Literacy Talks

Rethinking How We Teach Sight and High Frequency Words

March 01, 2022 Reading Horizons Season 1 Episode 1
Literacy Talks
Rethinking How We Teach Sight and High Frequency Words
Show Notes Transcript

In this inaugural episode, our terrific trio of reading experts tackles the need to rethink and redesign how we approach sight words and high frequency words in literacy instruction. Their advice centers around using phonics-based strategies to help learners connect the sounds and meanings of high frequency words, so they become part of students’ working memory. Hear all about it in this fascinating discussion among experts!

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Narrator:

Hello literacy leaders and champions. Welcome to the first episode of literacy talks. We're so excited to welcome you to this new podcast series from Reading Horizons dedicated to exploring the ideas, trends, insights and practical issues that will help us all improve our professional practice in teaching reading. Our series host is Stacy Hurst, professor at Southern Utah University and Chief Academic Officer at Reading Horizons, we're reading momentum begins. Joining Stacy are Donell Pons, a recognized expert in literacy and special education. And Lindsay Kemeny, a Utah based elementary classroom teacher. Today's topic is sight words, sometimes referred to as high frequency words. Let's get started.

Stacy Hurst:

Hello, I'm Stacy Hurst, host of literacy talks. And thank you for joining us today.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Hey, I'm Lindsay Kemeny, I teach second grade. This is I think my 10th year teaching and I'm also a mom to a child with severe dyslexia, which has kind of guided me along my journey or started the journey I should say,

Donell Pons:

great. I am Donell Pons. And I have been around for quite a while kicking around for a while, I guess, in the world of literacy, and came to the world of literacy because I have a husband who has dyslexia and went on to have two of my four children who have dyslexia. So clearly the struggling reader was the area of interest for me. And I currently work in a workplace literacy program, working with adults who have entered the workplace, and still need help with basic literacy.

Stacy Hurst:

Today, we thought we were talking about something that has been actually showing up quite a bit in conversations in social media and teacher groups. And that is the ever elusive sight word. I don't think it's really that elusive anymore than Kevin's but we're going to start with just some conversation about the definition of that term, and kind of just have a conversation like we do.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Well, I can tell you what I used to think sight words were and that may be an incorrect definition. Going around that's pretty popular is a sight word is a word that you can't sound out. Have you guys heard that? Which is incorrect, and not really the way we want to be teaching them. Right, so

Stacy Hurst:

true. And I make sure my college students know that that is no longer. That's an outdated definition of the term.

Donell Pons:

And I think so this kind of got me I was asking the two of you earlier in the week because my copy of the reading League, little research had come out. And it had an article on this by someone we all respect and Dr. Nancy Mather, and she's also co writing this with Lynne Jaffe, and she said the term sight word she quoted, and I'm going to quote her directly the term sight word is used in three ways in schools and Lindsay just mentioned one and we've been talking about this high frequency words like it the said Shay, those are examples, phonetically irregular words was bouquet, orthographically mapped or instantly recognized words a student's sight word vocabulary, those are the three ways in which they're used. However, she says in the article is an interesting researchers in the area of orthographic learning use it in one way, a sight word is a word that has been previously encountered, typically multiple times, and learned the point that it becomes instantly recognized. And that's the one way they refer to it. So it's very interesting, right? The confusion of a term that so important,

Stacy Hurst:

absolutely. And it's kind of become a little bit of a Shibboleth to for those of us who have a history with knowing the science of route that goes into reading, teaching, reading and learning how to read and those who are just coming to it. And so I think it can help us help each other as well. If we have a colleague or a friend that's using an antiquated definition or use of that, it's a good opportunity for us to help have a conversation. So Donal, in your experience with your older learners. I know sight words are quite the focus, and k three, especially k two, I would say. But what has been your experience of older learners?

