Episode 3: From Reading Research to Classroom with Dr. Julia B. Lindsey

In this episode of the Reading Symphony Podcast, host Katie Megrian interviews Dr. Julia B. Lindsey, a literacy expert and author of 'Reading Above The Fray.' They discuss how reading develops, the importance of evidence-based practices in literacy instruction, the role of phonics and comprehension, and the use of small group instruction. Dr. Lindsey shares her insights on the prerequisites for reading comprehension, ongoing professional development for teachers, and the integration of technology in reading instruction. She also emphasizes the significance of making reading instruction practical and actionable for educators and families. Throughout the conversation, the importance of clarity, explicitness, and coherence in teaching literacy is highlighted, with Dr. Lindsey providing practical tips for parents and educators. The episode concludes with recommendations on resources and ways to support children's reading development at home.

https://www.juliablindsey.com/

https://www.beyonddecodables.com/

email: hello@juliablindsey.com

https://www.instagram.com/juliablindsey/

00:00 Introduction to the Reading Symphony Podcast

00:26 Meet Dr. Julia B. Lindsey: Literacy Expert

03:22 The Journey from Classroom to PhD

04:42 Writing 'Reading Above the Fray'

07:51 Understanding How Children Learn to Read

13:46 A Day in the Life of an Early Elementary Classroom

22:08 Red Flags in Reading Instruction

30:04 Improving Teacher Training and Professional Development

33:23 Effective Small Group Instruction

37:00 The Role of Technology in Reading Education

39:38 Looking Forward: The Future of Reading Education

43:31 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Reading Symphony Podcast, the place where clarity meets compassion. This is where families and caregivers get evidence-based trustworthy information about how reading develops, how to understand reading progress, and how to turn overwhelming information into simple, actionable steps that help every child thrive. I'm your host, Katie Megrian educator, parent, and relentless advocate for helping every child become a joyful, confident reader. Let's get started. Welcome to this episode of The Reading Symphony. We are so lucky today to have Dr. Julia B. Lindsay with us. Dr. Lindsay is a literacy expert who partners with districts to transform reading outcomes. She's the bestselling author of Reading Above the Fray and Small Groups Big Results. Which just came out. Dr. Lindsay's work focuses on building teacher knowledge, supporting the implementation of evidence-based practices and materials, and ensuring all students can become successful, empowered young readers. Dr. Lindsay holds a BS in psychology from Davidson College and Matt from Relay Graduate School of Education, and a PhD in educational studies from the University of Michigan. She's a proud former elementary school teacher. So I grew up in Michigan and I'm a huge Michigan State fan, so, I'll make an exception though. Yes. Both schools are fantastic, I think, and I had the pleasure of working with people at MSU as well who are all fabulous and yes, I think that the rivalry is more of a like cousin rivalry and less of the rivalries that we might get with some other schools. Yeah, absolutely. They're both excellent, excellent. So I loved researching a little bit about you before this podcast.'cause I noticed we have some similarities. We both started teaching in New York City. Mm-hmm. And I believe it was at the sort of toward the dawn of the balanced literacy movement. I started in 2004, and so I'm not sure when you were in the classroom there. So I was in the classroom starting in 2015. Okay. All right. So I'm a little bit older than you. so not the dawn. You were like more in the sunset of it, I guess. Yeah. Although I would say New York, it was firmly the middle. I mean, it was, there was no other conversation about other ways of teaching, reading or thinking about reading. at least in my school. Yeah. Yeah. same. I just remember having to, I was teaching middle school and just had to figure a lot out and had so many struggling readers and I used to say they were reading two to three years. Below grade below, but I really had no idea just how far below they were because I didn't know how to assess that, and I certainly didn't know what to do about it. And I so wish that reading above the fray and small groups, big results was available to me as a 22-year-old teacher just trying to figure out like, what do I do tomorrow? And I was not consulting any research or the research that did exist just didn't feel super practical. And so that's something that I've always. Since learning about your work, really appreciated about your approach, that it's very, it's implementable like tomorrow, which is so, so wonderful and needed right now. So thank you for all that you've done to, contribute. Yes, it's, it's, that's really wonderful to hear because that's always my goal is for things to be extremely practical and to be honest, when I was in the classroom, I was not consulting the research. I assumed that the people around me and the people selecting curriculum and the people delivering professional development knew what they were talking about, and I didn't have access to the research. Partially because I genuinely would not have even known how to find it which is a little bit hard to wrap my head around. Kind of retrospectively because I did have a degree in psychology and I had taken education courses that were obviously highly based in empirical research and I had a master's degree and it still was not access to the kind of. Research that we hopefully have access to today in classrooms because there's lots more awareness and conversation about this. So it's a really exciting time I think, to be involved in education and to care about research. And I think it's great that there's so much more awareness and also many people working to ensure that everyone has access to this information. What led you from the classroom to University of Michigan? So actually I always intended on pursuing a PhD in additional education after I graduated from college. I was very interested in research in psychology, not so much in education in my undergraduate work. And so I actually started applying to. Programs. When I was teaching, I decided, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and get a developmental psychology degree because I'm really interested in how kids are learning and how