Episode 15: From Struggling to Successful: Teaching Reading with Linda Farrell and Michael Hunter

Linda Farrell and Michael Hunter are founding partners at Readsters in Alexandria, VA.  They work in schools all over the country to help educators provide assessment and instruction that ensures all students learn to read.

Teachers tell Linda and Michael that they appreciate the practicality of their consulting and their presentations.  The reason they can provide practical solutions for helping struggling readers is that they have taught struggling readers from ages 4½ to 81 to read.  They also learn from the hundreds of teachers they have worked with in the classroom who work their magic every day with students. 

Linda and Michael have presented workshops about effective instruction for beginning and struggling readers for more than 20 years. They participated in reviewing required early reading courses in all colleges and universities in two states.  They have coauthored curricula for struggling readers and diagnostic assessments to pinpoint decoding difficulties.  Linda is the instructor in Looking at Reading Interventions on the Reading Rockets website.  Michael is featured in videos used to demonstrate effective teaching techniques in LETRS modules.

Episode Summary

Katie sits down with two titans of literacy intervention — Michael Hunter and Linda Farrell — whose unconventional paths from investment banking and concrete construction led them to become nationally recognized reading specialists. Together, they unpack the most common reasons children struggle to read, how to identify exactly where a student is stuck, and the powerful (and often overlooked) practice strategies that make the difference between a child who can read and a child who reads fluently and automatically.

