Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ™
Melissa & Lori Love Literacy™ is a podcast for teachers. The hosts are your classroom-next-door teacher friends turned podcasters learning with you. Episodes feature top literacy experts and teachers who are putting the science of reading into practice. Melissa & Lori bridge the gap between the latest research and your day-to-day teaching.
Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ™
Ep. 201: Reach All Readers with Anna Geiger
Anna Geiger, author of "Reach All Readers," joins us on the pod today.
Anna takes us on a historical reading journey, from the early reading wars of the 1800s to debates between whole language and balanced literacy, up to the present Science of Reading movement. She shares her personal transition from balanced literacy to embracing the science of reading, providing critical insights into why a code-emphasis method is indispensable for early reading instruction.
Resources
Connect with Anna Geiger, AKA The Measured Mom
Listen to Anna's podcast, Triple R Teaching
Read Anna's new book, Reach All Readers
We answer your questions about teaching reading in The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night.
Grab free resources and episode alerts! Sign up for our email list at literacypodcast.com.
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When I was first learning about the science behind teaching reading, I had to do a lot of learning on my own.
Lori:Me too, melissa. I remember early on reading an article by Natalie Wexler. I think you read it too. It was about knowledge building and it made so much sense. But it also blew my mind because I hadn't heard about what she was writing about before and I hadn't read any of the sources that she had cited.
Melissa:Yeah, exactly, and there's just so much information out there, but it's hard to know which sources to trust or where to get information from, and a lot of it conflicts with other information.
Lori:That's right, but our guest today, Anna Geiger. She's proven to be such a trustworthy source of information. For years she started teaching using balanced literacy approaches and then learned about the science of reading and shifted course.
Melissa:And we love her blogs and resources on the Measured Mom and her podcast Triple R Teaching, and she's the author of Reach All Readers a new book coming out this month, Yep, so she's a fellow co-author.
Lori:Her comprehensive book hits on every topic about teaching reading. Hi teacher friends. I'm Lori 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:Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today. Hi, anna, welcome to the podcast.
Anna Geiger:Thanks so much for having me Thrilled to be here. Thank you.
Melissa:Yeah, we are so excited for your new book.
Anna Geiger:I can't wait, Can't wait to get it in my hands any day now. I hope you know how that goes.
Melissa:Absolutely we do. Yes, all right, we're going to jump right in. We want to hear as much as we can about this book today. So we wanted to start with you actually start your book with a really great overview of how literacy sort of changed over time from your lens, and we loved it. So can you just share a little bit for our audience about what went wrong with balanced literacy and the whole language approaches? We know we've heard of 3Qing comprehension strategy, of the week leveled text, all of that, but we want to hear it from your side.
Anna Geiger:Yeah, so I started the book kind of placing everything through history. That's important for me to understand how we got to where we are now. So I talked about the reading wars and, interestingly, this started way back when I don't know. I listened to Emily Hanford speak at the Reading League event, I think last year, and it was fascinating to hear all the things that these people were saying, these men from the 1800s, their disagreements about direct instruction and the place of phonics and alphabet knowledge. So this was nothing this is not new, but people thought that phonics got in the way of learning. So this was, you know, way back in the 1800s.
Anna Geiger:And then the Dick and Jane books became popular. You know the sight word method and I look at my mom as a casualty of that era. She learned to read in the early 60s and I'm pretty sure it was a whole word approach, because she doesn't remember learning much else and reading was really tough for her. She always says I didn't really learn to read until I read to you guys, and she did teach me to read using phonics, but that's not what she learned and so, unfortunately, a lot of kids were casualties of that way back in the 50s and 60s. And then I talked about Jean Shaw and how she did all of her research to try to figure out whether a code emphasis or meaning emphasis was the best place to start. And I don't remember where I read this, but I did read somewhere that she thought the meaning emphasis was going to win out. So she was maybe a little surprised to find out. Nope, it was definitely the code emphasis, and by that we just mean early instruction.
Anna Geiger:When you think about a meaning first approach, that was definitely what I did as a teacher with my predictable level books, because I thought if we're focusing on sounding out words, it's very slow, it's going to take a long time. If I heard someone else's students slowly sounding out words, I have to admit that I felt a little smug because I heard what my kids were doing with their predictable level books. They weren't stumbling over words, they sounded like fluent readers and they could understand what they were reading. So I thought and you know the whole language movement was very much that meaning first and so much of it sounds so good. You know, it sounds like it sounds magical and that's what teachers want Like.
Anna Geiger:People become teachers because they love learning and they love the idea of having their own classroom. It's funny One of my daughters my younger daughter, she's 10 and she's definitely a born teacher Makes worksheets on PowerPoint like teaches the neighbor kids. And she said to me the other day in the car I can't wait to be a teacher because I can't wait to set up my classroom, you know. So we think about those things, right. Right, people become teachers because they want to be creative and then it can feel like a very structured approach is going to take that away from you.
