Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
A Conversation with Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert
In this episode, Dr. Elfrieda “Freddy” Hiebert talks to us about language, learning to read, and authentic interactions with interesting texts. Freddy is known for her work addressing how fluency, vocabulary, and knowledge can be fostered through appropriate texts. Through documents such as Becoming a Nation of Readers, published by the Center for the Study of Reading in 1985 and Every Child a Reader, published by the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement in 1999, she has contributed to making research accessible to educators. Her work has also appeared in journals such as The Reading Teacher, Reading and Writing, Reading Research Quarterly, Reading Psychology, Education Sciences, Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, Journal of Literacy Research, Educational Researcher, and Educational Leadership. She has also authored many books and book chapters. Her work has been recognized by a number of organizations, including the Oscar Causey Award for Outstanding Contributions to Reading Research from the Literacy Research Association in 2015. Freddy has had a long career as a literacy educator, first as a teacher’s aide and teacher of primary-level students in California and, subsequently, as a teacher educator and researcher at the universities of Kentucky, Colorado-Boulder, Michigan, and California-Berkeley. Since 2011, she has served as President and CEO of TextProject, Inc, a non-profit corporation that prioritizes creating products and prototypes for student reading programs, primarily based on the TExT model of text complexity, providing teacher support resources and classroom reading activities, and supporting and disseminating related research.
To cite this episode: Persohn, L. (Host). (2025, June 17). A conversation with Elfrieda “Freddy” Hiebert. (Season 5, No. 11) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/4631-DA23-14D0-79DB-B764-K
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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. In each episode, I talk with a top education researcher or an expert educator about what they have learned from years of research and experiences.
Lindsay Persohn:In this episode, Dr. Elfrieda "Freddie Hebert talks to us about language, learning to read and authentic interactions with interesting texts. Freddy is known for her work addressing how fluency, vocabulary and knowledge can be fostered through appropriate texts. Through documents such as Becoming a Nation of Readers, published by the Center for the Study of Reading in 1985, and Every Child a Reader, published by the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement in 1999, she has contributed to making research accessible to educators. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Reading Teacher, Reading and Writing, Reading Research Quarterly, Reading Psychology, Education Sciences, Literacy Research: Theory, Method and Practice, Journal of Literacy Research, Educational Researcher, and Educational Leadership. She's authored many books and book chapters. Her work has been recognized by a number of organizations, including the Oscar Causey Award for Outstanding Contributions to Reading Research from the Literacy Research Association, awarded in 2015.
Lindsay Persohn:Freddy has had a long career as a literacy educator, first as a teacher's aide, and teacher of primary students in California, and subsequently as a teacher educator and researcher at the universities of Kentucky, Colorado-Boulder, Michigan, and California-Berkeley. Since 2011, she has served as president and CEO of Text Project Incorporated, a nonprofit corporation that prioritizes creating products and prototypes for student reading programs, primarily based on the TExT model of text complexity, providing teacher support resources and classroom reading activities, and supporting and disseminating related research. For more information about our guest, stay tuned to the end of this episode.
Lindsay Persohn:You can connect with Freddie through the Text Project website at www. textproject. org, or on LinkedIn, Instagram, Blue Sky and Facebook.
Lindsay Persohn:So pour a cup of your favorite drink and join me, your host, Lindsay Persohn for Classroom Caffeine research to energize your teaching practice.
