Executive Functions and Writing with Dr. Leslie Laud (131)

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Dr. Leslie Dr. Laud brings decades of experience as a researcher, educator, and consultant focused on improving writing outcomes, especially for students who struggle. We dive into:

• What executive skills are and why they matter in writing
• How ThinkSRSD helps students regulate their emotions and thinking while writing
• How educators can shift from “assigning writing” to teaching writing
• Tools to build independence 

Dr. Leslie Laud is a national educational consultant, author, and founder of ThinkSRSD, a leading organization supporting schools in implementing the Self-Regulated Strategy Development model. She has authored multiple books and articles on writing instruction, most recently Executive Skills and Writing Instruction: Developing Self-Regulated, Thinking Writers. Her work empowers educators to integrate cognitive and emotional self-regulation into writing lessons, with proven results across diverse student populations.

Visit www.thinksrsd.com

Coming Soon!!! Book: Executive Skills and Writing Instruction by Leslie E. Laud

Pre-order-https://www.guilford.com/books/Executive-Skills-and-Writing-Instruction/Leslie-Laud/9781462558940/reviews

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:02

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Literacy View. Well, she's back by popular demand, Dr. Leslie Lord. We are so happy to have Leslie with us. Leslie is the founder of Think SRSD, and she is just, you know, killing it out there. Everybody, wants training in Think SRSD, and she is the queen of writing instruction, and we're so pleased to have her. Leslie just wrote a new book. It is not out yet, but I was fortunate enough to get a copy beforehand, and it is just wonderful. Leslie, tell us a little bit about your book before we get started.

SPEAKER_00: 0:49

Sure. So this is my lifelong manifestation of everything I've ever loved and cared about as a teacher. Right off in the beginning of my career, I was fascinated by executive functioning. Way back when, before anybody ever talked about ADD or EF, I was fascinated by I have this distinct memory of watching Carrie on Sex and the City like 30 years ago who said, oh, he's just a guy with ADD. And it was the first time I ever saw it in the media. And I was like, oh, and now it's something that everybody talks about. But way back when, it was something that was very obscure and I was utterly obsessed with it. So

SPEAKER_02: 1:31

what is the title of your book?

SPEAKER_00: 1:33

Executive Skills and Writing Instruction. Woo!

SPEAKER_02: 1:38

Yay. And that is going to be the topic of today's discussion, executive function skills with writing. And we are going to be talking about the article, the relationship between executive functions and writing in children, a systematic review. But before we do, we have a very special announcement to make. Judy and I are going to be podcasting at the Big Sky Conference. So we are not just attending as guests. We're not attending as speakers. We are attending as podcasters and we are going to be podcasting all these wonderful speakers and guess who is going to be there? Wesley. So we are so thrilled. And wait till you hear this. When the offer was made for us to go to Big Sky and we heard about, oh, we're going to have to travel and we're going to have to get a hotel. And, you know, it's the summer and I'm going to be taking a vacation, a big vacation. And then this came up and it was unexpected. And Judy has her son going off to China. We were both kind of freaking out about the expense and who came in. But Leslie said, you know what? I have grant money. And I am going to sponsor both of you to be able to do this wonderful event. And we could not thank Leslie enough. Thank you, Leslie. This is grant money from IES. And since we are disseminating evidence-based practices, we are able to work with Leslie through her grant. And we are just honored and so grateful. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 3:45

Thank you. I actually got tears in my eyes. Oh.

SPEAKER_02: 3:50

It really is a wonderful thing you're doing for us. We can't thank you enough. So let's start sharing a little bit of information about executive functioning. So Leslie, why don't you kick off the findings from this paper and how it ties into all the work you do with writing?

SPEAKER_00: 4:16

Sure. So executive functioning was always something that lived here. And I was fascinated by it and wanted to support my students with it. And then over here, I had my writing world. And then I began to see that there were ways that we could scaffold the writing process, how to plan, how to organize, that organization is actually an executive skill. And it is something that we don't just scaffold, but we can teach and actually help children. So I began to see those connections. Executive skills are impacting everything, every level. I learned this from Kelly Cartwright, who wrote the Reading and Executive Skills book, which is a phenomenal read, one of my favorite, probably my favorite reading comprehension book ever. And I began to look at writing through that lens and realizing, holy mackerel, right from step one, from letter formation, executive functioning is everything. And when we teach in ways that scaffold it, we see a dramatic difference in the rate at which children can become proficient in all areas of writing.

SPEAKER_02: 5:34

So Judy, you know, you and I both work with children as well as do a million other things. So we certainly could see firsthand the importance of this executive function and how it plays into reading and writing. And when Leslie mentioned letter formation, I did not know at the time, years ago, when I knew that there was a connection between letter formation and recognizing your letters. And then of course, recognizing your letters quickly enough to be able to push the sounds together. It's like a domino effect. How do you address some of these types of skills, handwriting, letter formation, letter recognition, in terms of trying to improve those in order to improve decoding, and encoding and all those skills that we know that we need to be able to read and write. So

