Dr. Jerry Johns talks with us about teaching, informal assessment, vocabulary, and resources for supporting readers who struggle. Jerry is known for developing the Basic Reading Inventory, his work in teaching reading, and for his experience in schools. Jerry enjoyed a long, distinguished career at Northern Illinois University and maintains a close connection with the NIU Literacy Clinic which carries his name.
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2020, Dec. 15). A conversation with Jerry Johns. (Season 1, No. 6) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/episodes. DOI: 10.5240/938C-E16F-8490-78DE-862B-2
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Dr. Jerry Johns talks with us about teaching, informal assessment, vocabulary, and resources for supporting readers who struggle. Jerry is known for developing the Basic Reading Inventory, his work in teaching reading, and for his experience in schools. Jerry enjoyed a long, distinguished career at Northern Illinois University and maintains a close connection with the NIU Literacy Clinic which carries his name.
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2020, Dec. 15). A conversation with Jerry Johns. (Season 1, No. 6) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/episodes. DOI: 10.5240/938C-E16F-8490-78DE-862B-2
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Education Research has a problem. The work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom Caffeine is here to help. Each week, I invite a top education researcher to sit down and talk with teachers about what they have learned from years of study. This week, Dr. Jerry Johns talks to us about teaching, assessment, and resources for supporting readers who struggle. Jerry is known for developing the Basic Reading Inventory for his work and teaching reading and for his experience in schools. Jerry enjoyed a long distinguished career at Northern Illinois University, and maintains a close connection with the NIU Literacy Clinic which carries his name. For more information about our guest, stay tuned to the end of this episode. So pour a cup of your favorite morning drink. And join me your host, Lindsay Persohn for Classroom Caffeine, research to energize your teaching practice. Today, I'm here with Dr. Jerry Johns. Jerry, I have just three questions for you today and hopes that you will share some of your knowledge and expertise with teachers. Thank you for being here.
Jerry Johns:Your welcome.
Lindsay Persohn:From your own experiences in education, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?
Jerry Johns:That's really a tough question that you begin with. However, I'd like to just go back to my origins. I come from a family of eight, two parents, I have five brothers and sisters, three sisters and two brothers. And I like to think of them as kind of my entry into teaching because I'm the oldest of those five. And so what came with that was tremendous amount of responsibility, I mean, around the home. So I like to think I began teaching when I was actually pretty young. When I got into the classroom, I've carried many of those same kinds of caring and concerns for children, with me. And throughout my career at Northern Illinois University, I had the privilege of directing and being part of a literacy clinic. And during that time, I had plenty of opportunities to work with students, both in tutoring and supervision. And we also had opportunities when we went out into the field schools in which we would work with teachers, and then sometimes students. So I'd like to think that I'm grounded in a reality of classrooms. And then also thinking primarily about what framed how I have approached the profession. I've really not got one or two moments, but really a frame of mind. And that frame of mind has, I think, at least three aspects. The first is that I engage in wide reading. And second, I reflect or think about things. And then my third is really that I have a commitment to help teachers. I'm not trying to say I can solve all the problems or maybe too many problems. But my work at Northern Illinois University and other institutions as visiting professors has been really to be grounded with teachers, and how they can do a better job in the classroom or how I can maybe help them help students become better readers. So I'd say that it's a rather unorthodox approach. But but those would be the big things. And of course, there are titans in the field that go back years that I had a chance to talk with, sometimes work with, who really helped inform the kind of professional that I am now. I'm not mentioning any names because some of them would not be recognized by your listeners, because they go back many years and some of the writings or books are probably in the archives if they still exist, but that's what I see as how I got this spot now.
Lindsay Persohn:I really love that idea of collection of experiences and how that shapes who we are. Because I think that's so true for all of us. We may identify with one or two defining moments, but it really is a collection of experiences that we carry with us. And that's who we become based on those experiences. So thank you for that, Jerry.
Jerry Johns:You're welcome.
Lindsay Persohn:My next question for you is, what would you like teachers to know about your research, acknowledging that you have a very large body of research, but I'm hoping that you might be able to share some things that will specifically inform teachers since that is really where your work lies.