Lindsay Persohn:Freddie, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you Glad to have you here. So, from your own experiences in education, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now
Lindsay Persohn:? I
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:I have a really strong commitment to describe them as the kids who depend on public schools to become highly literate. I describe them as the kids who depend on public schools to become highly literate. That doesn't mean that they don't have great experiences at home with literacy or oral language, but for formal literacy. There's a significant portion of kids who depend on schools to become really good readers and my concern lies with those students, lies with those students, and I'm particularly concerned about descriptions of students that don't do credit to them. So, for example, when I hear on a study done through the National Assessment of Educational Progress that there's a recommendation that kids who are below proficient and on the last name that was about 70 percent of the fourth graders that they actually need phonological decoding practice, and when I hear things like that, I get pretty stirred up and I begin looking at what we know, about what our students actually know. So I'm always responding to what I regard to be inappropriate attributions of the kids who are in most need of advocacy. So in a sense, I look at kids as I'm their advocate. They might not know me, but I'm committed to asking questions.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:For example, at AERA this past month, I was the discussant for a session on the decoding threshold and that's a notion that some researchers have established that at a certain point kids who haven't scored at that point on a decoding assessment don't show progress in grades five and beyond in comprehension.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:But they never told us what was on that decoding assessment. So immediately I start asking questions because I don't think you can attribute a lack of decoding or even oral reading fluency to the majority of children and young adults. Our research shows that most students by the end of second, definitely third, grade can read the majority of words and text. So if you look at the patterns on dibbles I'm not advocating for dibbles, but they do make all their data freely available for you to take a look at. So when you look at their norms, what you see is kids attaining an accuracy level even kids at the 12th percentile at about lack of automaticity calls for a different solution than when we attribute a lack of reading or a lack of decoding ability to students. So what motivates me is a commitment to the kids for whom school matters the most.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah. In various assessments, you share some really powerful anecdotes and statements about what assessment is and often what it isn't, and, I think, questioning what assessments actually mean and maybe what they are actually intended to measure versus what they do in fact measure. National I Assessment think those are questions for everyone in education. You know, I hear oftentimes assessment data just sort of thrown around you know 22, only 22 percent of kids are ready for kindergarten. But you don't always hear folks saying, well, what exactly does that mean anyway? Where does that number come from? And if that's the flag we're going to wave, how does that actually impact kids and their learning? That's the flag we're going to wave. How does that actually impact kids and their learning? So I appreciate the curiosity that you bring, but also the, NAEP you know, the critical questions as to like what do these numbers actually tell us? What do we think they tell us versus what might they actually be?
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:telling us, including in the Lexile framework, there have been particular statistical procedures used that put students or, in the case of Lexiles, texts on a single scale. And then there are certain points that are labeled time, this know, on the national assessment, proficient basic, below basic. But we're not ever told, for example, what the typical proficiency of kids at the basic level is. What is it that they can read? So when you use a term like below basic, you know if I were not a literacy educator, I would think like, wow, they're below basic. That means they don't have the basics. And in fact you know that message has gone out in places like the New York Times. You know an article that you know our kids can't read because they're below basic on the name. Well, that's just not true. It's a particular assessment and we've never been told precisely the kinds of items that the kids can deal with and those that the kids can't deal with. And in fact, some very prestigious National Academy of Sciences panels have asked for that exact information, first in 1997. And then more recently in 2017. And we haven't gotten any closer to uncovering what that answer is.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:So you know I never really liked to hear about percentiles. You know, like the kid was at the 35th percentile. I don't even like to hear that a kid is, I'm told a lot of the time. This kid is reading at the second grade level and my response sometimes that will be attributed to kids in middle school and I'm kind of going, wow, great, I know how to work with that, because I actually have quantified what know, yes to be second grade level. a
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:You know what kind of decoding patterns do you need to know? What kind of high frequency words do you need to be able to read most second grade text? It's actually a lot more sophisticated than you might think. But if you tell me this vague idea of second when, or you know 35 percentile or below basic or below the benchmark, I don't know what that means. I don't know what the kids know and I don't think you know. Yes, there truly are some to, it's different students for whom literacy might, but we still know that kids know something and I think that that's really important.
