FROM FEBRUARY 24, 2023
In today’s episode, we discuss the structure and content of the literacy block. How can we teach using structured literacy in small groups? Kinder teacher Casey Jergens and author Natalie Wexler join us to connect theory and practice. Casey previously taught using a guided (leveled) reading approach with lots of small group time. In recent years, he’s switched to focus on Tier 1 instruction aligned to structured literacy, which supports access for all students.
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 FEBRUARY 24, 2023
In today’s episode, we discuss the structure and content of the literacy block. How can we teach using structured literacy in small groups? Kinder teacher Casey Jergens and author Natalie Wexler join us to connect theory and practice. Casey previously taught using a guided (leveled) reading approach with lots of small group time. In recent years, he’s switched to focus on Tier 1 instruction aligned to structured literacy, which supports access for all students.
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 Lori Love Literacy. Today we'll be talking to kindergarten teacher Casey Jergens about the big changes he experienced moving from balanced reading to structured literacy. He'll share what's changed in his overall literacy block, then get into the nuances of small group instruction. We also have returning guest Natalie Wexler with us to uplift some research about small group instruction. You might be surprised about the way we consider approaching small group time. We can't wait to keep learning together today. Welcome teacher friend. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two literacy educators in Baltimore.
Speaker 2: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, lori and I can't wait to keep learning about literacy with you today.
Speaker 1:Hi everyone, welcome to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Literacy Podcast. Today we are so excited because we are talking to a teacher who we met on Twitter. Thank you to the Twitterverse for this connection. He caught our attention because he dares to be different about his approach to small group instruction and it really resonated with us, so we wanted to learn more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so our guest today is Casey Juergens, and he's a long time first grade teacher, but he's new to kindergarten this year, so, but he'll talk to us about the changes in his instructional block and specifically around small group instruction, the changes he made on his journey as he learned about science of reading. And Lori didn't even mention we also have a special guest. I do, Natalie, that's all for you to say. Our old friend, natalie Wexler is here with us again, so she'll be popping in to give some information about small group instruction that she wrote about in a recent article, and, if you don't know, she's the author of the Knowledge Gap, which we've talked about a million times, so I can't imagine that you wouldn't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and co-author of the Writing Revolution. We can't forget that one, because we love that one too. Yes, that's great. I see some of them both on my desk at all times. So thank you, natalie, for those books.
Speaker 2:So welcome Casey, welcome Natalie.
Speaker 3:Yes, thank you.
Speaker 4:Thank you, great to be here.
Speaker 3:Yes, thank you very much.
Speaker 1:We're so glad you're here and I think, casey, I think we want to kick off a little bit by sharing your journey. So we know that there were big changes from guided reading to moving from guided reading to science of reading and I guess maybe even we should be saying structured literacy. I feel like there's a lot of debate now about the terminology, so I want to make sure we're using the right stuff. Can you share a bit about the big changes you experienced?
Speaker 3:Yeah, of course. So, like I said, I've taught first grade for quite a while and kind of at the beginning of my teaching career student teaching everything was really centered around balance, literacy and guided reading, which I know is very typical of a lot of people's stories. And so I was kind of thinking back to even my student teaching and how we structured the day in an ice cream, taught in a first grade classroom, and we really structured it through this lens of small group instruction. Everybody was in a guided reading group, a lot of mini lessons, no time for science and social studies whatsoever. And so then when I began teaching, I taught in an urban district for a while and I taught in a first grade classroom. So I just mimicked what I had seen, right, I trained everybody to do these wonderful centers and I had put everybody into a level guided reading group and I thought, oh, this is just so great and it really did it. The data was horrible, management was a mess, and that was really the first couple of years I was teaching. And then our district trained us all in Orton-Gillingham, which really started kind of that shift of oh, maybe there's a little bit of a different way to do this.
Speaker 3:So, kind of the next couple of years, we really started implementing a foundational skills block into our day. We were asked to do that using the Orton-Gillingham methodology, but we still kind of clung on to our guided reading and so it was like, well, we can do both. Right, we're going to still do guided reading and all these small groups. But, yeah, we've got Orton-Gillingham and it was just, it was a learning process. So each year I think I can really see a change of where oh, now I've learned a little bit more and we can implement another little change and slowly kind of phased out the guided reading because we saw there wasn't a need for it and it wasn't really being as impactful as what we were doing in our foundational skills block.
