Readsters® co-founder Linda Farrell shares about her Reading Rockets Special Video Series: Looking at Reading Interventions. Linda offers tips for caregivers and educators to support their readers and emphasizes the importance of Early Intervention. She explains changes she would make to education and intervention systems to help striving readers. Listeners will leave inspired by the success stories Linda shares of her former students.
Episode Mentions:
Materials Co-authored by Linda Farrell and Michael Hunter:
Articles by Linda Farrell:
Webinars by Linda Farrell:
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Readsters® co-founder Linda Farrell shares about her Reading Rockets Special Video Series: Looking at Reading Interventions. Linda offers tips for caregivers and educators to support their readers and emphasizes the importance of Early Intervention. She explains changes she would make to education and intervention systems to help striving readers. Listeners will leave inspired by the success stories Linda shares of her former students.
Episode Mentions:
Materials Co-authored by Linda Farrell and Michael Hunter:
Articles by Linda Farrell:
Webinars by Linda Farrell:
Get solutions from Schoolutions!
#solutionsfromschoolutions #schoolutionsinspires #schoolutionspodcast
[00:00:00] Olivia: Welcome to Schoolutions, where listening will leave you inspired by solutions to issues you or others you know may be struggling with in the public education system today. I am Olivia Wahl, and I am so excited to introduce you to my guest. an incredibly gifted reading intervention specialist, Linda Farrell.
[00:00:22] Olivia: Linda Farrell and Michael Hunter are founding partners at Readsters in Alexandria, Virginia. Linda is committed to effective early reading instruction to help striving readers become strong readers, and to ensure that strong readers achieve their full potential. Linda works in schools throughout the United States, training and coaching teachers while modeling effective reading instruction.
[00:00:46] Olivia: She also has designed curricula in Niger and Senegal for children to learn to read in their local languages. Linda is a former English teacher, and she was a National LETRS trainer for seven years. She has co-authored assessments and curricula for teaching reading, as well as several other published works.
[00:01:04] Olivia: She'll share about her recent Reading Rockets special video series Looking at Reading Interventions during this episode. Welcome, Linda.
[00:01:12] Linda: Thank you, Olivia.
[00:01:14] Olivia: I'm so honored and excited to have you as a guest. I love to ask guests who an inspiring educator is in their life. Would you share for listeners?
[00:01:26] Linda: I will. And this is really tough because there are so many. As with everyone who's involved in reading, I have to give a shout out to Louisa Moats because she's inspired all of us. And I was lucky enough to have her as a mentor. But the educator I want to highlight is Rossi King from Mississippi. And the reason I want to highlight her is that she was Title I teacher and she wanted to know how to teach her children.
[00:01:50] Linda: And she heard about me from someone I'd worked with in Mississippi. And she called me and said: Is there any way I could take one of your workshops? And I said: Well, we really only work with schools, but I'm going to be down in new Orleans (which for her was about a four-hour drive) I could meet with you afterward.
[00:02:06] Linda: So she came down and we were instantaneously, you know, literacy best buddies. I ended up going to work in her school and she's just fabulous. She learned everything that I taught her and more because teachers who do this every day are better at it than I am. But the thing about Rossi is that she is the best classroom manager I've ever seen.
[00:02:30] Linda: She and another woman named Erica McMahon. And Rossi worked with me to help me be able to manage classrooms. And so, the reason she's inspirational to me is because she is good at everything and she wanted to be better at reading and she helped me be better at what I do too. So, Rossi, Rossi, Rossi, thank you.
[00:02:53] Olivia: That's inspirational on many levels. I usually reach out to guests because there's something that I'm noticing in public education that I'll call an issue, a problem, and then the guests I seek are solutions finders. And I had the gift of working with a first-grade teacher named Bridget Idzi, and she forwarded me one clip of a video of yours.
[00:03:19] Olivia: And I ended up watching all of the videos in the series on Reading Rockets, which I'm a huge fan of that site and the information they share. I thought I have learned so much from Linda being able to watch these videos that I have to have you as a guest. The issue I'm seeing everywhere is there is a huge influx of students that are needing reading interventions more than ever because of the pandemic, but it feels almost insurmountable.
[00:03:52] Olivia: And yet I can watch a 15-minute video of you working one on one with a child and it is amazing. I take voluminous notes and then I watch it again and I catch my notes up. It's just, it's beautiful. So that visual that you're offering is wonderful. I'm going to ask you to speak to that video series more.