Lindsay Persohn:disservice to children, their families, their teachers and, ultimately, our community as a whole whenever we don't acknowledge what kids bring with them to their educational work. You know, what are their life No, what are they interested in and when? National Assessment whenever we, like you said, whenever we say, oh, they're a second grade level National reader Assessment and that's Educational sort Progress of where we leave it, you know that's what we boil their entire being down to. It's just such a disservice to everyone we boil their entire being down to. .?= It's just such a disservice to everyone. Yeah, I know that our whole conversation won't just be around this particular topic, but I want to emphasize that a lot of what we've done and keep remembering our state tests through legislation, during no Child Left Behind are actually modeled after the national assessment. So we're saying the same thing on the state test as we are on the national assessment of educational progress. But keep remembering those assessments are aspirational and aspirational means we wish for our kids to do that. We don't know what it takes for all the kids to do that. For example, on the Common Core State Standards staircase of text complexity, that was an aspirational model. That was something that somebody in a statistical modeling process said oh, to get kids to be at this point at the end of high school, we need to have covered this, this, this, this, this and this in terms of text complexity. We have to in that rate Really. I mean, do you have evidence that that movement will get kids to that level? Do you have evidence for what it takes to get kids to that level? Do you have evidence for what it takes to get kids to that level? And what I worry about is, you know, I actually was born in Canada. So if you hear me say things like y'all come back, eh, that's because most Canadians live in the deep south of Canada. But you know, in Canada it isn't an aspirational test. That's reported. NAEP know, in other countries like the Scandinavian countries, it's not an aspirational test. That's reported. You know, in in other countries like the Scandinavian countries it's not an aspirational test, it's actually grounded.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:n particular, you know, anchor points of this is what the kids can do, and I think that that is so discouraging for us in the educational profession. And actually some of those ideas have actually they've come from us and yet you know, we've built a whole culture that makes us look at ourselves and saying, wow, we're not doing a very good job. And I go to conferences and I hear, you know, reputable people saying that to a group of teachers, like you know, one out of every three kids you know on the NAIT isn't attaining the level. That means two kids won't be making it and I don't want them to be my kids and I'm kind of going what you know, those kids know something.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:And I think, especially in this, I'm going to really make a right turn here and just say, in this decoding climate, make a right turn here and just say, in this decoding climate, we have to realize that decoding works initially. When you're using words, you already know what they are, so you can't decode a word initially, even though people are using lots and lots of nonsense tasks, which is really an incomprehensible task to a kid who speaks another language or even another dialect. But when we give a decoding task to a kid for them to unravel the mystery, they actually need to know what the thing is that they're going to get to. You know, it's like asking a detective to solve a mystery without having any idea what's underlying the task.
Lindsay Persohn:that I want so far that, the you direction of decoding that we act Becoming though Nation and Readers knowledge doesn't really matter, or that maybe ultimately, comprehension doesn't matter, when, of course, in my mind, that is the ultimate goal of reading is understanding Right and asking critical questions. So if we, if we stop at decoding, we've definitely lost something there and it's only going to take us so far in life and in our educational career.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:So, yeah, Well, I want to emphasize that. You know, early in my career becoming a nation of readers, which was published in 1985, we made it really clear that one needs to decode to be able to be a proficient reader. I mean, there's there's not any argument about that. That's right. Things I'm seeing is taking little bits of language and attending to those little bits and not letting the kids, who don't know a lot about why you'd have those bits, not letting them know what the bigger picture is. One of the things I've just recently this is kind of like an epiphany I'm starting to write a new book series on selecting text at different levels of literacy and I looked at the book that I published in 1998 on emergent literacy, which, by the way, is for free download at Text Project. When I get the permissions back for the copyrights back for my books, I scan them and we put them there for everyone to see.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:But what strikes me about 1998 is how much of my book was about kids writing, because it turns out that writing is really you have to break a word down to be able to write it. So that's just the perfect part of learning to decode. You know, whether you start with magnetic letters. You know, in our interventions that we were doing in the early 2000s, we always spent as much time on kids using chartboards and you know whiteboards and writing and changing Like, if this word is, you know, matt, how would you change it to hat kind of thing? Or, now that you have hat, how would you change it to hat kind of thing? Or, now that you have hat, how would you change it to ham? And we'd also talk about what that word meant, because a lot of these interventions were being done with kids for whom English was an emerging language. So that really surprises me and I'm also surprised.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:I mean, a lot of my work in the 1990s was also around how you help kids get into text.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:You know, like, what are the library books that you'd really really want children to be part of as a read aloud in a kindergarten or first grade classroom? And now I'm just seeing these lists of you know, like the little pieces of literacy that you need to have mastered in kindergarten. So I don't want anybody to misrepresent me and saying I'm not saying that decoding is not important. I am saying that when we go off and take things to their extreme, like we did with level books where we were uncertain what the there there was and what the underlying model of reading was underlying those books. You could put a model to those books. That's something I did in some studies and Linnea Erie did too, and we found that when you put a good decoding curriculum under the books and, you know, sorted them topically, that would be a great thing. But I just fear that, you know, we often tangentially will say well, you know, scarborough's rope also has the language part to it, but right now we really have to worry about this other part, and that concerns me a lot.