Donell Pons:

Yeah. So typically, with the struggling reader, if they have dyslexia sight words have been a bear not so much that they can't eventually get to a level of comfort with reading them in text, right? Because I see them so often a lot of work we're talking about a sight word is one that we see a lot, right, which should be yes, maybe we should say out to find exactly what we're defining here. So for me, that's what I'm thinking of is the most high, you know, word that they see very frequently in text, right? And oftentimes, those overlap. So let's be honest here, when when I'm reading through the definition of high frequency phonetically irregular and orthographically mapped, those can overlap, right? Sure. Sure. So I think that's where a lot of the confusion comes from, too is there are strict boundaries between each of these categories of words, and more importantly, I think that I'm getting from Dr. Mathur is just having an understanding when you're having a conversation or when you're teaching your understanding of what it is you're doing and what part it plays in the teaching that you're doing. So that's really important too. So lest anyone feel like, oh dear, I use that term, think about how you're using it. And yes, they do overlap, right, so that we need to be thinking that way too. So for students who have dyslexia, the older students, a lot of these words, as we say they're high frequency, they see them in text a lot. So they may be able to decode them when they see them in text. But the spelling of many of these words, some of them are some of that irregular, phonetically irregular, so the spelling eludes them. And that's really interesting. Of course, if you know the understanding of dyslexia, then you understand why that happens, when it can happen. Someone can decode that word. And then later, you'll say, oh, go ahead, let's write a sentence, we're gonna use that word. And if they haven't seen it, they can struggle with spelling the word.

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, thanks for that context. And I think it is a good way to help us focus on kind of the history of that, because what you just described is what can happen if we don't approach that in the most appropriate way for how our brain learns to read right in our initial instruction. So the history of those high frequency words are is really interesting. And we have commonly, adults list in a fry list. And most, especially most early elementary educators will be very familiar with those lists. I know that in the curriculum I've been involved in helping to create we chose to use the fry list it's in, it's reflected in many state standards, teachers are held accountable for those words, in the early texts, they can they can comprise up to 80% of what a kindergartener sees in a book. So that can absolutely impede fluency if they don't know those words. And so I think that's kind of what fueled the practice that we see today of the flashcards and you just have to memorize them. And if you know those, you can be a fluent reader. And Lindsey, I'm thinking of your blog posts about swimming, and how that's the very practice that can make it appear that our students are reading when they're really not. And so actually, when I was being taught how to teach reading, that was the common approach. Lindsay, what about you?

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yeah, so it was definitely, there's this idea that, Oh, these you just have to memorize these as a whole unit. So you just need to memorize these. And I just remember sending lists home because really, I depended a lot on the parents to help the kids memorize this list of district required high frequency words. And then what did I do in the classroom? I kind of, you know, we did little songs, not that those are terrible, but it never really crossed my mind to let's, let's really think about connecting the letters and the sounds. And it was more like, Okay, I had a little song, t h e t h e, that spells the, you know, I can't believe I just say on the podcast, I'm not a singer. And so every time when my little kindergarteners came, they're reading a little book, and they got stuck on that word, and I would start singing th e spells, and I'd wait and they'd be like, there's like a limit to how many words you can actually memorize. Like, I want it don't quote me, I've heard 2000. Is that right? Do you guys know, there's a

Stacy Hurst:

range, but yeah, and it maxes out about the time we get to third grades. That makes

Lindsay Kemeny:

sense. And you can see these kids that are really good. memorizers really good guessing from context, you can really see them like when you're looking at analyzing, like, I use a cadence right for screening measure. And you see that their words correct per minute isn't too bad, but their nonsense words awful. And that's when you're like, Oh, my goodness, and we've got to catch those kids before they move on to third.

Stacy Hurst:

Just to add to this point, because I'm having a flashback. And yes, I'm calling it that I was actually administering a dibbles assessment to a first grader. And this is what I heard from her after, you know, we do the whole script. Okay. Ready, read. And this is on the oral reading fluency partner. So she takes a deep breath, and then I hear and the over it, and I said, Wait, what are you doing? After she said, My teacher said, just to skip the words I don't know. And I'm like, oh, so obviously, she'd been teaching those high frequency words, and the student had memorized them, but she was not applying any orthographic knowledge to that text at all. She was not connecting anything other than what she had memorized those high frequency words. And then when you were talking about the song, yeah. Yeah, I had a saying for the word that it was th e and you can't trick me.

Lindsay Kemeny:

And say that, yeah, it's just say that

Stacy Hurst:

but you know, I fully embraced the concept of a word wall to teach my high frequency words. My word well consisted of words from the fry list in order of frequency, and they were listed in alphabetical order is where balls are. But we had this whole ceremony every week on Monday, we did introduce the five words of the week, and they go at the front of the classroom, and we would use them in everything we could and I put them in the context of a sentence and we have a spelling test on Friday, and after that test, those words would ceremoniously become part of the word Yeah, I don't know that my students were really learning them the way they should have right? That was the best approach.