we can make that better. And I didn't even really realize what was happening within education departments versus psychology departments. And thankfully I had a conversation with Dr. Nell Duke, who was my advisor at the University of Michigan, and she said, you know, you should really be focused on literacy programs. You have such a passion for reading and for writing. And in fact, I actually even was obsessed with that, even back into college. I worked in a summer program that teaches children about reading, and I got like really crazed about designing a phonics program for that summer program. It is bar none, the worst phonics program that's ever existed because I had no business doing that at the time, but I had this. Kind of excitement around how children learn to read. And thankfully I had the right mentors and folks around me to help me clarify what it was about that, that was so exciting and so intriguing to me. And I was so grateful to be able to go ahead and get a PhD focused on literacy because I really think that reading is what opens up opportunities for everybody. And children deserve to have the ability to define their own destiny. And in this. World that includes being literate and being highly literate. And so it's such a blessing to be able to work on ensuring that all kids are getting the access to that incredible end goal. So your first book that you wrote, was it right out of graduate school? I started writing it the month after I defended my dissertation. You're like, I don't have enough to do anymore, so I'm just gonna go write a book. But you've titled it very intentionally, so it's called Reading Above the Fray, and I'm wondering if you can share for a parent community why you titled it in that way. Yes, I get that. For some folks it might come off as sort of a strange title. And people sometimes ask me questions about that. It's not about the band. I'll tell you that to start. So I was writing this book in. Let's see, this would've been 2021. And it was published in 2022. And at that time, and still today, there was a lot of, argument going on in the community of teachers and researchers and other interested folks around reading and around how we teach reading. And a lot of this fighting was productive. There were conversations that needed to be had that had been ignored in many ways about how we teach children to decode words and how we teach phonics, and also how we teach children to comprehend complex texts. So this was necessary, but at the same time, a lot of the fighting was unproductive because it was kind of like snippy back and forth or things that wouldn't actually impact children or pointing the finger at one specific individual when there was a whole systemic issue going on, or fighting with no actual clear next steps for teachers. And so I was in the midst of this landscape, like many people and looking at this and saying, my goodness, if I was a teacher right now and I saw all of this, I would feel an enormous sense of panic. I would not necessarily know what to do next. And so I wanted to write reading above the fray to say, here's some things that you can do next. Here is some things that you can hold onto, some things that are familiar, some things that are not but things that you can start to change in your classroom The current evidence really strongly suggests it's going to make a big difference, specifically in how children learn to read words. And so I wanted to invite people to join me above the fray, if you will, above the fighting to just be really clear about what the evidence currently can and also can't tell us and what to do about it in their classrooms rather than feeling like we needed to just be involved in a bunch of social media warfare. Hmm. Yeah, it's so grounding just to think about the little people who are the people who we are all trying to serve and then go back to the research, but then make it translatable. That's the task. And I love in your book how, and it's not a parent facing book, it's an educator book, but I really appreciated the swaps, the approach that you took. Like if you're doing this, try this instead. It just feels like this tiny shift that really does bring us back closer to what works and will make teachers feel so much more empowered and successful. That is definitely my hope, and that is what I hear from folks as well. And it is not written for parents. It's true. But I do know parents who have read the book and who have really appreciated it. So if you are really interested in aspects of how reading might be taught. Especially in the early years towards, again, this word recognition side of reading. It is I think a book that is fairly accessible to parents. Totally agree. As long as you're willing to grapple with a couple of complex vocabulary terms that maybe you wouldn't normally need to know. But it is, I know, a resource that some parents have really valued. Yeah, it's very, very readable. So for caregivers who are fluent readers, something that can be tricky is putting ourselves back in the shoes of our little ones who are just starting out to read. And so this is a big question I know, but could you summarize the process by which one learns to read. What are the key phases that they will go through just to help parents remember, or even learn for the first time So first I wanna just say it's really normal to not really remember how you learn to read or how that process happens. There's certain skills that we need in order to access these early moments of learning to read that actually atrophy over time because. They stop being necessary once you're a fluent reader. So that's one reason. Another reason is that, many people don't have super strong memories of the instruction that they received. And even if they do, sometimes it's not the best instruction. So it's totally normal to not remember this process. If you are also someone who is in the millennial age range and you were taught how to read in the nineties, maybe the early two thousands, it's quite possible that some of the conversation that you might be. Realizing is happening with your child around phonics is really unfamiliar feeling to you. You probably remember things like, oh, hooked on phonics, but you might not remember anything about saying individual sounds, which is a bedrock of what we need to do with children who are learning to read. That's okay. That is because of the instruction that you experienced. And so it might be weird, but you are not alone. I learned phonics when I was teaching kindergarten