FROM JULY 14, 2023
What if you could unlock the secrets to fluency instruction in literacy, and transform your students into confident and skilled readers? Join us as we delve into this crucial topic with Nathaniel Swain, Senior Lecturer at La Trobe University in Australia, who shares his expertise on the three components of fluency: speed, accuracy, and prosody. Let's explore together how balancing speed with comprehension can make all the difference in today's digital age, where skimming and scrolling are the new norm.
We discuss a variety of practical strategies to help students practice fluency in the classroom, such as choral reading and paired reading. Nathaniel also sheds light on the role of technology in simplifying the process of creating engaging materials. Discover how to create an environment that fosters student engagement and understanding, and learn the differences between fluency instruction in primary and intermediate classes.
Finally, we examine the value of fluency in reading instruction and how it can be integrated into the literacy block. Nathaniel explains the self-teaching hypothesis and emphasizes the importance of exposing students to unfamiliar words and challenging texts. Don't miss this insightful episode packed with tips and strategies to help your students become fluent and confident readers!
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
FROM JULY 14, 2023
What if you could unlock the secrets to fluency instruction in literacy, and transform your students into confident and skilled readers? Join us as we delve into this crucial topic with Nathaniel Swain, Senior Lecturer at La Trobe University in Australia, who shares his expertise on the three components of fluency: speed, accuracy, and prosody. Let's explore together how balancing speed with comprehension can make all the difference in today's digital age, where skimming and scrolling are the new norm.
We discuss a variety of practical strategies to help students practice fluency in the classroom, such as choral reading and paired reading. Nathaniel also sheds light on the role of technology in simplifying the process of creating engaging materials. Discover how to create an environment that fosters student engagement and understanding, and learn the differences between fluency instruction in primary and intermediate classes.
Finally, we examine the value of fluency in reading instruction and how it can be integrated into the literacy block. Nathaniel explains the self-teaching hypothesis and emphasizes the importance of exposing students to unfamiliar words and challenging texts. Don't miss this insightful episode packed with tips and strategies to help your students become fluent and confident readers!
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
You're listening to Melissa and Laurie Love Literacy. Today we'll be talking to Nathaniel Swain about fluency instruction. Nathaniel will share fluency instructional routines you can easily implement in your classroom.
Lori:Welcome teacher friend. I'm Laurie and I'm Melissa. We are two literacy educators in Baltimore.
Melissa:We want the best for all kids and we know you do too, our district recently adopted a new literacy curriculum, which meant a lot of change for everyone, laurie and I can't wait to keep learning about literacy with you today.
Lori:Hi everyone, welcome to Melissa and Laurie Love Literacy. Today we're going deep into instructional practices for fluency and how it bridges decoding and comprehension.
Melissa:And we have another Australian friend with us today, and Nathaniel Swain is here, who is a senior lecturer at La Trobe University in Australia. Welcome, Nathaniel.
Nathaniel Swain:Thank you so much for having me, Laurie and Melissa. It's an absolute pleasure.
Lori:Yeah, we're so glad that we connected on Twitter and that we've heard you on other podcasts and you're so fabulous, so we're really excited.
Nathaniel Swain:Oh, that's very kind. It's always fun to talk about this stuff. It's my hobby and it's also my job.
Melissa:Can't beat that, yeah, all right. Well, we're going to jump right into one of my favorite topics, which is fluency, and I'm just going to ask you a big question because I know how important I think fluency is to learning how to read. So I'll start with asking you why you think fluency is so important.
Nathaniel Swain:Well, if you think about the Scarborough's Reading Rope and the language comprehension and the word identification strands, fluency is really the thing that ties up all of the words Identification together. So when students read fluently, you know that they can accurately identify words you know automatically and they have a sense of sounding like they're speaking when they're actually reading. And that basically allows working memory to be freed up, so they don't have to think about decoding anymore. They can focus on language comprehension and the understandings of the text, which is the whole point of reading.
Melissa:I always love that thinking like that, like your brain only has enough space to do so many things, and I love that idea of like OK, take these things off your, off the plate, so I can focus on these other parts of reading.
Nathaniel Swain:That's so true and I think that's where we've gotten caught up with with the reading wars is that people are so particular about. You know, we don't want to do too much phonics, or we don't want to do the wrong kinds of phonics, and really you just want to do phonics really well, really early, so that we get students moving towards automatic word recognition and fluent reading as quickly and as easily as possible.
Lori:Yeah, that's such a good point and I love as quickly as possible.
Nathaniel Swain:Yeah, because you know, the longer they get stuck there, the more difficult it is for them to actually start focusing on the meaning, which is what we want them to get to.
Lori:For sure. So would you be able to share the three components of fluency and hopefully, during this conversation today, be able to connect back to them as we're, as we're talking, so listeners can just kind of get grounded in a definition and then, when we move on, we'll come back to those components.
Nathaniel Swain:Of course. So there's a few different ways to think about it. The three ones that come to mind for me in most ways of conceptualizing fluency is the speed at which students can read, connect a text, the accuracy, so the number of errors that they make, but also aspects of expression, or prosody. So, or prosody as you might say it. So that's the the what I was getting at before of making it sound like as if you're speaking so nice and fluent and with expression and pausing at the right times and providing good intonation and things like that. And that's the more artistic sort of part of fluency, if you like, because it's the part that's harder to measure if you're going to track someone's fluency. But also the bit you like. Oh, that's just, it's a really fluent reader, so you can hear in the way that they're reading. It sounds like natural speech.
Lori:Yeah, I think the one that they get tricked up on sometimes is the speed. We don't want to speed, race right, we? I think Jan Hasbrook says read like you're talking. Is there? Is that anything you would add to that in terms of speed or?
Nathaniel Swain:I think it depends on the purpose of reading. I think fluency is obviously important so that students can read aloud with with expression and clarity. They don't want to have lots of errors, they don't want to be too slow, but, as you said, you don't want to be too fast when you're reading aloud. The other purpose of fluency, though, is for students to be able to read quickly in their own heads, and as students progress with their reading, more and more they're actually going to read in their heads, and there is no limit to you know how fast you want them to read, as long as they don't impact the amount of words that they can process or understand, so they're not sort of skimming to the point where they lose meaning. So in some ways, we actually we don't want to hold students back from reading quickly, but if we're reading aloud, there is a limit to what you want them to do. You don't want I've seen extreme situations where you've got kids who are literally trying to beat the clock and go as fast as possible.
Nathaniel Swain:There is a there's a loss there in terms of the expression as a result. But I think if the message to students from teachers is that you can read as fast as you want to in your head as long as you're understanding the text. But when we're reading aloud there's probably some limits to how fast we can read, because it becomes a bit incomprehensible and it means that you're deliberately skipping over pauses and and full stops or periods when you really should, so that it makes sense for the listener but also for the reader.
Melissa:I was just thinking that I never think about it for myself. When I think of fluency, I think much more of teaching students and them reading out loud and glad you brought that up of like what happens in your own head because I was thinking about. I do that sometimes when I'm reading and you know I want to try and read something quickly and then I get to the end like I read that way too fast. Like you know I need to go back and slow down, but that's my own fluency and you know my silent reading fluency in my head.
