And, you know, one other thing I really admire about him is his vocabulary. I have not one time heard him speak or and I have been lucky enough to have some conversations with him that I don’t write down a word or a research reference, and he just has him on the top of his head, like it just flows like water. So this article actually is no different. And I don’t know about you guys, but I wrote down some quotes that when we’re talking about something as maybe technical as the word as MTSS, you don’t expect these kind of words. But on page 82 right on the first page of the article, he talks about the magical intersection. That was one phrase that I wrote down between, what is he talking about, the magical intersection, basically between knowledge and practice, I think, is how to somebody. It

Lindsay Kemeny 4:18
says learning happens at the magical intersection of teacher facilitated student engagement with oral and written language instruction and practice. Yeah,

Stacy Hurst 4:29
I love that magical intersection. And then also, on page 82 he talks about the beauty and power of structured literacy. So we have some really good things that we’ll be able to discuss based on this article, but I appreciate the way that he describes those aspects of it. A lot of in this article, he does talk about not that intersection of practice and instruction frequently and. Um, he highlights that student learning occurs there at that, that crossroads, just as you read the quote Lindsay, and then he highlighted teacher facilitated engagement and practice in oral and written language. So Lindsay as a teacher, how do you or How can teachers ensure that they are effectively facilitating this engagement in their classrooms, especially when it comes to language proficiency?

Lindsay Kemeny 5:31
Well, I think the question should be more, how can we make sure we’re supporting our teachers as they’re teaching this, right? Because, you know, we need teachers. Need the knowledge. We also need the tools. So we need both and for that oral and that written language to develop. We need professional development with those things. We need coaching with those things. And then we need the tools with this, you know, these things. So if we have admin, or anyone listening in that’s thinking, how do we make sure our teachers are doing this? We’ll make sure they’re supported, right?

Stacy Hurst 6:11
Yeah, and I love how he highlighted the the need to facilitate that student engagement, and I think it would never be a waste of time to have that be addressed in PD as well. And I know you have worked a lot with Anita Archer, and anything that she has written or developed would be a good resource in that area. Yeah,

Lindsay Kemeny 6:34
and that quote that we were saying, that you know you were mentioning how much you love that first quote, Stacy, and I do too. Learning happens at the magical intersection of teacher facilitated student engagement, okay, plus the language instruction and practice. So you’ve got your instruction, you’ve got your practice and teacher facilitated student engagement, so you are not just sending the kids off, just to and not facilitating that. You are there making sure they’re engaged in your lessons. So yeah, Stacy, totally, I think of Dr Anita Archer, and you know, everyone does everything, and we’re increasing those student responses and making sure our students are have plenty of opportunities to respond, verbally, physically, vocally, that is huge. And that’s when I think you see learning outcomes and engagement really go up. Is when you improve those Donnell,

Stacy Hurst 7:33
do you have anything to add to that? Well,

Donell Pons 7:36
just I mean, obviously my work is an intervention, and so I’m working typically, one on one with a student, and this is everything that we do, right? So from the word go, you’re figuring out exactly where your student is and what those needs are, and that’s the trick all the time, is to balance out just enough, shall we say, challenge for the student that they are reaching, but yet feel supported. And typically I have students who they were lacking both, so they were not supported correctly or properly, and the Reach was way too far. And so those are really important things to keep in balance. And I know classroom teachers do this as well, but particularly in intervention, because you usually have students who are burned out. They weren’t getting enough of either of those things. So the distance was too far, it didn’t seem reachable, and they weren’t getting supported, and so there’s just enough support, and the distance is within reach. So the students have to be having moments each time they’re learning where they feel like they’ve conquered something, because these are students who have never felt that way, right? It’s been years since they felt that way, particularly about language. That’s why they’re with you. So I think that’s really important, and you do that by constantly providing opportunities. And those are thoughtful opportunities.

Stacy Hurst 8:46
Yeah, another way that it could be said is explicit instruction in oral language and written language. And I I’m going back to what you both just said, that I think teachers need support in providing that explicit instruction. I know that I certainly was not prepared as a pre service teacher to do that, and also just really not underestimating the importance of that explicit instruction. So how does that specifically help students with language deficits?

Lindsay Kemeny 9:25
Well, and that’s one thing I want to say, because I’m pretty comfortable helping my students with written language. I’m pretty help comfortable with that, and we have a lot of resources available for that, but oral language is harder for me, and I don’t see a lot of us talking a lot about how to really support students with oral language deficits, because a lot of students come in and they already have the oral language so you know. And of course, if you have, you know. English learners, they’re going to have some more needs, but even just someone with, like, a language disability, like developmental language disability, right? DLD, so how do you help them? And what resources are available? What’s like a scope and sequence? I just that is probably something that I need the most help with, because I feel like more and more I’m getting students in my classroom with language difficulties, and so that I think that’s a little trickier.