Anna Geiger:So I think balanced literacy was just very appealing and when I started teaching in the late 90s, early 2000s, it was everywhere. That was right after, I think, art of teaching reading came out close to that time and the Founders and Pinnell became really big around that time. So it was really a perfect storm for me to get into that. Also, my master's degree program was very, very balanced literacy based, so it came at me from all sides.
Anna Geiger:It did not occur to me that these books I was reading could have anything wrong in them. I figured, hey, it's a book, you can trust a book, right. And then it just made sense. It looks like you're doing three queuing. I know Marilyn Adams even said that that makes intuitive sense, that that's how reading works, that you use these cues to figure out words, because it doesn't feel like you're looking at every letter or processing the whole thing. So all of this made sense to me. That was the world I lived in.
Anna Geiger:I know Nathaniel Swain from Australia. He talks about the water we're swimming in. You just don't look past that. And so when Emily Hanford put out her articles and I finally looked at one of them I think it was the second or third one that I finally saw at a loss for words. That was very jarring to have three queuing criticized because I wasn't hearing that from anyone, I wasn't surrounding myself with those voices. But that's where we are now. We're still working through that and I think it's a challenge because a lot of people are trying to move more towards a structured approach. But in doing that there's maybe some over-corrections that are happening. So I think we have to spend some time figuring out how all that works.
Melissa:But I think in general teachers are starting to see that we need to educate ourselves as to what the science really says and not believe our favorite voices necessarily. Yeah, I love that Nathaniel Swain metaphor, analogy, or whatever you might want to call it. It just makes so much sense because I think you can often ask, like well, how did we get there? Like why would we get to a place if there was no research behind it, if it wasn't the right way to do it? But it is so easy. You know we were in the same place. You know we learned the same things in grad school. And why, like why would you question it, doesn't you know?
Lori:we went to good schools and it's like why would you question your professors at a really great school that you're paying a lot of money to go to? I mean schools that were even known for teaching no-transcript, preparing teachers for service, and yeah, totally get that. And, Anna, I'm wondering if you might be able to just tell us what do we know now and how is structured literacy different and what does it mean or include?
Anna Geiger:Yeah. So I think about a few major understandings. Whenever I give short talks about the science of reading, I always start with the concept of. I talk about orthographic mapping, which for me was a big one, understanding that we're trying to connect the letters. Science of reading. I always start with the concept of I talk about orthographic mapping, which for me was a big one, understanding that we're trying to connect the letters, the sounds and the meaning of words all together to map it in our brain. But if we're using incorrect beginning reader material, like those predictable level books, we're bypassing that process. So understanding how we learn words is really important. We're not memorizing pictures of words. That's a big one. Another big concept, just to get a person started, is understanding how the brain and we do that through instruction and that if we actually teach students to use context or pictures to identify words without going through the decoding and connecting the phonemes to the graphemes, then we're actually operating on the right side of the brain, which is an inefficient process. It's an inefficient circuit. So, understanding that we want to train the brain to read and to do that we need this explicit instruction. Understanding that practicing reading words will lead to orthographic mapping, so we actually can read the words in the future.
Anna Geiger:Another thing I think is important to keep in mind is the importance of practice, and when I taught reading, you know it was definitely a very haphazard approach to phonics. I did teach phonics. If someone accused me of not teaching it, I would say hang on a second. Yes, I am, we're doing it in our Words, their Way lessons, or I'm pointing out phonics patterns. But it was not taught systematically and I did not have a system of review and assessment to see if the students were actually learning the patterns. And there was an analogy that a presenter gave to me somewhere along this way about when you walk across a field, and it's like a field that's got grass up to your knees. You might not be able to tell you walked across it the first time or the second time, but the more you walk across it you're going to build a path, and that's what happens in the brain. When we do lots of repeated practice, we build those pathways, but if you don't do lots of practice it's not going to happen. And it's also important to remember that that amount of practice required is different for different kids. So a child probably like the kind of reader that I was. I didn't need a lot of practice, and some of my students do, so that fooled me into thinking oh well, this is the way it should work. If it's not working for them, something's wrong with them. Couldn't be something wrong with my instruction. So those are some big things.
Anna Geiger:And then thinking about structured literacy in general that makes it so different from balanced literacy. A big one is the focus on the elements of language, things that I never had thought about before. So things like actually thinking about what the phonemes, how phonemes are represented in print, thinking about syllables and other controversy within our world about how much of that is necessary. But morphology I only learned that word a few years ago. I had no idea what that even meant, but then to understand that morphology is so intrinsic to how words are spelled. So I think it's exciting because there's so much to learn. I think with balanced literacy I never wanted to say this when I was doing it, but a lot of it's kind of guessing, like well, I'm not really sure what to do, but in general I know this is what you need to learn. So this is what I think we'll do. Next Was with structured literacy, there's a much bigger understanding of how the whole picture of language and it helps you when pinpointing problems and then making instructional decisions.