Nathaniel Swain:And it is a different, a different purpose for reading and I think Marion Wolfe does a really good job the famous neuroscientist and expert in reading of saying that the way that we read on screens and the way that our reading behaviors have been impacted by digital devices is actually Some somewhat in the negative, because we do find ourselves skimming and speed reading and flicking, you know, scrolling through pieces rather than actually reading them start to finish, and the skill of actually sitting there with a novel or with a long article and reading it properly and completely is somewhat being lost over time as we've actually changed our reading behaviors.
Nathaniel Swain:So we have to think about what kind of purpose do we have in mind when we're developing students fluency. Is it because we want them to read deeply, or is it maybe in this particular lesson or in this group of lessons we're actually trying to get them to read efficiently and there's sort of two competing goals there. So if we want every student to reach their potential with their reading fluency for the purpose of comprehension, then there's always going to be a balance between how fast we want them to go, but then also how well we want them to read, whether in their head or out loud.
Melissa:All right, we're going to ask you a big question now. I'm going to ask you the big question and then I'm sure we're going to stop you a lot and ask you to give examples and ask you questions about it. But my big question is what we really want to know here from you is what are some things that teachers can do with students for them to practice their fluency in the classroom?
Nathaniel Swain:So there's three main ones that I want to take you through. I think the easiest one to begin with that you can do all the time and doesn't have to just be in your reading class, is the very underused strategy of coral reading. So having a text that's shared with the students, whether on a document camera or on a PowerPoint slide or, you know, on a worksheet in front of everyone or a copy of an actual book or a text Students might have a class novel that they will have a copy of, for instance, actually reading together, and it's sort of been painted in a really negative way saying oh, it sounds so annoying when everyone's having to read at the same time and it sounds really old school. But there's actually something really powerful with the ability to track along with what other people are reading and also to hear fluent reading at the same time. It's also a really good engagement norm that helps everyone to stay focused and listening to the meaning of the text. So you can just embed a incidental reading fluency just by doing some coral reading and you might do that in your humanities, your what do you call it? Social sciences classes, you might do it in your civics or your or your actual science or you might do it in your literature and sort of English language arts classroom. And the reason it's helpful is because Every student is basically supported by one another to follow along with the text to hear fluent reading. Whilst they're also producing fluent reading, the other one is tracked reading. So when the teacher is reading aloud or one student is reading aloud and the students are tracking along, that's also a really nice opportunity to hear what fluent reading sounds like and there's opportunities for you there to say well, you know, joanne, you read that really beautifully. Can everyone go back now and read the portion that Joanne did and see if we can get the expression that she had and so almost practicing it together?
Nathaniel Swain:And the benefit of doing those things whole class is that there is a lot of accountability so you can see whether everyone's tracking and whether everyone's on the same page. The other big one, I think, is there's a real focus in Australia at the moment of getting paired reading fluency happening, so you might set aside 10 or 15 minutes. I'm not sure if you're doing this a lot in the in the states as well, but basically getting 10 or 15 minutes, you've got students paired with each other, usually one slightly high, one slightly lower in their reading fluency or they're reading accuracy, and they have a text in front of them, usually a shared text, that they're both looking at and they can take turns reading the text together and the idea is to read for fluency but also for expression and Ideally they're actually understanding what they're reading as well. So it's not just for the purpose of getting the words right. So you might build in that some teach like a champion, strategies like account, accountable, independent reading, strategies that you might have in there that allow you to check in with students to make sure that they're actually understanding as well, or have some questions that you get students to ask each other about the text.
Nathaniel Swain:So they might all be on different texts or they might go on different portions or different versions of the same text. One of the great things about chat GPT at the moment is that you can take a passage, put it into chat GPT and say can you generate a hundred word version of this or can you give me a grade three version of the same text? So you could have all the students reading the same content or the same topic or the same excerpt from a book, but you might have graded sort of different versions that you have across the class if you did want to have that shared comprehension in this activity as well. And the benefit of the paired reading fluency is that they have turns going back and forth of hearing the fluent reading and then having the turn themselves in producing fluent reading, and you might get them to read the same text multiple times so that you have that repeating reading effect, which does have some research behind it as well.
Lori:Yeah, I love talking about fluency because it always feels like so much fun to envision kids doing this. And I remember, you know, in my classroom especially, it looked different in the primary classroom versus an intermediate classroom, but students still jumped right into fluency as an activity that they knew they were going to get big wins from, and it excited them to work together in this way. So I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about I know you mentioned it the texts that we might use.
Nathaniel Swain:Sure, so in the primary or elementary school, as you call it in Australia, brandon Park Primary School we this is my school before I joined the Trobe University this year we had a lot of fun with these reading fluency sort of proportions of the literacy block. So it was usually 10 or 15 minutes set aside and the text that we chose did vary depending on the age level and the reading proficiency. So in my foundation or prep classroom, or you'd call it kindergarten we had students on a range of different decodable texts, so phonically controlled texts, and some students towards, you know, the middle and the end of the year if they've actually graduated off those decodables they were then using picture books or short passages that I would provide them that were just slightly harder and not so phonically controlled. But the reason why most of them, as beginning readers, were on phonically controlled text was so that the reading fluency was developed on words that they had already had success with and that the kinds of graphene phoneme correspondences they were familiar with and the kinds of word patterns that they could actually read well. So the idea behind doing the fluency session was so that the kinds of phonics patterns and the irregular words that they've encountered basically put together into different texts that they would also read at home with their home readers and they would have an opportunity to not just be reading it for the sake of getting every word right, but actually reading it so that they could get that sense of fluency and expression as they're reading.
Nathaniel Swain:And for some students this process can be really slow and they can have a lot of difficulty making that transition from being like sort of pre blending into, then sort of blending at a really basic CVC level and then eventually to more complicated syllable structures.
Nathaniel Swain:And then you might have students who are doing most things but then are stuck at certain irregular words and they haven't got that. You know this concept we can talk about today set for variability, where they've got that ability to say you know, look at WAS and read it. Maybe they might attempt it first time as what ass was, but then realize that they want to change it to was, because they've maybe encountered that before. They know that in this sentence and this word must be was, because we've got that approach to flexibly flexibly applying our knowledge of sound letter patterns. So through the process of reading passage texts like that, they can really hone that ability to use all of the phonics skills and phonemic awareness skills that they've got, but also starting to experiment with. How do you get the whole sentence to sort of flow together? And that's really it's the core work of getting the decoding to then flow into fluency and fluency to flow into comprehension. So it's really, really important.
Melissa:All right.
Nathaniel Swain:Did you want me to jump?
Melissa:I didn't want to jump in there because I was actually thinking for three plus for like grades three plus.
Nathaniel Swain:I was about to go to three plus yeah, yeah, I mean sure.
Lori:Yeah.