Donell Pons 10:35
Yeah, and I would say in the intervention space, Lindsay, just taking your thought and picking it up. Within the intervention space. Oftentimes you see all all of it treated the same. In other words, a student comes with dyslexia, and you do find as you’re having a conversation, oh, there’s something going on with oral language here as well. It’s never been pulled out, identified. It’s all just called dyslexia for a student. And yet, that isn’t typical of every student who has dyslexia. So the primary definition of dyslexia, right? Is a word level, reading problem, challenge, often phonemic awareness is the heart of it. That’s our base. But then you’ll see a lot of other things that, particularly for a student who’s now 1213, this should have been talked about and identified sooner. However, we got one diagnosis or statement dyslexia, and then just put everything underneath that umbrella. That’s something you often find in intervention, is that you’ll you’ll acquire a student who’s now older and still struggling with components that should have been pulled out and identified. That’s interesting, too. So it’s along your same lines. Lindsay of well, because I was never taught, or didn’t know, even within an intervention setting where you’re specifically working with students who so called have a challenge with reading. Even within that space, there might not be enough information for a lot of folks who are doing intervention too. So across the board, I think, yeah,

Lindsay Kemeny 11:50
I’m often going to the SLP in our building. Okay, how do I help them with this? Or, you know, I have a student who struggles with his pronouns, so he’ll say them went to the whatever. Instead of they went to the end, you know, I’m like, I was going to her, like, give me some ideas. What else can I do? But then, when I think about it, I can think back. I can think about things I do to to teach my students, sentence writing, it’s kind of the same, but focusing on that verbal right? And using the using a picture, you know, who or what’s in this picture? What are they doing? Put it together into a sentence, you know. But I guess it’s would be nice to have more, you know, just thinking about more support throughout the day and in conversation. And do I correct them every time? Or does that, you know, what’s the best way forward there.

Stacy Hurst 12:41
I think that’s a good thing to bring up, because there are many like you’re saying done. A lot of things can fall under that umbrella. And the one you just specifically mentioned, Lindsay, is one another one I had a student once that stuttered, and I didn’t know how to address that when he was reading, especially out loud, and there could be a lot of things, so definitely connecting with the speech and language therapist in your building. But I don’t know if it’s like this everywhere, but ours is spread so thin that she has assigned to her three or four schools, and so we don’t often see her, but she has AIDS that may or may not be trained in these things as well trained as she is. So those are things to learn for sure.

Donell Pons 13:32
And I was just thinking of resources to then share with parents, because oftentimes caregivers really want to be a part of helping as well. But if you yourself don’t have enough knowledge within the classroom, then how can you even have resources to then share with a parent, to say you could pick this up and continue some of this support, or even to find out, could, could home environment be contributing in some way, and they don’t know, because you just don’t have resources. So all of this would be so helpful, right? If we had the information. Yeah, a lot of folks

Stacy Hurst 14:00
and Lindsay, as you were saying that you would just appreciate more help and support in that area. I’m thinking about how I’m preparing my pre service teachers, and I think we’re doing a little bit better job with oral language than I certainly did when I first started teaching at that level, but with written language, I definitely, in fact, I get to create a new course just focusing mostly on that. But that’s a deficit right now for us. And I know Lindsay, you stated you have a lot of resources and knowledge about written language, but did you learn that after you graduated, or were you still

Lindsay Kemeny 14:45
good for sure afterwards? Right? And I did a deep dive myself, and I like, I love, I feel like I’m doing a lot better just building the oral language in my classroom. So I will say that, like by having scaffolded. Discussions and just, I think just knowing myself how important, like oral language, the foundation is everything. I think my main struggle, or concern that I’m trying to relay is when you have a student with a language disability, like, where is disability? The right word, a major language deficit. So I do like, I teach first grade, but both this year and last year, I had, you know, student, a student who came in, students who came in that could only say two three word sentences, so they were like, on a two to three year old level. And that is just, that’s where I’m like, How do I best help and support them where I really felt like I needed more help in that area?

Donell Pons 15:47
Yeah? And typically, Lindsay, they arrive without any additional information, right? Yeah, they just arrived at the classroom and there’s no additional information to say. Oh, here’s what might have occurred before as well, which could be helpful. So that’s the whole way along, more understanding right from beginning of that student’s educational experience on through

Stacy Hurst 16:04
and just knowing what those developmental milestones are, that is one thing I teach my students, and generally speaking, they should be able to produce a sentence that is close to the number of years they are in age. So as a five or six year old, two or three word sentences, not

Lindsay Kemeny 16:22
Yeah, a few years behind.