[00:04:14] Olivia: I do want listeners to know more about your story, though. What led you to being a reading specialist? What do you love about it?
[00:04:24] Linda: Well, what led me here could take up an hour, so I'll try to make it, I'll try to make it short. I was an English teacher in the late 70s. I was new, so they gave me all the students who didn't know how to read.
[00:04:36] Linda: I taught seventh and eighth grade the first year that I was there. Well, that was my second-year teaching. My first year was in Kansas. This is my second year. And they didn't know how to read, but I didn't know that then, because in my schema of getting an English degree and then I got enough credits to be a teacher, no one ever said you might get a seventh grader who doesn't know how to read.
[00:05:00] Linda: It literally wasn't in my schema. And what I did notice is that they liked me as a teacher. I liked them tremendously, but they would never do their homework and they would never read aloud for me. I'm so stupid that I couldn't recognize that, but I didn't. And so, I got an MBA and I became an investment banker and I was an investment banker for 17 years.
[00:05:25] Linda: I lived in L.A. and when I was an investment banker, all my clients were on the east coast, so I couldn't be a volunteer because I was always traveling. Then I moved to the East coast, and I could go to New York and have a meeting and be home at night. So, I volunteered to teach people how to read, adults.
[00:05:40] Olivia: Wow, I didn't know that!
[00:05:40] Linda: Yeah, because I've been a good teacher and so, all right, I can teach. Because they said if you can read, you can teach someone to read. That's baloney. So, they, they matched me with a woman named Sandra who I couldn't teach her to read. And I was on the board of directors and out of every ten tutors who were recruited, nine would not stay because they weren't able to teach reading.
[00:06:05] Linda: Fortunately, I was an investment banker. I had enough money that I could travel around and figure out, how do they teach kids how to read? And I, I took three training courses that were really critical. One was Lindamood-Bell. I took all of their classes. I took Wilson and I took Phono-Graphix. What Wilson taught me is about the structure of the English language.
[00:06:26] Linda: What Lindamood-Bell, l taught me is about the importance of phonological awareness. And this 1999 and 2000. And what Phono-Graphix taught me is speech to print.
[00:06:36] Olivia: Yes.
[00:06:37] Linda: So now, along the way, I had met Louisa Moats, who I didn't know was a big deal. I'm an investment banker. I don't know there's even a reading world.
[00:06:46] Linda: I'm just trying to teach Sandra how to read. And Louisa ended up. staying at my house for a couple of years while she was working on a project here. So, she really guided me in a lot of things to learn. And for my 50th birthday, I gave myself a gift, which was I left investment banking. And I said, I don't know what I'm going to do in reading, but I'm going to do something because it is ridiculous that we have adults who don't know how to read.
[00:07:14] Linda: So, that's how I got into this. I found, that once I had the knowledge of what goes on in teaching struggling readers, which is a totally different orbit from teaching typically developing readers, then I learned how to assess, and assessment is the key, because once you know the problem, now you can attack it.
[00:07:34] Linda: And that's my story. And now here I am talking to you!
[00:07:38] Olivia: That journey. It's wonderful that it ended in this place because you're changing the lives of striving readers in many different ways. And your gift is that instantaneous ability to troubleshoot in the moment. It's so natural. And that's what I strive to achieve.
[00:07:59] Olivia: As a mom having two boys that absolutely thrive with reading their nightstands full of books almost falling over teeter-tottering at the edge and yet as a kindergarten first, second, third, fourth, fifth-grade teacher. I have watched children, and whether they're native English speakers or not, come to reading in many, many different ways.
[00:08:28] Olivia: Something you just said is that a child that is developing as a natural reader is so vastly different than a child that has reading difficulties for a parent that is not an educator, that wouldn't notice red flags. What are your tips when you almost don't know what you don't know.
[00:08:51] Linda: What I can say is that unfortunately the schools really don't know what to do sometimes. The school wants to do what's best for your student, but they don't know how sometimes. I want to have a solution. And the only solution I have is find your local decoding dyslexia organization and let them help you get the support that you need because the schools, on the whole, I'm not saying every school, but I am saying many schools just don't know what to do when they have struggling readers.
[00:09:27] Olivia: Once you hear feedback from an educator that your child is not developing and reading as they should be, it's good to immediately reach out. I would say the earlier the better. In the past, I've heard that Early Intervention is key, yet I hear you saying, no, adult readers are also able to learn. But would you agree that Early Intervention is best?