Lori:Mm, hmm, yeah, and I could see like for a balanced literacy, like a pushback could be like well, no, I do know exactly what to do next. For example, you know if I have a reader who the text in those categories, if you will. So there are things that I think seem clear on the surface but that once you actually kind of dig a little deeper, are very murky and are very subjective and very much confusing. As a teacher and also as a student, I imagine my students were probably confused like what actually is a level D text? Why can't I read that? How come?
Anna Geiger:this level D is easier than that level E, right? Well, I don't know. This is what Vanessa Pinnell said. So this is the level.
Lori:Yeah, so it's so tricky, but, yeah, let's talk about the components of structured literacy. Let's go to what we do know all about, or a lot about, I should say All right. So in your book, just like in our book and we love this fun organization you have chapters for each of the big components of reading, so you have phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension and more, so much more. Your book is awesomely thorough, I would say so. We thought we would dive into a chapter that really resonated with us as we were preparing for this podcast, and it's not a topic that we think is highlighted as often as others, but that should be. So the topic is really linking reading and writing. We know those are so reciprocal and we just wanted to talk with you about ways that we could connect reading and writing. We know those are so reciprocal and we just wanted to talk with you about ways that we could connect reading and writing for the purpose of decoding or spelling.
Anna Geiger:Yeah, so, interestingly, at first I wasn't going to have a chapter on writing because I really felt like that's a book, which it is, which it is and personally I'm still working through a lot of questions I have about writing workshop and what that actually aligns with research and what doesn't, and so I definitely didn't feel like I was ready to write something all about how to teach writing. But the more I thought about it, I realized I have to have a chapter about writing, because one thing I've learned is that writing belongs with reading instruction and I used to kind of brush that off reading instruction, and I used to kind of brush that off. Like I know, lucy Calkins had some quote that I used to share all the time about how we have math class, we have social studies, why don't we have a writing class? Of course we should have a writing class, and I'm not sure I disagree with that exactly, but that perspective led me to think adding writing to other classes was just not really worth your time.
Anna Geiger:A limited perspective. Yeah, like, oh, that's. Eh, you say you're teaching writing, but what does that even do? But then the more I learned that writing actually writing about your reading actually helps you learn more about what you're reading, which makes so much sense, and you can certainly attest to this as an author. Like writing a book is clarifying your thinking. Lynn Stone has talked about that. I'm not going to quote her because I don't remember exactly what she said, but something like I write so I can clarify things for myself, something like that and for me that's really what it was.
Anna Geiger:You could write a book about each of phonemic awareness. Fine, people have done that. If you're going to write a book, like both of us did, more of an overview of all the parts you really have to distill is that the right word? Get it down to what's the most important, and so, anyway, that understanding I can't leave it out. It's important. And I did want to put in a few things about spelling and handwriting just because, especially in the primary grades, those are so important. But in writing the chapter, I focus a little bit on some tips for teaching handwriting and just some general tips for teaching spelling, because that's really important, especially for our primary teachers who wonder how to handle that. But then I focus on writing about what you read and different ways you can do that. So those are some things we've been learning about and I wanted to just narrow that down so that teachers could figure out how to just add this to their reading lessons. So, for example, teaching students to write about what they read.
Anna Geiger:I talked about starting with writing a very basic sentence, because it's so funny when I was really into balanced literacy and I talked a lot about writing workshop and I had people email me and say how do I teach my students to write a sentence? And I was like, well, I don't know. I mean like, just tell them to write a sentence. That was. That's one thing about structural literacy, is it? It takes you back to the beginning and you work from the beginning instead of. I think for me, balance literacy was thinking where I want to go and just kind of floating along as if we're there Right and without understanding all the components that had to fit into it and even knowing what to do about that. So I talk about, you know, explaining that a sentence is a who and a do, and just taking a picture from a book that you've read aloud maybe a nonfiction book and modeling how to do this and then helping students do it with you, and so much of this from the beginning can just be the teacher modeling and the students doing oral work. I think sometimes we might think that we can't start this until students are actually writing, but so much of writing is articulating what you're going to write and then getting it out.
Anna Geiger:I talked also about sentence expansion and sentence combining. Those are things you can do with a text you're reading. So in the book I gave examples of things that you could do. If you read the book Ladybugs by Gil Gibbons, so if you could write a very basic sentence, the ladybug flew and then walk your students through what kind of ladybug, where did the ladybug fly to, and so on. And then I modeled how you could put that together. So the book does have some specific lessons that teachers can use as a model. And then I also talked about connecting sentences with compound words and then very, very basic, writing a paragraph about something that you've read. And then, finally, I concluded with a set of ideas for helping kids respond to text and writing whether that's decodable text or something you know more complex text that you've read, maybe in second grade.
Melissa:Yeah, I love that you actually brought me right back to my student teaching. I'm like having all these memories right now because I was thinking about it. I was only 20 years old, but I was a student teacher in a writing class. And yeah, and at the time there was a writing class and then they would go over to reading class right right next door and I, even at that time I always thought I'm like, why, like this just seems so strange that these two things are separated yeah um, and you know we were having them write about the most random topics, I mean, it was anything because we were just practicing the writing.