SPEAKER_01: 6:50

it's interesting. I wanna just start off by saying as a little girl, I struggled with my executive functioning skills. So this topic is very personal to me and I never really got a lot of support. I had to learn to cope with it. And I actually improved in my organizational skills When I got older in life, probably at age 40, I started to feel really successful because life just made me become more organized. I became a reading specialist. Actually, I'm going to be honest. I became organized during my reading recovery days, as crazy as that sounds. Something good came out of that because I had to really be meticulous with keeping my paperwork organized and my data organized. And I really started to really appreciate setting up systems and structures for myself because I was in a role where my boss was counting on me. And yes, we all know there were many things happening there that weren't good. But for me, that's when I became a more organized individual. And I realized how important it was to become more organized because I was always the little girl that When I was traveling to school as a little girl, I had a bus pass. I was always the kid that lost my bus pass. I was always the kid that couldn't find my keys. And I'm very often the person that still can't find my keys. But there's such an important value in systems and structures in general. And they are such a big priority for me in the building that I'm supporting right now. And I think that thinking about writing We know it's a really difficult skill for a lot of our students. And we know that, you know, it doesn't go separately. So many people are focusing so much on reading only and say, okay, writing is going to come later. And yes, writing skills may develop later and get better later. but they go hand in hand. I mean, we've seen many quotes online that say one is breathing in and the other is breathing out. And that's how I feel to the core of my soul. And, you know, the system has neglected writing for so long and that's why it's becoming such a big priority in my building. And, you know, I just emailed Leslie and hopefully Leslie will be in my building next year. God willing, fingers crossed. She just emailed me today, but, um, You know, the pillar of writing has been neglected. And I think that, you know, as a system, we've given so much attention now for the last couple of years to making sure kids get better at decoding, but there's so much more to it. And like Faith just mentioned, even something as basic as handwriting, it's so neglected. And if kids' handwriting is neglected, how can they put their ideas down on paper with ease and automaticity? They can't. So it's interesting. I was working with a trainer from actually Wilson's Fundations, and he actually said, you know what, we're going to focus on one skill a month to make sure that it's rock solid. And I got knots in my stomach. One of the foci for September, actually for September or October, is going to be letter formation for my kindergarten team. And my stomach hurt when I heard that. I was like, oh, man. Because My handwriting was never great. I always struggled with it. But then I realized, you know what? My kids deserve more. It is an important piece of the literacy. Writing is key. Letter formation is key. And if we don't build that foundation, we're not going to get very far. So it's going to be prioritized in my own building. We're going to go deep into it because for so long, we just... neglect what's important. And we're always trying to squeeze things in that we think that is important. And then we wonder why kids can't write complete sentences when they're in fourth and fifth grade, because we're neglecting what's really important, which is explicit instruction in

SPEAKER_02: 10:42

writing. that they'll just get. And I, you know, I think it's a combination, as you said, Judy. And one thing I love about you is how honest you are. I think that's the first time I'm hearing that you struggled with these types of things. And we've been talking for a while and I don't think you ever saying that. So you learned

SPEAKER_01: 11:04

something. I get a pit in my stomach. It's something I really, um, I'm almost embarrassed. It almost made me feel like I was Leslie. Don't

SPEAKER_02: 11:12

be embarrassed. You're on the Literacy View. There are only thousands of people listening to

SPEAKER_01: 11:16

you. But it's very painful. A lot of people don't have money for executive functioning coaches. And the fact that Leslie's bringing something like this possibly into classrooms where parents might not have money. My parents were immigrant parents. A, they had no idea that there's executive functioning coaches But I struggled and I needed to overcome it on my own. Nobody taught me how to get better at it.

SPEAKER_02: 11:44

Right. So now let's take what Judy just said. I love so many things that she just said. So let's tease this apart. Leslie, so do you need an EF coach or we have your book now. And I can say that you really address this in a very deep way. What are some tips that you can offer to teachers in the classroom that address these executive functioning skills? Because it is the foundation for transcription. So transcription would be letter formation, the actual writing of these letters, automatically, oral language, everything seems to stem, if you look at the chart in the article, and I hope people will take a look at the article, that executive function skills really affect everything. And clearly, working memory was the one that came up probably as the leader of them all. So if you could just talk about that, because one thing I learned when I was involved in reading first and coaching, they said, you can't really teach these types of things, but you can make it easier for kids by thoroughly addressing some of these foundational skills. Could you maybe talk a little bit about that? I

SPEAKER_00: 13:19

have so many thoughts on that. So Can we teach these things? The jury is out. Youngsook Kim is looking at how we can impact executive functioning generally. My understanding, I hope I'm quoting her right, of Kelly Cartwright is that you really have to teach the literacy and the executive functioning together. That you can't just pull out executive functioning, build that, and then hope that literacy will rise, that you have to find the tasks within. I do think that we can definitely impact this. And some tips, I would say you just said the best one, Faith. My favorite is don't engage in assumption-based teachings. And I'm quoting Michelle Miglione from Hopewell, New Jersey. She really drives that home. Nothing can be assumption based. And she and I were talking and she was getting all fired up about how Think SRSD supports executive functioning. And she said, without this, you're pouring kerosene on ADHD. If you're not giving the kids these scaffolds and this kind of instruction, I know, right? Cheers for her. The language skills that we teach, we're getting more explicit about that. Teaching the kids what the letter looks like, how it sounds. That is all very important, but the executive skills and the language skills are growing in parallel and you can't count on it that teaching one will build the other. So my big epiphany after writing this book was that we have an army sleeping in the heads of our children, fast asleep. And when you wake it up and put them to work in the learning, they're happy to be part of it all. And suddenly the kids are learning at 10 times the rate they were before. But we were just not. The technical word is recruiting. And that means to pull them in and put them to work and get them going as well. So I also thought, well, we can scaffold, we can give an organizer. I didn't realize we could actually teach and develop the skill and the understanding of organization with this kind of teaching. And if I can add something, To relate to Judy. Judy, I too was the kid who always forgot this stuff and so did my buddies. So we would have been great buddies. We were always the last ones out of class trying to find our stuff. And I was tested for ADHD in my late 20s and found to have it. I went into an intense, this is what drove my career and why I culminated in this book. I went into a very intense, like Russell Barkley, like chasing them all down. Like I was a groupie before any of these names were known, reading any book anywhere I could get my hands on and putting all kinds of structures and things into place. And I was tested 20 years later and no longer made the cut. So I don't want to put the wrong notion out there that you can fix this, but I do think 20 years of intensive work can move us.

SPEAKER_02: 16:45

So what was pivotal in your decision?

SPEAKER_03: 16:47

That's

SPEAKER_02: 16:48

powerful. First of all, I don't think I would have been friends with either one of you because I was neurotic. We would have

SPEAKER_00: 16:57

driven you nuts.

