Melissa and Lori just returned from the Plain Talk About Literacy & Learning Conference in New Orleans and they will share their takeaways with YOU! Attendees called in while at the conference to share aha moments and key takeaways. You won't want to miss this one!
2024 Plain Talk Conference Presenters
Podcast Episodes We Mentioned
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.
Melissa and Lori just returned from the Plain Talk About Literacy & Learning Conference in New Orleans and they will share their takeaways with YOU! Attendees called in while at the conference to share aha moments and key takeaways. You won't want to miss this one!
2024 Plain Talk Conference Presenters
Podcast Episodes We Mentioned
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. We just returned from the Plain Talk about Literacy and Learning Conference in New Orleans and learned so much.
Melissa:This episode elevates our takeaways about structured literacy and learning from the Plain Talk conference. Let's jump in.
Lori:Hi teacher friends. I'm Laurie and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.
Melissa:We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.
Lori:We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing.
Melissa:Laurie, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today.
Jen:My name is Jen and my biggest takeaway from the Plain Talk conference is that the learning journey is lifelong. At any session you went to, you could run into speakers from other sessions sitting in on their colleagues learning new things, and that reminded me that the learning is lifelong and to never stop learning. No matter how far along in my career I am, I can always learn something new.
Melissa :Hi, my name is Melissa and my biggest takeaway from Plain Talk I actually have two. It was so amazing to be able to sit in and listen to Dr Erie talk about her work, and then her additional suggestions on how to move students in instruction, and then Dr Cable's emphasis on the importance of conversation and five critical turns you can make.
Elise:Hi, my name is Elise Lovejoy and I'm calling because I attended a session by Lorraine Hammond and she had an incredible presentation on the urgency and prompting that needs to happen in our classes and during my intervention sessions today, I required the kids to respond more often and at a faster pace. It was very successful and I very much appreciated listening to her talk about how all children can read, no matter can learn to read, no matter the zip code that they live in.
Lori:We are debriefing the Plain Talk conference today, sharing what we learned from speakers and sessions. So, melissa, I know this is so exciting because we just got back from the conference and learned so much.
Melissa:Yeah, from New Orleans, which is one of my favorite places. Yeah. I used to teach there. I did. I used to teach there and live there, obviously. So, yeah, it was so fun to be in New Orleans, but we learned so much. I mean, by the end I was. My brain was full, for sure, all the way full.
Lori:Yeah, I was exhausted from my brain working overtime, but we are going to recap our sessions today that we learned, or that we that we were in and learned so much in.
Melissa:Some of them. We should say that I mean, we'd be here all day if we did all of them.
Lori:We chose a sampling and we tried to vary our choices.
Melissa:But we saw a lot and learned a lot. So do you want to kick us off, Lori?
Lori:I'd love to. So I saw a session titled Building Stronger Readers Through Spelling with Pam Castner, and my favorite thing that came out of this session was this takeaway when you're teaching spelling, you're teaching reading. Spelling is a window into reading needs and also, I should say, reading strengths, so that's really helpful. I also appreciated that Pam sent everyone from the session on the way with a padlet with resources. I feel like she really gets teachers knowing that everybody wants to learn after the session. So you know, when you can spell a word, you can read a word, but the opposite isn't always true. And she took us through a little exercise where we all thought we were excellent readers and spellers and then we realized, oh, we can spell some really tricky words, like fuchsia, but we can read them. And if we are going to implement a spelling scope and sequence to align with what we're doing, it should be least complex to most complex and most frequent to least frequent. So that was a great takeaway and something really important, I think, for teachers to know and for practitioners in the classroom. If you're teaching spelling, to have that mind and you know, can of course, connect it to what you're doing, not random acts of spelling here and, you know, keep it connected to morphology, to your phonics skills.
Lori:She did also provide a routine called a simultaneous oral spelling and SOS routine for teachers and students to help students focus on the individual sounds in words. So I'll run through that quickly and then, melissa, you can let me know if you have any questions. Sure, so. Step one the student watches the teacher's mouth to see the way sounds are produced. So I guess, if you think about it during the COVID pandemic, this is right, like when you think about all the kids who had went through there then with the masks, that would be really tricky. Step two students repeat the word to stimulate the articulators and look in the mirror. Students map sounds to fingers or chips so they might move chips or hold their fingers up or tap. Student writes the word, spells the word, and then students says the word back to the teacher. So a really simple protocol where students are getting lots of reps, repetitions and practice. Pam also mentioned that more theme matrices are helpful tools as well, so I know that we're big fans of those too, melissa.