Melissa:So whatever we, you know the standards, the process, you know whatever it was anything because we were just practicing the writing. So whatever we, you know the standards, the process, you know whatever it was we wanted them to practice, didn't matter what they, you know quote, unquote, you can't see that but didn't matter what they were writing about at the time and I just thought that seemed crazy. But I was only 20, so it was like who am I?
Anna Geiger:to who?
Melissa:am.
Lori:I to question the water around you.
Melissa:Exactly, it was like and my teacher was a fabulous teacher, I mean, she was so good that I was like, okay, this must, this must be okay.
Anna Geiger:That's so funny. I I can whenever I think about writing and writing prompts which I don't know. I've changed my stance in writing prompts. I don't think they're always wrong, I definitely don't. But when I was in school, I just remember writing was like the teacher wrote a prompt on the board a chalkboard, of course and we were supposed to write about it and that was it. I don't think the teacher even read it most of the time, and the one I can remember over and over was what would you do if you woke up and an alien spaceship was in your backyard? I don't know how many times I wrote about an alien spaceship. I cared, and I think I really think that we're kind of waking up to.
Anna Geiger:Is that writing about your reading is actually productive? Not that it can't be productive to write in different genres, I definitely don't think that. But why not take an opportunity to cement what you're already teaching? We've talked that's a big thing about. Structured literacy, too is choosing quality texts that actually include something useful, and of course, it can be fiction, like fairy tales or just a good story, but it can also be nonfiction, and why not use writing to help them remember what you're doing? So your time is all well spent.
Melissa:All right. So the title of your book, again for everybody, is Reach All Readers. So we really wanted to ask you what are your top three tips to actually reach?
Anna Geiger:all readers? Yeah, good question. So number one I think teachers need to educate themselves and that just comes with never-ending learning. Right, and I know some people have taken letters. I have not because they won't let me, because I'm not in a district, but I have educated myself through a lot, tons of reading and everything else, have also been able to take some college programs and that's been really helpful. But even if a teacher has zero budget programs and that's been really helpful but even if, you know, even a teacher has zero budget, there's so much they can do. There are free trainings online that have it all organized. That's really helpful.
Anna Geiger:I think the Cox campus has that. There's the reading rockets one, and I'm sure there's more, and there's also one that ones that are pretty low cost. I think that's really helpful, like having the general, like the whole thing, in one place, so you can kind of wrap your brain around the whole thing and then dive into things. So I hope that my book will provide that for people, because that is what I work on doing is starting from the beginning to the end and then in the end of each section there's a learn more. So you want to learn more, you know? Go check out this video or read this book if you want to dive deeper.
Melissa:But just getting that big picture, I think is really important for teachers, and then they can pick something that they want to learn more about. So that's number one. Do you have any tips there, anna, for, like I don't know? Red flags if they see that the course or whatever it is is talking about this, like maybe stay away from it, but or green flag if they're saying these words.
Anna Geiger:Yeah, good question. So I personally like to take recommendations from people, so I like to go in a note. I mean I found all these myself, but just in general, if I didn't have all the resources that I have, I would ask around. I would be careful with people and I'll say this, people like me who are online business owners, because you don't know what you're getting unless you check closer. So I can certainly share my credentials, the things I've studied, the coursework I've done and things like the certifications that I have, but not everyone has those. So you need to be careful that you're getting your information from someone who has actually put in the effort, because it's easy to say this is science of reading. You know, lots of people are saying that, books are saying that, everyone is saying that, yeah, programs are putting that on there.
Anna Geiger:So do your due diligence, Ask the right questions, and the questions could be what do you mean by the science of reading? What have you studied or what are your inspirations for learning about the science of reading? This would be for talking to someone like me. Obviously, if you're talking to a professor or someone, that would be different, but things like what's the research support for this resource or this course. If someone really cares, they will have that for you. Even if they don't have it that instant, they will make the effort to do that. So I think those things are important.
Anna Geiger:And, just as a side note, this is kind of funny. But like five years ago when I had my old course, balanced literacy course, someone actually asked me that like, what's the research behind your course? And I was like, oh, I don't. I mean, I, it's based on the work of Lucy Calkinson, founders and Pinnell Like, and I just figured well, they did the research. Hopefully they realize, oh, she doesn't know what she's doing. Um, that's changed, thank goodness, and now I definitely understand that. But I'm I'm constantly learning all the time and updating things and anyone who's serious about learning and sharing is going to be doing that. Like, everybody knows, what we know now is not going to be what we know in one year, three years, five years. So that you want to make sure that the person you're buying from is educated but also humble, right, because there's not typically one way that you have to do anything, one specific way, but the big, broad ideas are where we need to be in the same place.
Melissa:And just to recap, we're still. That was only our number one tip still.