Speaker 3:And then slowly we transitioned something that a lot of teachers will do or at least a lot of teachers I've worked with kind of transitioned away from the guided reading groups and your Fountas and Pinae levels into now we're going to put everybody into a skills group. So I tried that for a while too, and it still was leading to a lot of gaps for a lot of students. Right, it was great that we were focusing on skills, but then it was still leading to, those kids in the lowest group were never catching up. So then it was like, well, let's think about this another way. And so over the past three or four years I've really focused on the whole group aspect and then thinking about small groups in a different way, where I'm really focusing on the students who need that extra dosage or going back and backfilling gaps for students. So that's kind of where we're at now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, euphir. The big picture definitely appreciate it. I want to dig in a little more. Can you take us back to guided reading? And for those who might not know exactly what that looks like, or they never taught it, they don't know what the FMP levels mean, can you just go into a little more detail about what that really looked like in your classroom?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so at the beginning of the year we'd get out our Fountas and Pinae benchmark assessment system box and do all these running records, see where everybody's at. Okay, we've got our level A's, our level B's, our level C's, and that's really how we organize students. We were not doing any diagnostic screeners. We were not. There was no focus on phonemic awareness or phonics. It was really centered around these levels. And then it was also so I would have upwards of five or six different groups at a time and then also thinking about what the other kids were doing. So when I started teaching, something that was really big at the time was what we would consider the daily five right. So which is just an approach to how you would structure your literacy block. And if we just have kids do these five things while the teacher is working with small groups, then just magic is going to happen. And we even had a kit for our guided reading where, let's say, I would have a level B group. I didn't really know anything about these B's and I would just start with the first B book in the set and we'd work our way through the B's and when we were done with B's we'd move on to the C's and we just kind of got as far as we did and there was really no purpose to why I was meeting with that group. I didn't really. It wasn't closing any gaps, and then what the other students were doing was kind of sporadic and chaotic as well. What kinds of things were they doing? So you know, one of the things that we would do, if you were thinking about the daily five or other models you know, we would think about students doing independent reading, reading with partners, doing word work, working on writing and doing some sort of listening to reading or kind of a computer center. So all the kids would be spread out throughout the room and I'd spent all this time and money making these centers and so we'd train them how to do read to self. Well, almost none of my kids could read, so they're going over and this is where, at the time, we were putting them into their just right books.
Speaker 3:So our classroom library was, you know, here are the A's, here are the B's, here are the C's, and you're a level C, so you're going to pick five books from this C basket and then you can also pick, you know, a few other special books or something like that, and then we would train them to build stamina and really all they were doing was sitting and looking at picture books, right, or making up stories. And then after a few minutes kids are rolling around, they're wearing half or books on their head and talking to their friends. So that we're talking about first graders, right, first graders, yeah. And then you know, we would have we had for reading to partner. We would train them how to sit next to a partner, read with a partner, when neither students could really read and there was. There wasn't a lot of strategy to how the partners were laid out, it just happened to be who was in your group. And for this we would do big books, right. So we had this big book center and students would pick a big book and then they'd look through it together and they were supposedly reading, right.
Speaker 3:And then I had a writing station where we just had this great, you know, vocabulary wall with pictures and all sorts of different writing things and students would go over there and it was a time for them to write about whatever they want.
Speaker 3:You know, and I remember my first year of teaching, I had this boy who wrote every day of the writing center he wrote I love my mom and then drew a picture Sweet, it's nice, but for 180 days that's what he wrote and I had no idea how to move him out of that, you know, and in my mind it was like, well he's, he's busy over there doing that, so we're just going to let it be right.
Speaker 3:So a lot of drawing, a lot of somewhat writing, and then word work is always an interesting one, because this is one I see a lot still where this is really, where, like websites, like teachers, be teachers come in, where we were buying so many things cutting and gluing and there were words, swords and activities that kids were doing, not a really a ton of accountability.
Speaker 3:And the problem with things like a cutting and gluing activity is kids would spend that 15 minutes cutting and gluing and that was it, and then they may be not, they maybe didn't even do anything else except cut and glue, and then it's time to move on to the next thing, and so that was just kind of I call it like a hodgepodge of whatever activities we could find, and I think we tried to align it to our phonics, scope and sequence in a way, but it still really wasn't meeting what kids needed.
Speaker 3:And then the last center that we would have kids do was a listening to reading center, which kind of ended up being you know, we go on the iPads, and they would just use whatever apps we could find for free. So whether they were actually doing anything on these iPads I don't know. So, and then that allowed me to pull all these groups, so I would usually see five groups a day and everybody would go do these center activities, and that really took up the majority of our literacy block. So that's really what it looks like at the beginning.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have so many thoughts on that and I do want to get Natalie involved in the conversation, but I feel like I want to name that we're talking about a lot of different things here. We're talking about vocabulary instruction. We're talking about writing. We're talking about reading. We're talking about foundational skills. We're talking, I mean, I think every plus classroom management, like every, I think, avenue for literacy instruction is what we are seeing in this conversation and I think you're illuminating it through this smog of time. We're talking about old practices, moving to new practices. I kind of want to make sure we all are normed on that. Like what is guided reading? And like, because you've thought you've said guided reading, leveled reading, and we're kind of also talking about the shift to some teachers pulling small groups for foundational skills and I think those are two different things, right? So what we're talking about guided reading, we're talking about focusing quote on comprehension through leveled books and there's not a ton of foundational skills instruction within that time. Is that right, casey?
Speaker 3:That's right, and I think I personally I use guided reading and leveled reading really synonymously, so, which is kind of a mistake I should do.