Donell Pons:

And so Stacy, you can see why, as an older person, all you'd be able to do really with those words is be able to read them in text, right? But they're not really yours. Because then when you want to write a sentence that uses many of the same words, your can't spell it correctly, you're selling it for different ways, right?

Stacy Hurst:

So let me tell you what happened as a result of that, that I think really highlights how far we've come as a profession. In reading, I was being observed by a university professor one day in my classroom, and one of my students was writing a story during what we did at the time, which was Writer's Workshop, I needed to spell the word that and he knew right where it was on the word wall. And he literally looked up at the word wall, which was huge, by the way, it took a lot of real estate in the classroom. And he went to find the letter T. So he knew it started with T. But you know, we'd had a week we had a ceremony. But then he goes, like, you pointed to each word 123, down the T wall, and you can see him counting 123 To find the word that he had memorized where it was, wow, so that he could use it in his writing. Here is the thing that I want to illustrate, I was praised for that. Because my professor said, that's amazing. You're teaching them how to use the word well, and he used it as a reference. And I thought, you know, great, I have arrived, but I should know better.

Lindsay Kemeny:

I have like, Okay, I have my own kind of thought, This is my own theory. My son, the one with severe dyslexia. We did that kindergarten list where he memorized those just visually, right? He just kind of we just memorized the word as a whole unit, he never orthographically mapped the words, those words, I feel like he still mixes up said and and he still will, when he said he'll say and when he says and he'll see said, and I just think he was never properly taught those words. He hasn't mapped them. So I think that's why because he just looked at them as a visual unit, which is not how we read, I don't have a

Stacy Hurst:

lot of memories of struggling learning how to read because I was one of the maybe 5% that it seemed like it came naturally maybe no, it didn't. But I remember confusing, and instead, and I think early on, I was looking at it like that as well. So even proficient readers, we're not helping them.

Lindsay Kemeny:

But you can see up to when those kids like they go to write a word that they've learned. And like even just I don't know, his went to high frequency word, and they go w n e t, because they haven't really you know, they just are memorizing this random string of letters like, that's what my son is doing is memorizing this random string of letters, and then he sees them, it's like four. And from all those get mixed up to instead, we need to help them even if they're irregular to match the irregularities with the sound that they're representing.

Stacy Hurst:

Right? That point is a working memory assessment, not necessarily orthographic mapping.

Donell Pons:

So Lindsay mentioned something she's talking about orthographic mapping. So that may be unfamiliar to some, right. So having a discussion of what some of these terms mean. And that's important, too, within the article that we were talking about the term sight word even now, they also mentioned orthography orthographic. What are these terms? What do they mean, and getting kind of our feet under us. And Erie is one of the individuals researchers that's responsible for a lot of the research that a lot of people point to when we're talking about orthographic mapping, mapping those sounds to the graphemes. But what's interesting is, she says here in her article, a pool of sight words is referred to as an individual's sight word vocabulary, or orthographic. lexicon. So that term is also appropriate. The point is that a words letter sequence must get mapped onto it sounds and meaning in long term memory. So that's the work of Erie, right from 2007 and 2014. And so that subsequently, when the word is encountered in text, the reader recognizes it triggering both its pronunciation and its meaning. So we've got the research that gives us that information to our understanding of that. But then what is orthographic mapping and she gives a definition, which I think is really good in this developmental sequence. phonemic awareness is the necessary foundation on which orthographic memory is built, because boy does that another term, right? phonemic awareness. So they're all here's the convergence folks of all the terms, right, that are coming together. So that phonemic awareness, the understanding of the sounds, the ability to be able to manipulate them, hear them, manipulate them, do what you want with them. That is the foundation of what we're talking about here of the orthographic mapping.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yeah, that happens in the brain. So sometimes people want to say we're doing orthographic. But that facilitating

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, in our instruction, we can facilitate that happening. And I appreciate that context on lb especially among the three of us, we know what we know. But we sometimes assume other people know it, or we assume we know but I I want to then define let's put a fine point on what we are referring to when we say sight word we're saying any word that you can recognize as sight.

Lindsay Kemeny:

There's like an article who said every word wants to be a sight word when it grows up. Yeah.