Anna Geiger:Okay, it was number one. Okay, so number one educate yourself.
Melissa:Educate yourself, and I was. I'm going to throw like into that, like keep learning, cause I think that's one thing I admire about you, anna you talk about it very openly. You know that, you know you might've made some mistakes along the way and you learned more and you keep learning, like I think both of all of us are in the same boat there, like we want to continue learning because things keep changing.
Anna Geiger:Yeah, and it's so fun to do, like there's. No, that was one thing. Like learning about structural literacy kind of reignited the spirit of me about teaching because there's there's so much to know you can just anyway I'll kick off on that forever. But so educate yourself and keep being willing to keep learning. One more tip on that Like if you feel overwhelmed by all the learning there is to do, I totally get it because there's so much stuff out there. I have a learning folder in my Gmail, so like if I see, oh, I want to read that article, I want to watch that video, I just put it in there. And when I have time ideally it's like every Friday, it's not been that way for a while, but I'll just go through and like just dive in and take notes in Google drive and so do that for yourself, like save it and know that when I can I'm going to go through this and then you don't have to feel like you're always missing out. So that's just a tip.
Lori:I love that. I love that I do that with Safari on my phone. Anna, I'll like open something in Safari and then I have like 29 things open in Safari and then, whenever I'm waiting at like a doctor's appointment or sitting in a car at sports, like I can pull open that Safari and be like, oh, okay, Okay, let me read this now. Oh, I have some time to react to it, but I love the folder idea. I'm going to steal that.
Anna Geiger:Okay good, because I can never remember where to find things I bookmarked on my phone. I don't know how to do it. Number two is have the right tools, and this is a really hard one because there's so many different opinions about where to get those from right. I mean, as a teacher, I made all my own stuff. That's what I wanted to do. I did have some programs, but I usually went far away from them, and there's good and bad in that. I think for me it was a bad thing because there was really no accountability. I thought what I was doing was right, and some of it was, of course, but some of it also was based on the wrong ideas about how reading works and there was nobody really checking up on me to see that what I was using was based on actual research. So I don't really recommend necessarily that teachers just make their own stuff.
Anna Geiger:You guys talk a lot about high quality instructional materials. It's so hard, though, right? This is the question I get the most in email, I know, and the thing is nothing's perfect Like it just isn't, even if you get a really good program, it's not. That's why the education is so important, because you can figure out what's good about this and what isn't. What are my actual goals and is this part of the lesson really going to get me there? Because I know a lot of schools are going with a really big box programs, like into reading, and there's a lot of good in those, but there's also a ton of stuff.
Lori:It's like that idea, anna, of like the reader, the text and the task, right that triangle, but except for it's the teacher, the text, the curriculum and the task that it's asking, and just how do we massage it so that it is better or meets my students' needs? And I think that that's where the teacher education is so powerful. So, going back to your number one tip super powerful to educate yourself and to have those like bullseye pieces of research that you know like okay, this is like solid. We know that this part's not necessarily going to change in the next 100 years, because it's been 100 years, but this stuff over here might shift a little bit and I'm going to stay up to date on that and keep myself aware.
Anna Geiger:Yeah, and then you know, back to choosing a program. I know there's this big big debate like should we go to TPT? Can we buy just stuff from regular people? You know, I mean I have things on TPT. That's not the focus of my business, Mostly I'm on my own website but I mean I have things there. I wouldn't sell them if I didn't think they were appropriate and there's a lot of people, I trust, that have things on there. But there's also people on there that just create stuff, put science of reading on it.
Anna Geiger:But to look at the other side too, I don't know why sometimes people think that just because something is a boxed program, it's going to be really great. Regular people think that just because something is a boxed program, it's going to be really great. Regular people write that stuff. Regular people, Just like regular people, create for TPT and not all of it is really. I see some of the stuff that my kids, their school's, using into reading this year and it's fine.
Anna Geiger:But some of it I'm like that's a really dumb question. Who wrote that question? I could do a much better job writing that question. You know, it's obviously some of it's rushed. So I don't think people should think that just because it's a published program. It's superior to something else. But I do think that schools do need, if they can get them, evidence-based programs. Not everything has that research behind it to show that the program actually is effective, but the knowledge about how to use it, so that is such a long. We could talk about that for a whole. Effective, but the knowledge about how to use it, so that is such a long. We could talk about that for a whole session.
Lori:But anyway, yeah, I know Melissa and I haven't talked about this in a while, but when we were adopting, we had an RFP out.
Lori:We were adopting stuff in Baltimore and it was like every single program had the highest marks and the best research behind it and I mean, honestly, I was like this is really hard because everyone is such a good salesperson there's only one.