SPEAKER_01: 16:59

These types of things. Wait, wait, wait. Faith, I'm going to say something funny. No wonder we have a hard time booking flights and stuff like that because Faith would book it like 25 weeks in advance and I'd probably book it the day before. There you go. Exactly. And

SPEAKER_02: 17:17

my trips are planned every minute. Just going through

SPEAKER_01: 17:23

the day, hoping for

SPEAKER_02: 17:24

the best. I should have figured it out. I'm like, Judy, you know what? It's a month away. I'm

SPEAKER_01: 17:35

definitely not type A. I'm not type A. I'm probably type B. But passionate. and very, very whatever. Faith, are you type A?

SPEAKER_02: 17:48

I don't know. All I know is I like- Let the viewers decide what they think in the chat one day. I like to be planned and I feel uncomfortable when things are up in the air. It makes me uncomfortable. It really depends. You know, I have a hairdresser who works on three people at once and she gets it all done and she's extremely efficient. I look at her, it gets me crazy. It's like my heart is palpitating, but she gets it done. So everybody has their own way of doing things. It would not be my way of doing things. I like focusing on one thing at a time, but... You know, to each his own, right? All right, so let's move on to Judy. What are some of your questions that would be practical questions for Leslie based on the topic? What are some of your burning questions that maybe you would want to bring to kids and their families and teachers? What are some of your thoughts that you would want to ask Leslie?

SPEAKER_01: 20:29

Well, I have a million and one thoughts. I know that teachers in the field, myself being one of them, are really struggling with writing instruction in general and how to get systems and structures in place so that kids can be successful. You know, they're being given quote unquote programs. Schools are trying to make it into a curriculum. Schools can't figure it all out. Principals are very frustrated with what they're seeing. They're seeing Some improvements in reading instruction, although there's still debate about that, and we know that there's still teachers that want to be better informed, let I say the magic word, strategies, in conjunction with knowledge building, because I don't want the knowledge building fans to go down my throat. But anyway, in terms of writing instruction, teachers really feel ill-prepared. in terms of writing instruction. Now, I myself work with kids after school, and I've been using a lot of the methodology in Think SRSD. And I know that planning is such a big piece of writing for kids. And I know that the kids that I work with after work, especially, planning is so soothing to them because they feel empowered. What are some tips that you can give so that we can, as teachers, be empowered because A lot of teachers are struggling. They're being given programs that don't follow the gradual release, that are all over the place, that are focusing on things that they don't feel important. Today, you're doing an adjectical lesson. Tomorrow, you're throwing in pronouns. The next day, you're revising, then you're editing, then you're doing adjectives again. It's frustrating because a lot of teachers feel like the kids aren't getting the basic skills that they need to write a piece that is meaningful, And, you know, has a topic sentence and details and an ending. And then, you know, there's just teachers that tell me, you know what, we're not following what's in the book. We're just going to write a piece about dinosaurs. And, you know, it's frustrating. Give us some practical tips as practitioners in the class. What are we doing to help our students? Because I know that planning is a big piece for a lot of my students.

SPEAKER_00: 22:43

Yeah. The astonishing piece of it is that these practices are not well known and very few teachers just stumble upon them. And instead, we just keep assigning writing or... Modeling how to write a sentence now that sentences are coming into the sunshine, which is, you know, a good thing, but we need the holistic. And when you start with the executive functioning outlook and you're thinking about that while you're teaching, then at every letter level from right from letter formation, I was working with first and second graders this year and their handwriting was a struggle. And I was reading, I happened to be writing the chapter at that point and reading about the importance of self-verbalizations. So a colleague, Michelle Miglione, again, showed me

SPEAKER_01: 23:39

this. Explain for our viewers what that is for some of us.

SPEAKER_00: 23:42

Self-verbalizations, yes. So as the kids, as we were writing in front of the class, the collaborative writing, modeling writing, so incredibly important to do. Many kindergarten teachers do that, but then we drop it in the older grades. We should keep doing it. So we were writing about Paul Bunyan. So we wanted to write Paul And first, we had to help them sound it out. What do you hear? How many sounds? What letters do you match? And then when we got to forming the letter, they found it very soothing, the ones who wanted to stay with me, when I would give the simplest verbalizations. And Faith or Judy may know the name of these. It's not Peterson, but it's something similar. But it was, we're going to write Paul. First letter is P. Top line, straight down. Top line. curve around. And we would give the verbalizations while they were writing. And that was giving them that extra cue that made all the difference in the world on their handwriting being legible. And then apparently they were going into school and doing the verbalizations and their teacher emailed the mom, your handwriting is neater. That's the kind of executive functioning support that is just add water and mix and can just take off. Now, if you've got You know, if you've got other issues going on, this won't solve it. But for the majority of kids who just have executive functioning challenges, those little kinds of tips can help them. And then you talked about planning. So planning is like the easiest breeze. And I used to make organizers for my kids because maybe I needed the structure as well, but I can see that they needed the structure. But what I didn't realize. was to quote Zaretta Hammond, I could teach them to learn how to learn. And that was the big surprise to me that I discovered 15 years into my career and never knew until then. I was the executive functioning for my children. I was like a prosthetic on their frontal lobe. I would run a very structured classroom. I would guide everything and they were successful. But when they left me, they fell apart. And I didn't realize that I could be teaching them with the vision of getting myself out of the picture and getting them in charge of organizing and guiding themselves. So Tide is the perfect example of this simplest, like a cinch thing you can teach kids. Okay, you're going to draw a Tide and you're going to fill it in. That is how

SPEAKER_02: 26:24

people write.