Lindsay Persohn:Right. So if you're only focusing on single pieces of the rope, or one or two, you're really missing out on what that model is all about. You know, showing the interconnectedness of the skills and why they all matter. So you've already shared some really rich examples of the work that you've done and the discoveries you've made, and I love that you have had this epiphany that writing is such an integral part of decoding, because I think that's so important.
Lindsay Persohn:And you know, again, we silo writing from reading so often in schools and we tell teachers they're not allowed to read books aloud to their kids.
Lindsay Persohn:You know, all kinds of things are happening right now that do sort of cut off parts of the rope from the other parts of the rope, without understanding how important it is for all of those things to work in concert in order for us to support kids, to care about reading and literacy skills and to understand that they have skills, they bring with them, that they already know strategies. How do we build off of that rather than, you know, conveying to them that they don't know anything, and it is really concerning that. That is the message that some kids get from their schooling experiences and I think the world is getting from some popular media sources. Yeah, so, freddie, what else do you want listeners Text Project about your work, or maybe, what have you done to help tackle some of these challenges? I know you've been hard at work for over a decade now developing the text project website with many, many free resources. Can you tell us a little bit. And so there's a whole series more about the work you've been doing?
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:Well, I love being a teacher and I need to be honest that when I establish something in my research, I often work on creating something that will support it. So let me give you an example. Last evening I was working on this new book that I'm writing and I was looking at ideas about polysemy OK, the idea that a word like bark or a word like wave can sound the same but can mean And I start looking for books and there are a handful of trade books that get into that. But one of my friends who's a literacy researcher sent me the most delightful book that her first grader wrote. You know that attends to polysemy and I started asking do we have anything at Tech's project that supports that idea? So last night and this morning I've been writing a series of little books that are basically called Same but Different, and so it'll be something like you know, about dogs barking and that you can feel the bark on a tree of that.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:But I write these books so that they can be read, not as the primary instructional program. That's not what I'm working on. I'm working on things that I'm hoping can ground or expand students' experiences. So, for example, could you write a series of decodable texts that supported kids' knowledge. So I spent about a year about you that question. So we have several hundred texts at Text Project. They're called Topic Reads Primary, topic reads primary and they are sets of four texts on a, on a topic like snakes or mud. Snakes would obviously be on long vowels, mud with short vowels and, yes, 100 percent of the words are not, you know, on the UD pattern or the AKE pattern with snakes. But with snakes there are things like scales and stripes and they shed their skin. There are lots of ideas related to consistent patterns in English, which is what you really really want to know in English, which is what you really really want to know. And I mean, one of the things that's not talked about enough in this current manifestation of decoding is the quasi-regular nature of English's orthography, and I'm sure you've talked a lot about that on this show. But that's a really important thing to keep in mind.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:And you know, the idea that kids need a set for variability was something that researchers 55 years ago Gibson and Levine were their names in one of the text at Text Project federally funded research projects in literacy. They called it at that point set for diversity, but they really talked about the critical nature of Freddy to, to know about. You know that a word like . team or peach Freddy! You're also going to encounter things like great or head. You know what, what to be some irregularity and you have to be ready for that with in English.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:So the texts that I write are intended to be used to extend kids reading opportunities. I just think we aren't giving our kids enough text, and the text-to-text project serve a particular function. So at the beginning levels we've got these decodable texts. I just read something online that somebody says well, freddie Hebert's texts aren't truly decodable, they're multi-criterion and I to education good Kudos for Freddie. I actually don't talk about myself like that, but you know what? What I'm working on is getting some concrete, interesting ideas for kids With some high frequency words. e i
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:And I think the model that we have used for decodability, which is the lesson to text match, I don't want little guys to only see text with short vowels for most of their kindergarten and half of first grade. You know, the thing is that very early on you have to actually move into some variability in English or you're in trouble. So I am confident that somebody very precious and near to me will not be listening an education podcast because she's now an emerging teenager who really loves makeup. So that'll be more of a TikTok kind of thing. But I had the privilege of supporting this young person at the beginning of the pandemic when it turned out that her first grade teacher hadn't gotten beyond short vowels when the lockdown came. And so my special little person thought, okay, that's going to aren't seeing enough of the text to start being automatic early on. vowels, well of course I mean you have to be dealing with variability from the get-go, right when you see words like was and the, but then when you get to long vowels, they're variable, right. So there are two vowels here that are making one sound, or there's a vowel in in the middle and then you know a silent E at the end. So you really have to support kids in not just getting to think that everything's going to be regular.