Jerry Johns:First, I know that I want my work to be defined not primarily as just basic research, or a lot of research. I know I have done some of those studies. But primarily, I see myself as writing research articles, articles, and books that are aimed at helping students become more efficient and effective readers. And if teachers gain things from those books, then I've achieved part of my purpose. So I'm not a basic researcher, I'm more of what I call applied researcher. And based on that question that you pose, maybe I can review what I consider to be some of the major strands of my research. And it's interesting, you know, I my career was not spent saying, I'm going to do this, this and this. I just did a lot of things that gave me joy, that informed my teaching, that helped me make me a better prof at Northern Illinois University, and then trying to be effective in staff development and other presentations with teachers, actually, around the world. So the four areas, and I'll mention them, and then I will go back and try to elaborate just a little bit. First, there's the area of informal assessment, or assessment in general. Second is the area of vocabulary. Third, strategies to help teachers provide high quality classroom instruction, and then fourth, helping readers who struggle. Now those four areas can certainly overlap. But as I look at my publications, those seem to be the ones that really have made a difference in my career, and I hope, helped teachers. The first area informal assessment probably goes back many years. Emmett Betts is called the father of the Informal Reading Inventory. And I actually had a chance to watch him work with students at an international convention. And I became enamored, even as an undergraduate with this notion of in some informal assessment. And then, as I entered my teaching career, I became a reading teacher. And I was working with 16 students who struggled in reading, they were all boys. I got them from 28 different elementary schools. So they were some choice struggling readers. And they struggled with many more kinds of things, too. I think with today's terminology, we'd have other words to describe them. But my job was basically to try to help them become better readers. And then I also started developing at that time, an Informal Reading Inventory. There were a few on the market that I just thought, I'm going to try to do that. And I got started as a reading teacher. And then when I came to Northern Illinois University, I continued that process. And then, eight years later, the Basic Reading Inventory was published. It's now in a 12th edition. So a lot of teachers who use it, recognize if they look at the time that was published, that books older than they are, but fortunately, through a dozen revisions, it's I hope, kept been kept current. The Informal Reading. Inventory just has word lists and passages from very early stages of reading, like pre K, all the way through high school. So it gives teachers an opportunity to see what they can do to determine student's strengths and weaknesses in reading and then how to help them in reading. And so that was a foundation but just finding out their struggles is not really the heart of the matter. The question is, what can we do instructionally to help students. So I'm going to jump ahead to the third item, which were strategies to help teachers. What I found is that it's one thing to say a student has problem with, say, sight vocabulary, or can't determine the main idea or has trouble making predictions. You can figure those things out informally in the classroom, as well as with something like an Informal Reading Inventory. So I developed a number what I call strategy books. One of them was called Improving Reading. Another one was Comprehension, Vocabulary Strategies for Elementary Students. Other ones go all the way through high school. And many of these books, in fact, all of them now are co authored. I've been able to bring on other people to help with those books. But in those books, and one in particular, the Improving Reading, it has, it's a big book, probably, I don't know, maybe 500 pages. I mean, and I've had teachers come up to me, and they say, Jerry, I've got to tell you something. I use that book of yours all the time. But I've never read the whole thing. And I said, perfect. And why did I say perfect, because I think the only people who have read the whole thing would be my co author, Sue Lensky, and me when we're looking at the various rounds of page proofs. And what makes that book so useful to teachers is there about 70 different reading behaviors that we identify and right in the table of contents, I mean, you open it up, and you look. And there's two pages that have all these reading behaviors that are classified by different areas, such as fluency, or comprehension, or vocabulary. And right after one of the behaviors is the page number, so you turn to the page number, and there you go. You read a little bit about it, and you have one or two or three or four different strategies to possibly try. And you also have practice activities that you could use to to reinforce that skill, or strategy, or whatever it is that you find. Now, we didn't create all of those. We look at the literature, we look at the research. And we say these are some strategies that have stood the test of time. I've even had teachers say to me, Jerry, you know, that book is good, but it's not like, I don't know some of those things. And I said, Absolutely. Those are there to try to help you and the things you know, there they are. But those teachers also will say, I really like the way it's organized. So we've had people cut off the spine, punch three holes, tab it, it's pretty incredible. The other