because I had to same and I had never used or known phonics before. But if you ask my dad who was in elementary school in the sixties and seventies, he can still do this like little vowel sound chant. So there's ranges of your experiences that might impact how you might think about this. So just first of all, knowing it's very normal. Second, thinking about, okay, how do children learn to read? When we think about reading, we wanna make sure that we think about two big components. We can get into lots of nitty gritty details, but we wanna start with the major components of reading. Reading is inherently two things put together. It's can you recognize the words on the page so you see the word dog in front of you? Can you figure out that that's dog? And do you understand language? If you are hearing a sentence, where is the dog? Or you're reading a sentence, where is the dog? Do you know what that means? Do you understand how that syntax is working and how those words are fitting together and if it's in a larger story, how that fits with the bigger picture? So these two things, language and word recognition are what come together to give us access to reading comprehension. Again, we can get way more complicated with it, but this is our big beginning. So if we think about those two components. We can really think about learning to read actually begins when babies are born. Even some might argue in utero, but it's with language. Language is really the bedrock of becoming a reader. And so when children are learning how to play with language, when they're learning new vocabulary, when they're starting to speak in two word phrases or then in sentences. When they're starting to understand referential pronouns, and you might see your 4-year-old kind of playing around with this when they're starting to explore more in language. Just this past week I was with two of my nieces who are both four, and they were rhyming up a storm just for fun because they're just playing with language. These are all examples of ways that children are actually experiencing the earliest bits of what they will need in order to become a reader. So we have language. That's one side of it. And then the other side of it, which I would argue is maybe the more technical and more annoying part of reading is word recognition. And the reason I say that is because language, in most cases with neurotypical individuals develops naturally. When you're exposed to it, you learn it. Word recognition does not. And that's so important for us to realize as caregivers, parents, whomever you are, educators, word recognition. Being able to look at dog and say, oh, that's dog is not a natural process. It does not develop because kids are exposed to a lot of books. It does not develop because kids know a lot of language or vocabulary. It really has to develop through explicit experiences with what we call phonics or the understanding of the connections between letters and sounds. And so that's the piece that typically is going to be really getting going in kindergarten. Some kids are gonna have some exposure to this in preschool. necessary to get tons of experiences beyond the alphabet and preschool, but when we're in kindergarten, when we're in first grade, second grade, this is when kids are really learning how do letters and sounds relate to one another? How do they come together to make a word? How do I use these to then spell a word and all of those processes that are occurring? And the primary way that this happens is through explicit instruction, through enormous amounts of really precise practice, and through lots of application reading and writing books. And over time, kids develop this grand store of understandings about how their language operates when it's written on a page. And in this case, how English operates when it's written in a page, which is an annoying language, let's be honest. And so eventually children are then able to galvanize some additional understandings in a, in some of their own learning. But most of this process needs to be facilitated and led. Really by explicit instruction where you say, this is the letter D. D spells the sound. Duh. Let's all say, duh. Let's look at this letter. Let's spell this letter. Let's form this letter with handwriting. And let's try to learn how we could read words with this letter. I think you touched on it a little bit in your last answer, but if you were to step into a lower elementary classroom, what does that actually look like? And I'm thinking about that because when our kids come home and we're like, what'd you do in school today? I'll be like, I don't know, or I don't remember, or I don't wanna tell you, which is what I get sometimes. Yeah, so I do spend quite a lot of time in early elementary classrooms. And so first off, some things to know, and some words that you'll probably hear teachers saying in most early elementary classrooms, they're going to have some sort of literacy block. It might not be one stretch of time, but throughout their day they're going to engage in activities, lessons, et cetera, that are really targeted towards literacy. Generally these are gonna be broken up into things like phonics, read aloud, which is generally where teachers are teaching kids about comprehension and vocabulary and to understand texts and writing where children are of course learning how to write. And then in many classrooms there's also time for small group instruction, which could go by different names, but is often part of this as well. Those are the major moments of the literacy experience in most K two classrooms. These are gonna shift as kids get older. And then you're probably going to notice, by middle school we just have something called ELA. So when we're thinking about the early elementary classroom, what do we wanna see? Okay. First off, we wanna have that time where we're doing really clear explicit work in phonics. So this means that teachers are using an explicit systematic scope and sequence. So that means that they know, okay, across the year, these are the letters and those combinations that I'm teaching kids. So in kindergarten that's gonna look like, here's the order that I'm teaching the alphabet, and then after I teach the alphabet, here's the order that I'm introducing. Some additional new things like, okay, actually some words end with an E and that changes what the vowel sound in the middle of the word is, like in the word cake. Or some words have what we call consonant digraphs. Were letters like th ch, or sh, which are