[00:09:49] Linda: Early intervention is huge, and that's what I'm all about. If Sandra, the first woman I taught to read, and David, the second person I taught to read, Sandra was 32, David was 48, if they could learn to read now, it wasn't like they developmentally just became ready at age 32 or 48. What happened is they didn't get the right kind of instruction when they were in first and second grade.
[00:10:19] Linda: Now, I don't think their teachers knew what to do. We now have the knowledge in our schools to be able to teach. And when Sandra, who's the first person I taught who speaks nationally, I actually hope you'll have her on your podcast. She says she's not angry at the teachers, but she's angry that no one said: She doesn't know how to read. How can I help her?
[00:10:42] Linda: They just kept passing her on. And they will tell you that, yes, they could learn when they were adults, but there are studies that show that it takes four times as much time to teach someone how to read in fourth grade than if you'd caught them in kindergarten and first. And it was a struggle for them.
[00:10:59] Linda: One thing I would say to parents and to teachers is catch your students before they're eight because their brain is still ready for language. It's ready to learn these things. Even struggling readers, their brains are more open then. And I know you call them striving readers and I'll try to do that too.
[00:11:19] Linda: Even striving readers, their brains are more open than it's just, if we can get them the right kind of instruction, then it's faster and it will stick better.
[00:11:29] Olivia: Yes. I want to circle back to the video series I've mentioned. Reading Rockets is an amazing resource, a plethora of information, I would say for families and educators alike.
[00:11:42] Olivia: The Reading Rockets special video series called Looking at Reading Interventions that highlights you working one on one with children. What inspired that video series to take place?
[00:11:52] Linda: The person who's head of Reading Rockets and a whole bunch more, I worked with his children. Probably 22 years ago, and we had always thought, geez, we should see if we can't tape something of people really working and doing this.
[00:12:06] Linda: It's very interesting about that series because I had taped other things. And when, when you don't like something, you get to say, stop, I want to redo that. Well, we went and I had never met those children before, or if I had, it was because we went for one day, about two months before those were taped. And I and Michael and Nicole were all there assessing.
[00:12:28] Linda: So, I thought I would have about three days to do this taping. Well, it turns out we had one day. I had 25 minutes with each student. Remember, I had never worked with these students. And the reason I want you to know that is because we had assessed them. We had an excellent assessment, and if I have good assessment, then I know where to start teaching.
[00:12:52] Linda: I don't have to know the student. I don't know exactly what I'm going to teach. For example, there's a little boy, Reese, and I knew he had trouble, I think it was with “Y”. And I think he always called it “V” or “V”, he always called “Y”, I can't remember which one.
[00:13:07] Olivia: Yes.
[00:13:07] Linda: But I knew that he didn't know one of those letters. What I didn't know, that I learned while I was teaching him, is that he gets “Y” and “V” confused. Because on the assessment he got “V” right and “Y” wrong or vice versa. And so, I didn't know. But immediately, because I know to work with “Y,” I can spot. Oh, this is a confusion. It isn't just that he doesn't know “Y.”
[00:13:30] Linda: He's confused. And now I can change my assessment. And what was so wonderful about that is that I did have 25 minutes and I was able to do something and then the magicians at Reading Rockets edited that beautifully. I mean, when we got the videos, I called Michael at night. It was late at night. My business partner. And I said: Michael, these guys did magic!
[00:13:55] Olivia: It's a gorgeous collaboration and to give a shout out as well. It's not just the video clips. I will absolutely put a link in the show notes of this episode, but each video clip even includes professional development guides produced by the NEA (National Education Association_.
[00:14:13] Linda: Yeah, we wrote those.
[00:14:13] Olivia: They're magnificent. I've been recommending for families with striving readers to follow the video. I love that there are the three different options, even the fillable PDF for professional development. It's such a gift for folks to use and to watch and analyze. The questions on the guides help you be more thoughtful as you're watching and taking the information in.
[00:14:40] Olivia: I want to be you in a way because you're just so instinctual with the children. Just so listeners can know, it's a series of seven videos with an extra that I highly recommend watching. Episode one helps a child, a kindergartner, master letter names as well as distinguishing between the letters “Y” and “V.”