Melissa:So for sure. Yeah, and it sounds like I mean, what you just went through, that was simultaneous oral spelling. Yeah, sos, sos. But it reminds me of our recent conversation with Matt Burns, who's talking about connecting that phonemic awareness with letters, and it sounds like that happens very quickly here. Right, that you let the child hear quickly, but then you are immediately attaching those letters so they're not just hearing the sounds but they're also connecting it to the letters too.
Lori:Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so, Melissa, I know we sat in another session together and I wondered if you wanted to kick us off for that one.
Melissa:Yeah, so this is one of our friends of the podcast, sonia Cavill, who very funnily I was walking down the stairs before her session so it was the day before and someone yells Melissa, and so excited and I felt I didn't recognize her at first because there's like a million people at this conference and so it took me a minute and then I was like, oh my gosh, sonia Cavill. I was so excited because we love her. I forget what episode number she is, but yeah, it was so fun to like meet her in person. She's, she's wonderful, and so she has a new book out with Trisha Zucker called Strive for Five. Is the rest of it what the title of the conference session was? The conference session was Strive for Five Conversations to Build Language Comprehension in Preschool through First Grade. I'm guessing that's the title of the book as well.
Lori:The book is Strive for Five Conversations a framework that gets kids talking to accelerate their language comprehension and literacy.
Melissa:So actually it's different, but Strive for Five is Strive for Five. Sonia Cavill, trisha Zucker, you'll find it. But it was really great, I think. I think, going into it I knew I was like, ok, strive for Five, you want to have five back and forth turns with someone while you're having a conversation.
Melissa:Seems easy enough, but I loved how she talked about why right, that was a big thing, was like, well, why do we care about doing this? And I have I have my five year old, so he was in my head the whole time and it made so much sense that like this is how you can really like build these, like having one conversation on one topic and building language and building vocabulary really makes a lot of sense as a teacher. And I loved how she talked about it as just like a marginal shift, which I was like, yes, that's so good, because I think so often we want, you know, we want that like thing that's going to change everything and it's going to be this huge, big new thing and I love that she's. It's just little, it's just a little shift in the way you do things. It's not like going to totally disrupt what you're doing in the classroom, just a little tiny shift in how you are talking to your students, asking questions, responding to their questions, so, or responding to their answers to questions. So I just thought that was excellent.
Melissa:I also loved that she brought up the idea of good job as a conversation stopper, and I am like I'm guilty of this to all the time, so don't feel bad if you're doing it, because I do it all the time with with my son. You know, it's just like, oh, look at this thing I made mom and you're like that's great, nice work, and it is just like that's the end of the conversation. Right there, you know. So it's so nice to think about that, like okay, how do you keep that going right, instead of just that good job and stopping the conversation?
Lori:Yeah, and I really connected that as as an to that as an adult, to and I'll give an example like if I walked into Actually I feel like I did this, melissa, I walked into your house Before you moved and you, you know, I that was the first time I had been there in a while and you had done some things and instead of being like, wow, this is so nice, I think I asked you some questions about it and I was intentionally doing that. I had learned the skill and then I was practicing it. But if I had been like, wow, this is so nice, you've been like, yeah, thanks, and the conversation would be over versus, you know, oh, how did you think to choose this color on your wall? Or why did you select this artwork? Or you know, where did you get your furniture from? Or what's the vibe you went for in here? It opens it up and it's the same for kids, and I was thinking of that.
Melissa:I don't say especially even more for kids. Right, because I mean, as an adult, you could give me that just oh, this looks great and I might add on to it. Right, because I'm an adult. But it's unlikely that a four-year-old, five-year-old, even six-year-old, like our youngest learners are going to like have those conversation techniques to be able to add on.