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:To text match LTTM, which has been driving selection of decodable text in our large state adoptions, which basically says once the letter sound correspondence has been introduced, it's fair game to have any word with that pattern in a text. You don't have to have repetition of those patterns or the word even. It's just has there been a lesson in the Willems plan that covers that pattern? Well, it turns out, the most of the kids that I know who actually learn to read in school don't learn one trial learning. So you have to actually see some of that a lot more. So the rate at which we've moved at the beginning levels Same for the Different kids texts, who aren't already reading is incredibly fast, and you know they aren't seeing enough of the text to start being automatic early on and we don't know how much you need to see. And we don't know how much you need to see. We don't know how much the kids who come to school with a really fair idea about reading how much text they've seen. Text We Project know it's probably a thousand hours of text. I just made that number up, so please don't quote me on that somebody out there but a lot of it Anyways in Text Project mean, well, if you thought about half hour reading for six years, yeah, that's, that could be about right, okay. So what I'm saying is you, you have to see a lot of text, and that's what I'm attempting to do at Text Project is to provide teachers with that text. So it's not that you know, I'm saying here's an instructional plan, follow this. What I'm saying is here's more grist for the mill and the kids really, really need that.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:And everything at TextProject, everything I built, is also supporting background knowledge. Now I want to be clear that we don't do a lot with narrative at TextProject, because writing a really compelling narrative story, for example on the AI platforms right now, you get very derivative and artificial text. And why be, well? Freddy, it turns out you know Mo Williams and Rosemary Wells and writers like that haven't let their material into the public domain, so AI hasn't had a lot of narrative to harvest. That's different with informational texts, so you can get some support. I mean, what I do is AI-assisted texts, like when I was talking about my same but different text same but not the same text. I get a lot of support and then I do a lot of editing, looking at it from the standpoint of what would a kid need to know to be good with this text. That's what always what I ask. And then the next question I ask is is it still interesting to me when I put it onto text project? Because if it's not, I think I don't have a very broad span for boringness. So if it's not interesting to me, you know I don't include it Text project.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:While we're on decodables, I know that I'm kind of seem unstoppable right now, but I want to tell you one of the things that I'm writing about in this new book, which will probably, you know, people are going to write and say when can I get it? And it'll probably be. Well, freddie thinks fast, but she takes a long time in doing things. And there I am again talking about myself and the third person. Stop it, okay. But one of the things I'm writing about is what, if you're in a school in a district that has adopted some of the most tedious decodables you've ever seen and I'm actually attempting to write some of those and trying to show teachers I don't want to have a long, long comprehension lesson around. Like you know, tim wins, tim hits whatever kind of text, or Dan had a bad fan. But what I want is to actually show kids that look, a fan is a kind of air conditioning, so let's put that in a semantic map with some other things that help keep you cool, you know, maybe even a swimming pool. I mean, I'm just saying that I'm going to encourage teachers not to do these, you know, like tedious lessons that try to get kids to say why Dan had a bad fan. I still don't know, you know. But what I want to do is have teachers think like, if Dan is pinning something in the picture to his shirt and it's apparent that he won a prize, why not actually say the word prize? How about actually writing the word prize up on, you know, on a semantic map? A
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:And um, and I've, you know, now gotten into the semantic mapping, I'm just totally committed to helping kids see the connections among ideas through semantic maps and I think, you know, we could sometimes, some stuff on, you know, some of these silly, silly decodable texts that seem incomprehensible. I mean, today I've been spending time looking for the one that my nephew, who's now almost ready for retirement, that my nephew, when he was six years old he showed me the text and it was just like so wretched and this kid was so optimistic about school and he says so on. Freddie, let me tell you what's really happening in that story. And then he proceeded to tell me this great story. So my question is, if you're forced to be using those, I've provided you some respite by giving you some interesting topically connected text and then when I wonder I haven't started doing this yet, but could we actually start giving you some ideas of some interesting read-alouds that would help give kids some background knowledge about why Dan, you know, has the bad fan.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:I don't know if that's possible, you know. I'm just asking whether you can connect some read-alouds so that kids can actually hear some good language at the same time as they're being subjected to what sometimes I don't know. When I look at this, you know, I analyze texts. I've got about 10,000 school texts in a database that I use for studies and when we type in some of those, it's just like I have to apologize to graduate students and to research assistants that they have to put those in, because you could just you could actually think you're having root canal surgery. You know, that's the nature of them. Okay, so I've kind of wandered around here in the wilderness. I apologize. No, no, not at all.