Stacy Hurst:

Good way to look at it and dine out? I don't know. But I like that. That's yeah, thank you remember, what Darnell just described to you read from the article is really important to know, because as teachers, that's how we facilitate it. And when a Airi did a lot of that work, David share is a colleague of hers. And he also added to that, and I am being probably far too simplistic in this explanation, but she actually helped us to know how orthographic mapping is facilitated, and what is actually happening in the brain when anyone recognizes a word right away, seemingly right away. And so she's saying, to build that lexicon, we need to map so connect the sound to the spelling for that sound. And as we know, in English, there are over 250 spellings for those 44 sounds with it. And we have 26 letters to do that with. So teaching phonics is not a question here. It's absolutely necessary. And so when we're teaching using a approach that facilitates orthographic mapping, there are some phonetic elements that we haven't taught yet. So as we're teaching that mapping those sounds, there are some features of those high frequency words or whatever word we're teaching, that will be temporarily mapped in a way until we teach the phonics approach, and then it will help kind of make it make sense. And then David shares helped us to learn that our brain is keeping track of all that data. And as soon as we've had the typically developing reader needs three to five opportunities with that pattern within that word, and then it will be automatically recognized in the future. So that's exciting for me to know, as a teacher, that there's something I can do to help facilitate that we really are changing brains, right?

Lindsay Kemeny:

I'd love to talk a little more about so what's the takeaway for teachers? How do they then teach a high frequency word, and big takeaway is we don't want to teach them as whole units. And we don't want to encourage them to memorize them visually, we want to help teach them in a way that's going to facilitate this orthographic mapping that we're talking about. What I do now is I'm going to say the word and we're going to segment the word orally together before I've even shown them the word so if we have said, and we're going to do it, and then we put, you know, you can put place markers or lines up on the board representing the different sounds in the Word, and then we're going to map it, what's the first sound? And I can show them the spelling? What's the next sound air? And what's the last sound? And then I can show them that a I look, they love to analyze it. Which one is tricky, you know, which is the tricky spelling. And we highlight that. And I just I don't know, my kids love tricky words are so excited for the challenge. We practice writing and spelling them, because if they can spell it, they can probably read

Donell Pons:

it. So Lindsey, I love how you've just described how you took research and reading about what's good practice and then put it into classroom. What does that look like when I'm in my classroom. So in the article, which is interesting, she's laid out some of the key points of really good instruction. And Lindsay just described that by a doing exercise, here's what you actually do in your classroom. And so she said, a good initial sequence of instruction for spelling would be a providing instruction in phoneme blending and phoneme segmentation. So you're preparing the sounds right, then be using tasks and materials that reinforce the connections between the phonemes and graphemes. And then evolve the accurate sequencing, it sounds your description of analyzing as you're looking at that teaching common letter sequences, letter patterns, and morphemes and reviewing and practicing spelling rules. So all of those, it was interesting in a very organic way, Lindsay as a teacher educator in a classroom with a firm understanding of what this should look like, then described an exercise. Yeah.

Stacy Hurst:

Which is why knowing that science is so important, right? If you know that you can make such informed decisions with a high level of confidence of the outcome. Yeah. And so you're not relying or over relying on a curriculum or making stuff up as some of us have done in the past. By necessity. I love that. And now we're focusing on what we should do in our instruction. What would you to say we should stop doing in our instruction related to this

Donell Pons:

telling students they need to memorize lists of words. Right away.

Stacy Hurst:

It did not take you any time at all.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Well, the thing is, is like I would send the little lists home and when they pass them off, then they bring them back and they'd get the next list until, you know, I'm like, Yes, I'm differentiating. They're kind of all on their own list. But the thing is, is that I couldn't control how the parents were teaching them and absolutely the parents are teaching them generally by sites like by just memorizing it because that's kind of petition Yeah, the repetition of it and without so I think if you want to send a list of five This whole it's got to be words that you have already introduced and taught, right? And then we know that some kids need lots of repetition before they learn that but

Stacy Hurst:

beyond three and five times, yeah, statistical learning.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yeah. So before I might just keep saying, oh, remember this one? Oh, yeah, essay ID What is it said if there's still struggling, I might say, oh, remember, the AI is going to represent as in this word, what's, what's the word, and they're going to blend it again and just give them more and more practice to.