Speaker 1:No, no no, no, I just wanted to call it out, not because you did it, but I think, like we have, we hear often about leveled libraries, right, but then we also hear often about this practice called guided reading, and those two things are kind of connected because we're using a leveling, like a leveled book system, to execute guided reading, where you're talking about, like student start in the B books and then move to the C books and move on, but then we also may have leveled libraries in classrooms as a practice that we know is now ineffective through this body of research called the science of reading. So I think that's like, I just think it is going to be used interchangeably because of the way that guided reading is using the leveled materials. Like I think in conversation I've heard teachers use that interchangeably. I've used it myself.
Speaker 1:When I was what you said, casey, I was like having so many pictures in my mind of when I was a second grade teacher, when you were like the books on their head and they're rolling around. I was like, oh my gosh, right now, yeah, I really see that. But I guess I would love to hear a little bit from Natalie, like before we even kind of dive into your the piece and the connectedness of it, like what are your initial reactions right now with all that you know? As someone who's not been a teacher, you know.
Speaker 4:Well, I haven't been a teacher, but I have spent time in class. In fact, when I was researching the book, one of the classrooms I followed through school year was the first grade classroom, and Casey's description is pretty much what I saw, and I think I mean that's. I guess the first thing that struck me when I walked into this classroom was that there were all these tables and there was this kidney shaped table in the corner and the teacher. So there are 20 kids and teachers working with like five at the same time. And I have to say my first impression was of noise. This was a class that happened to have 14 boys and six girls and there was a lot of noise and one teacher. Basically sometimes she had a sort of grandmother helper, but I just it was like a three ring circus. It just didn't seem like there was any way one teacher.
Speaker 4:These were six year olds and they were supposed to be directing their own learning, and this is leaving aside whether there was anything worthwhile that could have been going on at those centers, given what they were supposed to be doing. But they weren't often even doing what they were supposed to be doing. And so, you know, I was like what's going on here, like how does this work? And it took me a while to sort of figure out where this came from, and in fact there's it's not sort of grounded in evidence, I think this system it seems like, oh well, this is just the way it's always been and this is the way we do it.
Speaker 4:And of course it's got to be better than having kids all set at desks and rows, because that's like from the 19th century or 20th century, and actually this did come in and a lot or part of the 20th century, and I think it was imported from the English what was called infant school and the idea was there. It was very, you know, progressive. There was a lot of progressive, constructivist stuff going on between England and the United States. I don't think either country really benefited from it, and so the idea of the infant school is that, you know, kids just wandered from station to station or center to center at will. There was no set curriculum at all. They did whatever they wanted and that morphed into and that was maybe for the whole school.
Speaker 4:That fortunately went by the wayside. But what we are left with is this legacy of let kids move around from center to center and sort of direct their own learning, although it's much more restricted now because there are levels of the. You know you can't just choose anything to read. You know you have to choose from your level, etc. So it seems more scientific, but in fact there's still no real science behind it. If I could just, I guess, summarize what science there is, there are studies showing that kids do benefit, as you might expect, from like working in a small group directly with a teacher, right, of course, it kind of depends on what they're working on, but that seems to be canceled out by the majority of their time being spent without any teacher's guidance, doing things that may not have much educational value.
Speaker 2:Can I ask Casey really quick? Natalie, I was curious about that, like how much time were they with you versus how much time were they out in the centers?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I actually had to go back and work this out and do it and you know, if you have a typical two hour literacy block, you might say our rotations usually were about 20 minutes times five. So if they were in one group they were easily working independently for 60 to 80 minutes a day and in some classrooms that might be a lot less. But that was kind of typical for my first few years of teaching. The less whole group time was what we were told was better.
Speaker 1:What like stands out to me about that being a parent is I cannot even imagine like if I were a parent who had three kids, pulling one over to the side and being like let's read this book together or whatever we're doing, and the other two are just causing chaos in the background. I mean, I'm just thinking like times that by by what five. Imagine all those kids in your, your house.
Speaker 2:And you're an hour like chaos, laurie. It's like how much is actually like going on? What do they really do, even if they're like, yeah, hey, babe right, I know, I know we interrupted you, natalie.
Speaker 4:That's okay. No, but you're. You're right and I. But what I was gonna say is that the net result seems to be that the kids who are the In the higher reading groups, who are already doing pretty well, they benefit the most from small group instruction and the kids who, if they're supposed to be benefiting the most the ones at the lower reading groups, they don't move up, and so this practice seems to actually widen the gap between the highest and lowest achieving readers. Obviously not intentionally, but that seems to be the net effect. And if I I mean there's.
Speaker 4:There's one other thing that I can mention here, which is what struck me first, was that the noise level in these classrooms, and More recently I was reading a book by a woman named Annie Murphy Paul, who's an education writer, called the extended mind, and she was writing you know, it wasn't really that much focused on K through 12 schools.
Speaker 4:She was writing about open plan offices and all these studies showing that the noise level in open plan offices Is really distracting and interferes with productivity. One would think and it was. It started in the 50s. It was cheaper just to tear the walls down and there was this theory that it would lead to Collaboration and increased productivity. But no, the opposite really happens. And I just I wondered well, what about these classrooms, these sort of open plan classrooms, where there's this fairly high noise level and even when it's not that high, the teachers always talking to this one group and and it turns out that their studies showing that Children are even more sensitive to background noise and be distractible as a result of background noise than it then adults. So we're hard, we're a hard wire to be distracted by, especially the sound of human voices.