Lindsay Persohn:No need to apologize.
Lindsay Persohn:The connection I think I've made in all you've said, freddie, is this idea that you know learning really could but also to teachers and I think that's sort of what I hear you saying is that if we can identify texts that are interesting and relevant to what we're learning, why in the world would after, short the fat cat sat on the mat over a text that actually has some connection to something else we might be thinking about or something interesting that we could actually learn right, rather than just sort of these really bland texts that suck the life out of classrooms, you know, for teachers and for students.
Lindsay Persohn:So, yeah, that's what I think I hear you talking about is really authentic learning experiences that, rather than encouraging kids or maybe even discouraging kids and teachers to sort of just meet a bare minimum, how do we in fact give them more while still accomplishing that specific task or goal that we were after? Short vowels, long vowels, whatever it may be, but how do we also wrap into that new ideas and fresh thinking and, like you said, the word that actually we need to employ for the job? You know why can't that make it into good text also? So I'm really grateful to you for creating this database at Text Project, where I'm hopeful that teachers will cat, into this resource again and again and again in order to re-energize what's happening in their classroom, especially if they have been handed a really crummy core curriculum that is just tedious and boring for them and their students. Yeah, one of the things I also want to really emphasize is that language is the coolest thing about being human. Well, I mean, there are other cool things, but I'm just saying that it really makes us distinctive. And written language is even more amazing than oral language, I mean, because there are other species that have ways of orally communicating. But we have a way to actually document what we've learned. We have a way to actually document what we've learned, and English is particularly unique in that we have two linguistic sources that underlie English. You know, it starts as a Germanic, anglo-saxon language, and I keep thinking of these German chieftains saying things like hat, bat, cat mat. You know this is now going to be called that. And then, you know, in Great Britain, the Norman invasion adds a form of French to English, and then the Renaissance adds Greek, Greek terms. You know, I have this great illustration that my husband and I worked on for a long time to make. It shows a bratwurst, which is the German part of English, inside a baguette, which is the French part of English, and then there's some yogurt sprinkled on the bratwurst, which is the Greek part. And when I give presentations to teachers, in fact I'm going to put that, you know, when we give resources to people. I want every third grader to be able to see that and to know about the history of english, because english has. Each of those historical roots, gives us something different about the orthography and phonology and the morphology. So, you know, german gives us all these compound words and the Tim about compounding Tim is, compounding Tim is pretty idiosyncratic. You know, a cowboy is not a boy cow and a firehouse is not a house on fire. Now, the French layer, it's more systematic, and then the Greek part is even more logical, right, but it's interesting to know this. So that's one of the things that we have at Text Project too.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:I've written a whole etymology series. I don't call it that, we call it stories of words. So you know how have words from the indigenous people of North America influenced us? You know about 50 percent of the indigenous people of North America influenced us. name that started from an indigenous group. Those are really compelling things to know, being excited about language and recognizing the gift that it is, instead of beating kids to Heroes with some of these. You know, tim runs, tim wins, tim, whatever, you know, I I actually sometimes, when I see some of these interventions being Heroes to adolescent people, now, because of some of these statements like if they're below basic, that means that no, no, no, no, don't please. You know, in one of the texts that I've been looking at, it's a story for adolescents about Roy and Troy, who put grubs and slugs in the other kids' food. And you know what I've done
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:at Text Project is written something called Teen Reads. And you know what I've done at Text Project is written something called Teen Reads. So it's about, Grades give know, it's a little magazine about how to, how to use your cell phone for art. And then another thing that I have are heroes. So I've written what about? 20 pieces and it's ongoing. I could really use some partners, you leveled, because I get all these ideas, but in the heroes they're contemporary People from underrepresented groups who have made incredible accomplishments. You know, I don't want kids from underrepresented groups to just see Harriet Tubman or Common Core great people but I want them also to see, you know, the first woman jet fighter who is a Latinx. I think those things are important. So I've written words does interesting things on interesting people. And, by the
