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[Listen Again] Ep 98: Improving Student Reading Growth in Months with Fluency Instruction and Practice

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From Mar 18, 2022

How can regular fluency practice lead to fluent readers? In today’s episode, educators Lorraine Griffith and Lindsay Kemeny discuss the impact of fluency in their classrooms. Fluency is a bridge: It connects word recognition with comprehension. We dive into whole and small group fluency instruction with simple strategies and more. 



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.

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Lori:

Welcome teacher friend. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two literacy educators in Baltimore. We want the best for all kids and we know you do too.

Melissa:

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.

Lori:

Hi everyone, Welcome to Literacy Podcast. Melissa and Lori love literacy. We are very excited about today's guests because we could talk all day, all week, all month, all year to them. They are two repeat podcast guests. I'm calling them Team Double L. We have Lorraine and Lindsay here with us today.

Lori:

I didn't tell them I was giving them a nickname before, but today we're going to talk about their work with primary and intermediate students, the impact of fluency and the science of reading components. So, melissa, I know you're excited because you love to talk about fluency.

Melissa:

I do love to talk about fluency, and we haven't talked about it, I think, since Tim Rosinski was on in June. So it's about time to talk about fluency, and just hearing some of the things that Lindsay's doing currently in her classroom and what Lorraine has done in her classroom in the past with fluency is just really exciting. So I'm glad that they are here. To pretty much they're probably going to just have a conversation with each other, which is fine. So welcome Lorraine and Lindsay. Thank you for coming today.

Lorraine Griffin:

Yes, happy to be here.

Lori:

Yeah, I'm going to ask Lorraine, would you give a quick introduction bio to tell everyone who you are, and then, lindsay, you can jump in after that bio to tell everyone who you are and then, lindsay, you can jump in after that.

Lorraine Griffin:

Sure, I'm Lorraine Griffith. I presently I work for Great Minds as Senior Content Architect for Humanities. I worked for 27 years in a rural Title I school in Asheville, north Carolina, where I had the privilege, in the year 2000, of going to a summer workshop where only like 20 or 30 people showed up for and the speaker was someone I'd never heard of before, tim Rosinski, and he was working with struggling readers. And so I went. The morning was great, went to lunch with a friend, came back and he presented this article I Can Be a Star by someone named Martinez, and it talked about the dramatic work in second grade when a teacher focused on fluency for six weeks. I went home and it's all I could think about and I emailed him and I don't know how many of you have ever emailed Tim Rosinski, but he emails right back and I emailed and I said and he's so nice.

Lorraine Griffin:

He's so nice as David Lieben says, he's the nicest man in education Every single time I bring up Tim.

Lorraine Griffin:

Rosinski's name. He says that very same line. But he went back and he said I said I want to do it in fourth grade. Has anybody done it in fourth grade, this very same experiment with fluency? And he said, no, but keep me in the loop, I want to hear about it. And to make a long story short, he made me keep up my research for three solid years, oh my. And then we talked about publishing it. So in the end he and I worked together on a lot of books. Together we published a couple of research articles and I had the time of my life working on fluency in my classroom. So it was one of those things that it felt like it was just a workshop you go to and it really changed the focus of my instruction in my classroom. So he will always be one of my favorites, lindsay.

Lori:

Well, we hope this podcast has the same effect on people. It'd be great, wouldn't it?

Lindsay Kemeny:

Go ahead, linz, oh okay. Well, I'm a school teacher, so I've been teaching for 11 years and I was heavily trained in balanced literacy in my early days. So if you had asked me, I would have said this is the best way to teach reading. And then my son was diagnosed with dyslexia and that just took me on this deep dive where I had to kind of rethink everything that I knew about reading and I just did a kind of about face. So the more I learned, I started applying with my son and then started applying in my classroom and just saw amazing results. So I've taught reading, intervention too. I've taught kindergarten and second grade, whole class and then intervention for all the elementary grades and I've been a teacher, mentor and things. But my and people are always asking me why don't you be a coach or you know something else? But I love teaching too much to leave, so I currently teach second grade.

Melissa:

That's great and for our audience we're grateful. They probably recognize Lindsay because she was just on our podcast recently. So if you want to hear more about that journey of her moving from balanced literacy to science of reading and what she's doing in her classroom now, I don't remember the exact episode, but it was recent and Lorraine was with us I think it was really, wasn't it like one of our first.

Lori:

It was episode nine. Nine. I only know because I have recommended that episode so many times. Episode nine Not that I haven't recommended yours, lindsay, it's just a later number, so it's okay, I'll pull that one out before the end of this podcast. We are pretty close to 100 now.