Stacy Hurst 16:26
Okay. So also in this article, Dr Odegard emphasizes that something that’s been emphasized in other articles too, which I love, is that structured literacy must be integrated into a literacy ecosystem, and the individual language components are necessary, but not sufficient on their own. So why would you get and I feel like we’ve talked about this so many times, but it’s an important thing to highlight. Why do you think that those components, like phonics and vocabulary and so forth, need to be integrated together rather than isolation.

Lindsay Kemeny 17:05
Well, they will be integrated when they’re a proficient reader, right? Because they’re doing all those things. So I think it’s, it’s okay to be like, This is my phonics time, where my goal is phonics. This is my, you know, this is when I’m now, I’m teaching vocabulary in preparation for our close reading. Now my focus is, I think it’s okay to have parts of the day where you have something is more your focus. I think it almost has to be, because as teachers, I mean, it can’t just be like everything all the time, but at the same time, you still are attending to everything. You just have your focus. So in my phonics lessons, my focus is learning those sound symbol correspondences I can still I’m bringing in the language and the vocabulary, and we’ve talked about that before, too. When they come to a word that your students might not know, or maybe you have a lot of English learners that are going to need a lot more support with some of those words. You’re going to attend to the meaning. You’re going to read the Word, and then talk about what it means. And fluency as well. You’re building that accuracy, which is part of fluency in your phonics lessons, and then you want to build that automaticity, which is part of fluency. And then you’re reading the Decodable text, and maybe you’re focusing on accuracy and the automaticity and fluency together. Maybe your first read, you’re focusing on the accuracy you do a second read, you’re working on getting that smoother. Your third read, you’re adding expressions. So, you know, you see, like I did all that in my phonics lesson, I was thinking about phonics, but I was bringing in the other things, and then later, you know, maybe you’re reading, doing a read aloud, but the read aloud, maybe the title has the phonics component you just taught. Hey, you’re gonna bring in some phonics and point it out, while you’re also just working on, you know, maybe teaching them how to summarize or find the main idea. But you’re bringing in the other components too, right? That’s, that’s how I see it. So it’s like, Yes, I’m integrating, but I still have moments of the day where I have key focuses,

Donell Pons 19:07
yeah, and I would just emphasize, I love that. You breaking that down, Lindsay, and then also talking about developmentally, our expectations, right? So that’s a part of it, and Lindsay just described that. And then, in addition, in your when you’re doing intervention, and it’s an older student, you might see this happen all within maybe a 45 minute session, right? But you’re making sure you’re hitting everything together. And maybe the expectation might be slightly different because the student is older, so you can expect to have some things in place, but it’s making sure you’re not missing anything as well, and you’re making key connections for students.

Stacy Hurst 19:41
And you know, just I would ask the question too Donnell, because when we’re talking about older learners who are have experienced struggles in reading, that would you, I don’t know if argue is the right word. Does it become even more important to integrate all of those things? Together. I mean, it’s always important, but speak to the difference there as well? Yeah,

Donell Pons 20:05
absolutely. And this is part of that strengths and weaknesses piece too, is that all students come with a strength as well. We obviously are focusing on what the deficit is, because we’re talking about the key pieces that need to be in place for intervention or for instruction. But all students also come with a great many strengths, and so that should be a big part of the intervention lesson, as well as there will be moments within that lesson for a student to really shine. I mean, I have students that excel at all kinds of things, from being able to grasp a story really well and retell it so well, to having an affinity for vocabulary. And we talked about Dr Tim Odegard with dyslexia and having an affinity for vocabulary. So it’s not making assumptions about the whole student, just based on one particular need. I mean, that’s really good intervention, and that’s the integration of everything,

Stacy Hurst 20:50
well said. And I do think students at that stage have seen so many more things, and they’re required to integrate it, whereas we have a little bit of a luxury with the younger learners, where we can do a little more isolation, or focusing on one thing before we integrate it with another. So

Lindsay Kemeny 21:10
and think about Scarborough’s rope right, you see those strands separate, but then as you go over to the right, it gets tighter and tighter and tighter, and that’s what we want it to be, where everything is just so connected,

Stacy Hurst 21:20
yeah, and I love, like all of these things kind of converge together, right? We’ve been talking a lot this season about structured literacy and all the components and how they should be integrated, and this article is focusing on the system that in which we integrate them, right? So it’s even it goes beyond that on page, well, it’s 82 in the printed manual. I think the digital one might be different. Dr Odegaard has a table that says five key factors needed to implement response to intervention within MTSS. So there are two terms there, Response to Intervention within MTSS Donell, can you speak to the difference between those two?