SPEAKER_00: 26:25

Yes. Yes. Thank you, Faith. T is topic, goes at the top of your paper. Then you put I.D. I is your information or important evidence. D is your details or detailed analysis. I.D. I.D. down the page as you plan out your outline. And then at the end, the E. is end. And you teach children to write that and then to put down their thoughts. That in and of itself is night and day. It's so hard to get teachers to change practice, take on something new. But the minute they teach that, they're all bought in because they immediately see, oh, my kids can spell now. Well, that's because you took the weight off the working memory. Faith, you're right. The working memory is the MVP and the whole executive functioning game around writing. And so once they have their TIDE planner created, now they can spell, now they can handwrite more easily, now they can add more details because you took that load off their mind. Let me

SPEAKER_01: 28:53

ask you something. So I use TIDE on my own and to my school. A lot of teachers that I see in the field are still using race. Have you seen that they need to, in your opinion, is it better to transition to TIDE or Or do you also work with people and say, okay, this is what you're using. Let me show you how to work with that struck acronym. to have effective planning. A lot of race going on. I

SPEAKER_00: 29:23

know, I know. And Oreo and CER, they're all good. They all serve the same purpose. I'm highly in love with Tide. I see it as being the most flexible, the easiest to use. I don't have a hard time selling teachers on Tide. If they're using race, they'll normally switch. Occasionally you get a few who are really wedded, okay? So then use that, but then teach the kids how to draw it and use it independently. But the larger question, Judy, and I'm so glad you're bringing this up is there's no winning mnemonic. The point is to have a structure.

SPEAKER_01: 30:01

Yeah. Oh my God. That's so powerful that Leslie said that. There's no winning mnemonic.

SPEAKER_02: 30:09

Yeah. So it's all about structure. So let's, focus now on structure and working memory. Now, I know whenever I've worked with kids individually in a tutoring situation, or when I went into schools and was the consultant, the kids generally who had the lowest profiles often I won't say always, but most often had working memory issues. It's one of those red flags when kids are tested, they often come up with low working memory. But those people out there, who really are unsure of what that actually means. Can you talk about why working memory is so important for basically all academic work? And why think SRSD really does a lot to work with this to help those kids with poor working memory?

SPEAKER_00: 31:25

Yes. And I think one reason why I was made to do this or why I just love this work so much is because I was the kid who struggled with the working memory. And so I understood me. And so I looked at all this and I was like, oh, this would have helped me. And I was able to understand it, see its importance and teach it to my kids as an insider, you know, like friend to friend. Like, I know this is hard for you. It was hard for me, too. And this will definitely help you. The working memory load, working memory being the ability to juggle multiple pieces of information at once without losing them. I like to think of it as kitchen counter space. My brilliant editor said that's not quite the right analogy because it's not really space. It's not really like a physical thing, but it helps me to think of it as kitchen counter space. which I think I got from Mel Levine decades back, and that we can only hold on to so much information and juggle it, and it evaporates. Like a bird, it's flown away. And if you can't hold on to the information, you can't do the critical thinking, you can't do the arranging, you can't do all of the pieces that the kids who do have effective working memory can do effortlessly. But when you learn that beautiful, notion of compensation, you can catch right up. And by making a tied planner, it was a whole new world for a kid like me to be able to now hold on to the multiple pieces of information and then look at them and think critically about them and think about how should I organize these, to be able to externalize it all and put it on paper so that I wasn't depending on my weakness. Just moves mountains.

SPEAKER_01: 33:20

Leslie, can you tell us a little bit about what a complete tied planner would look like and how a student would take what's on their planner and then

SPEAKER_03: 33:30

transfer it?

SPEAKER_00: 33:31

And turn it into sentences. So there's the really hard work. Okay. This is my soapbox. You ready? Okay.

UNKNOWN: 33:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 33:40

We cannot teach these skills in isolation. We can't. There is not time. And what are we going to say by like November 15th? We're going to move from sentences now to paragraphs. It just the brain does not learn that way. It does not work that way. I remember hearing that it was rubbing me the wrong way. And then I kept seeing study after study. Well, when I wrote this book, I pulled it all together. I have 30 pages of references, almost 400 studies cited in this book. And I've synthesized them all together. And one area where they converge is that you have to teach the multiple levels of language and the writing process together, because here's the thing, we have to orchestrate using them together. So when we go from the tide planner to the piece of writing and we're turning our ideas into sentences, think of all the levels of language kicking in. We have to form our letters. We have to know how to spell. We have to have our grammar, innate grammar device, our language acquisition device that has to be kicking in. We have to be holding on to the gestalt of the project. All of those things need to be happening together. And they must be taught together and practiced together from the start so kids can do them all together.

SPEAKER_02: 34:57

So what if someone says to you, Leslie, they can't write a sentence and you want them writing a whole essay? And... But I'm sure you've heard this, and I'm sure people are out there saying the same thing, that when I see kids write, it's just a complete mess. It's a bunch of fragments. It's no capitalization, no punctuation. It's just a mess. And they're overwhelmed when they think of writing books. an essay when they cannot even write a sentence and isn't a sentence like a mini composition. So I want you to address some of this because I think that people need to hear this. Since there are so many different angles that we're talking about.

SPEAKER_00: 36:03

Yeah. Yeah. But the research is, has, it converges so beautifully. The most recent study from Karen Harris, she called it right out, her and Young-Soo Kim. She taught letter formation, spelling, sentence and composition to first graders.

UNKNOWN: 36:20

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 36:20

And they all managed it. And the pandemic was in the middle of the study and they all managed it. And they came out with these whopping effect sizes in all areas. So the kids can absolutely, and you will stunt them if you try to break down language and teach one area at a time. I'll try to explain it from the perspective of Linnea Arie. A sentence is not a mini composition. A sentence is an isolated fact. A mini composition could be a short write. Even three sentences, I'm okay. But it needs to be an idea, not an isolated factual sentence. And I heard Linnea Arie explain this so beautifully when she keynoted in New Jersey earlier this year. She talked about a new study that she's... Must be in her 80s because she's been around for so many decades and she's still doing new studies. She did a study with one of her grad students who's now a professor where they looked at children's learning of vocabulary and various other outcomes, learning from lists of sentences versus a paragraph. And she explained it with these diagrams so beautifully where she showed that the pronouns faith, the synonyms, and she had arrows how they were all coming together to repeat the key concept within a paragraph. And when the kids were tested on the facts presented in the list versus the paragraph, their reading comprehension was significantly higher. when they had been working at the paragraph level rather than trying to learn from a list of facts. Facts are just disjointed. You don't have the repetition. You don't have the connections. You don't have the causal relationships. Same thing with writing right from day one. When the kids are producing a little tiny paragraph, three to four sentences, they're making connections. They're using pronoun reference. They're using synonyms. They've got all of this other cohesion and variation and deeper learning and thinking and realizations. It's so much more joyful. Who wants to produce 10 sentences? Who wants to practice putting a positives into 10 sentences? Weave it in when I'm writing about why Malala is so important because she advocates for the education of girls. Now I care. Now I'm invested. Three to four sentences. But this idea of teaching and practicing sentences alone in isolation, there's just so much research against doing that.