Lori:I think, melissa, that you and I sat in together and I was like this feels kind of like I don't know, like BS, I'm not sold on this one, but the other ones all were pretty darn good and it was really hard. And so we needed to know sources to go to to find information that would actually help us learn more so that we could make better decisions, and kind of like peel the layers back right and like that's kind of where we stumbled into places like Knowledge Matters campaign and Ed Reports and things like that, and you know just that was those. Those were helpful tools or resources, or or even, like you know, reading things from Natalie Wexler or Daniel Willingham, like you know just kind of reading that stuff and being like, oh okay, so this aligns with that and drawing our own connections that were really helpful in making those decisions, anna. But you're right, it does come from that knowledge and the driver of being a learner and being willing to take the time to consume that than just like who has the best presentation.
Anna Geiger:Unfortunately, what I see a lot of is schools are like we have to make a decision now, we have to pick a program now, without taking the time to really understand it first, and what happens is then they spend thousands and thousands of dollars on this program and then two years later they're like that wasn't the best choice and I sympathize with them, because what are you supposed to do in the meantime? That's really hard. But if they can somehow communicate to the people who are insisting that they make a choice the second, that we need some time and maybe use something, that could be a time where you do something from a trusted TPT seller or something while we tread some water, because those programs are way less expensive. And if you have something good that you can just use for a year or two while you really figure this out, that might be a good place for them.
Melissa:I love when schools are able to do pilots Like that's almost like yeah, so like you're taking your time, you're like piloting a few different options, that that is just the way to go. If you can, all right.
Anna Geiger:And then did I say my step three, I didn't.
Melissa:Nope, that's what I was going to say. We have two top tips, so we're on to our third tip.
Anna Geiger:Yeah. So the first one was educate yourself. The second one was get good tools I wouldn't say the perfect tools, but the right tools for your situation. And then third is have a system for assessing students to figure out who needs what and then figuring out what to do if they're not learning. So that's why the last chapter of the book is using MTSS to reach all readers, and it talks about how your regular instruction, even when it's really really good, is most likely, according to research, not going to be enough for everybody, and we all know that. Anybody who spent a day teaching knows even if you have five kids, they're going to be at all different levels as to how much repetition they need, how explicit they need you to be. So realizing that you're not going to be successful unless you have a system for seeing what they know, reaching them and then supporting those who need extra help.
Melissa:I love that and I love how all three of those go together, because I often hear people try and pit your first two against each other. Right, like all you need is a really trained teacher and all you need are materials, and really it's both of those, plus what you just said, which is, if you're really seeing where each student is, you have the tools that you can use, but you have to have the knowledge to be able to see where they are, see the tools you have and see what each student needs with those tools. So you need all three of them together for sure.
Anna Geiger:Yeah, and it's a process it takes time.
Lori:That's right, Okay. So with the systems, thought you really cued me up here for this question. We get questions all the time, Anna, and I'm sure you get this too. What does a good schedule look like for teaching, structured reading and writing to reach all readers? And I think that this is something that is so important to think about, not just with the systems, but also with the tools that you're choosing.
Lori:Um, I remember when I was a coach. I was coaching a school and it was a middle school, and the program that we selected had a 90-minute block of time that you needed as a teacher in order to fully teach these lessons and the school, the system that they put in place, was for 45 minutes a day, and I was like, oh my gosh, you're like, by the time the kids come in and sit down, you're already down at least five, like right, Like a couple minutes. So we want to make sure that those, that those systems are set up so that we can set everyone up for success Teachers, students I mean leadership, right Cause then I mean you're you're going to be hearing complaints from everyone involved, including parents, um, about everything. So I would love to hear about what a good schedule looks like in your opinion, and you could even go like K2, K3, if you'd like, and then just throw out some ideas.
Anna Geiger:Yeah, well, I'm going to go ahead and take the one that's in the back of my book, and this is a sample reading block for K to third grade. Of course, a kindergarten schedule is going to be different from a third grade schedule, but there's a general idea of what you're trying to do. And one thing that I did in this schedule was that in the last column I wrote the skills addressed, because it's not like we're doing like you talked about in about your book, melissa. You're not just doing phonemic awareness. Now we're doing phonics. Now we're doing fluency, now we're doing comprehension, like so much of it's integrated all through the day. So that graphic of the five pillars is helpful to see what all is involved, but I can sometimes communicate that they're all on their own and that's just not true. They're all working together. So what could it look like? So in a primary classroom like K-2, it could be good to start your day with a morning message or a question of the day, something to build oral language, and that does not have to take long, like five minutes, and then we've got the word work and, honestly, the time required for this depends on how you do it. There is definitely more of a trend now towards whole class phonics instruction. That's not my preference, at least at this time. But either way, if you're doing whole class phonics instruction you've got to have some differentiation, some small groups after, because some of the kids are gonna need a lot more support. So this I put 60 minutes on here for this just because if you have a good strong whole class lesson it's probably going to be 30 to 40 minutes because just of all the pieces including the decodable text, reading and responding to decodable text, and but then you're going to need some differentiation after, maybe two groups that you meet with or three groups for 10 minutes each, so it doesn't stop with that whole class lesson. I talk in the book about possibly doing a walk-to-read model where you're working with other teachers so that kids aren't getting like kids are still getting like a good 30-minute phonics lesson and then there's maybe only 30 minutes where they're not meeting with the teacher. So maybe each teacher could take two groups. That's a way to really give differentiated phonics lessons but not have kids on their own a lot. So however you do it, I think it's reasonable to think this time could be a good 45 minutes, at least 45 to 60.
