Well, hello, hello. Welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. I am Jocelyn. Today we are going to talk all about programs. Now, we've all worked with programs of one type or another in our classrooms. There are programs for maths, programs for science, and of course programs for literacy.

Using programs has its benefits sure, but also a few drawbacks, and everyone seems to have their own opinion on whether or not we should be using them at all. In today's episode, we'll explore the role of programs in literacy instruction, and I'll share some considerations for using them in our classrooms.

There are a lot of moving parts in literacy instruction. Whether you are teaching lower, middle, or upper primary, it can feel like teaching students to read and write is absolutely a juggling act. Finding the right balance of instruction to build strong skills in phonics, phonemic awareness, spelling, fluency, vocabulary, understanding genre, syntax, parts of speech, and ultimately comprehension and writing is no easy task at the best of times.

Throw into the mix that your 25 to 30 students are sure to be at different places in their literacy journeys and have different needs in learning. And I can see how teachers come to the point where they are reaching for the nearest printable resource that looks manageable, even when that little voice in the back of our head says, "uh oh! You know, this isn't quality teaching right?" Hands up if you've had that voice. I know I have. 

The other path a teacher might take is to create their own teaching program and resources for literacy. And I have to say this would involve an exorbitant number of hours arranging content, putting all the moving parts of phonics, irregular, high frequency words, decodable texts, sentence-level work, and oral reading fluency together.

That might be all right if all the primary teacher had to do was teach literacy, but we know there are seven or eight learning areas that we need to teach to a high level, and trying to do this level of work across all those areas is a recipe for overwhelm and burnout and for me, this is where programs come in.

A quality program can be a great asset to your school. Programs bring everything onto the same page, and when we go into a school, we really should be able to move from classroom to classroom and see low variance routines delivered in the same way to every student. This isn't just about looking like we are being consistent, but it's about equity for everyone.

Every student should receive the same high quality literacy instruction regardless of who the teacher is. It is simply not okay for students in one class to receive strong instruction that leads to measurable outcomes and students in the next classroom to miss out. Programs help us learn new ways of teaching.

All of our students right up to year six are novices in literacy. They need guidance and support. They need to be told exactly what to do and shown what to do and then supported to practice these skills until they have learned them to some degree of fluency and automaticity and accuracy. 

We, teachers, are no different. When we learn a new way of teaching, we are novices. We don't have mental models of those new techniques or strategies to rely on. We don't know what good performance looks like. Sure we might have experience in the classroom in general, but when it comes to literacy, if we've been teaching with guided reading, sight words and group rotations, structured literacy can feel really alien and if this is your reality, making a shift in practice can be like landing in a strange city and trying to make your way to an unknown destination without the aid of a map or a GPS.   

A program can be that GPS for us. Someone has been there before us, and they know the way.   have mapped out the route, identified the quickest way to get where we want to go. What this preparation does for us is reduce our cognitive load,  gives us space and time to build our knowledge and experience without the overload of creating everything from scratch. After all, it's that that makes the biggest difference to our students.

When we have strong tools and effective low variants routines, we are able to get great results fast. That's another advantage of a well put together program. We are able to move much more quickly in moving the needle on outcomes than we ever could if we focused on general principles. And then trying to figure out how to bring it to life all by ourselves, and this is especially important when we have new staff coming on board, as I'm sure that you will have at the start of this school year.

There's nothing worse when you are a new teacher in a school than that feeling of being lost and worried that you aren't going to get it right. It's also not that great to be an existing teacher or leader in the school and feel like you want to spend loads of time with new colleagues to help them, but you simply don't have the bandwidth to be able to do it.

Being able to point a new teacher in the direction of the school's reading program and providing them with some modelling and support to get started helps that person really settle in. Of course, this needs to be followed up with coaching, but it's a much more efficient process than a teacher going on a journey of discovery, feeling their way along for a year or more.

Now I've just outlined some of the benefits of using programs, but there are some drawbacks that I'm sure we've all considered or experienced at some point. The first challenge that comes to mind in bringing on a program is cost, and there's no denying that published programs run on the expensive side costing anywhere from $400 to over $1000 per classroom just to teach phonics and decoding. And that doesn't include the decodable texts you'll need to buy to align with the program or the student workbooks that some programs require you to buy to be able to teach them fully. Throw in a thousand dollars per person for training and implementing a structured, systematic synthetic phonics program is an expensive exercise.

It's one thing for a school to fund all of this, but what are we supposed to do when we have to resource our own classroom because our school isn't? And as a teacher, I don't think we should be expected to spend thousands of dollars of our own money to resource the classroom just to teach well.  

It's this situation that led me to develop the Reading Success in Action series, a fully mapped out set of lesson sequences for phonics and decoding at grapheme, word and sentence level that comes with printable partner practice booklets, assessment, and QR codes that lead you right to videos of me unpacking instruction. And you'll find a link to that in the show notes. 

A second challenge with programs is that we can view the program as being our everything. And I can't tell you how often I've heard teachers say, oh, we don't need to do any more training and reading because we are program X, Y, Z trained. There is so much more to literacy instruction than using a program.

There's a saying a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and I do think that this is as true for reading instruction as anything else. We know from research that phonics is important, that an approach that begins with the simple and moves through to the complex with explicit instruction and loads of targeted practice yields better results than a loosey-goosey figure it out yourself approach.

But what we don't have direct research about is all of the elements of instruction that we might be using. We don't know if PowerPoints are better than cards, exactly how many repetitions are needed for the best results, or precisely how many minutes of decodable text reading students really need for strong growth.