Narrator:

As educators, we know there's always more to learn. Want more information about bridging the gap between the science of reading research or practice, visit reading horizons.com/reading resources. And while you're there, we invite you to dive into other topics from our literacy talks podcast series.

Stacy Hurst:

So I would recommend to, I don't know if this is a stop or start, I'm having a hard time framing it as a stop. So I'll just go start, we need to probably start reframing the way we look at those high frequency word lists. They are important, but over 85% of them if you're teaching with the systematic, explicit phonics program, become what we would call decodable recognizable, you're teaching that or that grapheme phoneme mapping your phonics

Lindsay Kemeny:

instruction, just the district's mandating a certain amount, like I have heard the most, I don't know, like, passing numbers, when they're like, in kindergarten, they have to have 100 words, you know, by or 200. I mean, it's insane. And I'm just and then the poor teachers, put on them, and they're just trying to fulfill the district requirements. So I think that's probably the biggest stop is having this large amount of words that we're requiring them to memorize.

Donell Pons:

So Stacey, I think this brings us back full circle, again, to the beginning of the conversation where we were, we were going over definitions of what it is we were talking about, right when we talk about sight word, and how that definition, right? How the definition can help inform what it is we're doing with those words. And so how we teach them and the interaction the student is having with those words. So again, those definitions are critical and how they might overlap. As we talked about before, how do I see some of these definitions of the words overlapping? And then am I teaching them appropriately? Are the students being introduced to those words appropriately given my understanding of those words? So again, I think the definitions are so important and understanding exactly what we're talking about. So the term sight word is used in three ways just to reiterate in schools high frequency words like it the said she phonetically irregular words was okay. And again, these can overlap as we said, orthographically mapped are instantly recognized words, a student's sight word vocabulary. And remember, that's the term that researchers are going with, right? That's the way they're looking at it. So we need to know we

Stacy Hurst:

can safely say from those descriptions, and check me if I'm incomplete on this, that essay word is actually the product, it's the end goal. It's not like that an approach right? It's what we're going for. Like Lindsey, you said, every word wants to be a site. That's the goal. So what we do as teachers, whether it's a high frequency word, or a phonetically regular Word, and the high frequency word or irregularly phonetic, then our approach to teaching those words a phonics is critical, when areas help us to really highlight the fact that we know that phonemic awareness is critical. And we need to connect the two we need to map this spelling with the sound and the sound of the spelling, we think about that four part process or that we have learned so much about in recent years. And that really is critical to all of that tying it to the meaning and then able to put it in the context that we're reading it in. And I would say to its it might seem like a slow process at first, but it is not really once a brain picks up on those patterns in that that method.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Well, and everyone's done that deer typically developing readers are going to they have four encounters with the word and they have it it's a sight word for them, but others take many more. I've heard different numbers on it. I've heard 12 to 17. I've heard 100 I need to look it up.

Stacy Hurst:

You know what I did some research in my first grade classroom on the lake some action research. I didn't take a deep dive but one of the books that informed my early practice, along with the first grade studies was a book written by Bill Hoenig, who is one of the co authors of the core books and it was teaching our children to read I think is what it's called it. I think it might be an obscure book. I don't see it. I don't see people referencing it. But it was short, but it was dense. And one of the that's where I first learned about the self teaching hypothesis or the fact that three to five encounters with the word and that's the student working through it, not us telling them the word right. So I took that to heart. And I did notice that even with my magical word wall words students were getting them in a relatively short amount of time. Most of my students some were not. And with one little kiddo is still just have fun memories are so cute. She's probably like 30 now, but she's a first grader in my mind, but I actually started tally marking how many it took her her entire kindergarten year to recognize the word duck. And so I wanted to know, okay, if I know that this takes the student 100 times with this word, then it will help me plan instruction, which I don't think was entirely efficient either, but her average at the end was like 36

Donell Pons:

Stacey, it's interesting what you're observing in the classroom from the research is typical readers with accurate and efficient phonemic awareness and phonics decoding ability automatically create orthographic images of decoded words in memory. So a lot of the students as you say, we were witnessing this, and readers with a weakness in the ability to process orthographic information are less likely to perceive the orthographic pattern initially, thus, no stable memory for the letter sequence is established. So that's what you're seeing the other group of students, right, even if they have seen it multiple times, as we've talked about, before, that word does not register as familiar or activate its pronunciation. So consequently, they depend on sounding out words for identification, and acquire sight words more slowly read less fluently and spell words phonetically.