[00:15:00] Olivia: Episode two supports a child in kindergarten with pre-reading skills and strengthening her phonological awareness. Episode three is with a first-grade student that supports her with short vowel sounds, blending and manipulating sounds, reading whole words, and fluency. Episode four, you work with a second grader.
[00:15:23] Olivia: I've watched this over and over. This is such a problem with children that struggle distinguishing between the letters “B” and “D” and the notion of you really have to look at the text because it's a visual shape issue, not phonological with sound as well as reading short words. Episode five is you working with a third grader that needs to master the silent-e pattern and speed up his print processing.
[00:15:48] Olivia: Episode six is with a third grader reading multi-syllable words. Episode seven is with a second grader mastering the three key elements of reading fluency, accuracy, reading rate, and reading with expression. And then there's the gorgeous extra video where you share about your role as a reading intervention specialist and what your more than 20 years of experience working with kids, teachers, and schools has taught you about their potential.
[00:16:15] Olivia: That series is absolutely magnificent and I'm really grateful for you to take your time to put it out there in the world. So, thank you.
[00:16:23] Linda: Well, thank you. It wouldn't happen without Reading Rockets. Everybody needs to know about Reading Rockets. What a fabulous resource it is. I agree. And I hope you'll have Noel Gunther on some time, he started Reading Rockets.
[00:16:33] Olivia: I hope so too. You're, you're making all these connections. I can only dream, Linda. I can only dream. You know, the intervention system in general is, I'm not going to say broken, but in desperate need of people like you that really know their stuff and have fabulous assessment tools and use those tools to cause change and break bad habits and instill good habits in striving readers.
[00:16:59] Olivia: What would you change about the educational system when it comes to intervention if you could?
[00:17:06] Linda: The first thing I do is I would have the schools recognize that there are two parts to reading, The Simple View of Reading. There is decoding and work recognition, and then you have to have language comprehension.
[00:17:18] Linda: So, I would have the schools recognize that if children cannot decode by third grade, do not hold them back because their language may very well be good. What we need to do is give extra time to children.
[00:17:35] Linda: And if I were the reading czar, which would never happen because I'm not very diplomatic, I would be saying we're going to assess every kindergartner at the end of kindergarten to know how far they are in skills. We're going to assess every first grader, and we're going to assess every second grader, and we're going to assess every third grader. If they haven't achieved good, strong decoding by the end of third grade, we're going to make sure that they get the help going further.
[00:18:02] Linda: What would I do with that assessment? The first thing I'd do is I'd look and say, what teachers aren't teaching their children how to get where we need to go. Most of them. I'm not saying all of them are going to get there. And then I would help those teachers get the skills to do that. That's the first thing.
[00:18:19] Linda: The second thing I would want to do is recognize that striving readers need extra time. I want to give an illustration. I was just talking to someone yesterday about how frustrating it is because the fifth-grade students came back after COVID and are all needing decoding. And there is a person at the district who's in charge who insists that these students have to learn the standards.
[00:18:50] Linda: And I have no problem with they have to learn the standards, but they have a 45-minute block for literacy.
[00:18:57] Olivia: It’s not nearly enough.
[00:18:57] Linda: You cannot teach the standards and catch these kids up. So, what I would like to see is this policy of, I'm talking about decoding, I think we could do the same thing with language, but I'm going to talk about decoding and word recognition right now, that if children don't have word recognition, and let's say we have a school with 100 children and 25 haven't met the standards for word recognition.
[00:19:21] Linda: They would be mandated to set aside extra time for those students. They still get their regular language arts so they can get the exposure to the standards, but they've got to have extra time to catch up on those foundational skills that they've missed.
[00:19:36] Olivia: I've heard you say assessment, assessment, assessment.
[00:19:39] Olivia: What is your favorite assessment tool?
[00:19:42] Linda: Well, the assessment we use for kindergarten or anyone who's not a reader who's struggling to read is something called the Pre-Reading Probes. They're available free on our website. And what it says is, do you know your letter names? Do you know your letter sounds?
[00:19:58] Linda: Not just do you know them, but which ones are you struggling with? That's like what I said, I knew Reese was struggling with “Y.” I could show what you do when somebody confuses letters. So the Pre-Reading Probes., they test letter names, letter sounds, 10 high-frequency words. And if you're in first grade or higher, we would ask about digraphs.