Lori:Sure, and what I really liked about this too is that it really does extend, not just for ELA but to all content areas and all areas Really. I mean. Even think about art, you know. I mean, if it's a child's making a piece of artwork in art class, instead of walking by and saying great job, that's nice, you ask like, how did you think to draw this, how did you think to create that? And really modeling those inquisitive, curious questions and kids want to tell you about it. And you know, I've tried this at home with Press and I think only one time in the history of me asking her all of these questions, she's she said like I don't know, I just did. And outside of that, I pretty much always get a really great response back. That then prompts me to ask another question and and does forge the conversation forward. So it's exciting to think about moving the conversations forward and just strive for five and why that is important that those five interactions over time become really, really meaningful for kids' language and language comprehension, yeah.
Melissa:And just just to like stamp those five. You know your teacher is the first turn, right? So the asking that open-ended question and then the student response. However, they respond, right, and it might even be, like you just said, lori, it might be a response like I don't know, I just did right, but you can still take that to your.
Melissa:You know, your next turn could be like okay, you know she called this scaffolding down right, like the, so might need to scaffold that to. Like okay, well, did you do it because of this reason or did you do it for this reason? Right, maybe give them some options if they weren't able to explain themselves, so you give them another chance to to to talk about it. But if they do give a, an actual response, then you scaffold it up and right, you might take it to the next level like, oh, what made you think of that? Or like, how does that connect to something else?
Melissa:You've done this other painting you did the other day, you know, so you can take it to another place. And then, you know, let let the student respond again. That's the fourth turn and then the wrap up. I liked that. I always felt like that last you know time the teacher got to say something was the the place you might like be able to like add in some vocabulary, like, oh, that sounds like this thing that we've been talking about in class, and connecting it and making it just just kind of putting a stamp on it at the end of the conversation?
Lori:Yeah, and I think if you're curious about this when Sonya's book and Trisha's book does come out, because I think it's on, it's an out, on pre-order. I'm pretty sure it's out already. Okay, so we will get that information for you in a moment, but there are videos that go along with it and so that is super helpful if you would like to see this in action. It is out. It's out by tomorrow. I wasn't sure if it was out or pre-order. All right, so onto the next session.
Lori:I saw another friend of the podcast, doug Fisher, called Interactive Read-Allowed. Done right. He based this on a 2004 piece and then added onto it which kind of made it really fun and special. The 2004 piece was called Interactive Read-Allowed is their common set of implementation practices. It was by Fisher Fry and LAP, and Doug's original piece called out seven non-negotiables for an Interactive Read-Allowed that there's a clear purpose established, that there's a text selection that obviously is like, meaningful and worthy. That we're previewing and practicing the Read-Allowed as teachers, as practitioners. That students are doing some sort of independent reading and writing connected to it. That we are modeling fluent reading and being animated and having expression. And that we are discussing the text and students are discussing the text I'm sorry the text. And then in this presentation Doug added three more to update. So he added print referencing, so giving the students an opportunity to see the text and reference the text. That that's an important feature. Again, that word that we just talked about a whole lot with Sonia, scaffold is coming up. So scaffold work, when students have a mental model of success and so they know what they're doing. The purpose is clear, the goal of this Read-Allowed is clear and everybody understands the end goal. And the third thing is think-allowed from the teacher. Doug likes to call them think-alongs and I thought that was fun and he also, of course, is like the king of the.
Lori:You know gradual release model, gradual release of responsibility. So one thing I thought would be really important to note, because Doug talked about it quite a bit, is that he said anywhere in that gradual release model you can start, anywhere in there. You don't have to start with the I do, we do, you do. It's not linear. So, as you're doing a Read-Allowed, you might want students to begin by talking about something, to review a concept. Well, that's kind of like the you do right or the we do, depending on how it looks, and then you might come back together Read-Allowed model and then kind of release some responsibility and come back. So it doesn't have to be this linear process in the gradual release. But here's the key Close the loop every day. It has to close. You can't leave it open. It can't be I do, we do or you do, I do. We have to do all of those steps to bring the gradual release to a full circle in the interactive Read-Allowed and just, I think, generally speaking in the bigger picture.
Melissa:But for the case of this session in the interactive Read-Allowed, and I'm assuming that would kind of be driven by the text. If I was planning a Read-Allowed, I know that places I would want to model would be driven by the text. Where is it that I want to show them something tricky about the text, or the vocabulary is tough, or something that I want to show them versus? Where do I think I can just ask them a question here and we can talk about it. So did he talk about that? Is that? Am I on the right track?