coming together and they are representing a new sound. in first grade and second grade, that's gonna look a little bit more complex because teachers are introducing a lot more of the nuance that happens in English. So they might be introducing things like. Vow teams understanding, okay, what happens when you see EE together in a word or oow together in a word, and they're going to be introducing understandings about multi-syllabic words. What do you do when you come up to this really big word? What are some of the ways you can break it into parts that are readable? How do you come to understand things like a prefix or a suffix? And all of that is gonna be part of this idea of phonics. It's typically about a half hour. Give or take in most classrooms. And again, it should have this like clarity in what's the sequence, the order that you're teaching. any teacher should be able to tell you, here's the order that we're doing. Here's what we've done this week in phonics. It should be like, very simple to say that because it's probably just like a list of letters or types of words. And then from in that time period, children are going to be hopefully reading and spelling words with that specific thing that they just learned. Okay. We just learned that C makes the sound ch like in the word chat. So now I'm gonna read some words and write some words with that. And especially in kindergarten, we're also gonna play around with hearing the sounds in words. This is called phonemic awareness, where we might listen to a word orally and talk about what sounds we hear in the beginning, the middle and the end. We might blend sounds together, so if we hear separately sounds like,/n/,/a//p/ then we all might say, nap. We might combine that with letters as we go. So that's what we should be seeing is that experiencing with language, lots of reading, lots of spelling. And then of course I should have mentioned this, but it hopefully it's obvious, is the explicitness of a teacher saying, mm-hmm. Hey, this is ch. It's ch. And then, so that's our phonics block. And then we also likely have something called read aloud or something of that effect. And in this time, the most optimal thing that teachers can be doing is engaging in really content oriented instruction where teachers are building children's knowledge about a particular topic over time. Often in the best case scenario. This is related to science and social studies topics too. But normally, we would also suggest you have a separate time for really deep dives into science and social studies topics. so teachers might say, okay, we're doing a whole unit and we're gonna learn all sorts of stuff about bugs, and we're gonna read some informational texts about bugs, and we're gonna read some fictional narratives where bugs are the characters, and we're gonna read some poems where they're bugs and we're going to utilize some strategies to help us make sense of these texts. In the service of building knowledge about this experience. And we're going to build vocabulary and we're going to also build our ability to engage in writing.'cause we're gonna write about these texts too. Or we might emulate the writing of one of these texts. So that's our read aloud portion. And then moving into writing, you already noticed me connecting that in. We did spelling and phonics. That's writing. We wrote about reading, connected to that read aloud. Also writing. But in most cases we also need to have some dedicated time to teach children. how do you engage in the writing process? Writing is really hard. I think all of us know that even sometimes it can be hard to even write an email. So the process of writing is very challenging, and we need a lot of self-regulation to engage in this. So the best writing instruction, even in the early grades, is going to be dedicated to teaching kids how to engage in that process. What the steps are that a good writer takes and have the opportunity for kids to both write about what they've read and create their own novel compositions. So that's like the flow of those three major content focuses. And then the final piece in most elementary classrooms is that small group instruction. This is the time where a teacher can pull just a couple kids at a time and do some really targeted, precise work. Make sure that kids are getting exactly more of what they need in a smaller setting where they can truly give more feedback and more support. Not every kid is gonna need a lot of small group instruction. Not every kid is gonna need it every single day, but having those touch points with teachers where they're able to really tailor instruction based on clear data can make a huge difference in children's abilities over time. And that. That small group part could touch any of those things. Mm-hmm. It's not a content area. It's more of a tool that teachers are able to leverage. So that is, that's how the day would look. And then throughout the day, in a perfect world, teachers are continuing to use the same vocabulary. They're encouraging kids to have big, rich conversations, even in math, and they're doing all these other things to build children's language and experiences throughout the day. That was such a beautiful answer and so nuanced, but the string that is running through it all to me is this idea of coherence. Mm-hmm. Like how explicitness and intentionality, but then also the connections across. And, within all of those different components, I'm thinking a lot about writing and as you said, it's so hard. And that's because you have to be doing a million things while you're putting your pencil to the page. You have to obviously know what you wanna say, which that knowledge building piece, the more you know about bugs, the more you have to say. But then also, how do I form this letter and how do I put these letters together to say what I want them to say? And then, oh, there's punctuation and capitalization just. So much to carry. And so the more practice we're giving in a way that is repetitive and overlapping, the better we are setting kids up to be able to feel successful in those moments. So you just painted a beautiful picture of what we want to see. I was just thinking too, just how amazing teachers are in doing this work. That's just one block of the day and for most teachers they have, you know that maybe that's 90 minutes, hopefully it's closer to 120 minutes. they have math, they often have science, they have social studies, they have socio-emotional work, they have recess duty. There's so much and I just