SPEAKER_01: 38:56

Bingo. And I think that's important that Leslie just said that, Faith, right? Because very often you'll see on social media, people get comfortable with what they're think is cool or in style rather than what is the research saying, right? I agree. And I was one of those teachers, Leslie, myself. I was doing the whole positive thing for a while and in isolation and thinking that was the biggest bang for my buck. But once the research said that that wasn't the best approach, I shifted.

SPEAKER_00: 39:25

And we don't have any studies that show that working like that. And then people propose it and say, well, there's no studies yet, but it hasn't been studied. Actually, it has. We have 50 years of isolated grammar instruction. And even if you link it to the content they're learning, that's no different in the research studies. We've got all kinds of studies that are looking at history teachers, teaching history content with sentence diagramming. No gains. So-

SPEAKER_02: 39:54

So this to me sounds like what we had discussed with Trina and Doug. So obviously their focus was on language, but writing is language. So it seems to me that listening to you, Leslie, and having had Trina and Doug on talking about how you can't just you know, pull out certain pieces that he, I forget the exact term, but he said, if you focus on a strand, one strand, that's not it, you know? I

SPEAKER_01: 40:36

think it's, if you focus on one strand, somebody's trying to sell you something.

SPEAKER_02: 40:42

Yeah, something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the point, what I'm trying to say is that there's this holistic approach to language and writing that And yet we know that balanced literacy doesn't work. So now how do we separate this out? Because I'm sure there are listeners saying, this certainly sounds like balanced literacy to me. Can you please explain Leslie, what is the difference between holistic and a balanced approach? Because I think that could be very confusing

SPEAKER_01: 41:22

I think you hit on something very important, Faith, because even as you were talking, Faith, I was like challenging myself because, you know, what about drill and kill or whatever, like practice, practice, practice, even things in isolation. Is there research behind that? Yes, there is. But you

SPEAKER_00: 41:44

don't practice, practice, practice phonemic awareness for a month. without read-alouds, without application, without all the other. It's an explicit lesson, has multiple components to it. I remember learning Orton-Gillingham 35 years ago, and my lesson plan had six chunks. And I was teaching each part of language. Now, you do want to be... I'm not saying immerse kids in reading and they're going to magically write. We are very explicit at every level, giving them the verbalizations for the letters, modeling the letters, showing them how to do it. Spelling instruction needs to be explicit, systematic with your morphology and all your... daily practice, but your lesson is going to have multiple components. Now, K-1-2, they really are rocket scientists because they have to do the double work of building comprehension and all that foundation entry work. In a K-1-2 lesson, you've got your 90 or 100 minutes with an explicit introduction of a skill, modeling the skill, practicing the skill, but then you bring it all together when you have the kids read the decodable and then read an early, you know, book that they can access, but you're bringing it all together. You're not spending a month on one little piece of foundational. We are so explicit. At the beginning of our lesson, you would have had your 30, 60 minutes of foundational instruction with letter formation, with spelling, all following a systematic explicit, but then you would move into, okay, now we're going to write about chrysanthemum. All the way to Peter's chair. It's easier to sound those words out. But we're going to write about what lesson Peter learned. Like, it's okay to grow up. And then the kids are engaged in the story. You've got their mind, heart, and soul because they care. They want to talk about Peter. But then you're showing them, here's how you do a P. Here's how you sound out P. Peters, you're modeling all of that. And then we do something with the gist, which I learned from Dr. Charles Haynes. I uniquely merged it with the work of Sharon Vaughn, pulled in K. Wood Jemma Kumar so that we start every single day with sentences, 180 days a year. Who put baby in the corner? Like, why did we ignore sentences? It's so sad. But it doesn't mean that now we clear the decks and that's all we do. We do spend five minutes explicit, but then we get into writing about Peter's chair. And now we're bringing in second grade. We were working on irregular past tense. So we're going to use.

SPEAKER_02: 44:23

Can I say something?

SPEAKER_00: 44:25

Please.

SPEAKER_02: 44:25

So many moons ago, when I taught first grade, going back quite a long time now, we did DOL, daily oral language. And we would put up a sentence on the board. and correct it together every single day. And then we would get on with our other work. And so it's so interesting to me how these types of things come back.

SPEAKER_00: 44:57

That's funny. If I had a matchbox, I'd like fired all those DOL books. I don't agree.

SPEAKER_02: 45:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 45:06

No, no DOL. The gist is tied to what you're learning and the gist has a double purpose. You're going to write a sentence that summarizes Peter's chair, and then you're going to bring in all the vocabulary you learned from and that you used in your gist. And now you're going to use it when you go to write and you're going to pick up your gist sentences and use them in your paragraph later.

SPEAKER_01: 45:25

And is the main reason that you're doing the gist is so that kids understand what they just read?

SPEAKER_00: 45:30

It's two things, Judy. It's so that you build a mental model, not only check for understanding, but build understanding, build a mental model of what they've just read, but then also give them practice in capitals, periods, grammatically complete sentences. And it's quick. It's five minutes, but it's production. It's not evaluation of somebody else's. You're producing it.