https://www.readsters.com/

https://www.decodingdyslexia.net/

Transcript

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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 Merian, educator, parent, and relentless advocate for helping every child become a joyful, confident reader. Let's get started. Welcome everyone to today's episode of the Reading Symphony podcast. We are so lucky to have Michael Hunter and Linda Farrell of Sters with us today. Linda and Michael, you are legends in the field because of all the work you've done with striving readers and educators, and I'm so grateful you're willing to chat today. Our pleasure. We were thrilled to be here. So I would love to start by asking you both to share a little bit about your backgrounds and what led you to teaching. You were both in different careers prior to pivoting to reading, although Linda, I know you started out as a teacher. Well ly and I first met back in the early nineties. And we met as volunteers. We were both volunteers teaching, trying to teach, I should say adult non-readers for the Washington Literacy Council here in Washington, DC who, who spoke English. This was not an ELL program. These were native born students who had gone through the school system and had not learned to read. And Lyn and I met at a meeting of frustrated tutors'cause someone had gathered us together. There was some rumblings going on because we were frustrated because we knew that the program that they gave us was not effective. And the tutors that gathered together all agreed that the problem was the program, not the students. It was what we were doing. That was the problem. And we needed to find something that worked. And Lynn and I hit it off at that meeting because we both had on our own, tried a bunch of different things and were both already searching for answers at that point. So Linda, you want to take it from there? Sure. Just to let you know, reading teachers will appreciate this. The first three le four letters that they introduced in the program we were using were b and d and then IR as in bird. So you got a B, a D and an R controlled vowel. And if you, goodness, a reading teacher, you know, you couldn't have picked worse things to start with. I was assigned to a woman named Sandra and I tried everything with her and probably worked with her about three or four years. And I knew I wasn't teaching her and she knew I wasn't teaching her. And it ended up that I somehow got into a Wilson Reading workshop. Now, Wilson was not exactly the right program for our people, but it was the right workshop for me to understand how to teach reading. And when I went to the Wilson workshop, I thought, okay, this is what we need. This is exactly what our students need. So I came back, I implemented it, talked to Michael about it. I showed Michael how to use it. We got it started and it turned out that Wilson worked for about, I'm gonna just make an estimate, one out of five of our students. The other ones just couldn't get past the first lesson. And what we figured out is Wilson doesn't teach phonological awareness. I learned that later. We learned that. And actually Wilson told us that, but it didn't mean anything to us at the time. Right. So much information, we didn't really know what phonological awareness was. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. When we first started. Me neither. Yeah. Now how I got into reading as a profession. Is I was an investment banker when I moved to Washington. I had been in Los Angeles in our offices, sold to three different people. And so I went with the people in Washington. So I'd moved to Washington, DC and it's in a bookstore, which of course I loved. It was down the street from our office and it said, oh, if you can read, you can teach someone to read. So I thought, well, you know what? So that's what I did. I was real excited and then I got Sandra and after about two years I realized I'm not teaching her how to read, but in Washington DC there are a whole bunch of things to do. So I still pretended to teach her to read, but I started taking her to places that she'd never been to. Ford's theater. She lived, she grew up in Washington, dc never been to, the White House, never been to some of the museums, the Smithsonian. So I started doing that. When I went to Wilson, Barbara Wilson was our teacher and she told me that there was a woman I should meet in Washington, DC And so I said, oh, what's her name? And she said, her name is Louisa Moats. I said, well, I'll call her, see if she wants to have dinner. Well, I'll be darned if this Louisa Moes wasn't so interested in reading. Now you have to think I'm an investment banker. I don't even know there's a reading world. I don't know. They're reading experts. I don't, I just know this person's really nice. So we ended up becoming friends and she was working part-time in Washington, DC so she ended up staying in my extra room. Because she was only there part-time. So then I went and I told Barbara Wilson I met Louisa Motes and she's gonna be on the board of directors of the Washington Literacy Council. She said, do you know who Louisa Motes is? And I said, yeah, she's really interested in reading. And then she told me who she was. So I came home and I said, Louisa, you didn't tell me you're the Alan Greenspan of reading. And then I decided I liked my volunteer work better than I liked my real work. And I said to Louisa. I think I wanted, I'm gonna go back to school and get a degree in reading, and she said, I'll help you get some work. Well, when Louisa moats commend you, nobody says, what degree do you have? And Michael, you might wanna tell how you got from a concrete construction president. Well, I was president of a family owned concrete construction business here in dc working with my dad and my brother and I wasn't loving it a hundred percent. So I was always looking for creative outlets. And one day I picked up the Washington Post and there was a little thing on volunteer stuff and it said, if you can read, you can teach someone to read. So I figured, well, shoot, I'd love to read. I can do this. And then I found out it's not quite that simple. And my student, the first student I had was an extra challenge because he had had a significant stroke. He was an older gentleman, and so we were battling some basic issues there that I'm not sure that I could have ever entirely gotten around, but he made some progress and certainly once we moved over to Wilson, things were a little better, but his phonological deficit was pretty profound. And then Linda made her move and Louisa started putting her to work. And I was like, you know, Linda, I