wanna take a moment and just validate how much teachers do and have to put together every single day. Yes, absolutely. I say that all the time. I'm so blessed to be able to just think about literacy. But teachers are not just thinking about one thing. They are truly like the world's multitaskers. Mm-hmm. And on top of that, they are thinking about how do I ensure that the children in this classroom are feeling loving and belonging and are able to operate best and are getting a snack if they need it. And are getting some time to calm down if they're having, big emotions and all of these other components that go into organizing a room of up to 35 year olds. And so I ask this next question with a lot of love because the line that I wanna tow with this podcast as a former teacher and a school leader, a director of literacy and a parent, is I wanna keep it above the fray, as you said. I wanna assume the best, but there are still practices that are not aligned to evidence that are happening in classrooms, even in some of the best districts. what are some terms or potential red flags that if we hear our kiddos talking about, or even if a teacher sends home a particular resource or you hear something in an email or school announcement that might trigger some curiosity and questions just to make sure that our kids are getting what they need. Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's first important to always try to take the stance of assuming the best intent. my first book came out in 2022, and that was right around the time where a lot of conversation was coming out and podcasts and that sort of thing. So I know that in some ways that feels like a long time ago, but it also was not very long ago. these. school systems are massive and they're slow to change like any massive systems. And so it's not necessarily the case that there's any malice behind some of this. I think that that's just like always the first thing to consider. And so the first thing to think about, okay, what is maybe something that would be a red flag? The first and most important thing, because this is probably gonna be really common and they go together, but they're two different things, is either if you are sent home a list of words that your child is asked to memorize, or if you're sent home a spelling list and you cannot figure out how these words hang together, and I don't mean by content. Don't look for the meaning of the words to hang together. I mean, the spellings of the words. So in many classrooms, historically, especially in that K two zone, teachers would send home a list of words that they might call sight words and ask parents to practice these at home so that children would be better able to read these words that occur very frequently in books. And so that process of memorizing those words is unfortunately not the best way for kids to actually hold in long-term memory. These words. The best way is for children to match the sounds to the letters, even when they're unusual. So you could say to a child, here's the word of and then you just show it to them on a flashcard a million times and cross your fingers that they remember it. That word is really weird because O normally doesn't make that sound and f normally does not have that sound. If we were gonna spell it phonetically, we would spell it UV. So that's very unusual. And so we might think, okay,'cause it's unusual, we don't wanna deal with all the unusualness, so we'll just memorize the whole word. But actually when kids know in this word. O is saying, and F is saying Woo. And now we talk about that and we practice saying those sounds and we practice writing those sounds even with an unusual spelling. We actually hold that word stronger in long-term memory. This process is called orthographic mapping, and it's actually how we hold all words in long-term memory. So we don't actually want to memorize lots and lots of words. It's okay to memorize a few words within the context of. Really good phonics instruction, but for the most part, what we wanna do is actually think about how these words sounds, and letters are connected, which is the process of decoding. Mm-hmm. So if you're getting a site word list home, you might have some questions, particularly if you get that at the very beginning of kindergarten, along with the knowledge that your child has not mastered the alphabet that is too early for these words to really serve any purpose. Similarly, if you have a child who's in the upper grades and you're getting home a spelling list every week that they need to memorize the spellings of, and you look at that spelling list and you say, okay, the words this week are country and continent and United States, and that sort of thing, and you think, okay, maybe this is like a social studies list. Maybe, but that is actually not necessarily going to do a ton for us because just like when we want to read a word, our best option is to really make deep connections between the letters and the sounds. The same with spelling a word. Spelling and reading are actually just two sides of the same coin. So when we're thinking about developing kids spelling in the upper grades, if teachers are talking about, oh, well we want kids to be better spellers, the best thing that you could possibly hear them say is, so we're working on morphology, which is the root words and the prefixes and the suffixes, and they're, you're getting home a spelling list and it's actually says preview and preheat and prefix even would fit into that. So that the spelling that they're practicing is actually really understanding how to fit these parts of words together. And not that they're just spelling random content words where they're basically just having to memorize them. So that would be across that K five zone, that's one thing to really look out for. A second thing to look out for is if teachers are saying that they're utilizing a kind of structure called guided reading for small group instruction. Unfortunately, this has been historically like the most dominant mode of small group instruction. It's lost a lot of favor in the past couple of years, and many places are not utilizing this, but I personally know of several places that still are. And so if teachers are using guided reading and they're really dedicated to understanding kids' reading, and they talk to you a lot about your kids' level, and they give it a number. Or a letter or a lexile and don't say anything else about what that means other than they are a B that's a red flag because that means that