When we learn to use a program, and that's all we know, it's really easy to think it's actually all we need to know. We can falsely view the program as the total embodiment of the science of reading when truly no program can make that claim. That's why I encourage teachers to think of a program as one of the tools in their kit bag, not the whole bag.

Then it brings us to the question to program or not to program, and this is something that has been the topic of discussion in many leadership meetings. In the 2022 Teacher Voice in Literacy Instruction survey, 96% of classroom teachers reported that they wanted a program that lays out reading instruction step by step. However, when I speak with teachers, they frequently tell me that their principals are dead against using one, and I think that part of this is this thing we hear all the time, it's teacher capacity and not programs that make the biggest difference to student outcomes. Now, I'm not denying that teacher  skill and knowledge are critical if we're going to create strong, sustainable outcomes, but let's get into that a little bit more.

 There are three types of knowledge. There's declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge and conditional. Now, declarative knowledge is the things we know. The things that we can talk about and say. Procedural knowledge is knowing how to do things. It's the what? The conditional knowledge is. Knowing what to do when. How do we adjust things based on certain circumstances? We need all three of these types of knowledge to be effective teachers. 

Programs give us the procedural knowledge to get really quick runs on the board and lighten our cognitive load. But beyond a quick outline of the theories of reading science and the training, if we have it,  They don't help us build declarative knowledge and learn about the bigger why of what we do. They also don't build the conditional knowledge that's necessary. When we're supporting diversity in student learning. How do we decide when it's time to slow down to speed it up or break things down into even smaller chunks? To support students who need additional help. 

No program developer knows your students like you do. No program developer can anticipate every single situation that will arise. And that's why declarative and conditional knowledge are so important. We have to be able to make professional decisions in our teaching. Otherwise, we're teaching the program, not teaching students.

If your program tells you that you'll be teaching the sound I in term two, week five that can be problematic. We need to know how to evaluate student responses to our teaching so that we can adjust, review, and revise as needed. So in my opinion, it's not a case of either a program OR building capacity but about using a program AND building capacity. 

Now, I'm fully aware that it might seem that in one moment I've said that we need programs because we're novices who need to be told what to do, and then in the next moment I'm talking about teachers changing things up in response to student need. And I'd like to unpack that for you. 

So let's consider a situation that is really very common: A school adopts a program and teachers do the training. The school then adopts some aspects of the program but keeps some of the existing practices that they've had in the school. They supplement based on what they know. Now a situation like that is guaranteed to create roadblocks to achievement. 

To guide us in nutting out this challenge, let's view it through the lens of the situational leadership model. If you attended the Learning Difficulties Australia Professional Learning event with Linnea Ehri in Melbourne, or if you have done the Simple Actions to Move the Needle on Student Results program, you will have heard me talk about this model. 

There are four quadrants in this model, and the first quadrant is called the enthusiastic beginner. So we really don't know what we're doing, but we feel pretty good because we are very motivated.  We know that we need someone to tell us what to do. After a little while though, we try and put our new learning into practice, but we discovered that we don't quite have the knowledge and skill we need to do it well, so we can get really, really disheartened. We still need lots of direction, but we also need lots of support.

From there, we move into box number three, where we are doubting ourselves. We have the knowledge to do what we need to, but we don't have the experience to be able to know that it's time to persist when the voices in our head tell us, oh, maybe you're not as good as you think you are.  We don't have what we need to put one foot in front of the other and stay the course. That's where we need loads of support. 

Now when that happens, and we build our knowledge, skill, and confidence, we move into box number four and become a peak performer. We know what we are doing. We have all three types of knowledge. We know how to problem solve, and we can help others. 

Now when we are in box number one and box number two, we don't have the necessary skills and knowledge to make decisions. As a general principle, the novice and the knowledgeable person talk, but the knowledgeable one decides. When you are a novice, it's not the time to use your judgment because basically, you don't have any. You don't yet have the understandings to base judgments on. It's not until you have a moderate to high level of skill and knowledge that you are in a position to adjust elements of a program that you have taken on. Remember, conditional knowledge comes about when we have declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and the experience to be able to know why we are doing what we are doing.

But even when changes might be made in the way we use a program, these are not decisions that teachers should be making on their own. At the start of this episode, I talked about the need for consistency across classrooms and that this is a matter of equity. If individual teachers are making changes to the school's program on their own, this is very quickly gonna lead to a lack of consistency and variation in the quality of teaching.

 If something is going to be adjusted, I encourage you to talk with someone who has a high level of knowledge and experience about structured literacy. That person could be in your school, there could be a regional support person, or if you're a resource room or Evergreen teacher member, you can reach out in the forum or attend a live mastermind or coaching

The point is that classroom practice should reflect the research about reading and learning as we understand it at this point in time, and it should result in measurable growth for every child. We can't go off willy-nilly making changes to our whole school approaches and programs simply because we prefer it. Recognizing that we don't yet have the knowledge and skills to make decisions on our own doesn't mean that we and our teaching aren't being respected. It simply means that we acknowledge that learning anything new takes time, effort, and support. Programs can be a part of that process. 

When it comes to teaching with programs, it's not as easy as simply spending a bunch of cash popping it in classrooms and saying, job done. We need to make building teacher capacity an ongoing priority and support each person to develop the skills and knowledge that will help us create equitable high expectation learning environments for all of our students.

After all, every child deserves to be taught to read and write by someone who is highly knowledgeable, highly skilled, and professionally equipped to support them well. Programs, while not the only thing we need to have in place can be a part of making that happen.