Donell Pons 22:08
Well, so you just said it. So one, one is Response to Intervention, and one is a multiple, multiple System of Supports for getting the job done. I’m not so sure. I just kind of want to hang out here for a second. What I’m going to hear inevitably, and I think inevitably, what some listeners are probably thinking is, I never see this. So it doesn’t matter what definitions we give if you’re in a location where you never see this. So let’s kind of speak to that a little bit for a minute, because I want to honor that, because that’s typically later, when someone is having they’ll say, Well, to be frank, when you were talking about that, I’ve never seen that. I didn’t even know what you were talking about. I’ve never seen it before. So, Lindsay, you’re currently in a school setting, and I hate to put you on the spot, but what does it look like where you’re at on the ground? If we were to say these terms, how familiar would a teacher be with these terms? Have they ever heard them? Would they see them used?

Lindsay Kemeny 23:01
Yeah, I think they’ve heard them. I do think it’s common to like not understand the difference, but it almost doesn’t matter, because MTSS or RTI, whatever you call it, looks different depending on what school you’re at, what district you’re at, what systems you have available. So, you know, at our school, we have, we don’t have a differentiated tier one setup, like how some people go across the grade levels and they divide their students, and let’s say they’re going to different rooms for their phonics lessons, and then you have a bunch more adults usually come in and it’s all separate. We don’t have that at our school. We do our tier one in our classrooms with our own class. You can’t, of course, you differentiate within the tier one, then students that are not reaching benchmark, you know your grade level goals, because a lot of students, that’s all they’ll need is tier one, and they can achieve, you know, your grade level goals, but other students are going to need additional support, so that’s like considered a tier two intervention, where they’re getting something else in order to get to grade level, if they’re still not responding and we’re not getting them caught up, then we need to work on getting them at tier three services. So even more intensive, even more you know, more often, more frequent. So all those things are to support them to reach grade level goals. And you know what sometimes bothers me and is when people say, Oh, he’s, he’s a special ed student, like he’s, he’s a tier three kid. They’re all tier one kids, right? They all need support from their general education teacher. And my. Worry is that sometimes I see kids that are pulled out that then the teachers kind of check out and think it’s the special education teacher’s job to help them that really like hurts me, especially as a, you know, mother of a son with dyslexia, because I’m like, no, they still need intervention from their teacher. They need instruction and intervention from your general ed teacher, as well as the interventionist, the special ed, you know, whatever is set up by your school. So that’s

Donell Pons 25:30
interesting, just listening to you describe it, because we’ve talked about the RTI Response to Intervention, the tier three tier system, but then also MTSS is a broader framework, which ought to include social and emotional well being. And I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that part really being at play, okay? Because, as we say, right? What do you think? Lindsay, yeah,

Lindsay Kemeny 25:49
well, we, we do. And now I’m remembering when we, we had a podcast episode A while back on MTSS, and we did talk about, what’s the difference between RTI MTSS, and I remember we’re saying MTSS includes other things. So we do that on our at our school, where we have a local case management team, and you’ll come and bring any concern. It could be academic, it could be behavior, it could be emotional. You come to the team, explain what you’re seeing. They’re going to give you supports, ideas, things you can do. Someone might meet with you after school to help and and then you’ll, you know, try whatever it is, come back, let us know. And we kind of, it’s supposed to be really like a brainstorming, kind of help, supportive meeting.

Narrator 26:36
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Donell Pons 27:19
you know, Stacy, this gets me thinking about Tim’s presentation at plain talk too. Yeah, the social and emotional aspect of individuals who are struggling with reading, right? I mean, does a really compelling job. I anyone. If you have an opportunity to conference to hear him give that particular talk, please go in and listen. But it makes that even more important, because I think that’s the piece Stacy that often is missing. I think I see, if I see anything, it’s more of an RTI. There’s some tears going on. A student might be moving to a tier two to get some intervention directly for some sort of academic support, so typically with reading. But then I don’t see a great deal going on to help support the other aspects of a student that oftentimes has anxiety that goes along with this, that there’s a good deal of depression that can occur and that feels on the outside of a classroom, not really on the inside of a classroom. And I don’t, I don’t know that we’re really reaching those needs on that MTSS grander scale. I don’t know. It’s just a thought. So you