books are pretty much based, I mean the same way they don't have the reading behaviors, but we classify them often in skills or strategies that we think students need to become better readers. Now those same principles also apply to that fourth area, which is helping readers who struggle, good classroom teachers have readers who struggled but then there are some other students who require special help through reading interventionists, or reading teachers, or whatever we call those individuals today. And so the strategies that we have in our books can apply to both those students in the classroom as well as teachers who work more directly with students who struggle in reading. Curriculum coordinators have found the books to be useful, because they're often asked to help teachers with strategies or activities for some of their readers. And I don't again, want to stress that these are not all ideas that we created as authors. They are in the literature, or they're long in tradition within the field. And we really take our time to sort through those things and try to be informed by some of the more current research that goes on. In a word, those are probably the hearts of it, but I want to go back to that vocabulary. Just for a moment. I did a lot of word counting. You do that when you're determining difficulty level of passages today, we have Lexile score, but back in the day, and they still exist today, we have a range of readability formulas. And before all the computers did this, he did a lot of word counting with, by hand. So I got interested in words, partly because our language has a fair amount of repetition in words. And so I was able to determine that there are about 13 words in the English language that account for about 25 of the words in a piece of text. So basically, a quarter of the words are made up of these 13 words. You might say, well, you know, that's interesting. But I'm going let's go to the pre K, or kindergarten teacher. And let's say, let's get these 13 words along with color words and a number of other words into the curriculum there so that at the end of the year, those students will master not only those 13 words, but a number of other words, and there's nothing magic in a sense of those 13 words, but when you think about reducing the number of words that students have to decode, or figure out for themselves, that's 25% of it. Then further research, and I'm going to refer to the Dolch word list is probably the most widely known word list. It's been around since 1936, when Dolch published that list. And a few decades ago, I decided that I would look at the Dolch list in terms of what's happened to our language since 1936. I mean, some words come, some words go. And what I found is that based on a number of very large word count studies, like a corpus, they're called I mean, the books are two inches thick. Sorting through all of these words, I was able to determine that I think about 189 words were still current, popular, and that I could add some additional words that would meet the criteria. So I revised the Dolch list from his 20 words to a new list. I don't recall them quite the exact number in it. But the point was, here's a list that we showed by research was potentially more useful, at least statistically. But even as I work with teachers, I don't get caught up and saying, Well, there's only one list. I mean, Ed Fry has a list. That there are a number of different ones out there. But I do want to say that if teachers can be committed to helping students master a list of 100, or 200 words, they can pretty much be content to know that those students will know at least half or more of the words in print. So to think of beginning readers, it's up to 75% of the words. For those seventh graders, eighth graders, it's still going to be 50% of the words or so. That again, doesn't cut it for the decoding but it reduces it greatly. And almost always, if you can find a middle grade student who has trouble with a high frequency word list, struggles with those words, you can almost say that student is going to be a struggling reader. They're not going to be reading at grade level. It would be very rare. So that vocabulary was interesting. We've also done strategies with meaning vocabulary, not just always sight vocabulary, but a number of things beyond that. So in those four areas, I think that can define at least part of my career.
Lindsay Persohn:Thank you for sharing that with us Jerry because I think it helps to really reframe the importance of learning sight words, and learning those high frequency words because they that's why their sight words right there, they're so prevalent, that they really give readers kind of a key to too much of the text that they're going to encounter.
Jerry Johns:Right, but I don't want to just say it's just all about sight words. We need wide reading, repeated readings, all kinds of things to help students and not just a list of words that you rote try learn how to put them in phrases sentences, use predictable books with the youngsters. I mean, that famous Brown Bear Brown Bear, What do you see by Bill Martin? I mean, some of the most common words are in that book. And there are a host of wonderful, predictable pattern books for beginners to use.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, absolutely. And they are, many of them are tried and true. And that's why they remain classics.
Jerry Johns:I'm glad you said that. Because just because it's been around a long time doesn't mean it's time to throw it out. And just because it's round a long time, doesn't mean it can't be reconsidered as well.
Lindsay Persohn:So Jerry, my my third and final question for you is, given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?