Speaker 2:I also. I because, casey, when you did your overview you, you said that basically there's like a step in between when you are now and I'm. I would love to hear that. That like basically you kind of kept, like you kept the small group structure but changed to science of reading. I'd love to talk through like what you learned during that period too, before you got to the like what really works.
Speaker 3:There were a couple of years where there was like a shift right, that big shift where we were training on Gillingham. So then it was told, we were told by our district you need to have a minimum of 45 minutes whole group where we're teaching. And that's really where I started learning about what I'm doing now. But then we probably had it was probably less time than it was, I think maybe a 45 minutes when we would see like three groups and then the kids would go to a couple different activities or centers and then we still were doing like readers workshop and writers workshop. So this was taking, you know, the majority of our day, right, hey, and no, no time for content. But when we were doing the skills-based approach, we started using, like the corphonic survey or screeners, and that's how we put kids into groups and you know I might have a group that's working on learner sounds of, another group is learning about Magic E and another group is learning about, you know, our controlled vowels and then maybe in our whole group time we're learning about digraphs, right. So now you're kind of all over the place based on this and I think what it led to it sounds really great because you're pinpointing oh, these kids are ready to move on to this, but it didn't always tell you like all the holes that they might have.
Speaker 3:And Then it also there were a lot of like rules of things. So like an example might be you know the CK rule after a short vowel. A lot of kids didn't know that. They maybe knew how to read those words, but did they know how to spell them? No, but we just moved them on anyway. So we were still creating all these holes and kids were really confused because then what we were working on at whole group time Was not aligned to what they were doing in small group time and then maybe what they were asked, being asked to do at a center time was even something else different. And it just it was hard, it was hard to implement. So it sounds kind of really nice Theoretically, but it was hard to implement.
Speaker 2:And it sounds better than like the level B, where you're like I don't even know what we're doing, we're just pulling out the level B bugs, like at least you were like okay, I assess them, I See where their gaps are, I'm gonna do something about that. So it seemed like a step in the right direction.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think it was. And I think it was. And then I think the kind of the shift after that was actually when the school district I was working for previously, we adopted a content building curriculum EL education was the one we did and we adopted their the content strand and they also have a skills block strand. We chose to continue with the work we had already previously done and that's where it was like, well, where are we going to fit in this hour of content literacy? And you know, it kind of replaced our reading and writing workshop. But we also then, you know, we kind of went back and forth and that's kind of when we developed the model of like, well, maybe we don't need to be seeing you know five different groups, because we also weren't seeing kids every day.
Speaker 3:So some kids were being asked to spend 45 minutes or an hour Away from the teacher, never being seen in a group. Oh, we don't have to worry about them, they're at grade level kind of thing. And so that's where we went through and said, let's think about this a little bit different. We've already got this really great whole group I set up. And then, what is right after we teach this, you know, 45 minutes or an hour of whole group. We then just really meet with the kids that need the extra dosage, and there were, you know, there's a lot of things that I can add to that of how we like made those groups and decided what whole group we were doing, and that's kind of. Then we were using that data to kind of really inform those instructional pieces versus just opening up you know the scope and sequence says we're going to start here, so this is what we're going to work on this week, and that's really where what we're doing now kind of evolved from.
Speaker 2:Can you dig into those details a little? I'm ready.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So kind of what? The literacy block? Sometimes I don't always like that term right, we can do that literacy all day. But if you're thinking about a two hour literacy block, really about half of the time is devoted to that decoding piece, your foundational literacy piece, and then about half of the time to your content literacy piece, and most of that time is done whole group. That doesn't mean we're sitting in rows, that doesn't mean we're just sitting. You know it's very. You know I'm teaching kindergarten that we're switching up every five to six minutes throughout those blocks of time. It's very engaging and interactive, but I am with the kids all the time.
Speaker 3:And then we, for the foundational skills hour, we would teach for about 45 minutes and then the last 15 minutes I would just pull the students that really needed gaps filled in. Now, if there were years where I would, you know, my class would start 30% of kids on grade level, 20% of kids on grade level. So then what does that look like? I'm not going to put 80% of my students in a tier two intervention. So that's really where we leaned on those diagnostic assessments, our universal screener assessment, but then also our diagnostic assessments, and that's where we would go through and go okay, where do we need to begin at? Whole group, what's our data telling us for whole group? And then who are kind of the outliers that may need something on top of that? So, for example, you know, one year we do.
Speaker 3:We always start with a letter sounds assessment in first grade and the letter sounds assessment was just all over the place. There were so many gaps. So my team was like you know what? I think, even though it's first grade, we need to go back and reteach letter sounds. So we took 26 days to have a letter sound, a day with formation letter names started into CVC words. And if we hadn't done that or the whole rest of our year, we would have just been fighting a battle. We went back and said, okay, whole group, this is where we need to go. And then at the end of those 26 days it was like, okay, now who is still not quite mastered those, we're moving on to the next thing. But oh, these four kids still have some gaps in their letter sounds. Great, there's my small group that I'm going to see. And you know, until they've mastered those, then we can kind of move on to the next thing. And so that really changed how we looked at that foundational skills block or foundational skills power.