Stacy Hurst 28:12
know what? I have had a slightly different experience, but I still agree, because in my district and I am talking years ago, we had a very progressive team, and we implemented for and I feel like historically, RTI was a thing before MTSS was, yeah. And in some cases, people say, well, MTSS has replaced RTI, but you always need to be attending to response, to instruction and intervention, so I don’t think it can be replaced, but we did a good job in the district I worked in of really having a solid plan. And we have, we had a pyramid, and it had literacy and math and behavior, but And and so within that, like if a student struggled with behavior, and my first job in the school district actually was the behavior interventionist, but we had a plan in place for those students. What was missing was the integration we’re talking about, because often behavior was considered separately from how it impacts their academics and vice versa. So And I echo when we do have Dr Odegaard as a guest. Let’s ask him to talk about the contents of his presentation at plain talk, because I, I also think those things cannot be separate from each other, either, and and my experience those, they were even in an MTSS model, you got support, but it was for separate things, not how those those impacted each other. Yeah. So great, great questions. I know the question I often hear educators ask, what’s the difference between tier one, tier two and tier three? And let’s maybe, let’s just talk about some aspects. Of that. So tier one. Lindsay, you’ve already mentioned this. Every student and it receives tier one instruction, they are part of tier one, no matter. And it should be aligned with these structured literacy principles that we’re talking about. The component should be there. It also includes knowledgeable and skilled teaching in that area, and from all of the MTSS models, we noticed that if things are all aligned, about 80% of your students should be making adequate progress based on that. What else would you like to say about tier one? I

Donell Pons 30:36
want to add and Lindsay, you’ve mentioned it many times. Let’s not forget, the student who’s receiving services maybe at a tier two or tier three gets tier one two, right? Lindsay, we’ve had this conversation a lot, yeah. And

Stacy Hurst 30:50
I would say as well, that’s the type of instruction it’s we often classify students like that. They’re not classified like that. That’s the type of instruction they’re receiving. So every student receives tier one instruction always. There’s never an exception, right? And then tier two. Lindsay, how would you describe tier two and its relationship to tier one?

Lindsay Kemeny 31:17
It can be additional. It can be like a double dose of something. It’s generally going to be in a smaller group than you did in in tier one. So that it’s a little more intense, it might be a little more frequent. You could increase the dosage like so, yes, frequent. But also how long they’re working with you. The intervention, the tier two intervention, could be provided by the teacher. It could be provided by an interventionist. You know, it can look different, really, kind of depends your school setup and the supports you have.

Stacy Hurst 31:51
Yeah, thank you for that. And do you know one thing I forgot to mention in tier one, it does include differentiated instruction, yeah? So you can have small groups tier one, no matter where the students are. One thing that Dr Odegard says, and I’m on page 83 in the print manual, he talks about, of course, quality structured literacy instruction should be delivered from day one of kindergarten by teachers with knowledge of both the structure of English and how to teach students. Then in the next paragraph, he talks about and he uses the word triage. So he talks about tier two, and he says, when high quality, structured literacy is well implemented as part of tier one instruction and paired with universal screening and monitoring progress learners who start to fall behind expectations can be more easily identified as soon as they struggle in learning essential literacy skills in the next sentence, when identified, these students should be triaged to receive Additional intensive instruction as part of tier two instructional support using structured literacy. And I do, I have heard the word triage before, but to be honest, it’s mostly in reference to tier students who need who require tier three instruction. What do you think of that?

Donell Pons 33:21
Well, I was just thinking in my head, wow, wouldn’t things look a lot different if we actually did some of this? You know what I’m saying, and the dosage the time, this is something we really need to talk a little bit about, because I swear we’re so busy during the day, particularly in schools, where you have so many needs. You really need to watch that, because you would, you would swear that student has had the 30 whatever minutes that are committed. And what you’ll find is little things eat away at that time. And what you find is, in a day, a kid may only be getting 10 to 15, and that is not effective. And yet, then you’ll say, Oh, they don’t respond very well to intervention. I’ve seen this happen so many this is why I’m saying it’s because it happens. It happens even with the best of intentions, because you just get so distracted and busy. But it isn’t the fault of what was occurring. It they just the student never got near the dosage the student should have been receiving. Yeah,

Lindsay Kemeny 34:14
so many things that can appear with that. You know, researchers call it academic learning time, the minutes the students are actually engaged in learning, and it’s something that’s going to improve their learning, and sometimes in small group, and I hate to say it, but sometimes we have very well intentioned paraprofessionals, maybe that are providing intervention, but they might not have the training or the expertise in behaviors. And so if you have them dealing with difficult behaviors or not sure how to handle the group, you lose a lot of time. And I think that’s an important point, because you could say, oh my gosh, they’re getting 30 minutes. Why is. Isn’t it working? Maybe we need to increase that, but maybe we need to look at what is happening within those 30 minutes, and how many practice opportunities are they getting within that 30 minutes? Are they just sitting there listening to something and not actually engaging?