SPEAKER_02: 45:54

Okay, but... How many kids can do this in a direct lesson, as you said before, Leslie? And then it comes to the point where they have to write an essay on their own. It all goes out the window. The capitalization, the punctuation, things that they were able to spell, all of a sudden, they can't do it anymore because of the working memory. It's kind of like they just... They were able to do it when it's short and finite and they could show you they know what to do. But then once they have to think of their ideas and then they have to plan and get it down, by the time they actually sit to write it, so much of that goes out the window.

SPEAKER_00: 46:46

Unless if. Unless if. Go ahead, say it. You're working off of a tide planner. And they've had extensive modeling in, as I keep coming back, to teach the orchestration. Teach it from the first day of school. Teach it when you go to write in front of your class. When I write in front of my first graders and we write Paul, we do... We're doing phonemic awareness.

SPEAKER_02: 47:11

We

SPEAKER_00: 47:12

straight down, around. What's that all? A-U, right. Okay. Around, down. And we're bringing it all over in as we're modeling and we're teaching them to do the self-talk and the verbalizations so that when they go to write on their own, you're literally hearing... I don't know if you can hear it, but I heard my little John tapping under the table. I said, what are you doing? He goes, oh, I learned this in Wilson. I should tap out my words. But he was creating a paragraph about Neanderthal man. So he was orchestrating. He was pulling it all together. He had a planner, which alleviated the working memory. And then he had the tools and I had modeled and shown him how to bring up and use it all. That's why we can't lose a day on isolated. Only one thing has to be all.

SPEAKER_02: 48:00

Oh, I just wanted to ask you, Judy, what I'm hearing is a problem of being pulled out for intervention. So what I'm hearing Leslie say, at least from my point of view is, You could be sending these kids to intervention and they're working in isolation. Then when they get back to their classroom, it's like a different language again. I have

SPEAKER_01: 48:30

to be honest. I'm seeing a lot less of that. I'm seeing a lot of intervention time is taking place that everybody's working on intervention during intervention time. So kids are missing. I see a lot less kids in the field missing core instruction. So that's a really positive thing. So that's good, right? But the other thing I was thinking about also is, this is really important to me. So a lot of administrators, they're like, oh, you know, we're teaching them these scaffolds and these planners and on the state test, they don't have these planners. And when I walked around during the state exam, because I was a proctor, you know, you're not supposed to look at the test, but you know, you see what kids are doing. And I don't see a lot of kids planning on these stay tests. So is the goal to be that the kids are creating their own little planner on a sheet of paper and then going at it? Is that the goal? Because I honestly still don't see enough kids doing it. And I can't imagine, I could only imagine how much better their writing would be if they planned. And I don't know if everybody is, in education understands how important planning is and how critical and how much better writing could be. And I think a lot of people still see it as a waste of time or that it's not authentic or they'll think about themselves and maybe they don't know how to plan. So they're like, oh, I don't plan when I write. I just plan. You're

SPEAKER_00: 49:58

in New York City. That's where they think that way. But yeah, I know. And I was in that that town as well, that that beautiful city as well, where I would get all that insane pushback. But Judy, next year, it's going to look different. I Every March, I get these excited emails, texts. And then in September, I get sobbing calls from special educators who tell me every single child built a tie.

SPEAKER_01: 50:27

What do you do with a principal or principals in general? They're like, okay, not everybody needs a graphic organizer. Why are we giving you a graphic organizer? Or what happens?

SPEAKER_00: 50:38

I take out my BS button.

SPEAKER_01: 50:41

But what happens during the state exam? They have to make it. They have to draw it. Do you know that they barely give kids space on state exams to plan? Scrap paper. So right from day one, we offer them scrap paper. Oh, wait. Now I'm going to get crazy on the literacy view. I'm about to go wild. This year, the state exam was on a computer for fourth grade and fifth grade. So let me tell you, There wasn't a lot of planning going on because kids barely know how to keyboard when they're so young. So there was the planning stage. And even if kids do plan, let me tell you, they don't even give a lot of space on these damn state exams for planning. So guess who doesn't prioritize planning?

SPEAKER_00: 51:34

Cooper. Even with the computer, our kids all grab the scrap paper and make a tide. We've drilled it into them and made them self-regulating right from the beginning. So wouldn't that be great if the whole

SPEAKER_01: 51:47

universe was equitable in who's getting scrap paper, who's not getting scrap paper, and who's given these strategies?

UNKNOWN: 51:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 51:58

Thank you so much. them out in their classrooms for free just from watching the people who are posting, which is the most exciting thing. But yeah, it needs to scale.

SPEAKER_02: 52:38

So here's something that I'm thinking about, what Judy said about equitable practices. And she's just talking about the state exam now. But that's something that goes throughout the whole year, that we have... you know, these different programs, I'll call it what it is, different programs where they throw in a million different types of things and let teachers choose their own adventure. And the children are the ones who have to figure it all out. And yet then there are some schools where they really make it a priority to make this a daily habit that when we write, this is the way we roll. This is what we do. So how do we really compare schools at this point? You know, are we looking at the teaching? Are we looking at the teachers? Are we looking at the curriculum? Are we looking at the programs that are being chosen?

SPEAKER_01: 53:46

What's the con or what tool or what tool are kids being given? Is this kid given the chance to actually write with a pencil or are they being forced when they don't know how to keyboard to keyboard? Or maybe some kids like keyboarding.