Stacy Hurst:

And you're reading that right from the article. So get a copy of the most current journal. And you know what else was interesting to me in retrospect, now I look back and I say, you know, I should have been doing more phonemic awareness with that girl, I did phonological awareness with her, I remember that. But I wasn't as focused to my thinking and Gordon's instruction. And I do think the other thing that she ended up repeating first grade, and then having a classification of intellectually handicapped, so that might seem discouraging, but it's not even somebody with that classification can learn words, yeah, it takes more time. But as linaria has helped us and others, Mark Seidenberg and many others have helped us to learn that it's the same in any brain that what ends up happening, the way it connects, it just might take longer for us to get that input. So start connecting phonemes to the graphemes. Start drawing students attention to the irregular parts, keep using phonics and searching, keep using phonemic awareness instruction, rethink those word lists. And don't worry, you're still going to meet this standard that your district or the state or even the Common Core State Standards are are saying we should meet and they're even when they refer to lists. Right? You'll do it with that approach. I mean, teaching reading is complex for sure. It's hard to summarize something was important. Is that anything else? parting thoughts?

Lindsay Kemeny:

No, just thanks for listening. And

Stacy Hurst:

yeah, and we would love to hear from you, too, will save for another time. It's usually Lindsay and I don't know if we're just contrary or what, but we usually get in these healthy debates about particular things. One of our recent debates was about which order to teach the irregular parts. This approach, yeah, we can save that for another time.

Donell Pons:

And I don't recall making that discussion any easier for either of us. Three way,

Stacy Hurst:

because they think it's a different I don't know that there's a right way. This is a question. Oh, we can just put it out there. We can just pause it and see where it goes. So I think I referred to Dr. Kilpatrick has talked about this approach the heart word APPROACH. Yeah, they do it this way. So I don't think I questioned it. It made sense to me that you would map each grapheme to the phoneme that they know that they've been taught so for example, in word said, the regular parts of that word would be s, spelling, this sound and D spelling the sound and then you teach the irregular part. So that's how I've been doing it.

Lindsay Kemeny:

And my position is left to right left to right, we're gonna go do the sounds from left to right because I want them to learn to look through the words that way and not their eyes jumping around everywhere. And and I saw one time I saw a teacher like demonstrating this and she's like, it was a three syllable word and she started at the last syllable and then the different sounds within the syllable was showing an order and then you know, not showing some We'll do that one a minute and then the middle and so I just think it's keep it left to right. And I was watching. I was watching the the reading leagues summit annual conference. And Dr. Heidi beverage and curry was doing a little demonstration and she did it my way. Oh, no, it's your way my way. Stacy, I was like, Oh, well,

Stacy Hurst:

I guess. Our goal is to find the researcher with the Most credibility and see how they do it right settle this once and for all. I don't know, I don't know that it matters, right? I know overall, no.

Lindsay Kemeny:

I could see it going. Oh, let's wait and do did. And then I could see that but I think it can get complicated in other words, which is why I think just keeping it left to right kind of simplifies things because

Donell Pons:

I think if we had benefit of some research in this area, we might see that as a combination, depending on the length of the word and what the irregular parts of the word are, I think that might be more what

Stacy Hurst:

just is a linear area when she's talking about multisyllabic words that are irregular like this, she used a term in a research article I read that was spelling pronunciation that would help students remember the spelling. And I do this every time I spell the word Wednesday, still, I say it wetness day.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yeah. So

Stacy Hurst:

that's another question that I have about this. And we will wrap it up by saying let us know guys, do you go from left to right. Do you do the consistent parts first? And first? Do you think it matters? We can also say for another time how this approach applies to multisyllabic words you make a good point, but we do

Lindsay Kemeny:

have a little healthy debate. So we still love each other. And so we

Stacy Hurst:

do. I think that as we're all figuring it out, right? But we still you'll notice, even with this debate, which is not as big as we might be making it sound, is it actually both of our approaches are built on sound research. And so we are helping facilitate that process in the brain either way, because we're pointing out their regular parts. That's the important part of that process.

Narrator:

Thanks for joining us today for literacy talks, the podcast series for literacy leaders and champions everywhere. Literacy talks comes to you from Reading Horizons where reading momentum begins. Join us next time