Stacy Hurst 35:15
And I think that’s where a system of support could be improved, because I know in schools that that I’m in frequently, they’re in intervention. Time for Tier Two is 30 minutes. But like you’re saying, Lindsay, that’s, that’s the total time allowed. But it takes a good five minutes for the students to move to the room, and then in five minutes for them to get back. So already we’re just down to 20 minutes. And then, as you mentioned, if a behavior disrupts the instruction, or if the pair, professional, whoever’s providing the instruction has a distraction, and that happens. I mean, this should? They should be receiving this 30 minutes five times a week, but we could very quickly cut that time in half, just by the accounting for those things alone.

Lindsay Kemeny 36:04
And the same thing in our tier one, the same thing we allow 30 minutes for our phonics lessons. How much of that you know are we actually using in that actual academic learning time? It’s definitely a thing to consider how to tighten up transitions to get you know everything running smoothly and efficiently.

Stacy Hurst 36:24
Also, I hope you’re noticing when we’re describing the difference between these tiers, the thread that’s running through them all is assessment, and we’ll talk about that in a minute after we describe a little bit more in detail about tier three. So Dr order guard on page 84 in the printed version of this edition, says those students who, let’s see whose rate of learning in response to tier two instruction, structured literacy instruction, if they do not reach proficiency and Meet grade level expectations, they’ll need more intensive intervention. This type of intervention is often achieved through additional time to provide students with the dosage event, dosage of intervention they will need to achieve academic success. You already mentioned that Donell as part of tier three, in addition a highly qualified instructor with deep knowledge of the English language and demonstrated instructional skill at delivering structured literacy is critically important.

Donell Pons 37:37
And Stacy, I think that we put code word for tier three is it’s a specific program, okay? So notice how Tim is very careful, and he’s helping if we don’t have the understanding, he’s helping us come to an understanding it’s not a program, right? And more specifically, it’s bang for your buck with the training of the individual and their understanding of how to teach that student, right? So that’s so important.

Stacy Hurst 38:02
So as a system, I guess one systemic support. How do you ensure a highly qualified instructor with deep knowledge of the English language and demonstrated instructional skill at delivering structured literacy? How would a system provide that, providing

Donell Pons 38:21
the training and support, like we’ve all been talking about from the beginning, and Lindsay mentioned,

Stacy Hurst 38:26
right? And when necessary, the certifications. Yes, I think about that, especially when we’re talking about students with dyslexia. Oftentimes they’ll have to go outside of the school to get a certified dyslexia specialist to tutor their you know, so to be tutored by So, lots of things. Lindsay, what are your thoughts on that?

Lindsay Kemeny 38:48
Well, I wanted to say sometimes we think tier three means special education, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be special education, but it doesn’t have to be. It can just be more intense intervention. You know that the student, the student, still needs more. They need more in addition to tier two, and in addition to tier one. The thing that we haven’t said that it’s so difficult is, when do you provide more time? I mean, time is like the most precious commodity, and you’re like, well, we don’t want them to miss tier one, well, we don’t want them to miss tier two. Well, we don’t want them to miss math. We don’t want them to miss science. They can’t miss art, they can’t miss PE they can’t miss music. And you’re like, well, they’re gonna miss something. Okay, they’re going to miss something. What do you do?

Donell Pons 39:32
And so Lindsay, that’s why a lot of us, with students who have dyslexia, our own children at some point or another, at least one and maybe more folks at a school has pulled us aside and quietly said, if you really want to see him make gains, you’re going to have to do this outside of school.

Lindsay Kemeny 39:48
Yeah, and you have to be you have to be very careful if you work for a school district like I can’t say that, because then, no, the district is on the hook for paying for that. Yes.