Nathaniel Swain:So, with as students get more proficient, as the decodable texts become less relevant, they might sort of graduate off them because they just no need for them. It's too simple. You want to basically move them on to authentic, you know regular sort of text. It doesn't have to be like a leveled text in terms of the number of sentences are shorter, deliberately as soon as they've got the phonics, patterns and the ability to read a range of different kinds of words. The kinds of complexity that you want to introduce is actually about the content and the vocabulary. So, thinking more about comprehension, sure, there might be some words in there that they might have trouble decoding because you're not thinking about the length of the syllables and things like that anymore. But the idea is that if they move on to some texts that are about topics that they're interested in and that maybe relate back to units of work that you're doing, that's the real money spot in terms of fluency is an opportunity.
Nathaniel Swain:That fluency session is an opportunity to develop their prosody, their expression, their rates and their speed at sorry, the accuracy. But also they might actually be learning extra information or retrieving information from what they've learned about previously, so that might be a storybook that they've read before in your English language arts. It might be passages that you've created or that you've taken as excerpts Exerpts from texts that are about the topics from science and social sciences and civics, or it might be other texts that are interesting to them, so you might actually have interest area texts that you generate for them or that you get from things like read works or other great resources that have passages that you could use. And that's where fluency can be about. You know, getting really fluent and good at your expression and maybe working in those pairs still, but also potentially learning from what you're reading as well, and sort of knowing that if you're trying so hard to be fluent but you're not understanding the text, then you're not quite fluent enough, if that makes sense.
Lori:Yeah, can I ask a quick question before we kind of go into the ways that we would dive into fluency practice. So when we think about what you just said about the building knowledge or you know students would read texts that they might have some familiar knowledge and vocabulary on in three plus say I'm a classroom teacher and I'm looking at a book and the book has the word, let's just say it's like bioluminescence.
Nathaniel Swain:Yeah.
Lori:So say the other words around it were, you know, not terribly difficult to decode, but that has that's a word, what I as a teacher use, that sentence or pack. Could I use that to build fluency and use it as an opportunity to like unpack that vocabulary word? Or is that like too much for my students? I'm just wondering what you would say to teachers who are listening who are like okay, so how many words are like too many to be unfamiliar? Or this is a really big word and it feels really tricky for my students. What advice would you give to teachers looking at a passage thinking I just I don't know.
Nathaniel Swain:Yeah, sure, so I think it is. It's a balancing act. You don't want to give texts that are inaccessible and that sort of break, sort of the break down the process too much for the students and they get stuck on every second word. But if you've got the word like bioluminescence, and you have in your English language arts, you've got opportunities to learn about prefixes and suffixes and morphology, then there is actually an opportunity for students to practice. How do you attack a new word based on its prefixes, suffixes and root words. So bio meaning life, loom meaning light and essence I can't exactly remember what, but probably essence and the fact that it all comes together. So it's light that is created by biological creatures, and so there's an opportunity there, I guess, to challenge your students if you've got that particular word or words like it. But if you're finding that it's a barrier to them actually enjoying and using that fluency session to develop fluency and to feel successful at their reading, then you can obviously strip it back. I think there's probably a tendency, as a hangover from the balance literacy movements, in that we're afraid to give students challenging texts and we're afraid to give them things that are in the frustration zone, but it's actually important to give them opportunities to encounter unfamiliar words and to tackle difficult texts. They don't always have to do that independently. They might do that in pairs or you might actually do that as a whole class. I know Tim Shanahan talks a lot about whole class sort of analysis of complex text and there's that close reading sort of concept which is really helpful, where you actually look particularly and look at challenging texts and try and pull it apart. So it depends on what you're trying to get out of that session. But I think if it's for fluency and that's the time that you're trying to develop it and it's set up in a way that you can actually wander around and there's a bit of autonomy, for instance, at our school, in a few others that have done similar things, we've got a bell that sort of rings on the PowerPoint slide every minute and that bell tells the students to swap partners. So when the teacher sort of presses go on that PowerPoint slide, that's automatic. Then they know that to swap and as a teacher you can then float around the room, actually hear students that you want to hear and you don't have to sort of keep an eye on the time or to click your fingers or whatever it might be, to tell students to swap partners so that 10 minutes could free you up basically to go in and do other things. So I think it's a balancing act, because if you want that 10 minutes or that 15 minutes to work really well and you want students to feel successful, you are going to have to do a little bit of pairing back of complexity.
Nathaniel Swain:Luckily, we don't have to do a lot of writing or editing ourselves these days. If you can use things like chat, gpt to your advantage. You can take any text and simplify it or make it more complex in the click of a button and then have those ready. So I think it's a bit of a trial and error, but my message would be don't shy away from complexity if, especially if you know you've got students in your class that are ready for a challenge and seem like they're tracking along well you don't want them to stay stagnant on comfortable text for too long, because if you're not fluent on unfamiliar text, then you're basically not fluent yet.
Lori:Thank you.
Melissa:So I have my teacher hat on and I'm still stuck on the three suggestions you gave for how to improve literacy, and I have a million questions for you and I want to ask them so that because, I know our teachers are going to ask them, so I want to make sure we do.
Melissa:So I'm going to take us right back to those, those three that you mentioned. So the first one choral reading. I was a middle school teacher and so when I'm thinking of older students, I'm wondering, like, is choral reading something that is good for students of all ages, or is this something that maybe is just a K2 thing and I think that's a question I've heard before Is it something that older students could be doing, should be doing? Will they do it? And then wondering to as you get in the older grades, you're reading much longer texts. So what's realistic for how long of a text or part of a text you would actually choral read together as a whole class, because I, you know, if we're reading a novel, we're clearly not going to read the whole novel together but you might still want to put it in there, so I'm wondering your thoughts on that.
Nathaniel Swain:Yeah, that's a really important question. So I think you're right, the call reading does work well when it short bursts and it works well when it's you know, particular segments that you're wanting to highlight. I think in the regular sort of lessons, call reading works really well when you're like reading a shared definition or if you're, you know, wanting to look at a particular segment of the text that has a really good quote or has a really nice use of language.
Melissa:Like bio luminescence.
Nathaniel Swain:Like exactly, if it's particular terms, like actually do that the EDI engagement norm of pronounce with me and say you know everyone, say with me bioluminescence, and you might do it syllable by syllable if you need to, so the students have that opportunity to orthographically map it, because if they haven't got the sounds of that word then they can't map it to the letters and they'll always have difficulty saying that word but also reading and spelling that word. So I think with the older students particularly, but also with younger students, it's going to be smaller chunks and if you've got older students, like in middle school for instance, your amount of reading is going to be a lot bigger. So I sort of use call reading as a thing that mixes up the way that we approach some shared reading together or some explanations of the explicit part of the lesson. Say, we're doing some writing about a particular text. We might read elements of the instructions or the definitions that help to drive the content of the lesson.
Nathaniel Swain:I think it's really helpful to just know that it's there in your back pocket and you can use it and it's a really easy way to sort of ensure that everyone's on the same page but also gets a chance to do some fluent reading as a group.
Nathaniel Swain:You can definitely overuse it, so I'll just be aware of that. But in terms of older kids, I, with my university students, sometimes I do use call reading as a way to make sure that everyone's with me and we're all sort of reading together and it's just a nice way to know that everyone's got a chance to turn their voice on and to ensure that they're with you, because it's so easy. You know, in high schools and things like that, they might have devices and laptops and stuff around iPads and things, and so there's a lot of distractions that are there. So it's nice to have something you can to bring everyone back on the same page, but also, as we were talking about before, to give them a chance to hear what it sounds like when you read fluently and what, what those particular vocabulary words sound like, all the particular parts of grammar. So yeah, that's my sort of caveats around coral reading, but it's a really useful tool to have in your back pocket that you can just introduce a little bit of fluency in every lesson.