think I kind of like to do what you're doing. And she said, well, if you really mean that why don't you come along with me if you can. And so I, that's what I did. And a couple years later well actually after nine 11 was my wake up call. That I was gonna pursue my passion. As difficult as it was to extract myself from a family business, I needed to do it. And so, at that point, Linda and I were working independently, but collaboratively. And then eventually we teamed up with some other people for really great reading. And then Linda and I left there and became Readsters. Wow. And thanks to Louisa Moes, we've been busy for a long time. So when you diagnose the needs of a struggling reader, what are some of the key things you are looking for? What's the inventory that you go through when you're trying to diagnose what a kid needs? What we've learned after many years now of assessing. Working with data, even if we didn't do the actual assessments, we do a lot of grouping for schools we'll do hundreds of kids with all the data so we have learned over time that for intervention kids basically fall out into three to four buckets, however you wanna look at it. Bucket one is they're not even ready for phonics yet. Pre-reading skills, which would be letter names, letter sounds, and phonological. If they don't know their letter names, or at least most of them, and their letter sounds or most of them, and can't blend and segment three sound words they're not ready for phonics. And that's blend in segment without letters. So when we are working with phonological we might even give them B, what's the word? Even though we aren't even gonna teach that word until second grade, but they can hear the sounds before they can read. If they can say the word boot, then they can segment it, learn to segment and blend it. It doesn't matter whether they've been taught that, you know there's a vowel sound. Oo. Yep. You can teach'em that and then they can learn it, but they don't have to know how it's spelled. And that's someplace we do see kids get lost sometimes in kinder. They only get exposed to CVC and then when you bring in the other vowel sounds, they've never tuned into them because nobody's ever asked them to tune into them as sounds. So that's the first bucket. Second bucket is they've got those pre-reading skills, but they're not reading short vowels accurately. So they, they are confused about their short vows or at the, they're at the beginning of phonics, still working on that basic CVC, they might need digraphs blends. All that basic stuff we do in beginning phonics. And then we find kids that actually have gotten enough experience there. They've got the basic decoding wired in their brain. And by the way, the second place we start losing kids, they don't get enough practice in the CVC to automatize it. And that's where you build the reading circuits in the brain because you are changing brain circuitry when you're teaching, reading your co-opting parts of the brain that were evolved for other purposes. And you're literally rewiring the brain to do this new task. And if you don't spend enough time at that basic one where it's basically one letter, one sound, very consistent and solid, if you don't get the wiring and automatic there, when we throw on multiple spellings and silent ees and all this other stuff, we lose a lot of kids because, not only are they trying to figure out the decode now they're getting these complicated things. If I were to go try to learn to read French, which I don't speak, I know there are different spelling patterns. I don't have to learn how to read again. I just need to learn the French spelling patterns and the pronunciation for those patterns. I'm not learning how to read, I'm learning how to read French, which is an entirely different thing. And so for our kids, if we can wire the brain in that CVC pattern, get that secure, then when they go to the advanced vowel patterns, they're just learning spelling patterns. They're not learning how to read. And that's the third bucket is the advanced V spellings. And you notice that we're grouping this around the vowel sounds? Yeah. And the V spellings, because every syllable, it's got a V sound and most syllables are gonna have a vowel spelling. And in English that's where it all goes wonky. Mm-hmm.'cause we have not enough vowels, not enough vowel letters to spell the 16 or 1718 vowel sounds we have. And then we can also spell some of our vowel sounds, 6, 7, 8 different ways. And that's why it takes three years to learn to feed English. And then the fourth bucket that I would say would be you've got your basic decoding. You've got your exposure to multi-syllable and advanced vowels, but you have some fluency and accuracy issues. And that would be an oral reading where it's just really oral reading practice first to develop your accuracy because you've been taught how to guess or you've learned how to guess. And then once you're accurate, then we work on the rate if you need it. So those are the four buckets. You mentioned this idea of practice. Can you give a few examples of what that would look like the CVC and with the more advanced vowel patterns, are you thinking about both real words and nonsense words and decodables? I'm just curious how that would look if we flesh it out for families. Well, once you're past the pre-reading skills, you might warm up with a little bit of phonological just to tune sound in. And then you're gonna start with whatever your spelling pattern is, make sure that you're introducing that and that they've seen it. And then word lists. I like to do word list phrases to sentences to connected text in every lesson if possible. And it's individual turns because remember, the teacher needs to hear each student read individually so that you can monitor what's going on. Other students can track along and should be tracking along silently, which is giving them practice. But everybody should have a turn where they get to do it aloud so that they're being challenged and you can see what's happening. And then we never finish with any errors, so any mistakes get corrected before you move on. It's not just that the mistake gets corrected. so let's say they've read a sentence and it has 10 words in it. I'd say you got nine words. I would have them look at the word I'd, point to the word and say what's this word? And they would read the word and read the whole sentence again with no errors. And I think it's a huge mistake when teachers think if they correct the error, but they don't go back and have the student read the whole word list, the whole sentence again, that they have changed a behavior. The