Jerry Johns:If it was a year ago, I would not be saying what I'm saying now. We are now in a new era, COVID 19 Plus. And as I reflect on the question, it seems to me that in this COVID era, we have a number of different models going on to instruct students. I actually have a brother in Michigan, who is a substitute teacher. He's been doing this for really a number of years. And today is a school day. And actually, he is in school, helping as a substitute teacher. It's not a class of 25. It's a class of 12. It's a class that is only there part of the time. It's a teacher who's working with some of those students, as well as teaching students online who are at home. So it's an entirely, I think, different world. And as I think of teachers, what I would like to stress, and my most important aspect is that I want you as teachers, to cut yourself lots of slack. By that, I mean, whenever I would do workshops with teachers, and one of them would be involved with learning how to administer and score the Basic Reading Inventory, an informal assessment. The goal for teachers, they always wanted to get it right, like, Am I doing it right. And I would always say, cut yourself some slack, you're in a learning process. COVID-19 is a learning process. And my prediction is, unfortunately, it's going to be with us for longer than any of us would wish. So number one, for teachers cut yourself some slack, which means it's not going to be ideal, it's not going to be perfect. But we're in kind of a progress process to try to move toward educating students in this new era. Second, I want to offer encouragement to teachers. This is a tough time. And without encouragement from those around teachers, it can become very disabling, in a sense. The third thing is I want teachers to have patience. Patience with themselves first and foremost. And then with their students. There are perhaps listeners who are working with kindergarten children or fourth grade, eighth grade students, my gosh, attention spans just come to the forefront right away. And I even have colleagues and I'm speaking university people, they are in Zoom meetings, and they get worn out. That's like a day of, like one day I had eight Zoom meetings now not me. I'm not a Zoomer, but there's no doubt that they take a toll on professionals as well. Next, I want to say I have appreciation for teachers at all times, but especially in this era. In addition to appreciation, I want to see if we can respect teachers, even though they're not immune from criticism and parents are often short tempered, but they are teachers and they deserve our respect. And perhaps, finally on what I'm thinking about is just support, how we can support teachers with new forms of staff development with online learning and with the kinds of resources that teachers might need. It's to me a real tragedy in our society that we don't have what we need to really deal with COVID. Certainly, it would be wonderful if we, we get what we need to eradicate, or greatly reduce the disease or the virus, but those days aren't here yet. And so teachers are faced with trying to do the best they can. And I respect them. But I wish that school districts, state and local as well as the federal government would have stepped up more to try to do this. It's like a moving target that we're in. And in my particular state, Illinois, here in October of 2020, we are seeing resurgences of the virus. And that will play havoc, not only with many aspects of society, but schooling is one of the most important of those. So a year ago, I would have probably had other things that teachers could be doing. But I want to be supportive of teachers, that's been my career. I love teachers, I love teaching, it's like one of the most beautiful things, rewarding and challenging. And I have had students who have become colleagues, that have become co authors, that have made big differences in the field of reading. And so it might not be the traditional answer that you're looking for. But that's my answer in the COVID era.
Lindsay Persohn:I'm looking for whatever answer you would like to provide. And I think that's such an important message right now, Jerry, that we, we as teachers have to be patient with ourselves. And, and and I think, you know, teachers have always, one demand has been to be flexible, obviously. But I think we are just in an era of extreme flexibility. And if we're not able to find that flexibility, I think that that people do break, you know, and leave our profession. And it's certainly sad to see good teachers leave when, when maybe what they needed was that support and respect from others that you've mentioned.
Jerry Johns:Yeah. And also, we have to remember the the feeling of safety because teachers are on the front lines. And probably each of us can identify one or more teachers who have become infected or have chosen to retire. This year one, perhaps they had several more years of teaching that they prefer to do. But the virus said no.
Lindsay Persohn:Right. It's really been a very strange year to say the least. And again, just a year where I think there are so many new demands, in addition to the traditional demands on teachers. So Jerry, it has been an absolute honor and privilege to speak with you today. And I thank you so much for your contributions to education and to the work of teachers. So thank you for your your time and for sharing your words with us today.
Jerry Johns:I'm delighted to do so thank you.
Lindsay Persohn:Thank you. Dr. Jerry John's has been recognized as a distinguished teacher, teacher, educator, writer and professional development speaker. Jerry is notably the author of the Basic Reading Inventory, which is now in its 12th edition with co authors. He is also co authored the book Improving Reading, Strategies, Resources, and Common Core Connections now in its seventh edition, and most recently, Teaching Reading and Writing, Pre K through Third Grade A Practical Approach. In addition to these and many other important books for teachers, Jerry has authored or co authored nearly 300 articles, monographs and research studies and given more than 700 presentations and professional development sessions across the United States and in 13 countries. Jerry is a 2015 inductee into the International Reading now Literacy Association Reading Hall of Fame, and he has received the Alpha Delta Literacy Award for Scholarship, Leadership and Service to Adult Learners, the AB Herr Award for outstanding contributions to the field of reading, and the prestigious William S Gray Citation of Merit award from ILA for his significant contributions to reading. He's also received the Outstanding Teacher Educator Award in reading presented by the IRA, the champion for Children Award presented by the Host Corporation, and the Laureate Award from the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers for lifelong contributions to the field of reading. He's been President of the International Literacy Association, the Illinois Reading Council, the Northern Illinois Reading Council, and the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers. He is an alumnus of Oakland University and Michigan State University. Jerry enjoyed a long distinguished career at Northern Illinois University and maintains a close connection with the NIU Literacy Clinic which now carries his name. For the good of all students, good research should inform good practice and vice versa. Listeners are invited to respond to our guests learn more about our guests research, and suggest a topic for an upcoming episode through this podcast website at ClassroomCaffeine.com. If you've learned something today, or just enjoyed listening, please subscribe to this podcast. I raised my mug to you teachers. Thanks for joining me.