[00:20:21] Linda: Do you know the sounds for the digraphs? That's on the orthographic side, which has to do with letters and words. On the phonological side, which is also important, we give them two parts of a word, so they have to tell us, for example, we'll say: cup-cake, what's the word? Rain-bow, what's the word? We're doing blending.
[00:20:39] Linda: Can they blend compound words? Can they blend regular words? Can they blend onset and rhyme? And then can they blend two sounds and three sounds? And we go to four sounds if they're in first grade. That's it. That's what I need to start with someone who is a non-reader or a pre-reader. For someone who knows how to read, for example Xavier, who we worked with with multi-syllable words, and Mike, who we worked with with silent-e, and Kalista, who we worked with sound by sound, I need to have them read words for me.
[00:21:14] Linda: So we have something called the Decoding Detector that we're just now getting ready to get it out and make it available to people. But we use that and then we use a one-minute oral reading at their grade level so that we can find out how do they read individual words. But what I learn in how do they read in text is if they're really poor at individual reading but they don't make so many mistakes in text, I realize they're relying on context a lot.
[00:21:44] Linda: And so that's it. Those are the assessments we use.
[00:21:48] Olivia: I can include links if it's okay with you in the show notes.
[00:21:51] Linda: Sure!
[00:21:51] Olivia: So listeners can access those resources. I want to end our conversation. I'm hoping this is first of many. I have a lot to learn from you, Linda. I want to hear your favorite success story that you hold onto close to your heart.
[00:22:07] Linda: Well, I'm going to give you a personal one as opposed to the success stories that teachers tell me about. Michael, my business partner and I, we travel a lot, but we had four months where we weren't traveling and someone came in and it was a second grader. I'm going to say his name because his entrance essay to get into college was about how he learned to read.
[00:22:29] Linda: Oh. And he came to us and he had no language issues. He could read his name, which was Rowan. He could read words that he had memorized, but if he could read job. He couldn't read jab. He'd just say: I don't know that word. Or he'd guess. His parents were wonderful. They brought him in. They would call us: Can, can you tutor him tonight?
[00:22:52] Linda: Can you tutor him tonight? So, we tutored him almost every night. And in four months, Rowan worked so hard, even though he didn't really want to work hard. Like he'd say: I'm not going to do this. And I'd say: Well, I can stay all night. And he'd say: Yeah, but I have to go to school tomorrow. Oh, you can go to school tomorrow.
[00:23:09] Linda: What clothes will I wear? Those! You know, so I mean literally…
[00:23:13] Olivia: Challenge accepted!
[00:23:14] Linda: So, we had four months to teach him and he came in at the end of that summer and we gave him an IRI (Informal Reading Inventory), and he read all the way up to the 10th grade, and he was an upcoming 3rd grader.
[00:23:28] Olivia: Oh my goodness!
[00:23:28] Linda: His, his vocabulary was so strong, he just needed to stop guessing. And do we have time for me to tell you one more story?
[00:23:37] Olivia: Please, of course.
[00:23:38] Linda: At his school, he had a reading intervention. And the report card came back: Rowan does a great job of making connections in his text. Well, yeah, we knew that because we would have to tell Rowan: You have to read! I mean what we would say is: Rowan, you can tell us about the moon and then you have to start over. You know, because what he wanted to do was go to his strengths, which was language and knowledge and things he knew.
[00:24:06] Linda: You've got to teach reading when you're teaching reading. And if the problem's decoding, that's what you've got to teach. Rowan went to college, and he was an exchange student in Germany. And so reading changes self-esteem. Reading is so important, and we can teach anyone to read.
[00:24:25] Olivia: It changes everything because it's access. It's access to the world around you. When you read and write and think and know the messages you want to convey to the world, it's power. Reading is power. I cannot thank you enough for spending the time letting me pick your brain and I hope we can circle back and have more conversations about this really important.
[00:24:48] Linda: Well, I thank you more for inviting me. This was wonderful. Thank you so much. I'm so glad to know you.
[00:24:53] Olivia: You as well. Thank you. Schoolutions is a podcast created, produced, and edited by me, Olivia Wahl. Special thanks to my guest, Linda Farrell. Thanks to my older son Benjamin, who created the music that's playing in the background. If you like Schoolutions, please share, rate, review, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @schoolutionspodcast. If you want to reach out, leave me a SpeakPipe voice memo at my website: www.oliviawahl.com/podcast or via email @schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com. Don't forget to talk about us nicely on social media, and please keep listening. Let's continue finding inspiration together.