Melissa:Yeah, I think that's really helpful. Just so you know, teachers who have much longer texts don't just throw that away and say, Well, we obviously can't coral read this text.
Nathaniel Swain:Yeah, no, you might just do a sentence or you know you might do an excerpt as a coral reading and the rest.
Nathaniel Swain:You might do some tracked reading if you are doing a shared reading experience together. The teacher might do it and the students track, or one of the students might read and then you track and students often depending on how the culture of your classroom is going and how confident the readers are. We've found a lot of success with students being like I want to read in front of everyone. Or you know that there's a bit of a culture that builds of like students feeling like they do want to show some of their skills because they've worked so hard on their reading. And that's nice for other students to hear examples of how other students read and knowing that if you've got a culture of error built into the way that you do things, when students stumble or if they make mistakes, it's all part of the learning process and you have a supportive way that helps students through it. I think you know Rob round Robin reading has been really sort of my question.
Nathaniel Swain:It kills off People really hate it because and the problem with round Robin reading in some ways is that because it's a set order and students know when it's their turn Often there's an anxiety sort of thing that happens where their working memory is dedicated to which part of the text is going to come up when I'm going to have to read and therefore watch part. Should I pre rehearsal that I don't make a mistake and like that's all the wrong things that you don't want students to think about when they're doing shared reading or, you know, individual reading like that. So with round Robin, the problem is that it's a set order and the problem is that there's not some discretion for the teacher to use around who they call upon. When I think something that's driven around, students who do want to do it, or when we've done non volunteers say we'll pick someone from the cup of sticks and say, ok, josie, it's your time to read. We've actually set up the culture already so that we know that Josie can give it a go and it's OK to make mistakes, but also if she's not ready, like we'll just come back to her.
Nathaniel Swain:So having a no opt out is important, I think. And if you don't have a culture where it's like you know you don't want to have it, so that only certain students read and the others listen, because that sets up a power dynamic that you don't really want. But you can do it really nicely where, say, even if you're reluctant readers say Josie isn't ready to read that excerpt you say that's OK, I'll come back to you and you put that down and you come back to it the next sort of after two more readers. Or you might read and then she might read, and then you've also got an opportunity, if you really want to scaffold it, to say you might read a sentence, or the whole class might call a sentence and Josie gets to read that sentence again. So a repeated reading of just that little bit so that she still feels successful. But also you've scaffolded it as well.
Melissa:Do you have a suggestion for when students are reading aloud in that kind of tracked reading?
Nathaniel Swain:I've never used that term before, it's new for me, but if they're reading aloud and they say a word incorrectly, yes, as the teacher, I would be listening all the time and trying to see if you and if you get it to work really well, like I get my my hands out, like I'm doing like a conductor sort of movement. There is a sense of like you're there. I basically tell them we're all like instruments and we're going to create beautiful sound together and so if we all, if we all sort of speak and read with one voice, then it's actually going to sound really good and it's going to be sound really fluent and everything. So it's a bit of training to sort of get your class to do that. And it depends on how much, depending on the age and sort of how cool they think they are, like whether they'll go along with you with it. But I can get university students to do it. So I reckon you know, if we try really hard, we can set up the culture in any classroom.
Nathaniel Swain:But as you're doing that, you're then listening, for you know deviations, or you're listening for changes in words and I just pause at straight where it is. It's like someone stuck on bioluminescence or I've got like bio and it doesn't really come out. It's like, ok, let's pause everyone, let's say bioluminescence, your turn, everyone says bioluminescence, and you might even chop it into everyone, say bio, biolumine, luminescence, essence, put it together etc. And so you just be looking out for things like that and once you've got it all set up and you've got those strategies ready to go.
Nathaniel Swain:It's easy for me because I've got this sort of drama, musical, theater background. So I'm used to like getting a group of kids, whether it's for a dancer or a singing class, like to do stuff like this which is sort of in the realm of dramatics, but as a teacher you might not be as familiar, so it's a bit of trial and error to sort of see your flow. But once you get it working well, you can actually get your whole class sort of reading in symphony if you like, and also listening to each other and hearing fluent reading all throughout the day. It doesn't have to be something you just have in that 10 minutes a day.
Lori:That's great. You can tell when you did your choral or conductor.
Melissa:I was like oh, like that.
Lori:Can I throw out a couple other things that as I was writing them down, I was thinking maybe their choral reading, maybe their tractor reading, maybe their combination. But I know that there are strategies that I've heard people use. So, for example, popcorn reading. Do you know what that is?
Nathaniel Swain:Yep, that's when you sort of take over one at a time from each other.
Lori:Yes, and the way that I've seen it done more recently is that if, like, say, I was reading and then I wanted to popcorn to Melissa, I would say popcorn Melissa. And Melissa could say pass if she didn't want to read. Okay, I don't know, should we let students pass? I think I appreciate what you said about the culture. So I think my first question is is popcorn reading a good strategy to help with fluency In terms of like tractor reading, or is it a stress inducing strategy? I don't know.
Nathaniel Swain:I think it depends on how you set it up and it depends on the expectations of the students around it. So if students are finding it stressful, then you haven't set it up properly or it's not quite working for your group that you've got, and every group is going to be a little bit idiosyncratic into what they sort of want to do. Some students really would love that strategy because it's like oh, it's fun, I could start reading at any moment and there's an opportunity for me to make sure I'm listening and tracking so that I know when to pick up. And if you've got a class of semi-fluent readers, then this is actually a really good level of challenge for them, because the teacher's reading some, you may be coral reading some, and then you're popcorning, as you said, or just swapping the reader, basically, to someone else. And I think if you need to have it so that there is a pass option, I would always just come back to them, because the reason you come back is to say, well, if you do say pass or you need to opt out for that moment, it's not an opt out all the time, it's an opt out for that moment. And then I'm going to come back to you because the idea is you want to keep that need archer sort of phrase in your head, being that learning and teaching is in a spectator support.
Nathaniel Swain:If students know that they don't have to answer questions or that they can opt out of participation, then they will opt out and some students will do that for years and years on end. I think that removes that opportunity to hear what they're reading is like or to hear what they think about issues or to gauge how they're going in terms of their understanding. So it's a problem if you let it sort of go on that way. If it's really big and if you've got students with particular anxieties around speaking in front of the group, there's other ways that you can check in with them or there's other ways that you can help them to participate that maybe aren't as stressful. But you know Doug Lamov says this, the you know Hollingsworth and Yabara say that when you've set these things up really well and you have these engagement norms sort of part of the normal every day, it's not actually a stressful situation If you've done the scaffolding that you need or if you've given them a chance to come back to them and to choose which answer like the best or to repeat a certain phrase that they've already heard before.