only way you change a behavior is by doing it. So immediately doing it right, it's not, oh, we'll do it again tomorrow because tomorrow's a whole nother day. Everything's forgotten. So that's a really important part of working with struggling readers is it, from my experience, that can take who's making mediocre progress and really catapult their progress. And it also reinforces the accuracy message as well. That if you're always finishing 100% accurately, that's obviously the expectation. And if you do it every time, then it becomes a habit. And back to practice I always like to share this about practice, and I can tell you this is one of my bugaboos is automaticity. There's two words that get thrown around, mastery and automaticity as if they were the same thing, and they are not the same thing. Mastery means you are able to do it accurately, correctly. But it may be effortful. You may have to think a little bit to get there. You may be slow. Automaticity is, you're not thinking about it. Automaticity is driving the car. My analogy is you drive the car and need a Big Mac at the same time and you're still staying on the road, not running into people which was what we want to coding to be is that automatic. Because if you're having to think about the decoding, you can't eat the Big Mac, which is your comprehension, you know? So that's my analogy. Decoding needs to be so automatic all your brain power is there to think about the meaning of what you're reading, not how to read it. And when you come to practice. If you're building mastery, that's where you need individual turns with guided, immediate feedback, positive error correction. Finish it again correctly. Once a student has the mastery of demonstrating some mastery, they still need to keep practicing that same concept to develop automaticity, because it has to be that I'm not even thinking about it. And that takes a lot of practice. Yeah. But once a student has some mastery, automaticity can be practiced somewhat independently because you that they can do it now they just gotta keep doing it till it becomes just automatic. And so thinking about parents, we send work home for parents to work with students on, it should always be something they've already mastered so that the kids, you're not relying on the parents to do that. Teaching and accuracy piece. They can just be there to monitor and make sure that the practice is happening and the student is practicing something they've already mastered, like developing the automaticity. So what I heard you say is the importance of individualized feedback. Really hearing the kids read independently, even with if it's within a group, because teachers have to group kids based on efficiency and the amount of time we have. Making sure that, I would say even before that, using grouping based on the data and making sure they're in the correct bucket. And then from there, really getting that individual picture of what they're able to do, giving them feedback on the errors so that they understand the exact letter sound correspondence issue. I would throw in intervention should be at the lowest level, skill level that the student needs. It's not the same thing that they're doing in the classroom necessarily. It's not just double dosing. If they're significantly behind, their intervention shouldn't look like what's going on in the classroom. It should be they are addressing those lowest level skills and getting those fixed before jumping in and too often we see intervention that is just, oh, well you didn't get it in the classroom. We'll do it again. And that's fine if you just need that little extra practice, but if you're significantly behind, we're not meeting your needs because we're just throwing more confusion at you for not clarifying anything. Yeah, that's an excellent point. So I am obsessed with how you two integrate positive error correction into your work with kids. It's something I've used with my own kids at home even more since listening to your podcast on literacy and color with my kids when they're working on handwriting, for example. So could you just talk about what that is and why it's so essential for integrating into your work with readers of all ages? Essentially, it is telling the student what they did right in their answer before you go to correct what they're doing. If I am giving positive error correction, it means I've listened to what the student said and I've analyzed their error. And so if I have a student read five words, and I say, oh, they missed five, because that's how I'm used to thinking is they missed five words, or I can say they missed the vowel sound on everyone. They got the first and last sound right on every one of those words. It was the vowel sound. It helps me know what to teach, and I can say to the student, these five words, you got the first and last sound right on each one. I'm gonna teach you about the vowels. Now teach about the vowels. Go back and read the words again and see meaning again. It focuses me on what they want to learn. And it is very powerful. Today, I was working with an interventionist and she said, good job, good job, good job. I said, let's stop saying good job, and let's not say anything if they get it right. Because my intervention students are used to looking up to see if they got it right. And I want them to rely on themselves. So I don't say anything. I just move on to the next person. And if I say something, then they know, oh, you know, I'm gonna have to do that. But I'll say, wow, you got four, right? Let's look at this one. And it so that they feel good about themselves because I'm telling them that they did something right. So positive error correction puts everybody in a better mood. It even puts me in a better mood when I do it because first I have to focus on what they got. And it's okay to give yourself a second or two to think of a positive response. Another little knit on the positive error correction that I also like to mention is, once you've given the positive error correction, I call it don't dwell in the mistake. So don't tell'em what they did wrong. Don't if you offer them a choice of check your vowel sound, is that ah, or if, don't give them the wrong answer that they gave you as part of the choice. Walk away from the error, guide them to the correct answer. Don't dwell in the air. Don't keep in the brain. Don't muck around in it. I think a perfect example of that was watching a teacher teaching CVC words, let's just pretend it was hop and this. Kid went hope and the teacher went, well, if it were hope, it would have a silent E Let me show you these other. And now suddenly we're not teaching