SPEAKER_00: 53:58

The keyboarding thing is a real problem and the kids do need the before and after school. Adria Truckin Miller is doing incredible research. If you don't know her research, you need to look her up. And she's lifted up the hood to see what are the most powerful levers for writing instruction. And typing fluency is one of the big ones. The other two biggies are Tide, including all the parts of Tide and having a language box. But back to a minute ago, again, it's kerosene. It's pouring kerosene on ADHD when we do not give these scaffolds. And when we do give them, I call it magic pixie dust. That's what I call it in the book. And I never had a word for it, but it comes back to Zaretta Hammond again, this paradigmatic shift that changed my whole world of it's not me structuring them. It's me teaching them how to structure themselves. And we call it magic pixie dust because every March, the teachers call me and say, every single kid made a planner. And like, how did that happen? And every time I run these classes, I think, is it going to happen? But I was... teaching first and second grade this year. And my little second graders by about the fourth or fifth class, I was teaching and they were sitting there and they were doing something on paper. And I realized and I said, what are you doing there? And she said, I'm working on my essay. I don't want to. And she was trying to be polite, but she had realized how she could make it better. She had made a little planner and she was fixing her work and I had not asked her to. And this is that thing that kicks in. And it's like a scary thing because it's like, will it kick in? And the teachers in our workshops will constantly say, I think I'm going to be the first one to break it. And I'll say, I don't think it can be broken. If you teach in this way, you will set them on their path and they will take off and you will watch them go like Khalil Gilbert. And, you know, I'm the archer. I let you go. It's not me guiding it. And it's magic pixie dust to see it happen. And it's not me in control. It's Karen Harris used to say to me, it's not regulation, Leslie, it's self-regulation. And that is incredibly powerful, that distinction.

SPEAKER_02: 56:21

So, Leslie, name three BS practices ever. I thought you were going to say five. Well, I could do ten. You could do ten. Fabulous. Name at least... Wait,

SPEAKER_01: 56:36

wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

SPEAKER_02: 56:38

Get your BS button. I don't have it. I'm moving. I don't even know where anything is. It's already downstairs and I'm in a different computer. So what I usually have is organized. I'm sitting now in my husband's office because all my stuff has been packed up. But so I'm going to ask you, please, if you could name at least three three BS practices in writing and at least three practices that you would give a big cheers to. Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 57:16

Number one is this thing that's taken the nation by storm of we have to put sentences first. We have to work on only sentences. We have to spend a month or two months on only this skill. It will not transfer. You're not going to see meaningful gains in quality. You may see longer sentences, but according to Adria Trockenmiller, that's not even a predictor of writing quality. Sentence correctness is. You do want to have a good capital period, things like But longer sentences do not equate to better, richer, deeper quality. So I would banish that one. I would say spend your five minutes a day on sentences, but then get into composing, going through the writing process, creating a little outline, creating your piece and being sure to model. how to compose and bring in faith, all of those intervention pieces, model using them in an integrated way. Another BS is to do writing once a week. Well, that will never work because the kids need to see how to integrate and orchestrate every single day. It's as important as reading. A second one, exemplars are stultifying. That's a New York thing, Judy, I know. I used to hear it in the New York City schools. I think it I don't know where, but no, kids, it's like a human right. They need to see what it is we're asking them to do. But the goal is to go beyond the exemplar. And if you only show one exemplar, sure, you might get formulaic writing. You have to show multiple and show them various ways that they can get there. That planning is not necessary and planning can be stultifying. Planning is absolutely essential. There is no way around it. There are many ways you can plan. You can plan in fluid ways, but you absolutely have to plan. Okay. The idea of, well, I don't know if this is such a BS, but like, okay, I'm done and I turn it in and now the teacher scores it all. No, no, no. And teachers are going to like this one. You have to do the work. Who's the one doing the work here? You have to self-score it. Your peer has to give you feedback. You have to color code it. And then this is where inhibition kicks in. Working memory is a piece of cake. I will take a working memory kid any day of the week because they build a planner and now you're halfway there. It's inhibition that's really hard. Once the kids have finished, I'm done. And that's where you have to have like speed bumps. And the speed bumps are, no, first color code it, make all your strong words blue, self-score it, peer score it. Think, look at your past goals, go back and revise for your past goals. This is all drawing on inhibition and inhibition is a much harder executive skill to develop and support, but we can, and we can have this impact. And when you develop it, that's when you get the kids on the state assessments, because think about it to independently create an organizer is not just working memory at scaffolds, but it requires inhibition. to stop before you jump in and start drafting to remind myself to take that pause. Adele Diamond, she's a big guru in the executive functioning world. She says, time is the antidote to inhibition. So as long as they get like a minute to just breathe or pause, and if they've written power every single day on the top of their paper all year long, and it just happens, like it's just motor memory, writing power at the top of their page and then crossing- Can you remind them what power is? Oh, power is plan, organize, write, edit, revise. I remember seeing it posted in a classroom when I was a sub when I was 22. I was like, oh, look, that's the writing process. I had no idea it would become something that would be part of my every single day life when I taught because it is the anchor that allows kids to guide themselves and it facilitates the inhibition, which is so much harder.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:29

So what do you want to give big cheers to?

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:35

To Faith, I keep saying this in podcasts, but I, like you, lived through reading first and lived through striving readers and just watched them fail again and, you know, watched everything get blamed for why it went wrong. And, you know, we do need to look in the mirror. But I think this time is different. And I do think there's a real wave. And I think we're going to look back in a decade and say that was when it happened. And I think a big difference is the translators. And that is you, Faith. And that is you, Judy. That Faith is reading these articles and Judy is in a classroom and the two of you are coming together to try to bring what's in the research world to teachers. We didn't used to do that. We would just, we had this secret body of knowledge. We would say, well, the research says, and if we took out an article, it was this scary black on white paper thing and nobody understood the Greek letters and it was two worlds. This time we have something different. This time we have translators. and more and more of them. And the two of you do it so beautifully that I think cheers because science of writing is taking off everywhere. Our little Facebook group is at 15,000 now. And it's starting to like mushroom where again, as I said, people are telling me that they're spending an hour looking through a podcast or a video and then getting it up and running in their school. And I think the schools are hungry. And somehow through the magic of social media, Facebook, I don't know, we're just reaching more and more corners. And I'm excited at where this is all going and how kids are going to have an easier time learning to write. And they're going to write better and as a result, think better.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:29

Well, Leslie, your book is amazing. And I really recommend that everyone in education gets their hands on your book because it is groundbreaking. Everybody is trying to do this without understanding what the foundation really is and looking at these kids and understanding what's holding them back. Judy, first thing on my mind that Leslie said is never assumed. And that reminds me of the odd couple. And you know what I'm talking about. Never assume unless you make an ass out of you and me. And I just always see those letters from the odd couple. And I do see a lot of people assuming that these kids are able to do way more because it's assumed that they have oh, they could write, they have the handwriting, but how quickly can they get it down? And how can they coordinate what they're thinking with what their hand is doing? What are some of your takeaways, Judy, from our conversation with Leslie?