Lori:He did, yes, but I also. I'll kind of share that in another session. So I don't know why. I was really into Read-Allowed, this plain talk, and I saw Molly Ness, who another friend of the podcast, speak about Read-Allowed, episode 170. Episode 170, and Doug was 158. Oh, we have to give Sonia's old episode. Do you know that number by heart? No, but I can find it, we'll find it out.
Lori:So in this session with Molly Ness, she talked about how we should pause for eight to 10 think-alouds. Right, modeling our metacognitive strategies, modeling what we're thinking for our students, modeling. I'm really confused here. I'm going to pause and stop and reread. Oh, I noticed this vocabulary word. That's an interesting word. I wonder if it's talking about this character. I wonder what so-and-so meant by that. So really getting metacognitive and just kind of saying what we're thinking about eight to 10 times throughout a text or throughout a read-aloud. I'm sorry, because I think if we're reading a text that is a little bit longer for our older students we would do it eight to 10 times throughout that read-aloud and with our younger students, eight to 10 times throughout a text or a read-aloud. That makes sense, melissa.
Melissa:Yeah, that makes sense, and Sonia Cabell is 116, episode 116.
Lori:Cool, all right, we'll link all these in the show notes.
Melissa:The next session I went to was about fluency, which you know is one of my favorite topics, and the speakers were Marianne Wolff and Melissa Orkin. Marianne Wolff, who we're both familiar with, read Proust and the squid and we I know we listen to her on an MPR show and maybe something else.
Melissa:Um, and, and I'm just gonna be honest, we're like a little intimidated by Mary Ann Woof, because she is extremely intelligent, a very smart lady, not that no one else is, because they really are no, I know, but I mean, yeah, I mean when, when proust is in your title of your book, you know you're here, you're a smart, smart lady, so I was very pleased that she's hilarious and she made it very easy to understand. So I was like, oh, thank goodness, um, because my brain was like not ready for Super heavy material. But their session was called the future of fluency instructional strategies that reflect the reading circuit, um, and they talked a lot about just the you know amount of students, the number of students that they see all the time. They said it's usually around 70 of students that have fluency issues, right, that need more support with fluency.
Melissa:But what they said is what happens often is like we, we do the the regular things for fluency, which is aren't. None of these things were bad. They weren't saying what you're doing is bad, you know, but repeated readings, the you know coral reading and echo reading, all of those, all of those things that are really good for fluency. But they said we might want to dig a little bit deeper too, right? So, in addition to those, you might want to think about that this fluency issue just doesn't like stand on its own right.
Melissa:So it's not like there are other things that affect A student being able to read fluently and we need to think about them all because they all come together, um. So that here. Here was one way that Mary Ann Wolf was very smart, so they talked about their multi-componential you, yeah right, multi-componential, um, the the way of of teaching fluency was is multi-componential, and that helps to build the circuit. And you might be familiar with the acronym possum p o s s u m. I know you are lory, I am.
Lori:I know you only because Of I read an article about possum, but I don't know if anybody else is familiar with possum other than the animal right.
Melissa:Which is a helpful way to remember it. But those are the, those are the different components. So when we're talking about the different components that might affect a student's fluency, these are, these are the different components. So one is just phoneme awareness, right, so making sure that students are actually hearing the right sounds, right, so that's a place to start. Or the graphic awareness that they're connecting those sounds to the letters correctly, um, so you know, you're like, yes, this is just phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, yes, but some students might still be Having struggles with that which is affecting their fluency. So that's something to think about.
Melissa:But then the s's are semantic word meaning and syntactic knowledge, which is, which is sentence level meaning, um, which this was really interesting to me because I don't think we often connect meaning and actually I'll throw in the m here too which is morphology, which is the knowledge of the, the meaning of word parts. So all of those have to do with, like, the meaning, um, and, and you know, you kind of think of it as well if a student can decode, they have down that phonemic awareness and the orthographic awareness. What do they need to know the meaning for fluency? Yes, absolutely they do, and they gave a really cool example, um, with two words, one lime and the other word lie in Um and they said, even though Lime is technically easier to read in terms of, like, just L, I, M, e, right, it's pretty straightforward.