Nathaniel Swain:It's not going to be out of this realm to expect everyone to participate. I think that's a really good thing if you can get that to work well, because the alternative where only some students participate just like the traditional classroom, where every question students put their hands up and the teacher literally chooses only the people with their hands up it means that you've got, you know, two tiers or three tiers of your, of your students, and people don't always feel connected because they don't have to participate.
Lori:Yeah, I love that idea about setting it up. I think there's I actually, you know, I feel like in fluency, I felt like it was something more that I did, rather than it's maybe set up, and I'm reflecting on my time and thinking, oh okay, I could have, I could have set up some things a little differently. So I love that idea of setting things up to be, you know, more successful in, in, maybe, the culture or in the expectations. So that's, that's great. Can I throw it one more for you, nathaniel?
Nathaniel Swain:Of course.
Lori:Okay, so I'm thinking about I call it fill in the blank reading. I'm not sure what it's actually called, but say there's a sentence and I'm reading it, and and I'm the teacher and I'm reading and I pause, and my students know when I pause they say that word and then they coral read that word. Now, like I'm imagining it being done really strategically, right, if I'm a first grade teacher and I've just taught you know long, sound spellings for long e, then I would have pre read that book and or that text and really pulled out those words that would be meaningful to me, that would be meaningful for my students to practice fluently. Or if I am a thinking a fourth grade teacher and we are, I don't know, building knowledge on on the heart, and I would make sure that I'm pulling out some academic vocabulary that is related to that content for my students to maybe work through or, or, or you know, sound out and practice that vocabulary. So I'm curious what you think about that strategy.
Nathaniel Swain:I think, whether you call it fill in the gap reading or it sounds a little bit like sort of like a close reading into that. C L O Z.
Lori:E approach.
Nathaniel Swain:But instead of the word being something that's missing, it's something that you're leaving out, so they actually know what the word is because it's in the text. I think that's a something that I've used as well in my kindergarten classroom. So, particularly because I had a lot of students who weren't yet reading fluently, they did just reading CVC or CCVC words early in the year. But when I was reading a text with them say it's a knowledge building sort of text or a literature text that we're sort of reading together I would do that. I would pause on words that I know that they could read, or the words that I wanted them to read together independently, and they like whether I can't remember exactly if I prompted them or if maybe I did the leave that pause and there was an opportunity for them to jump in. Or I might have said read this with me and I got them to sort of sound it out together. So I think with older students you could just do it in that subtle way of like pausing and then they know to jump in. I think that's really nice.
Nathaniel Swain:I do a lot of those nonverbal things of like. You know, if I'm wanting them to repeat something, I don't have to say anything necessarily. I just say the word bioluminescence and then I'm just you know for the listeners I'm just gesturing forward to the audience to say, well, now it's your turn to say bioluminescence. I think those subtle nonverbal cues can be really helpful as well if you, if your students, can pick up on those, because then it doesn't interrupt the flow of what you're trying to do and interrupt the flow of the meaning that you're trying to build as well. So, yeah, I think that kind of strategy is really handy, and whether you could do it at a single word level, but you might actually do it at a phrase level as well, if you're saying, let's actually make sure that they can put these words together in a nice phrase or even a sentence, yeah, yeah, that's great.
Lori:Thank you, I was just curious. Those are ones that I've read about and I was. It just is like samples and I thought, oh, I should ask Nathaniel. I wrote them down for you.
Nathaniel Swain:Yeah, and I think that's really handy. I have used that as well. I just probably haven't called it anything, but I like filling the gap reading as a working title.
Melissa:I like this. You just created something tonight Conducting. I have one more question about the paired reading. I love that strategy and I was. I'm curious about how you kind of set it up for students so successful, like do you have any suggestions for teachers of like the kind of the same things you're talking about with the norms and the things? Like you know, how do they tell each other when they may have said a word incorrectly, or how to improve their way that they're saying things? Like are there ways to make it really work well by setting those norms up?
Nathaniel Swain:So I was thinking that, as we're talking about set up in the other aspect of the core reading and tract reading, I think it's exactly the same for the paired reading sort of fluency session. There is a lot of set up and there's a lot of opportunity to get it working well. I think I found it the most difficult to get that to work for my kindergarten class with you know, year three, four, five, six, where I was able to, you know, basically say the instructions one or two times, maybe provide a model, and then they run with it. It was kind of easy. But with kindergarten especially, you have to be really explicit and really intentional about how you show them how it works and also just be ready to go in and jump in. And we'd have situations where, like you know everyone, you know most students are doing it, but then two are like stuck or they're like looking at each other, they're like who's meant to be reading, and then you'd have you know, five year olds having arguments about who's turn it is.
Lori:Of course, so you know all the fun things that you've got.
Nathaniel Swain:But I think usually I'd have like a really clear model, like when we first do it and you know, over the first few weeks that we trial it, we sort of do it gradually and we might build up to doing it Eventually. We probably started it twice a week and then we started it three times a week and eventually by the end of the year we were doing it five days a week, so that there was always 10 minutes a day that they were doing that fluency practice. And you do have to make sure that students are able to read at a sentence level. If they're not yet reading words and sentences together, If they're stuck at the CVC or sort of simple words, you don't want to push them onto reading whole texts. I was about to ask that with kindergarteners.
Nathaniel Swain:So you might have two different things happening where if you've got students who are reading decodable text and are able to read at a sentence and a text level, you'd set them up into these pairs and while they're doing that, for maybe six months of the year in kindergarten, you'd bring the other group down as a focus group and actually just do more single word work or more opportunities to, you know, revise aspects of the code that you're trying to teach them, so the phonographic correspondences or the blending of. You know you might have magnetic letters that you're sort of getting them to spell or to read with, so that it's actually a nice way to differentiate. So that you've got something set up so that your students are doing those 10 minutes a week and it's a really helpful fluency practice because that's where they're at and for your other sort of half of the class, they might actually be doing this focus group with you for another 10 minutes, which is really handy way to sort of separate yourself and you're not disadvantagey anyone in that regard. I think over the course of the year, once everyone's sort of in that sort of mode of doing it, you just have some models. So I used to actually get two students sitting on a desk and have everyone else sitting on the floor and sort of looking at them and we actually do a model run through of like the first three or four dings. So we would do the slides that we've got set up. We have like you press go and it sort of makes a. There actually wasn't a ding sound on PowerPoint, so there was like a chaching.
Nathaniel Swain:This is like when the cash register, my friend Shane Pearson, and I like to say like we're cashing in on all that great reading, so there's a chaching every minute, and so the first chaching goes off. They know it's the whoever was going first. They read for one minute and they're reading the text. The other person is tracking and watching, just like we've practiced as a whole group. One person's reading, the other group is the other person is tracking, and then when they get a word wrong they're meant to jump in and sort of help them with that word. Or sometimes they overdo that and they sort of give them the word way too early because they're so helpful, and so it's a little bit of partner training in that, you know, let her try, let her have a go.
Nathaniel Swain:If she really gets stuck, like then jump in and provide the word, or you know, it's actually a really nice peer learning strategy that you can develop there if you get it working well. But as the other group is watching them and how they're doing it, they then hear that when it goes to ching, the next person swaps and they pick up where they left off. Sometimes, when they get confused, they do this thing where I've got my book and you've got your book and we've both got different books going, and then when the bell goes, I start writing, reading my book. When the bell goes, you read your book and I just don't care because I've got my own book and that's not what you want. But students will start doing that because you know they start realizing that we're on.