Melissa:

So it's been a while since we've had the rain.

Lori:

Thank you both for coming back. Yeah, absolutely.

Melissa:

So I think we should probably start with Lindsay, right? And, lindsay, tell us a little bit about what you're doing currently, specifically around fluency with your second graders.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Okay, well, there's lots of different things, so I could be talking forever.

Lori:

We'll jump in.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Okay, because I think of fluency. I do things whole group and then I also do things in small group. So do you have a?

Lori:

preference where we start.

Lindsay Kemeny:

I'd love to start whole group and then thing is, I love to have all students have access to the complex text, so have everyone in the text, and then this can be done with a lot of different scaffolding and throughout the week it's going to change where first I'm going to preview the text and read it to the students and then we're going to do some choral reading and then we move to partner reading and I really love doing partner reading in my classroom and there's lots of different ways I do partner reading. So, and one of the things with partner reading is you need to really have some clear procedures centered around that right and expectations, and so we have rules that we talk about what to do when we are partner reading and we only talk with our partner and only about our reading and all those kinds of things. And every once in a while we've got to review that right. So like we came back from winter break and, ah, I got to rein him back in again.

Lindsay Kemeny:

So and then when I, when you set up your partners, I'm really intentional with how I set them up for partner reading. So I take their most current fluency scores and in my district we use Acadians, formerly Dibbles, next, and so I will put them in order from the least fluent to the most fluent, and then I divide the class in half and then I take that like second half and line it up with the most fluent. And then I divide the class in half and then I take that like second half and line it up with the first half. So the strongest reader in one group is going to go with the strongest reader in the other group.

Lindsay Kemeny:

So I wouldn't want to pair my strongest reader with my one who's the weakest right, Because that's going to be just miserable for both of them.

Lori:

So yeah, Lindsay, can I ask very quickly what type of text are we talking about here? I just want to define that before we go any further.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Well, I do fluency practice with different types of text. That's good. So I have some of my students, especially at the beginning of the year, they needed to be in decodable text and some of my students, especially at the beginning of the year, they needed to be in decodable text and some of my students did not and they were fine with a regular, you know, second grade level text. So a lot of times for well, I'll use this partner reading. I do it both with our second grade. You know we have like a basal program that our district is supposed to use, so I will do the partner reading just with those texts. But I also pull in texts from ReadWorks. That's a free website you can use and I'll pull passages off of there. And then I have some students in actual books, decodable books, that they're using. So it kind of depends on the student.

Lori:

That's good to know. Can I ask one more follow-up question? How do you choose the text? Is it like a random selection? Is it based in knowledge about what you're learning?

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yes, so I love I don't. My district doesn't have like this knowledge building curriculum right now. I don't my district doesn't have like this knowledge building curriculum right now. I'm really envious of those who do. But I try to pull in knowledge as much as I can. So of course we have our just our, you know, for our basal. So, like last week we were reading about the rainforest, so we learned about the rainforest and our text was about the rainforest.

Lindsay Kemeny:

But I will also take the opportunity because I do this procedure, kind of protocol that maybe we'll talk more about, called partner reading, paragraph shrinking. That I learned about from Matt Burns. So if you look him up he has a great, some great webinars and videos on that. But for that I will choose, I will go to ReadWorks and I will choose passages that are all on the same topic, because then the, the students are getting kind of a deeper dive into that topic and they're seeing similar vocabulary, you know, over and over kind of helps build that network. So you know, in one session they have maybe five different passages all on the same topic. This week it's money, so they're learning about money and trading and savings and things like that.

Melissa:

Lindsay, I have a couple of follow-up questions too. Is it the same passage that they're doing? Each of you said, like they hear the fluent reading, they do choral reading, they do partner reading. Is it the same passage that they do all of those with, or is it a different passage?

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yeah, so this is a complicated question just because, like, I do this several different ways at different times. So if we're talking about whole, like just my whole group, where I'm using our district curriculum, we have about two stories that we do a week. So I'm doing you know the one, maybe Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and another one Thursday, Friday, when I am doing the separate partner reading paragraph shrinking where I'm using those read works passages. They when Matt Burns explains it, he has them doing. They never repeat, they have different ones every time. But I also know that there's value in repeated readings and we know there's a lot of research behind that. Also, just logistics, I can't print off new passages every day that I do this for all my students, right? So we usually have kind of the same packet of stories for the week or maybe for four days and then I switch it.