teachers are likely thinking about reading through this really stair steppy mode, which unfortunately research shows does not correspond to how reading actually develops over time. So. In both of these situations, you might be thinking, okay, well what do I do next? Mm-hmm. So if it's the site word and spelling list conversation, it might be worth an email or a check-in. Maybe it's parent conferences where you just say, can you talk to me about why you've chosen to do this and how this fits into the rest of. Of how kids are learning to read and spell. And if they are doing that within the context of a lot of other great stuff, it might just be that that's something that is lingering in their practices. If you are in the situation where guided reading is the dominant mode of small group instruction and is leading your child's reading, experie. That's definitely worth a conversation, with the teacher, but also probably if you have access to administration, to just go ahead and have a conversation and say, I've been hearing a lot about how researchers say that guided reading is not proven to be effective and doesn't actually really make sense of how children's reading development occurs. I would love to have a conversation with you about why the school has decided to use this and how this. Is going to support my child, particularly in their word recognition development. And hopefully you can have a good relationship with someone and you might share a podcast like this one or some other podcasts that are a little bit more targeted towards this conversation in order to open that up and just to say, Hey, I'm not sure that this is the best of what we could possibly do for students. And, offering that as an opportunity to learn. Those are such great tips and such good things to look out for. Like you said, 20 21, 20 22, that is fairly recently. So it might be indicative of the overall ecosystem and less about a particular teacher's practice too. Yes. But I do agree. It's just starting with the question, not like you're wrong. I'm gonna post this on Facebook and blast you, but just let's talk about this. Yeah. Yeah. In, in my experience, it's almost always about the system. Yeah. There might be places where teachers are told that they have to have a spelling test grade on their report card. So the only way that they might be able to do that is by giving spelling tests. Or where the whole school has a model around guided reading. So generally I find that these things are deeply interconnected and so if the system is doing something, then probably the individual teachers in that system are also operating that way. So thinking about teacher training. Yes. You have teachers entering the workforce from so many different angles. For example, I did Teach for America. I got a six week training program and just jumped into the classroom and didn't really figure it out for about 10 more years, what I was supposed to do. You have people who go through more traditional routes, places in between where maybe there's more of a residency and you have a longer on-ramp. So if you could wave a magic wand, what would training look like for teachers? Let's say K to five. and if you wanna extend beyond that, that's fine, but really thinking about how to teach teachers how to teach reading and writing. So I will extend beyond that. Yeah, I would say that any teacher, especially right now, because we are seeing so many needs, K 12, should know how to teach a child to read words. It should just be. A requisite for everyone. My experience in education for educators was that there was very minimal conversation about how to actually teach kids to read words. In fact, I would say basically none. And that has changed. There's a lot more conversation about that in the higher education spaces, and certainly there are certain places that have made big shifts in how they are preparing educators. Some of that has actually been legislative change. Mm-hmm. And there are many schools that are very dedicated to helping their teachers gain this knowledge through professional development. So there's two kind of sides to this. If I had a magic wand, first of all, every single teacher would and tutor and everybody would have to take a course to learn how to teach kids to read. Now, it would not be a massive course. We actually have some fascinating information about how. Professional development best goes and it's not just like longer the better. It's often actually shorter professional development that is really targeted to the practices that teachers need that's the most effective. Mm-hmm. So giving everybody access to this is how kids learn to read words. Yes. It is something that you might have never been taught before. Yes. It might feel very weird to talk about this with a 12th grade science teacher, but unfortunately right now there are 12th graders who do not know how to read. Really well and are somehow still getting through the systems. And so everybody would need to learn how to do that. And then the second thing is I think that we underestimate how much we need ongoing professional learning, coaching and support for teachers to remain at the top of their game. There's a lot of other fields where we have a much a kind of more cohesive system for getting research into practice and for ongoing training. Think about doctors. They have a lot of access to. Information from medical journals through various apps, but also through conferences and also through ongoing professional learning and even ongoing licensure. And we often don't really think that much about that in education. And while some places have really strong models of this, I think every school should have a strong model of ongoing professional learning. The coolest thing about research is that it's science and science is alive, and that means it's changing and it's growing, and we are always learning new things. But if we don't have mechanisms for continuing to support, how do we take these new things and put them into practice? When do we need to make a pivot? Then we will find ourself in the same place where we have been before, which is everybody having some sort of astonishing wake up call that we've been missing a big piece of a puzzle because we've been hyper-focused somewhere else. So I think that those are the two things. Everyone should know how to teach a kid to read words and everybody should have access to ongoing really high quality, professional learning for their whole career. One of the most fun things I've done this year