Nathaniel Swain:Yeah, and you know we're on slightly different levels and I don't want to read her one because they're on a different level to me and it's like well, we're in this pair, you got to make it work. So we're going to read her levels because that's where she's at and you know, you do swap the pairs deliberately so they get a chance to go with someone higher or lower than them, so it's not always the same dynamic. But once you've got it working well, you show them it's always the same text. It's always picking up where they left off. It means that at the end of the 10 minutes they've actually read a text together and they've practiced fluency both and they've also heard fluent reading back and forth as well.
Nathaniel Swain:And it's at that individual sort of paired level. Sometimes you've got threes, because you've got an odd number and threes works as well. You just sort of go one sort of at a time. You just got to have them on a desk, that sort of works or get them on the floor so they can all see, because that's always an argument that you get with five people, that's right, yeah, so it sounds like.
Lori:it sounds like you did a kindergarten fish bowl Is what I think you're talking about A little bit.
Nathaniel Swain:Yeah, exactly yeah for that. For those first few weeks of getting in embedded, that building that norm and building that routine was definitely needed. They need to see it and they need to go off and practice it themselves. So obviously, when you first set this up, you have to set aside longer than 10 minutes in your literacy block to make this work. But once it is working well, we would have eight minutes on the clock, with one minute either side for set up and pack up, and you could get it done in 10 minutes, which means that you've got still a lot of time in your block to do all the other things you need to do.
Melissa:I'm curious about with can be these strategies that you mentioned or something different. But for any of them, if you have students who are maybe better at some aspects of fluency than others, so maybe they can read pretty accurate but they're going pretty slowly, or maybe they read pretty quickly but they're just reading without stopping in the punctuation, there's no prosody Is that something that you kind of work into any of those strategies, or do you have extra strategies to share that work on some aspects?
Nathaniel Swain:So I think when you get into that aspect of you know the accuracy and the speed is either you know accuracy is going well because you're doing all your phonics lessons and they've got a handle on single words and they've made that transition to sentences and short texts.
Nathaniel Swain:I think that's the thing to do first and that these strategies that I've talked about so far, they're the ones to sort of to think about first. When you've got students who are starting to either read too fast or without prosody or they're reading too slow but they're getting every single word right, that's where something like repeated reading works really well, so you might have the same text that the students are reading and they'll actually read it multiple times. One way to do this, to make it sort of interesting, is that you might and Tim Rizinski talks about this you could create like a reader's theater sort of situation where you know you've got actually a small play or a little script and best thing about chat GPT I'm saying that a lot today you can actually get it to create a play version of any text. So I've got it to generate like a script.
Nathaniel Swain:Oh yeah, anything Like I've got it to do sitcoms, I've got it to do like a movie treatment of, like you know, a random storyline, it can do it. It can really like creating. So if you put, like I don't know, a nursery rhyme or a fairy tale in, say, the gingerbread man I've done recently, and you say I want a different version of the gingerbread man, where it's like a soup bowl full of dumplings and the dumplings are going to escape and run away from being eaten, it'll do that, so it and create in a really interesting way. It'll create it. But then what you can. So that's a variation on story.
Nathaniel Swain:You could also get it to do a variation on format. So you can say, take this text which is the gingerbread man, and it actually knows all those texts already, so you don't even need to provide the text. You'll say, like create a version of the gingerbread man, which is a script for three students to read three dialogue parts, and it will do that for you. So it'll say you know three students and they all have dialogue. And you can even say put in stage directions or take stage directions out, and then, if you wanted to, you could have a group of three and you've got your script. It's maybe about a story that they've read before or slightly different version of a topic. You could do fiction or nonfiction with this and you could turn it into a play where students have a dialogue that they then read, and the benefit of the play is that there's a real reason to actually repeatedly read and to get to fluent reading, because at the end they then perform it and ideally they perform it without the script, so they actually memorize it. That's a really helpful way to do it and obviously that would take more time, but it's also a really nice oral language activity as well for them to remember. You know parts of texts in their memory forever. You know we're all good at learning nursery rhymes and aspects of different stories or quotes from famous books and things like that, so those are really important bits of language that they can take with them in their life. So you can do this, obviously, with established plays and with established stories that as well that are more important for literature reasons. But if you just wanted to generate something quickly or that is, at a particular level, chat GVT can do that for you really well, so it's actually a really handy tool in that way.
Nathaniel Swain:The other thing I'd say is that poetry is the other thing that's really useful for repeated reading.
Nathaniel Swain:So you might have famous poems, or you might have poetry that you find online for written for children, or you might even take things like nursery rhymes and sort of give students depending on the age level give students an opportunity to master that poem or that piece of writing so that they can recite it really beautifully and really clearly and maybe without actually looking at it as well, so they might memorize it too, and the benefit of doing that is that they actually.
Nathaniel Swain:You can actually jump in and say if everyone's memorizing a similar text, you can jump in and provide feedback on internaction and feedback on prosody. You can say well, here you really need to pause so the audience can listen and hear what the next bit is before you jump in Cause. At the moment you're rushing through every single period or every single comma, and I think repeated reading is probably an underutilized strategy. But if you make it interesting for the purpose of a good performance, you know, it's where that drama sort of background of mine comes in handy, and every teacher should see themselves as being dramatic in some way, because we are creating things together with a live group of students and like an audience, so it's really it's an opportunity, I think, to use aspects of drama in a really considered way that also enables students to become better readers and better writers.
Lori:Wow, I'm gonna rabbit hole with some chat. What is it?
Melissa:I don't even know how to say it, we need to just take a TPC Glory and dive into it together.
Lori:Yeah, Like GPI, gpt. I kind of know what this thing is, but I'm very excited about it, also, a little scared of it. Equally, equally excited and terrified.
Melissa:We'll get there, we'll get there.
Nathaniel Swain:Chat GPT questions. You wanna go down that rabbit hole or you can. I've played around with it a lot. It's really, really powerful for teachers.
Lori:Yeah, oh my gosh, I bet. Yeah, that's what I'm gonna spend my evening doing. As you're starting your day in a annual, I'll spend my evening rabbit holeing right into that.
Nathaniel Swain:It's awesome. The other benefit with it is teaching of writing. So you can take texts or get it to generate text that has particular writing structures in it. So if you wanna say, give me a text with examples of a positives or, you know, think back to the writing revolution you can say give me texts that have examples of subordinate conjunctions or, you know, generate example sentences that follow the structure because?
Nathaniel Swain:But so, like you know, there's a lot of writing that you have to do when you create written materials for the purposes of teaching and some teachers are really good at that and some teachers find it really hard to actually make grammatical errors without realizing. And then if you've written that text for that lesson, then that lesson is gonna reinforce a grammatical error potentially or miss a potential nuance there that you could get across. So utilizing other shared planning where you actually share those responsibilities together and you have better writers in the team that help to ensure the quality control, or using other tools like chat, gpt or Grammarly and things like that in a more simple sort of way can actually help you to ensure that what you put in front of students is high quality and also fit for purpose for whatever you're trying to teach.