Stacy Hurst 40:00
Sure. Speaking of systems of support, this is another area that systemically can be improved. And I know when we first started implementing MTSS, some of us were confused about those time frames, and thinking that that 30 to 45 minutes that students receiving tier three instruction needed was in addition to tier one and tier two. It’s not so you’ll have a student in either tier one and tier two instruction or tier one and tier three instruction, right? You don’t do all three at the same time, but something else that and that does become tricky. I have been responsible for creating those intervention schedules, and it is. I’m not prone to headaches, but is a headache like there is. It’s so complex, and

Donell Pons 40:54
Lindsay just Stacy, just to be clear, a student could be in tier two for math and maybe tier three for meetings. You’re not saying that right point, yes,

Stacy Hurst 41:03
yeah. I’m just always hyper focused on perceive, yeah, that’s a good point,

Lindsay Kemeny 41:08
I think, to consider how we’re using the minutes and the time with the student. What do they need most, especially as we’re talking about, oh my gosh, they need more. But what are we doing with the minutes? For example, students in my class, like they are. We have some that have been identified for intervention. They get pulled out for that intervention for like, 2025, minutes, then they come back to my classroom, and I am doing small groups at this time, and I pull them back to work with me, and I give them what I know they didn’t get enough of in the intervention, because in their intervention, they’re really doing a lot of isolated phonics. I know the program they’re using, they’re really kind of, you know, working at the word level, but they haven’t had a lot of practice just reading text connected text. So when I pull them back to my small group table, I’m not necessarily going to start with, okay, let’s do a phonemic awareness. Warm up now. Let’s dictate some words. Now. Let’s because I know they’ve done that stuff already, so I’m just going to get right to reading and because they didn’t have and then I can support them right there. So, and

Donell Pons 42:13
that’s that communication between the tears that’s beautiful. And I’m glad you. I’m so glad you brought that up, Lindsay, because we don’t say it enough. Is your understanding of what your students received when they were in tiered instruction. Instead, it’s like a mystery. They go through a secret door, they come back, they emerge again from the secret door. You have no idea what went on in there.

Stacy Hurst 42:29
Yeah, yeah. And I was gonna say that too. That requires communication. Now I again, the district I worked in, we had a grant, but it took a grant where as a literacy coach or the reading specialist, and we had our Director of Special Education and the principal, oftentimes we had time to meet with each teacher every week, where we could make sure those things were being communicated. But that I know is not common. That is so uncommon. So a lot of times, the teacher will need to approach the people who are providing that intervention to find out what it is they’re doing. So I love how you’re using that. Lindsay, one thing I wanted to point out too, starting on page 84 in the print version that Dr Odegaard says, and he’s talking about students receiving tier three instruction. These students respond best to a sustained, oh, I should sorry, I should clarify if they have the profile of dyslexia, and notice he said profile and not diagnosis, right? Because we have many of our students who are not diagnosed. These students respond best to a sustained, multi component, structured literacy intervention. Okay, that makes sense. The duration of the intervention these students will require has been documented to be multiple years. I think that’s another area that the system has to support. It,

Donell Pons 44:01
yep, built for an understanding that this cannot be done in a certain amount of time for certain students, right with, with certain challenges, and that should be part of the system

Lindsay Kemeny 44:11
well, and also why we shouldn’t wait. True. It’s like I was told that by someone not long ago, and I was so frustrated because, because she said, You know, sometimes these kids catch up, not without intervention. They don’t it. They’re just not going to magically get better. So they need the intervention, then they’ll catch up. They

Donell Pons 44:35
might look that way years later, if their parents have been finally, out of frustration, realizing it’s never going to happen? Pulled them out and started giving them right. Oftentimes I’ll see them re enter the schools, and they’ll go, Oh, look at these. Made such event. You have no idea what went on outside of this place, in order to have that happen, yeah, yeah.

Stacy Hurst 44:50
Oh, wow, that is that is important. And, man, that’s definitely an area for improvement. And then, as we. Say, don’t wait, like that’s where assessment comes in, right? What types of assessment are we talking about in an MTSS model? Universal

Donell Pons 45:10
Screening, let’s say it again. Universal Screening, good

Stacy Hurst 45:14
job. I was about to say, I feel like I’m asking a quiz question. You get an A Donnell. Okay, so, yes, universal screening for sure, because what is the entire point of a universal screener to identify students who are not at benchmark, or where they should be right, or who are

Lindsay Kemeny 45:33
at risk for not getting bench, you know, reaching benchmark right? Yeah, depending

Stacy Hurst 45:36
on the assessment, right, if the assessment was designed to measure risk. Good point, absolutely. And then what do we do?

Lindsay Kemeny 45:46
Okay, first, Can I Can I mention I like Acadians, that’s my shout out, universal screener. Then what do we need to do? Well, well, we, we’ve got to give a diagnostic to the ones who are, who you know, were showed at risk on the screener or not at grade level, we got to get a diagnostic to see, hey, what exactly do they need help with? Because, you know, the screener is not going to go into detail. It’s going to say, these are your ones who need help. And now we need to see what exactly do they need help with,

Donell Pons 46:14
and progress monitoring.