C, V, C words. We're talking about silent E to a kid who can't even read a CVC word. And that happens much more often than we would like to think. I'm sure I do that all the time. Yeah. Well, people are taught that that's a teachable moment. But it's not a teachable moment for a CC kid because you're teaching something way over their head when they just misread something at the level that you're trying to do. So the word is hop and the student reads hope. And you say you got the first sound and the last sound. Right. And I might say, remember we're reading short vowels. What's the short vowel sound? You got the first sound and the last sound, right. And it will vary on the kid in the circumstance. But we do encourage as far as once you've left the positive error correction, doing as little providing the correct answer and as much as guiding the student so that they have to do the work to get there. That's great advice. I'd love to touch briefly on your work with kids with dyslexia. And my question is, with a dyslexic student. Is there anything different you do with them or is it the same understanding where the gap is and then spending 2, 3, 4 times as much time on it? If somebody comes to me with a diagnosis of dyslexia, I know two things. I know for sure that they are going to need more practice than a student who has just had DYS teachia, and so that lots more practice. Lots more practice. And the other thing I am 99% positive of is that they have a phonological awareness weakness that I must work on. And so that's the only thing for me that if I learn a student has a diagnosis of dyslexia, I still teach the same things there. The English language has a structure. The structure isn't different that I have to teach for a dyslexic kid. I just have to make sure that I break it down into small enough portions. But so do non dyslexic kids need small enough portions, but it is that they generally will need much more practice. And that probably a dyslexic kid if they have been diagnosed, I would expect more times that I think they've got it and then they forget it. And then I have to remember to go back and say, okay, I need to practice. I thought I'd had them practice this enough, but I haven't. And just have to recognize that it is a lot of practice. Im patience. And a word of caution because this just came up in something recently and I'm reminded a lot of people think that the dyslexic students need to learn the rules of English, and nobody uses the rules of English to read. It's helpful for the teacher to know the rules of the English. And there are times when you may remind the student, like, one vowel not at the end is gonna be short most of the time. If they have to think through that to read that short vow, you're gonna be a lot longer there. Because what they need to see that pattern and automatically read it as a short vowel because they've practiced it a bazillion times. This is something to watch out for in interventions. We don't want an intervention that's focused on having the kids memorize rules, copy down the rules, recite the rules, and not practice readings. Of course, most of the rules don't apply a hundred percent of the time anyway, so there's always gonna be exceptions. But there are generalizations rather than rules. And that's helpful to know, but we don't read using the generalizations we read using our stored mental practice of absorbing the patterns. So let's say there is a child who's dyslexic, maybe they haven't gotten a formal diagnosis and they're getting really great support. Is there ever a time when it's necessary to have that label, or is it just as long as they have the right instruction, they'll get there Eventually. Some schools will give children with who have the label more intervention. So that would be a good time to have it. Another thing is sometimes they make sure that, for example, a dyslexia therapist has to work with them. And I'm not saying every dyslexia therapist is perfect. But you can pretty much assume that a dyslexia therapist knows something about the structure of the language and how to teach. There are occasionally insurance companies that will pay for children to have remediation outside the school. But the short answer is if getting the label provides benefits, then it's worth it. Otherwise, reading struggles are on a continuum. Dyslexia is the bottom of the continuum. And people can arbitrate where that cut point is as far as diagnosis, but the truth is struggling with reading, that's what dyslexia means. And as an interventionist, it doesn't matter to me if you've been labeled or not, other than it gives me a clue as to, as Linda said, the intensity that's gonna be involved. My last question is, if you could offer any advocacy advice for families what would that be? Advocate. Be ready to advocate for your child and be ready for a system that is difficult to deal with. Mediators can often help. Don't give up. Because even if your child doesn't, let's say you work for three years to get the right kind of intervention in your school, some other student will benefit that. But I just thought of what my real answer is. My real answer is find your local dec coding dyslexia group and join it. The decoding dyslexia groups are wonderful advocates, and they don't give up. And they have done a lot of research so that they know if you're gonna go to a school, this is what you need to take to the school. That's a wonderful resource to check out and I'll link that. And I just feel so encouraged to know that the two of you are out there doing this work and have been on the ground. I love how you say, give me your hardest student, the most challenging reader that you have, and then let me work with them. Because I think if you can model that for a teacher, every other case is going to feel a little bit easier. So I'm grateful for this time with you We love what we do. To help children learn to read is so satisfying. You feel like you've done some good in the world when you can help children or help teacher, and teachers love it when they learn how to teach children to read. And all students want to learn to read regardless of what they tell you. Regardless of age. You may have to work a little bit to get'em on board, but everybody wants to learn how to read and everybody knows how important it's, so thank you again so much. Thank you. Thank you. The pleasure. 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 at katiemegrian.substack.com, and you can connect with me on Instagram at the Reading Symphony. Until next time, take care. And remember, reading doesn't happen by accident. It develops when the right parts come together.