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:Once you start moving Topic Reads Middle Grades Text Project we really emphasize the word zones. We have something called Topic Reads. Middle Grades Give kids experiences with informational texts that are connected to each other. You always want connected texts when you're teaching kids to get good at something, because you see the words in different contexts. So that was one of the problems we had with the level text right, kids words in different contexts. We know that to be a really important thing, but these texts emphasize in a sense it's a staircase of word complexity, but not like the common core. Topic So Reads because Middle English Grades has these historical, different historical roots, that means that we've got an Teen Reads dictionary or lexicon, but it turns out a very small group of words. . the heavy lifting, and we've actually established that heroes, you families of words does the heavy lifting, and we've actually established that about 2,500 families of words. So that means like help, helper, helpful 25 of those families account for about 94% of the words kids read and that we read as adults. You've got to be really good with those words. Words, and they're not just the Dolch words. There are also words that fall into the general academic vocabulary group and keep remembering these are families of words, so it'll be a whole set set of words.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:So the text the topic reads middle grades kind of . So there's six levels. So what it allows you to do is become more automatic with the words that fall outside that group so that you can have contextually, conceptually interesting text. So I see that as being incredibly important for kids data in the middle grades who . And seen enough accessible text. Accessible text. You know you do need complex text, but you also, if you're not a How highly automatic reader, you need a diet with different kinds of text. Okay, and that's what the topic reads middle grades do. And, by the way, when I was talking about the teen reads, they also are heavier than usual on the words that matter most in text, Of course, because they're about people, the heroes. You know they're going to be a lot of names, which can make the text seem a little harder, although it doesn't necessarily have to be.
Lindsay Persohn:I think what you've shared with us is really inspirational. I think what you've shared with us is really inspirational. I think it also in some ways provides a little bit of license for teachers to question what they're being asked to do, especially when it doesn't feel right or it isn't working, you know, to say well, what is this? Data that I've been handed right, and I think that that's so important to think about how we serve the kids who are right in front of us. How do we start with what they already know and what they want to know and build from there, especially in a climate that doesn't always support that kind of thinking? So I think teachers, as professionals, have the right and the responsibility to tap into what kids already know and to provide authentic interactions with interesting and meaningful texts.
Lindsay Persohn:Because, you know, I taught kindergarten. That was my first full-time teaching job and one of my mantras was texts, if kids leave kindergarten thinking that school is . I think that, they have a training, we're road ahead of them and I'm afraid that that, in many spaces, is what happens. You know, when you're six years old and you don't think that learning is exciting, you can't find, you know, the kind of the thrill of learning something new or making a new connection. Yeah, school becomes very tedious very quickly and without the motivation and the engagement I don't know what we expect of the academic side of things, you know. So I really appreciate the resources you've created.
Lindsay Persohn:Next semester, we will be working with youth grades three through six. We will certainly be using text from Text Project as a part of their teaching, particularly in teacher a, there's always looking for free and freely available text resources, because, of course, you can buy a subscription to a website that has some pretty awful text on it, or you can go to
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:And emerging products. As I attend to something new, like the polysemous words you know, my last foray were could I write books on the practice, morphological layers of English. So there's a. There's a set of books called Word Roots, that's actually are some stories. I don't usually venture into stories, but on some of them you actually have to do a story, so well, I will check those out as well.