Speaker 2:So then you have about 15 minutes, you said, for pulling the very targeted yeah, our groups. What are the other students do during that time?
Speaker 3:So I think one important thing to note is you know kind of your most high needs students are not get really getting this independent time right. They're with me in that group or we're in a whole group setting and that doesn't mean they never have downtime to, you know, read or draw or whatever. The rest of the students were really working on targeted tasks aligned to our current skill. So if we were working on you know AI and a why that we, then we would go through and pick really targeted skills. So, for example, I might have students rereading decodable readers you know what for fluency, and they were so much more engaged in that because they weren't just picking self selected books, they could read them and they really liked practicing those. And you know you could add in some different ways to motivate them. And then last year in first grade I would do like I'd give them a decodable passage they'd have to go through and highlight all of our you know the words with a why. Then there were maybe just be a few like basic comprehension questions that I would ask. And you know the nice thing about that was they were doing was there was a accountability piece to it, right, and it was routine. They knew how it worked. It was much quieter. Students were working maybe at their tables or desks. They may be on the floor, but it was wasn't all over the place with materials.
Speaker 3:And then occasionally we add in some writing tasks, either, aligned to the skills, so I might give them a word bank of words with a why, and then they would have to use those words in their writing. Okay, and then the other thing we would do was tie it to our whatever we were working on in content. So if we were in first grade, one of our big units was on birds. So then we had already built all this background knowledge about birds, and then I would kind of give them, you know, a writing template about birds. And then they just went crazy with their writing because they actually had something to write about. Right, they had knowledge about this topic and it wasn't just write about, you know, whatever you want, kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Right right, I love my mom for 180 days. Right yeah, Natalie, I'm wondering if you want to add anything or share anything that you might be thinking about. What Casey is?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean, I guess one thing that I've been thinking about is that we're talking about both structure and also sort of content, and so it would be possible to have whole group instruction. That doesn't work very well because you're not teaching things that are actually meaningful. So I just, you know, I think we might want to clarify the distinctions here. And the other thing that occurs to my mind is, you know, when I've seen guided reading and using small groups, it's been mostly, I think, focused on comprehension skills with like oh, you're having trouble reading that word, let me help you, like read that particular word but not so much on decoding and also and so Casey's been referring to skills and often I think there's some fusion between decoding skills, or foundational skills, and comprehension skills. So I just feel like there's a lot of different things that are being discussed here. That and I hope that it's not confusing to listeners.
Speaker 1:No, please. Yeah, I'm sorry, I think. I agree. I think anytime we can clarify that is important and I'm wondering, casey, if you have anything to to share and reaction to that, like clarifying skills and things like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I definitely I can see what you're saying about that, I think when I'm talking about I mean in my reference so far, when talking about skills really has been on like those foundational skills for anemic awareness, bonnet, fluency, those types of pieces. And I think something interesting to note is like when a lot of this these ships happened in how I Structured the small group time was really when we shifted away from, like our comprehension skill of the week, which a lot of times then we were asking kids to do something with at their independent time, because now we had this whole hour where we were really digging into, instead of a comprehension skill or task, it was now focused on our content and then that's kind of removed away from the foundational skills lock.
Speaker 4:So I don't, I don't know if that really clarifies a little bit, but and I think, well, I think there are a lot of classrooms that are not really trying to teach any content in the literacy block, and so you could have. I Guess what I'm thinking is well, you, you could take away from this discussion. Well, I could do, I should do a whole class instruction on comprehension skills and strategies for an hour, and that's probably not going to work very well either, because we know that you know those kinds of skills and strategies of limited value and that what is really key to comprehension, especially comprehending more complex text, is Building background knowledge, building familiarity with the complex syntax of written language and those things. And I do think that that Kind of content focused instruction really lends itself very well to whole group All you know, whole class instruction, and one of the advantages of it is it gives the kids who Maybe are not as advanced and they're decoding their foundational skills.
Speaker 4:It gives them access to rich content, complex text and to participation in class discussion about that content. And all of that is going To help them absorb and retain vocabulary, familiarity with complex syntax. That is going to kick in when their foundational skills Catch up to where their oral language skills are and they're listening comprehension is. It's going to enable them to read at a higher level Once they can decode Fluently, because they'll have they don't they'll have the background knowledge stored in long-term memory, and we know from studies that that is a real boost to comprehension and and, of course, to writing as well. So I just wanted to get that in there.
Speaker 3:Well and I'll like. I think, when we're talking about, like, some of the shifts that I made, it has kind of brought some of that back. You know, one of the things we did not want to give up when we were working with level text was Because we were saying, well, we're also working in comprehension. This is where students are working in comprehension and reading for meaning. But we would go through, let's say, our skill of the week was, you know, finding the main idea. That Then I'd go through all five of my groups and I try to pick a text. That was like working on finding the main idea. But that's really hard or impossible to do when you're reading a level, a book. You know I mean, that's just you're not doing that. But we were like, can you?