is leading a year long series on science of reading and we have a version that's more customized to the just K through eight range. But then we also have a high school series that we're doing, and we didn't spend as much time on the word recognition piece, but we went through it and we talked about, Just the building blocks of it and how to use ways to break apart longer words to help kids be able to read them more fluently. And just inviting teachers into the conversation, even if they teach computer science, has been just wonderful to hear their insights and ways that they think about how they can leverage that information to support their kids. I mean, frankly, it's fascinating. I think most of us would find it really fascinating. And I have trained teachers all the way through 12th grade as well as administrators on some of these more basic things. Because I've been asked, because school systems are saying, whoa, something is going on in our middle school. Something's going on in our high schools. We really need to take it a step up and to identify these children and then to do something to support them before they leave our care. And so I think that, that's something that we're seeing. But I also, think it's an interesting process probably everybody could be curious about. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned small group work earlier. love to take a little bit of time just to talk about your new book. I read it in a day. I loved it so much and I'm excited when we get back from break to try a few of the evidence-based comprehension strategies that you talk about, vocabulary and syntax with a group that I'm working with, some fifth graders. But what are the prerequisites to make it really meaningful and impactful? small group instruction has gotten. Really mixed up in a lot of practices that are not associated with research and that have not been proven to work. And so I think as a result, it has been a little bit maligned. You might have seen headlines in the press about small group instruction is bad or whatnot. And I think that that's a little bit lacking in nuance because. What is small group instruction? Well, you as a, a parent or a caregiver who has not been steeped in all of the ghosts of the past, that educators have been, you probably can answer this question just as well as anybody. What is it? It's a group of kids. It's a small group, and that's actually the only like cohesive definition that everybody share. In a typical environment that would be probably five or fewer kids. And then if we're talking about more of an intervention space where kids have really particular needs, we're probably talking three or fewer kids. And that is pretty much the only definition that everyone fully agrees on. The content, the structure and the instruction that's happening in that small group is does not have to be. Something that's not aligned with research, it can be exactly what it is that those kids need. So what makes small group instruction work is when we are first leveraging clear data to understand what do the kids in this classroom need and what kinds of things do they need to practice more, what kinds of things have they mastered? And okay, wait. It's only two kids over here that need this, but actually like all 26 of them need this other thing. And knowing how to then organize that content into whole class and smaller targeted experiences. And then using the same clear evidence and research-based principles for incredible instruction that we actually would talk about with any kind of whole classwork in the small group. The way that I like to think about small group instruction is we're talking about this really precious time. Teachers, as I had talked about before, are often, engaged with like 26 children all at once. There's not a lot of room for targeted experiences or precise feedback when you are wrangling a whole room of kids. In a situation where you say, okay, this group of kids needs more practice with this specific skill, I'm gonna grab these four kids and I'm going to deliver a really targeted routine that's highly focused on getting them that practice with my precise feedback, and it's gonna take seven to 10 minutes. And then we're gonna move on. But I know that I've given them that little hit of what they need, that like high impact experience that they are going to take with them, and that we are going to continue to build their skills in that. So I think about small group instruction as a way for teachers to provide tons more high quality practice and lots of feedback at their exact point of need based on data, based on the evidence that tells us what's the best way to teach these things or to practice these things. And then this continual kind of monitoring of children over time. Again, through that data. So when you're hearing teachers talk about small group instruction, really listening for why are you meeting with my child about this thing? Okay, we know that they have this little gap. How is that being filled? What, how is that need met with your whole group instruction? How might it be met in other contexts and really digging deeper than just hearing things like, oh, they're green, they're a yellow, they're red. Ask, well, what does that mean? What skills are they working on? And how are they gonna work on those skills with you? What kinds of practice are they gonna get to experience to build these? What could I do at home to bolster what's happening in the classroom? And so I think that it's always about just digging a little bit deeper both for teachers, but also if you're a parent who's really curious about what's going on in terms of the questions that you ask. Yeah. That's so great. One follow up question. I know a lot of districts are using Lexia or Lalilo other computer based programs to give kids practice on skills. Do you have any input or any research that supports or doesn't support that practice when kids are kinda off doing that on their own? Yeah, this is a complicated area. So first of all, the current research that we have on foundational skills in those computerized contacts suggests that the very best way that these can occur is when they're deeply tied to teacher's instruction. So if a teacher is teaching children, this is how you put three sounds together. This is how you blend three sounds like. At to read the word cat, then ideally the practice that they're getting in that computerized environment is exactly that. And so what's a little bit hard to talk about here is that most of those