Melissa:That's what I was gonna say, because you can connect it to the topic of whatever, whatever it is you're reading about and that's great because I remember, like randomly researching readers, theater scripts, like about anything, just so we could practice one, or is? This would give you something that actually might relate to what you're teaching, so it's much more meaningful.
Nathaniel Swain:Exactly. You could take a reader-seated script that's already there and give it to chat GPT and say generate another script like this to the same format and the same conventions about this topic, or using this story as a basis or ensuring that you have these particular concepts. So you've got to put bioluminescence or photosynthesis in there somewhere, because it's a focus in your science class. It can do it and it can do it in really interesting ways. I've got to do some pretty fascinating things in terms of, you know, with high school. It's done like a dramatic version of two competing epistemologies of throughout history. So it's looked at the fight between the enlightenment and the romanticism, sort of periods, and I've got it to generate a play with key figures from history sort of fighting with each other, the way that those ideas were fought back in the day, and it was actually really clever and really insightful. I was like I actually learned from this this is awesome, so you know if you wanted to give students information in a different way.
Nathaniel Swain:You know dramatic sort of creations or you know scripts or poetry or song. We can generate songs and things for you Like it's just really useful, I think, if you're like well, how do I get this across to students? Well, there's things that you could do creatively yourself, or there's things that you can do creatively with a tool like chat GPT, which can just generate text really quickly and allow you to experiment.
Lori:Yeah, I love that idea of keeping the text that we're using or the topic that we're teaching about at the center and then using that as a springboard for our fluency instruction, but using the tools that we have. Like Melissa said, you know, we don't need to spend an hour Google searching for something if there's a tool that can help us do it more efficiently and actually get what we need a little bit easier. So I love that. I think that's really practical and especially just you know, I can't say it enough keeping that topic or keeping the text that we're studying at the center at the core of the fluency. Like you know, I think it gets tricky when we try to pull in our fluency work with something that feels random or maybe that is random, and I think in the past that might have happened, because that's what we can find.
Nathaniel Swain:You can find resources Right.
Lori:Yeah, yeah. So if we have that access, it's really cool to be able to provide those different opportunities for students.
Nathaniel Swain:And just to do a little plug here, my colleague Lynn Stone from Lifelong Literacy and I, and in my charity that I've got for teachers called Think Forward Educators, we've got a PD session that's coming up in the next few months, so look out for the advertising for it and it's basically how to use chat GPT for classroom planning and instruction. So interesting things that we hope to show teachers and seeing how you could get chat GPT to work the way you want to, because you have to train it in some ways and to give prompts that really get it to the result that you want. It's not going to give you magic straight away. You have to be patient, but there's hacks that we can share with you that would be helpful, so keep a lookout for that.
Lori:That'd be great. Will you be sure to share that information with us so we can share it with our listeners?
Nathaniel Swain:Yeah, definitely We'll put that in the show notes, potentially Definitely.
Lori:OK, you know it's funny too. We did talk with Lynn and she also shared a lot about chat GPT, so I'm feeling like now I know why You're working on it a lot yeah.
Lori:It's very cool, you know. I'm wondering if you might be able to share a little bit of what the research says about fluency and what the research says we can do to improve fluency. I know we've touched on some of it, but just to kind of hit home that these are research based practices, you're not just whimsically sharing what you feel like sharing tonight, this morning.
Nathaniel Swain:So definitely so. As we know from the National Reading Panel report, fluency was one of the big five that were included, and the reason it was there, and the reason it continues to be an important aspect, is that there's a few lines of research that have shown how important fluency is. One of the lines is they've looked at struggling readers and they've looked at readers who are having difficulty and fluency remains a challenge for them, and so they've been able to map that. You know, success with reading is tied back to proficiency, with fluency, and they've seen the flip side, where they've tracked students over time, longitudinally, and they can predict their reading outcomes, with fluency being one of those factors that they use.
Nathaniel Swain:Others will be the other aspects of the big big fire, so the comprehension, phonics, phonemic awareness and vocabulary, and so the fluency is a really important sort of cornerstone. But the other research that's really interesting is the intervention studies to show how to improve fluency, and some of the things that have come out of that are the repeated readings, but also the modeled reading as well. So the teacher modeling fluent reading and getting the student to imitate it and to sort of try and get that fluency happening in their own reading, but then also the work on improving accuracy and improving familiarity with connected text, so that work in the phonics space but also the fluency practice is really powerful as well. So giving them a chance to get comfortable with connected text and we've both chronically controlled and then uncontrolled text as well, which is what we want to move them to.
Melissa:I have another teacher question for you, if you're okay with it.
Nathaniel Swain:My teacher hat never comes off.
Melissa:So this is the question we get for literally anything, and everything we recommend is about time. How do you fit this all in? Where does it fit in? I have too many other things to handle, so I'm sure you get that question. So we're just curious if you have any suggestions. Where does this fit?
Nathaniel Swain:So I think the good thing about fluency is that if all things are going well in your literacy block and you're doing your phonics sort of part and you're doing your phonemic awareness, you've got vocabulary and comprehension happening, you've got writing, handwriting, all that sort of stuff happening. Fluency doesn't have to be a massive part of your block. I think if you set aside 10 minutes a day and maybe a little bit more in the setup phase when you build one of these routines or these ways of doing fluency, you can get it to work for 10 minutes a day. And I think we've found that in grades three or four onwards, if you've got fluent readers, you don't necessarily have to do 10 minutes every single day. You might actually get enough fluency through doing some incidental choral reading or by doing accountable independent reading. So then if you've got students who you know are not quite fluent and they're in grade four or grade five, you can actually spend some of that accountable independent reading time to go and work with them. So you might then hear them read a little bit more often than you've got the other students. So we've found, with you know, years five and six and I wouldn't expect secondary or high school teachers to do this very much if they've got their kids at a certain level of fluency that you might do it occasionally, but it doesn't have to be a big thing.
Nathaniel Swain:I think fluency is one of those things like phonics and phonemic awareness, that once you've gotten students to a certain threshold it's not something you have to continually work on, because the ultimate thing that gets them better at fluency is lots and lots of reading and lots of success at reading, and that's both reading aloud but also reading in their own heads. So if you've got students who are reading novels, there's not, unless they're doing a particular focus on presentations or, you know, say, putting together a play or doing a read this theater or something like that there isn't a huge need to constantly drill fluency. You can check in on them and make sure that they're up to where they need to be. So, using your orph methods or reading fluency methods that help to see how many words per minute they get correct at a single word and a passage level, that can be really helpful to make sure that they're on track.
Nathaniel Swain:But in some ways, because of the self teaching hypothesis this is David shares theory of reading and how it sort of works at this higher end Students actually start to teach themselves any exceptions that they find in words that they encounter.