Speaker 1:see why. Why is that hard to do?
Speaker 3:Well, let's say, you're reading, you know, at the park and it's. You know, I like to swing, I like to slide, I like to run, and then you know what's the main idea of this book.
Speaker 1:I like to do things at the park.
Speaker 3:I don't know, you know, I mean it just you know you're not, and then we were like well, that's. We're working on comprehension, though, and it's yeah, that's, that's what I saw too.
Speaker 4:I mean, I remember observing one small group, I think was a level C book, it was brown bear, brown bear, what do you see? And the skill that was supposedly being taught was, I believe, main idea. And I said to the teacher, like what's the main idea here of brown bear? She said well, I'm gonna just try to get them to see there's this pattern and that's. I mean, it was like Right.
Speaker 1:So I think if we can kind of shift now, what do you, what do you see in your students with a? Because you've taught using a knowledge building, content rich curricula, what would you see students like? For example, you want to run with that bird idea without the bird content idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah like.
Speaker 1:Can you tell us a little bit about what you see, or what you saw in students as they like? What does it truly look like to to teach you know and comprehension, which I kind of use that loosely to say that so?
Speaker 3:Well, especially in kindergarten and first grade, we're now focusing on the listening comprehension piece. And that's not that we never transition kids into reading their own texts and comprehending those texts. Obviously that's our goal for reading, but Students aren't always able to read those high quality texts that really lend themselves to these great comprehension pieces on their own. So now I'm reading aloud those books which are usually above our, our grade level, which we never would have done before, and Everybody is has access to that.
Speaker 3:Just because you don't know your letter sounds or you're in whatever group, you can still listen and comprehend what we're doing, and then you can apply that to your writing, you can apply that to our, our discussions we're having in class, and and so on and and so far. So like it really creates this access to content and comprehension for everybody in the class when we weren't doing. I mean, that just wasn't happening before and students really just never got the opportunity to move past those low-level stages. And I think some of the things that really changed my mindset is when I saw some of those students who maybe were struggling readers but they're telling me facts about birds and they're you know, they know all of these things, and it's like, oh, and this is really going to help you later on too, after you know, when you do know how to decode and read, and so that's Kind of what I would add to that.
Speaker 2:I'm super curious about this question, how you both would answer this question, because you're taking me back, casey, I actually taught EL just for one year, but it was in sixth grade and I remember very distinctly I had an administrator who said that she wanted me to start doing small group instruction. Mind you, I had like a 45 minute block. It's a teach to students EL, and I was supposed to also do a small group instruction. So it was a lot. But I also struggled with the how do I do this With? There's sixth graders, so we're not really talking about.
Speaker 2:Some of them probably still did need some foundational skills, but I didn't have the assessments for it. I didn't have the time to do that within my own classroom. So if I'm looking at the EL curriculum, I'm looking at more comprehension. I struggled with exactly like what do I do? I don't want to do? Oh, so they took this assessment, they got this inference question wrong, so now I'm working on inferences with them. That didn't make sense to me. I think what I did do was like I think they're not getting this text that we're reading right now. So I was trying to help them through with that specific text. I don't even know if that was the right way to go with it. But I'd love to hear what you both would say, especially Casey, from in the younger grades. Do you do any small group instruction with the comprehension side, the knowledge building side, of your curriculum?
Speaker 3:So I wouldn't say it's really like a set small group. There were times when maybe we were working on an independent writing task, there might be some kids that I would pull over to provide more support to or like a scaffold to for whatever that was. Maybe those students got additional writing prompts or I had, you know, you had to kind of guide them along a little bit because they weren't as independent with their writing skills and some of that came with, like with the comprehension piece too. I taught, you know, my class was always, you know, 50 to 60% of students were multilingual learners, so there was a lot of those vocabulary pieces. So sometimes, you know, we would, in conjunction with my like multi-label partner teacher, she might come in and pre-teach some things and her group right that she knew we were going to talk about. So those were kind of the ways we approached like the small group piece. It was really just as needed for students, but there was no structure to it per se.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Can I ask you see when she would come in and pre-teach? Would she come in and do something like today we're going to be doing inferences here's what an inferences and then bloody, bloody blah. Or would it be? Today we're going to be learning about and here are some vocabulary words you might see, or something of this sort. I'm just curious what it looked like to really be specific here, so that when we talk about, like pre-teaching or front loading, how that could look for our students who might need more support. Quote in comprehension.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was always tied to the content. So we'll go back to the birds piece. It might be, you know, if she's taking them. You know, let's build some background knowledge even beforehand about just some vocabulary that we might talk about, maybe just looking at a diagram of a bird and talking about, you know, the beak and the wings and the feathers, and then you know, in whole group, those students were like oh yeah, I know a little bit about this too, which just kind of helped. I'll also add some of that that those pre-teaching pieces were also just so beneficial for all students, right. So, but it was just a way to kind of bring those kind of two groups together.