Melissa:Lion is a little trickier, the way the I and the O make that lion sound. But because lion is such for kids, lion is like a more familiar term. They they understand what a lion is. Not all kids might have seen a lime. They don't talk about limes that often maybe. Maybe some kids do, but a lot of kids don't, right, it's not something that Um kids see as much that they actually can read the word lion quicker than they can read Lime, which I just thought was really interesting. That, like because they have more familiarity with it, they have more of a meaning than they can actually, they can actually read it faster. So their fluency is faster when they have more connections to the meaning of the word, which I just thought was really cool.
Lori:That is really neat and the you is understanding.
Melissa:Thank you very easy, right? Yeah, so that was. That was their multi components and how just thinking about fluency as more than just Word calling and rereading, and thinking about all the different components that go into a student being a fluent reader.
Lori:Cool. Did I tell you that I turned around and saw both Mary Ann Wolfe and Melissa Orkin at dinner one night? I know you didn't yeah, and I also heard somebody yell Margaret and I was like that's gotta be Margaret Goldberg, there's not other Margaret.
Melissa:No other.
Lori:Margaret, yes from the right to read project, so I, of course, ran over. It's like Margaret, that's you and we. So I met some former guests, which in person, which is so nice, and Lonnie from the same episode as Margaret. That was really awesome. That was a while back. And then I also met Amir Baraka, who wrote it was dyslexic, wrote a book about his experience Growing up with dyslexia, and it was just such a that was a night where I just feel like I was Overwhelmed with meeting people and my brain was even more on overload.
Melissa:We talked about him With Julie and Sherry and last summer. Yeah, I talked about him on their episode.
Lori:Yeah, we did. We're gonna have to link all these episodes in the show notes. Okay, so I think one last session we want to talk about is Denise I'd, which we both got to go to. We did it was really fun, and the title is is it time to rethink the definition of phonics? My big takeaway English is logical, so logical. I loved learning about it. I was pumped For all of these cool rules that I didn't learn, all of these morphology things that I didn't know before. So good, she's great. If you don't, if you have not read uncovering the logic of English, now is the time to pick it up.
Melissa:I know, and you did you know, that Corey Jensen Recommended that to us in his episode, which was many Episodes ago.
Lori:I don't remember that.
Melissa:I know. So we took a while to get on board and we are telling you that you should not wait as long as we should not wait, because it is well worth it and it really is just, I mean so logical, right, and we, when you hear it, you know to hear things like yes, you know the yeah. There is a reason that there's an e on the end sometimes, and it's not because it changes the vowel sound, right, sometimes it's what words can't end in V, or you, so they just have an e on the end For sure, and it just explains it. You're like, there you go, there's your explanation for so many words.
Lori:Yeah, so okay, I'll give you an example. I just thought I followed logic of English on Instagram and love how they put their the rules up and the different Things we should know. So C always softens to one, followed by E, I or Y.
Melissa:Otherwise C says and that explains circle and circus, and and cylinder and cat absolutely yeah, and all of the rules are also on her website, which is so, if you, you know, not ready to get the book or dive into that, you can go to logic of English calm and she. She is not trying to, you know, make money off things. She's trying to share Information. So she puts all the rules there too. So, you know, you know, don't even have to buy the book, you can just go there and see all the rules, but if you want more, buy the book for sure.
Melissa:Yeah, yeah, it's very, very good read.
Lori:Yeah, so we have some new friends of the podcast. After that conference it was so nice to make new friends and Just kind of catch up with everyone. It was really fun to meet our listeners. A lot of our listeners. We're like, oh my gosh, you're more listen, laurie, because we had our sweatshirts on. So that was really fun.
Melissa:Can we say that we recorded with Denise I and she's gonna be on soon?
Lori:Yeah, she's gonna be on really soon we just so get ready after yeah, yeah, we can't wait for you to hear that conversation. She always blows my mind, so love it. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks, melissa, I'm glad we got to do this. Thank you everybody, thanks.
Melissa:Laurie. To stay connected with us, sign up for our email list at literacy podcast calm, join our Facebook group and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
Lori:If this episode resonated with you, take a moment to share with a teacher friend or leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple podcasts.
Melissa:Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Laurie love literacy podcast Are not necessarily the opinions of great minds, pbc or its employees.
Lori:We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.