Nathaniel Swain:So they have enough phonics and enough morphology and enough vocabulary and awareness and understanding to basically be reading text independently and then to be sort of making good predictions on what the word would be if that's an unfamiliar word. And the reason we know that this works is the self teaching hypothesis is because there's lots of examples of really precocious readers who in conversation, will drop an epitome or a hyper bowl you know which is meant to be epitome or hyperbole and the reason they do that is because they've only heard that word in their own head as they've read it. And so that shows that once they are fluent and once they've got good abilities to attack words and to use other sort of morphological as well as phonological and orthographic strategies to figure out the word, then they're going to get to the meaning of the word, even if the pronunciation isn't quite right, because there's a. There's an interesting thing going on there with Greek words and how they're pronounced.
Melissa:It's like the first time I heard Hermione after I read her.
Lori:I know I was thinking Hermione the whole time. For like seven years I know Well, because we all probably read it before. They had audio books and we could even take a listen. That wasn't a thing, yeah.
Nathaniel Swain:And who would have thought Hermione like that doesn't look like Hermione, it looks like Hermione and that's not a normal name but like there's. There's lots of lots of strange names and unfamiliar terms in that book.
Lori:So it sort of made sense. Yeah, yes, I totally agree. That's what I was thinking too, melissa, that's the exact example.
Nathaniel Swain:Harry Potter fans.
Lori:Now, daniel, would you just would you share, like what is the value add? Like why should we be doing this other? How is it helpful? And and any teacher listening who's thinking I'm so stressed about time, there's so much I need to do and you know what is the true. If you need to like narrow it down like what is the true value add for your students, like kind of bring it together.
Nathaniel Swain:So with the early reading space, the value add is really like this is make or break for some of your students in terms of being confident independent readers, because to be a confident independent reader it's not just about how well you can figure out each word, it's how well you can do it efficiently, effectively and smoothly so that it doesn't actually interfere with your working memory on the comprehension piece, which is what we talked about at the start. So it's really important in that space. I also think, to be honest, when you've set it up really well as a busy classroom teacher, when you're trying to manage all the things that you've got during the day, that 10 minutes of the bell sort of going off one minute at a time, is actually a chance to breathe, like if you've got explicit instruction and if you've got lots of sort of teacher directed or teacher facilitated teaching throughout your block because you're using good instructional practices, it's actually it's very tiring to stay on top of that all the time. So having 10 minutes maybe in the middle of the block, that gives everyone a breather to just read and to do it in a meaningful way. So they are practicing fluency and it is peer assisted. You can actually if you haven't got time to go and read and listen to students reading, in that sort of 10 minutes you can actually just get a drink of water, have a listen to the lovely sound of all your students sort of reading together and know that it's all going to be okay if you don't go and listen to a particular student read in that moment.
Nathaniel Swain:So I think it's a 10 minute thing that if you set up really well, it's an easy part of your day and it's also a moment that could be really important on that daily sort of practice, because some students will have lots of time to read at home but, depending on your students and the home environment that they're in, they might not be able to do that daily reading that we want them to do when they take their readers home or when they do reading in other ways. So this might be their moment of 10 minutes a day where they actually put all of the skills that you've been developing together the phonics, the phonemic awareness, the irregular words that you're trying to teach them, vocabulary comprehension, trying to put it all together to sort of read successfully with a peer, and that might be really important for some of those students who aren't going to get that 10 minutes of reading or 15 minutes of reading at another point.
Lori:Yeah, we appreciate that. That's a great point too. Thank you for so concisely answering that too, like a final plug for fluency.
Nathaniel Swain:It's really. It's awesome, like, and I think you can think too much about it and think, well, how do I make the fluency exercises more interesting and how do I get really crazy about it? And, like you know, depending on your age level and the level of challenge you've got, you might go more fancy and say let's do it through poetry or let's do some some some scripts that we've got developed and do a performance and that can be really helpful. But if you have to strip it back because you're limited for time or you're limited for what you can fit into your day, just doing those 10 minutes of peer peer reading or combined with some opportunities for choral and tract reading as well in your everyday sort of classroom teaching, that'll be a lot of fluency that you can build in, so it doesn't have to be a huge extra thing that you add in on top.
Lori:Very reassuring yeah.
Melissa:Thank you for sharing these, I think, really concrete practices with teachers. We really appreciate these takeaways that they can do in their classroom.
Nathaniel Swain:Oh it's, you know, it's the bread and butter of what we need to do to support each other.
Nathaniel Swain:I think, because in students sorry, in teachers that are making their transition to a classroom that does align with what we know about how we learn and how we learn to read specifically, there's a lot, there's a lot to think about and there's a, you know, you have to de implement at the same time that you implement, because you can't just keep adding things on top of each other. So if, when you look at your literacy block and when you think about what definitely needs to be there, you don't have to put in half an hour of fluency like 10 minutes, maybe 15 if you really need it, is sufficient so that you've got enough space for everything else that you're trying to do. And that's, that's the takeaways that, hopefully, to make teachers feel better about, you know, not bidding themselves up, they haven't made an hour for fluency sessions or you know a weekly thing, that they're constantly learning a new script and a new performance, and you know how do I fit in all these performances.
Nathaniel Swain:It doesn't have to be as elaborate of that elaborate as that all the time. It can actually be quite simple and quite a relaxing part of your day as well, if need be.
Lori:Yeah, that's helpful and I know it's like so motivating to for kids to see that or reading fluency number go up.
Lori:You know I we've talked, we talked about it with Jan Hasbrook, but I just another plug to for that motivation factor of kids knowing that their goal, seeing the number where they're at seeing themselves increase, and also the benefit of really teaching the idea of consistency, of practice over time and it's just a little bit, goes a really long way and that that to me is always like the big appeal with fluency. I just I adore flu, like the fluency instructional practices, because I think they're so much fun and I just think they're they're so like tangible for kids to see the results of and it's very motivating especially, you know my favorite grade to teach was fifth. So fifth graders are like the most competitive kids. You know age you could get, so that it was always a big thing. And you know, melissa, I know middle school too like they want to see themselves increase from their previous number and if you can get that idea of you against you, you know, and help them feel motivated, it's pretty awesome.
Nathaniel Swain:Exactly, and it's yeah, it's students being able to see their progress. I think, as you articulated, is so vital. It's. It's an opportunity for them to, yeah, just know that that daily practice is really paying off and that there is a point to all of this sort of work on it. You know, there's a point to doing phonics, there's a point to doing phonemic awareness, there's a point to learning about morphology, because it's not just for the sake of it, it's so that you, in those moments of reading interesting texts and coming across unfamiliar words and having a long sentence that you have to try and pull together, you have got sort of tools in your tool about that you can use and through daily practice it becomes more and more automatic and you, as we said before, you don't, you can stop thinking about it and you can focus on. What is this author actually trying to say to me?
Melissa:Well, I am really glad that you came on today and we're able to share all of this with us. We really appreciate all the work you're doing and being able to take time for us. We really appreciate it.
Nathaniel Swain:Thank you. It's always a pleasure to speak to passionate teachers and passionate educators, and I think you both, in the work that you're doing, really fit that the bill. So thank you for thinking of me as well.
Lori:Thank you. Same to you and we will link your think forward, educators, in the show notes as well.
Nathaniel Swain:Thank you so much.
Lori:Yeah, thanks for listening. Literacy lovers, to stay connected with us, sign up for our email list at literacypodcastcom.
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Lori:We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.