Lindsay Kemeny 46:16
Progress monitoring,

Stacy Hurst 46:18
what questions are we answering with progress monitoring, is the

Lindsay Kemeny 46:21
intervention working? That’s what the progress monitoring is going to tell us. Is my instruction working for and you can look at this on the individual student level. You can look for broader patterns too, to say, hey, is my instruction working for my whole class? Or, you know, if you’re a coach, you’re saying, hey, across the grades, across my school, who needs more support? Who needs help? Yeah,

Stacy Hurst 46:43
and you could analyze your own data to know if your tier one instruction is working right well, because, in theory, you should have at least 80% of your students at benchmark right dibbles a long time ago, and I think Dr Stephanie Stoller did say that Acadians has this kind of report that it does tell you how effective your tier one, tier two and tier three instruction appears to be based on your student data. And I found that very useful back in the day, not only to help support my teachers, but to know areas we needed to focus on for professional development. This is when I was in a more administrative position, obviously, but um, yeah, ask yourself those questions. And

Donell Pons 47:33
if anybody wants more information on assessment, I think Louise spear swirling in our interview with her, she did a good job of talking about those and their importance, right? Yeah,

Stacy Hurst 47:40
you really did. And I think Dr Odegaard points that out over and over again that we need to for students receiving tier two and tier three instruction, they actually need to be assessed more often so we can intervene faster. And the whole point of MTSS is to prevent reading failure, right? So analyzing within the system and within what we as teachers individually have control over, we’re always going to help make improvements. There’s

Lindsay Kemeny 48:12
no point in giving the assessment if you don’t do anything with the data. So don’t make it a waste of time. You’ve got to respond to the data. If a student isn’t doing well, you’ve got to change something and just try not to take it personally. You know, it’s just okay. Something’s got to change. Something’s not working here. What can I do? But I think the key because you can test, test, test all you want, and it’s not going to do a single thing if you don’t respond to the data you’re getting from the test.

Donell Pons 48:41
Love that. And then I’m going to add because I’ve heard it before the with universal screening. Well, we did that last year, and they were fine. Remember, things can change for a student. Maybe that student was hanging on, barely just hanging on. And remember, developmentally in those early grades, we want to catch those kiddos who maybe came in and they were just enough to keep them on board. But then the next year, things got harder. So yes, that screener will do it more than once, and that kid only show up differently on that screener. Yeah, yeah,

Stacy Hurst 49:08
that’s a very important thing to notice in again, in DIBELS, the D in DIBELS stood for dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills. So they are dynamic. The benchmark will change, and what’s important at a certain point in development is the thing that changes, right? So very important to note that. And then I also appreciate Lindsay that you are highlighting that. And sometimes other people do that screening for us, and we just get the data as teachers don’t waste their time either. There’s good information in that assessment and good direction for you as a teacher, one thing I heard Matt burns say a few months ago, if a student is still struggling, you haven’t found the right assessment, because if you don’t. Know what they need. You need to make sure your assessment is the right assessment, and it makes sense. And we’ve talked about this a little bit before on other podcast episodes, but for example, Acadians and DIBELS and the like do a really good job of helping us to know which area A student might be struggling in, and then we could do it more diagnostic, you know, to find out exactly where. But we’ve talked before about oral language screeners that aren’t often. They’re not given as often or as frequently in the way that that reading screeners are. So that’s something that systemically could help too. We have

Lindsay Kemeny 50:41
one. We have an oral language screener at my school, the University of Utah, comes in, students come in. And I think it’s, I don’t know if they’re piloting it. It’s pretty new. It’s, this was the second year, and it’s really interesting, because I’m like, Oh yeah, it definitely catches students. I need to find out what the name of it is, but, yeah, it’s interesting. It’s just now I needed the support of what to do

Stacy Hurst 51:08
well, and I think our speech and language pathologist, they definitely give a screener, right? Maybe in kindergarten, or, I don’t know, I should know more about that actually. So I will learn more about that, and we’ll have a speech and language pathologist on our podcast soon, so maybe we can talk about that then as well. Well, thank you both for this conversation. There is one quote on page 85 that I will just kind of end our discussion with, unless you guys have anything else to add, and it states the beauty and power of structured literacy is the intricate weaving together of critical reading related skills through direct and comprehensive instruction. I think that kind of sums up this article quite nicely. Thank you for the conversation. It’s been awesome as usual, and thanks to all of you who have joined us and we’ll see you at the in the next episode of literacy talks.

Narrator 52:08
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.