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:42

That we still have a lot of work to do in terms of writing instruction and getting it right. That we need to pay more attention to planning. And it's been neglected for way too long. And I want every administrator that's listening to this podcast and every teacher to realize it's a non-negotiable. It has to happen. If we want kids to generate greater ideas and write a way stronger piece of writing, give planning the respect that it deserves, Also, another big takeaway for me is let's bring back exemplars, whether they're exemplars that I use this year myself from Think SRSD that were ready-made. Thank you, Leslie. Thank you. Free to the public. Amazing. My teachers loved it. We got a lot of information about kids and their writing based off of those exemplars. We were doing baseline writing from your Think SRSD, but exemplars and also generating our own exemplars and also creating Guys, there's no excuse anymore. You have AI to help you create great exemplars too. You have Leslie's, you have your own brain, but kids need to see examples. But another great thing that I'm taking away, and I wanna hear Faith's takeaways from the book because I haven't read it yet. I haven't seen a copy yet, but color coding and the power of color coding. Color coding when you model for your students, but also... As an accountability check. Okay, you said you finished? Show me. Color code those bold words. Color code your topic sentence. Color code your conclusion.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:24

Where are your

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:25

details?

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:25

That's all the inhibition, the self-monitoring, self-evaluation.

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:31

Exactly. And also the other great thing, and, you know, I'm definitely not an expert in Think SRSD, but I've been playing with it. I've seen the modules. I've... you know, explored the book. I've joined the Facebook group to push myself. Those little report cards that you make after a piece, those checklists, kids love them. I've worked with private clients in my house where a kid would score themselves. And then the parent is sitting at the desk, you know, because they sometimes stay for my sessions. And then a parent is scoring their kid's writing. And it's such a powerful thing. collaboration and the kid is looking at the father and the father gave only a half a point to something. And then there's a discussion on how you could improve. And that's such a powerful thing to be able to, A, receive feedback as a child, but also to be able to have that communication on how we could get better as writers. Because you know what? You know what was happening in the balanced literacy days? A lot of kids were told, go write. Go write some more. Go write five pages. And then that was your writing lesson. And maybe the teacher showed you a little bit. But do you know how many kids were sitting and writing and never got feedback and wasted so much precious time? And kids don't have time to waste. And the other big thing that is important for me, principals, districts, don't just squeeze in writing. Give writing the attention it deserves. Don't put it at the end of the day just to get it over and done with. It really is important. But I have one more question for Leslie. One more before we go. So a lot of programs that I'm seeing did not connect the reading and writing. Reading about one genre and writing about a completely different genre. Burn them. Okay, but what do we do? We don't have a choice. We want to... We want to make a bonfire, but we can't. We've been told this is mandated research evidence, blah, blah, blah. Now it's on a list. What do we do? In my perspective, it makes it damn harder for teachers because it's like when they're starting their lesson, it's like starting from scratch rather than it being seamless. And in balanced literacy, sometimes we have thematic units and we were writing about the same thing in reading and writing. So what's your take on that one before we go? We

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:51

need the BS button. Reading and writing should not be disconnected. Yeah. task or whatever you read, the main selection, and blow that up and spend the whole week preparing for that. And then at the end of the week, evaluate that as a class, peer, self-score, class score, but blow up your writing that's in response to the reading you did that week.

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:00

So to wrap up, Judy wanted to know what I found to be a takeaway from the book. And What's apparent is Leslie lives this. And there are some authors that write about things, but there's no evidence that they do it. You cannot say that after reading this book. You just can't. I mean, she... lives this, and her examples are from her lived experiences. So I always appreciate from a practitioner's point of view, and Leslie's both. She's a researcher and a practitioner. So I have the utmost respect for her work. I thank you, Leslie, for being here. This was a delight. Can't wait to see you in Montana. And this is a really exciting opportunity for us to be able to be the podcasters for a conference. We are honored to have been asked. Thank you, Danielle. And we are just so delighted that you thought of us and that you think highly of our work. And we hope we're going to make you very proud. So

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:29

Faith, I think we're making history. I think we're the first official podcasters at the conference. This is so exciting because think about how much, A, we're going to be getting so much professional development ourselves. B, we're going to be sharing so much of what's happening with the whole world. We're going to speak to all the people that are presenting and guess who asks really good questions? Faith is going to ask some really good questions. I just cannot wait to see it in action. And I want to thank Leslie for one more thing. You introduced us to the greatest people. I mean, Trina and Doug.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:04

Oh, Trina. Doug is great, and Trina is just, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:10

They're

SPEAKER_02: 1:12:10

going to be at Big Sky, too. I know, yay. We love them, and I can't wait to meet them in person.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:17

Yes. Literacy View is going further than just talking about one pillar of instruction. We really believe that reading and writing is so many factors are so critical. And we're giving them the attention that they deserve. Yeah,

SPEAKER_02: 1:12:37

this conference is called Language is Everything. That's the headline, Language is Everything. And I think language is really getting the spotlight this year in 2025, along with writing. So I'm excited about that. And this is just going to be a fabulous opportunity. And we are going to bring it all to you. And I hope you're going to follow along with us. Can I just

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:05

add that I want to thank you both for the public service that you do, your genuineness and your dedication to children. I am always so proud to associate with the two of you because you are doing the real work. Judy, you're going into a public school every day. Faith, you're going in and helping the public school teachers every single day and getting real impact. And that is, you're a service to our nation So thank

SPEAKER_02: 1:13:33

you. Thank you. Well, you know, you're our No BS Bestie. You are in the club. So, and that's a very elite select group.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:46

I think she's a No BS Bestie MVP. 100%. All right, everyone. So long. Thank you.