Lindsay Persohn:, given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:Well, I'm a great believer in the human spirit, and the creativity and the positiveness of children overwhelm me all the time I make a practice.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:I live very close to the Pacific Ocean where we have a really beautiful park right by the ocean and there are just lots and lots of little kids in that park and I do a lot of interacting with them. They do think I'm a little strange, but I always say that I'm trying to understand my clients. You know, this is the future and that's a commitment that I have and I anticipate longevity where I can keep being a voice for kids like myself. You know, I was a child of refugees to North America, parents who couldn't, you know, finish high school because they also ended up actually arriving in the Canadian prairies just in time for the Great Depression and they had to work really hard, hard, and I've had incredible privileges, and so I look for hope, I look for possibility and I keep seeing these little guys who don't know a lot of the stuff we know and are just jumping and skipping and laughing, and that's what I serve.
Lindsay Persohn:Kids are amazing, aren't they? Young people just bring so much life and energy and hope to the world, and may that always be inspiration for us as educators, thinking about the next generation. So, freddie, thank you so much. About the next generation. So, freddie, thank you so much. I have so enjoyed talking with you and learning from you and learning more about the wonderful resources you've created, but I think you also helped me to see the world in a more interconnected and hopeful kind of way. I've always described myself as a curious person as well, but you've given me some new things to be curious about.
Elfrieda "Freddy" Hiebert:So for that I'm truly grateful. Thank you so much for joining me for the show. Thanks for what you're doing. I really, really appreciate it. Take good care Bye.
Lindsay Persohn:All right, bye-bye, r Dr Elfrida. Freddie Hebert is known for her work addressing how fluency, vocabulary and knowledge can be fostered through appropriate texts. Through documents such as Becoming a Nation of Readers, published by the Center for the Study of Reading in 1985, and Every Child a Reader, published by the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement in 1999, she has contributed to making research accessible to educators. With co-authors, freddie has published over 150 journal articles appearing in journals such as the Reading Teacher, reading and Writing, reading Research, quarterly Reading Psychology, literacy Research Theory, method and Practice. Journal of Literacy Research. Education Sciences, educational Researcher and Educational Leadership sciences, educational researcher and educational leadership. Many of her publications are available at academiaedu or Google Scholar. Most recently, freddie published the book Teaching Words and how they Work with Teachers College Press. She has authored around a thousand texts that are freely available at textprojectorg. Dr Hebert was elected to the Reading Hall of Fame and received the William S Gray Citation of Merit from the International Reading Association, now the International Literacy Association, in 2008. She also received the Oscar Causey Award for Outstanding Contributions to Reading Research from the Literacy Research Association in 2015, and received the Research to Practice Award in 2013, and the Notable Vocabulary Researcher Award in 2017, both of those from the American Educational Research Association. For more than 40 years, freddie has worked in the field of literacy education, first as a teacher's aide and a teacher of primary level students in California, and subsequently as a teacher, educator and researcher at the universities of Kentucky, colorado, boulder, michigan and California Berkeley. Since 2011, dr Hebert has served as the president and CEO of Text Project Inc. A nonprofit corporation that prioritizes creating products and prototypes for student reading programs based primarily on the text model of text complexity, providing teacher support resources and classroom reading activities, and supporting and disseminating related research. You can connect with Freddie through the Text Project website at wwwtextprojectorg website at wwwtextprojectorg that's wwwtextprojectorg or through LinkedIn, instagram, blue Sky and Facebook. For the good of all students, classroom Caffeine aims to energize education, research and practice.
Lindsay Persohn:If this show gives you things to think about, help us spread the word. Talk to your colleagues and educator friends about what you hear. You can support the show by subscribing, liking and reviewing this podcast through your podcast provider. Visit classroomcaffeinecom, where you can subscribe to receive our short monthly newsletter, the Espresso Shot. On our website, you can also learn more about each guest, find transcripts for our episodes, explore topics using our drop-down menu of tags. Request an episode, topic or potential guest. Support our research through our listener survey, or learn more about the research we're doing on our publications page. Connect with us on social media through Instagram, facebook and Twitter. We would love to hear from you. Special thanks to the Classroom Caffeine team Leah Berger, abaya Deluru, stephanie Branson and Shaba Oshfath. As always, I raise my mug to you, teachers. Thanks for joining me.