Anna Geiger:And then I put interactive read aloud in there, which should be for all grades, but K to three, certainly all of those, and of course that's what the teacher leading that, so that's a whole group. And then I put partner reading and if you're in kindergarten and you're just getting started, maybe that's just alphabet games or something they do with a partner or letter sounds, but something where they're working with a partner to read, versus a long period of independent reading, because here they're actually reading out loud, which is, I think, very valuable, especially in those primary grades. The material they're reading can vary. So maybe they're reading a decodable text and they're taking turns reading pages. You know, as they get further along maybe they're reading um, a more complex text or rereading something they've read in a small group and I. That's maybe 10 to 20 minutes. And then then I put 10 to 20 minutes for shared reading of complex texts and I talk in the book about how you can do shared reading in the primary grades differently from how we understood it to be working in balance literacy world.
Anna Geiger:It wasn't exactly a way to. It's not really a way to teach reading necessarily kids how to read, but it's a way to share vocabulary's not really a way to teach reading necessarily kids how to read, but it's a way to share vocabulary knowledge. You know modeling of prosody, but you know, as students move through, you know, maybe even later, first grade, it could be the whole class reading of a complex text. And I talk in the book about how to support students in reading complex text. We hear a lot about that these days. That would be a longer period for third grade. So for third grade that foundational skills piece is going to be much smaller, probably be more focused on morphology, and then you'd have more time. You could adjust this time to be longer.
Anna Geiger:And then finally I put in there written response. So some kind of written response to that complex text reading. Or you could move that for primary grades and put that after your read aloud. And again, this does not have to be necessarily the kids actually writing at the very beginning. It could be oral forming of sentences but some kind of response to text in a written way. So that's just one way you could schedule it. I thought I always want to see things like that. If I would go back in the classroom tomorrow, I would take this and try it and I'm sure I would change it, but just this is a starting place.
Melissa:Anna, can you talk a little bit more about the difference between that interactive read aloud and the shared reading?
Anna Geiger:I read a really interesting interview from way back when. I don't remember what year it was. It's referenced in the book Might've been the 80s Between Don Holdaway and somebody else, and he was the one who invented shared reading and what he was trying to do was to replicate a child sitting on a parent's lap, like you do at home in the classroom with a group of kids, and that's great. But in the interview I mean, he's very clear, very clear that he's not a fan of phonics instruction, especially on learning to read individual words. He wants kids to read and I think he really meant read not in quotes, but read this text with the adult, this predictable text, and eventually they'll start to read words and whole sentences, very whole language. He was a big whole language guy. That's where shared reading came from. So I always say about shared reading so many people say, well, we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to balance literacy things, and there's some truth to that. But with this one I always say we need a fresh tub, like you just got to start over. There's a lot bad in there, but it's not all bad.
Anna Geiger:And I've heard Jocelyn Seamer talk about this. She's a educator in Australia. She has her own podcast and I've taken some of her courses and I need to have her on my podcast and we can talk about this and in fact that's a to-do for me to get back in touch with her about that. But she talks about using shared reading as a way to build oral language and vocabulary and I think it's very tricky. But once you understand that the shared reading of a text where you have an enlarged text and your students are reading as much as they can with you when you understand that the point of this is not necessarily to teach them to read we're doing that in our decoding. I should say it's not teaching them to pull the words off the page. We're doing that in our foundational skills work but it is giving them access to oral language and knowledge. And you guys have talked a lot about how kids need to say these big words. They have to say them. They need them in their oral language vocabulary so that when they get to reading them later they can land on the right word. They have it in there and this is a way to provide it. You know, if the only reading they're doing or the only speaking with text they're doing. I'm not sure what the right word to say there is. It's just the simple decodable text. We're blocking them from access to these words. So I don't pretend it's something to differentiate, but I do walk through what a lesson could look like about that in the book.
Anna Geiger:And then the tricky thing is that when researchers talk about reading to kids, they call it shared reading. That's what they call it. So for people like me, coming from balanced literacy, that's confusing. So the thing I just talked about before with Don Holdaway, that's capital shared reading from the balanced literacy model. We can make it lowercase and talk about it in a different way. And then I like to use interactive read aloud versus shared reading. So lowercase and talk about it in a different way. And then I like to use interactive read aloud versus shared readings. So there's no confusion when I talk about reading to kids. The same thing you can do in the shared reading, which is teaching vocabulary, asking questions, you can even take a look at syntax and things like that. But typically with the interactive read aloud they're not seeing the text. That's the big difference and you're doing more of the reading. You're not having them join in with you to read. But it's also a really powerful place to teach vocabulary, build, ask questions and things like that.