Speaker 3:And I think something important to note that I honestly struggled with when moving to the content building curriculum was moving away from the comprehension skill of the week. Right, it was like, okay, I'm teaching this unit on birds and today we're asking questions and now tomorrow we're going to retell some facts about this story and then the next day. But it was because we had moved away from that piece and it was more about the content and I don't think we had to teach kids. You know, this is how you make an inference. It just kind of lent itself to that right as you're reading these high quality texts and asking the right questions, right. So it really truly moved away from that comprehension skill piece.
Speaker 4:If I could jump in. It reminds me of when I was following this second grade class, and they were using a curriculum called Core Knowledge, language Arts, and they would be making inferences and predictions and comparing and contrasting right and left in the context of Athens and Sparta and the War of 1812. But this school, this class, they were also still doing leveled reading, and they had a time set aside for comprehension skills with level text. And these same kids who I had just seen comparing Athens and Sparta, they were not getting the difference between the Canadian Thanksgiving and American Thanksgiving, that they're in different months, and it wasn't, you know. And so was that because they couldn't make inferences? No, maybe they were bored by this little text about Thanksgiving or whatever.
Speaker 4:So I do think, though, it is important to make sure that students have a literal understanding of the main points of a read aloud. There are different ways to do that. I think. With older kids, writing can be brought in as a very effective way of not just teaching writing skills, important as that is, but as a comprehension check, and you can do sentence level activities. They don't take long and, you know, often kids are not going to raise their hand and say you know, hey, I didn't understand, like whatever.
Speaker 4:But if you give them a quick writing activity and it's well designed, you find out very quickly who did not understand what you thought they understood. And then of course you don't want to stop with literal questions. But I think often teachers have been trained to think we don't want to waste time on just literal comprehension, we want to go straight to those higher order thinking skills synthesis, analysis, etc. When eventually you do want to get there but you can't get there unless you first make sure that kids have literally understood what you think they have understood. So a good curriculum, I think, is going to be structured in such a way that it'll start with the teacher asking questions that test literal comprehension and then move on to more higher, like let's make, you know, not let's make an inference, but a question that implicitly requires kids to make an inference or draw a conclusion or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's helpful. Natalie, I think it's where I was going with my, where I wanted my small group instruction to go. I don't know that I was ever successful with it, so don't don't look at me as a model for it, but I think that's. You know, I kind of was thinking well, if they're not understanding the key points of because we're reading a whole novel right in the sixth grade, so if they're missing things at the very beginning that are just the literal understanding of this, I'm losing them for a whole quarter. So I wanted that's where I was, instead of, you know, just doing random practice on different types of questions. It was like I want to make sure they understand this text so that they can do that more difficult work as we keep on moving.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm wondering is there anything that you both have to say that you haven't said yet, that you'd like to share or add to any thoughts that you've maybe previously started and hadn't finished, or you just really want our listeners to know about what we've talked about today?
Speaker 3:I'll add that I think, when you're making these shifts in small groups because I was one of those people that was so set in my way, you know, and I know I've been teaching you for a few years, right, so I was like I know that this is what we have to be doing and this is what you know, in our whole day was really built around these small groups of instruction and I think a lot of people this is where we start with we start by moving to, you know, structured literacy or, as you know, set work, where we're kind of trying to move away from just calling it science of reading, because now I see a lot of classrooms are like well, we do science of reading and I can still do my small groups in science of reading, but it really also needs to add in that knowledge piece.
Speaker 3:Right, they go hand in hand because you know, my first four years of teaching, we almost taught no science or social studies or it was, you know, just integrated through a read aloud that we did. And then, as we moved away from the small group, it allowed me more time for science and social studies, right, like I teach kindergarten this year and we have a dedicated science block with content literacy and a dedicated social studies block with content literacy that these kids are engaging in daily. If I was still doing an hour or plus of small groups, we would not have time for that piece, so it really does go hand in hand together when you're making these changes and I think that's just. It's been so beneficial for the kids.
Speaker 2:Yeah, such a good point. Thank you for bringing up the whole day, not even just the literacy block, but what it can do for the whole day. Thank you.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I think, following up on that point, I mean you know sometimes people feel like, well, I don't have time to do all these things, that. But we waste a lot of time in the current structure. A lot of this time spent in small group rotation is wasted. So there is enough time in the school day if we just use the time more wisely.
Speaker 4:And I guess one other point I'd like to make is the it's going to be tremendously helpful for a teacher if the school or the district has adopted a good curriculum that covers it does a good job, covering both foundational skills and the comprehension I would call it, you know, building knowledge piece, because it's not just that we want kids to memorize facts about content, but if you are not giving them rich content to sink their teeth into, they will not become good comprehenders. And it's hard for individual teachers to come up with all of these things on their own. Plus, all of these things, especially building knowledge, extend over across grade levels, periods of years, and only a curriculum is going to be able to sequence these things in a logical way so that kids will have the knowledge they need to learn the next thing the curriculum expects them or the teacher expects them to learn. So yeah, that's what I would add.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we get a lot of questions about that too, Natalie, in our inbox. Like I don't have a knowledge building curriculum, what do I do? And I always think it's fairly impossible to build the knowledge in the sequential way across the grade level and within the grade level and then across the grade levels, across the grade bands, in the way that a knowledge building curriculum would and does. So I think what I think this conversation is making me think so much about I wrote it down is that tier one is so, so important in terms of what happens in structure and content. I think that that is like the biggest takeaway for anyone listening and how we're thinking about maximizing that instructional time and, Casey, I think your journey really illuminates that for our listeners.