programs are actually designed for hyper individualization. And in some cases, some of these programs have been specifically studied in research and they have some evidence to prove their impact. And so that kind of is good on its own, but then we look at the broader body of evidence on these computerized programs and it's really the tighter instructional connections that make the larger difference. Okay. So I don't always know what to do with that kind of dichotomy. And I think that the biggest takeaway for parents should be you just don't want to hear about your child spending tons and tons of times on these programs. There is not evidence to suggest that kids need to be spending upwards of a half hour on a computer program to become readers. First of all, because people became readers before they were computers. Second of all, because there's a lot of questions that I think many of us have about screen time and young children. And third, because we actually know quite clearly that children's comprehension and adults, but we'll focus on kids here, children's comprehension, reading texts on screens is actually different than their comprehension reading text on paper. It's not as deep, and so we don't want them to only experience. These tech tools. So I think that when we're thinking about tech tools we can ask questions like, Hey, why are y'all using this one in particular? Are kids told that they have to spend enough certain number of minutes on it? Or are they just using it for short segments of time while teachers are engaged in other activities? And it is a reasonable way to engage students in more practice, but not used as our central mechanism for teaching reading, because. At this point in time, which granted, it's possible that this could change, but at this point in time, there's no evidence that any tech tools can teach reading better than a highly qualified teacher. So we do want the teacher to lead the instructional experience. My last question for you is what are you most hopeful about going forward? With respect to the way reading is taught in schools, I think what makes me hopeful is the sheer excitement and passion that so many folks have for reading. And when I started advocating more for an evidence-based approach to decoding, I have some very clear. Dark memories of things like literally being cussed out in the middle of co talks or Zoom calls where people felt that they did not want to hear that message. And I would say that now, at this point in time, it is basically the opposite. There are so many educators across this country, those who have had. Huge district and state level changes and huge initiatives and tons of money poured into training them. But also those that are the solo fighter who are standing up in a system that is not serving kids with the best evidence and are really doing everything in their power to make a difference in their classrooms and to try to advocate for changes outside of their classrooms. And there are people like that all over the country, probably all over the world who are really doing. So much, and I said in my first book, you know that I consider myself to be a bit of a phonics nerd. I find it fascinating to talk about, to think about, et cetera, and. I think that there are so many phonics nerds out there, and it's so exciting and I think that what's exciting about that is that I can't wait for that to be galvanized in the same way for people to also become knowledge nerds and to become writing nerds and to become nerds of all of these other topical areas because the more that I think we get excited about finding out these different ways that we can better teach each element of the day. The better kids' experiences are gonna be overall. And so I think that that's what I'm excited about is just that there's so much passion out there and excitement and it's so cool that there is so much awareness of what we can do and how we can really change children's reading lives. I've learned so much from you. I know our parent community learned a lot from you today and just can't wait for all that you continue to share. Thank you so much, Julia, for your time today. Well, thank you for having me here. And if folks are curious about reading research, they're welcome to follow me on Instagram. Julia B. Lindsay, I do post little videos. They're mostly for teachers, but they hopefully can help contextualize some of what I talked about today and it's always fun to learn in these little one minute ways. So if that's your jam, you can join me there. If you need me for other reasons, you can find me at my website, julia b lindsay.com. If you send a message there, it will come straight to my inbox. Or at my second website, beyond decodables.com, which is a repository of content rich decodable texts. They were written for a research project with the Boston Public Schools. But they are free to download, free to use. So if you're looking for that, if you've been hearing people talk about Decodables and you're like, I don't even know where to find those, that's one place to start. And they are most appropriate for kids in that kind of K two zone. So those are some ways that you can find me if you need me. And I hope that you learned a lot today and that I hope if I can actually leave you with something out of left field, it's please go read a book to your child tonight. The number one thing you can be doing at home to support literacy even up through fifth grade is to have the opportunity to read to your child. they are, first of all, gonna love that, but also you are going to be developing their language comprehension and their reading comprehension in huge ways. Thank you so much, Julia. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the Reading Symphony Podcast. My hope is that each episode leaves you with more clarity about what actually helps children become skilled, joyful readers. If today's conversation was helpful, I'd be so grateful if you would follow the show. Leave a quick five star rating or review and share this episode with a friend or teacher or another parent who cares deeply about kids. Those small actions make a big difference in helping this work reach more families. You can also find resources, deep dives and practical tools for families by subscribing to my free weekly substack newsletter at katiemegrian.substack.com And you can connect with me on Instagram thereadingsymphony Until next time, take care. And remember, reading doesn't happen by accident. It develops when the right parts come together.