Melissa:So it sounds like interactive read aloud is more of an oral language practice, shared reading, more of a bridge from the oral reading to decoding.
Anna Geiger:I would say shared reading is the oral, oral language, because you're doing a lot of talking with them about it, like you're, um, you're. You're putting it in a place that they can see it, you're reading it out loud and then you're giving them a chance to read it with you if they can, uh, or read parts of it if they can, and then sometimes you might pick a poem where they can kind of pick up on the phrasing, and I'm using quotes here. Read it and so, and then you're also giving them access to knowledge. So the material you use is probably different than we would have used in the old days. Right, and you guys taught older grades, but for me it was like, well, whatever big book I have, I guess that's what we're using.
Lori:That's what I was going to say. Like the big books, yeah, the book, the big book idea really resonated. So the big book idea would be in a uppercase shared reading. Is that right? Is what would be in, what would be like the uppercase shared reading? Yeah, experience.
Anna Geiger:And it's funny because when I did that I would see some of these big books that were like words my students couldn't read yet and I thought, well, what am I going to do with that? That actually probably would have been a better choice, because it was actually something they could learn from. You can still point out words. You can still review phonics concepts you've taught by picking them out. But understanding that this is oh, I forget the word. This is adding on to what I actually went to this conference back in the early 2000s where she showed us how you should put a piece of calculator tape, if you remember that, on the wall next to your big book so you could date and keep track of all the times you've taught these skills to show your administrator.
Anna Geiger:Because we didn't have a scope and sequence, we didn't have a phonics program. It was you know, when it comes up, teach it. It was you know when it comes up, teach it. So we have to shift from that to know. This is not our primary teaching method, but we can support what we're doing in our foundational skills if that helps.
Lori:Yeah, I'm even thinking, you know, in a book where we're having that kind of shared experience or interactive read-aloud experience, you could pull out a word that would be challenging for your students that has a part of it with a phonics pattern that you've taught, and focus on that little part and then help them extend that learning. And extend that understanding Like, say, the rest of the word, help them learn that word and then you can build vocabulary, you can build their phonics knowledge, because what will happen when they encounter a word like that? They're going they should try different sound spelling patterns for that part, but they're going to start with what they know and so we're helping them access those, those bigger words in context.
Anna Geiger:I think that's a good point too. I think one part of over-correcting with structured literacy might be well, I don't want them to see words that I haven't taught explicitly taught them how to read, but you're there to support them. You're there to show them how big words work. There's nothing wrong with that, and those kinds of texts can provide those experiences.
Melissa:You've told us a lot about some things that are in your book, but is there anything else that you just want our listeners to know about your book?
Anna Geiger:Yeah, well, I think the reason I wrote it was because I really wanted a place to send people to who are well, now what I have, all this information. I can't figure out how it all goes together, and I really tried to answer a lot of the questions that people have. Even if I couldn't give them a straight answer, I still addressed it. This is what we know, this is what you have to think about. I addressed briefly, but I did address the speech-to-print-to-speech debate. I addressed things like well, how do you know when to get kids out of decodable text.
Anna Geiger:I addressed the knowledge and the comprehension strategies conundrum. I addressed phonemic awareness, with and without letters, like how does that work? And so I hope that people find that not only does it kind of walk them through and give them a broad picture so they don't have to feel overwhelmed, but also tackle some of those tricky questions. And I also am very available via email hello at TheMeasuredMomcom and I will be offering a course in the fall, using the book as the textbook, and that's where I'm really going to get deep into things that I couldn't necessarily get into deep in the book. Although the book is, it's pretty comprehensive. It's about 300 pages, but you could always write a thousand page book right. So in the course I will be going more into detail about some things and also about 40 or 50 classroom snapshots of me doing this with students so people can see how it looks in real life.
Melissa:Love that. Everyone will love that. And when is the book out again?
Anna Geiger:I love that. Everyone will love that. And when is the book out? Again, july 23rd is the date, so, as of this recording, it's less than a month.
Melissa:I sure hope it's out on July 23rd. We'll see and I'm sure they can find it Amazon.
Anna Geiger:Everywhere.
Melissa:Get it from your website, absolutely, and we will link that in our show notes, so if anyone's looking for that link, they can find it easily.
Lori:For sure. Okay, so the book is called Reach All Readers and it's by Anna Geiger or the Measured Mom. Did I say your last name, right? That's?
Melissa:how I've been saying it.
Lori:I didn't ask you before, I said it, but we are so grateful. This is so much fun. It's so much fun to do this author series this summer and we are so glad that you're a part of it.
Anna Geiger:Thank you so much. I love talking to you guys always and you know, before we started recording, we finally just had to say, okay, we've just got to record.
Lori:We could talk all day I know we could have talked all day about reading and writing.
Anna Geiger:So thank you, it's a pleasure and I appreciate the chance to talk about it.
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Melissa:Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees, we appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.