Speaker 3:I think, like what you're saying about tier one I think that is where you know when my shifts happened that's because I saw in tier one that that's where we could close those gaps for students in foundational skills and in our content and comprehension skills. So because before we were just trying to almost over differentiate for students and it wasn't working the way we thought it was. And I still see a lot of this happening in our schools where it's like, well, I have to see all these kids in group and well, oh, you never see those higher readers in a group. You know I have to see them and work on these things and it just never felt like a good use of time. It never felt like, you know, it's like there has to be a way we can do this together.
Speaker 3:And if I look back at data, you know, from the first four years of teaching to the next couple, and you know, last year in first grade, you know I saw I had 95% of kids at grade level at the end of the year. This year in kindergarten, you know we got we are 100% of kids meeting the winter benchmark in kindergarten and I truly attest because it's because of tier one, it's not because of you know, I put everybody into a specific group. I also would add you know, I think about some students that I have this year. If I would have started them in a group, let's say working on letter names, for the first six weeks of school, and not allowed them the opportunities to engage in anything else, they would not have probably met that winter benchmark, they would not be as far there along. And it's because I was using a really high quality tier one whole group piece and then just focusing on the specific needs for those specific students in a small group setting very sparingly.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad you said that. I mean, I think it's a general misconception that if we're closing any gaps, we're looking at tier two, tier three, right Small groups or one on one. That's where that happens. So I'm just really glad you brought that up, that it can happen and can happen very well in tier one instruction, maybe even better and better use of time.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I actually saw a piece yesterday that I knew we were having this conversation today and I was thinking, oh my goodness, like I saw the headline and I thought this is why I think, like teachers and principals are confused, and it was in the 74 and it was about how we were trying to, I guess, repair the or fill in gaps from the COVID learning loss through tutoring and small groups.
Speaker 1:And that to me, I was thinking well, what about if we just fix tier one first, not first? Maybe we fix tier one and, right, casey, like you just described, have a strong tier one in place and fill in gaps as needed. So I think if we miss that tier one, we're completely missing the boat for all of our kids. And that just struck me, and so I'm so glad that you're here today to have this conversation. I'm so glad that you shared it in the way that you did, with such clear examples for everyone, and that Natalie shared what the research says and all of this important information about your experiences in classrooms too. To just kind of illuminate that, it's bigger than Casey's classroom. Right, I'm sharing it happened in my classroom, melissa's like oh, I didn't really know what was going on either. So thank you for both for being here.
Speaker 3:Of course, my pleasure.
Speaker 1:Thanks. Can we wrap with a couple rapid fire questions? Do you have time? I know we're a few minutes over. Do we want to escape without that, or would you like to?
Speaker 3:No, that sounds good.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Melissa, I'll turn it to you. All right, we're going to start with one for Natalie. You may have done this before. I don't remember what your answers were. If you did, so, it's okay. What do you love to read?
Speaker 4:Well, I love to read fiction. I mean, that's what I read for pleasure, and I don't often get enough time for it, but I will see Right now I'm reading a book that this happens to me. I've had a book on my shelf for like 15 years. It's called the Dive From Claus and Spear and I'm really enjoying it Nice.
Speaker 1:Casey, what do you love to watch?
Speaker 3:Oh, I think it really depends. There's a lot, but I tend to. There's a lot of true crime and a lot of dramas. Currently I'm on a rewatch of all 19 seasons of Grey's Anatomy, so that's been filling up my time, so All right.
Speaker 1:Natalie, what do you love to listen to?
Speaker 4:I love to listen to well, all sorts of things, but mostly I like to listen to sort of jazz that's, but not just really from the American songbook, like popular songs from the 40s, but not with words, because I remember this background, not his distraction. Like I, often I'm cooking or reading the newspaper or whatever, and so I don't necessarily want to get distracted by the words. So that's what I like to listen to. I get that.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 2:Last question for you, Casey why do you do what you love for education and literacy?
Speaker 3:I mean, I think most teachers say this, but we're really doing it for the students. I think my reason 10 years ago was much different than it is now. And I think so much of what I continue to do and advocate for and being on the podcast is because I've seen what structured literacy and building students' background knowledge of an array of content topics can really do to close gaps and provide opportunities for a lot of times for our neediest students who we've traditionally left behind. And that's just where my passion is and we'll continue to do that, moving forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, thank you both so much. We've linked your Twitter handles and, natalie, we've linked your article that we referenced here today, and so everybody can find you all on Twitter and beyond, and we're just super grateful that you took some time to talk with us. Thank, you.
Speaker 4:Thank you, thanks for having us.
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