Melissa:

And I might be jumping the gun, but I also want Lorraine to weigh in on anything too, so tell me if I am. But I was wondering what the procedure actually was with the partners, like, what are they doing with each other? And that might be what you were talking about with the paragraph shrinking.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yeah, this is such a great, great protocol. I just learned it this year and I'm going to be doing a speaking at patton's summer conference and it's all going to be on this. So if you want even more detailed and visuals, then I'm pretty sure that's free and anyone can register. Uh, but and you can also just look up Matt Burns on YouTube he has this partner reading paragraph shrinking Don't worry, lindsay, I've already got it up.

Lori:

Don't worry, I'm linking it. Okay, I'm Googling it too.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Well, and let me share. And let me share at the beginning of the year, in second grade, you know we do our Acadience measures and they should be at about 54 words correct per minute. So I took my students, did our, you know, measurement or assessment, and my class median was 50. So I had a lot. I had like 12 students that were below or well below where they should be at this time of the year. So I knew I needed, you know, to do something, maybe a little more drastic than I had done before. And I watched this webinar with Matt Burns and it just kind of, oh, my goodness, I could do this and there's a class where I need. Do I have a class where I need? Yes, most of my class is below benchmark. So I implemented this partner reading paragraph shrinking for two weeks and my class median was 64. So it was 50 and two weeks it was 64, which was huge.

Lindsay Kemeny:

And then you know, I kept and I kept trying little things and I'd watch and I kept every couple of weeks I would do a progress monitoring to monitor my students and I can share, you know, all that, like I said in more detail in that webinar, because there were certain students where, you know, I had to change their partners because I was like, oh, they're not making a lot of progress. What if I try this? What if I try this? So just really looking closely at the data. But what you do is you give your partners a passage and you set a timer and and you have a, your partner A and partner B, and partner A is your stronger reader and partner B is the little bit weaker reader. And I use the term cookies and milk, right? So one student's the cookie and the other one's the milk, and they don't know who is stronger. You know they don't know that. So my, our first one will read for four to five minutes.

Lindsay Kemeny:

I set a timer and then I stop and then the weaker reader is going to it's now, it's their turn and they're going to go back and read that same past part of the passage. They're going to start at the same place. So this is great because the weaker reader got that little listening passage preview. And there is there's a study. It's I think it's a Lee and Yoon, uh, I think it's 2017. I yun, uh, I think it's 2017. I can't remember it's 2017 or 2007 now, but they showed that when they had a listening passage preview, they did a little bit better. Uh, had, you know, higher effect sizes with their fluency. So so they get this preview, then they read, and then I start.

Lindsay Kemeny:

The timer goes off again and now it's back to the first partner and now they're going to start right where they left off, and now they're going to do paragraph shrinking, which is just a protocol that it's kind of like, helps them figure out the main idea of what they're reading. And then the timer goes off and then again the second reader reads and does the same thing. So it's a lot of a lot of practice out loud. And then we do a lot of coaching with the about how to be a good coach and air correction procedure. And I took an air correction procedure right from Anita Archer's explicit instruction and in fact I'm not a big YouTuber or anything, but I put little video clips on my YouTube channel it's just my name, lindsay Kemeny, because I use those. I made them for my classroom, so anyone is welcome to use them and it tells students how what to do when their partner struggles with the word.

Lori:

I love that you're giving students the tools.

Melissa:

Yeah, to give you back to each other. I feel like I'm talking too much.

Melissa:

Like I said, I absolutely want to hear what you're doing, but I think that's so great because, I mean, we talk about fluency. I know, when I did fluency practice, I did it terribly when I first started because I would just had kids timing each other and it was just awful because all they wanted to do was read as quickly as possible and I was like, oh, this is a disaster. What did I get myself into? But you know, what I didn't do is what you were doing, which is teaching them how to give feedback to each other, and that's what you need to become more fluent, right?

Lindsay Kemeny:

If you don't have the feedback, you just read it the way you think, and then I'm walking around, yeah, and then I'm walking around during this time, right, and then I'm also giving feedback or helping or modeling, or you know, if they both don't know a word, then I've got to help them with that, and just kind of and it's really good too for me to see how are they doing with this passage, does this? Oh, that's the other thing you, you, matt Byrne, says you give them the passage that's on the weaker readers reading level, and so you know, just kind of listening and you know, trying to ascertain if, oh, can I do a little bit harder one next time. You know, what do they need?

Melissa:

That kind of thing I'm actually interested, lorraine, to hear from you about. Does this match up at all with the work that you did with your fourth graders? How is it different? What questions do?

Lorraine Griffin:

you have. Yeah, I mean, I was sitting here thinking how similar the partner reading so SSR, sustained silent reading was a big thing in my district. A big thing in my district, and there were some very upset leadership people when they found out that my students did not do sustained silent reading, that they did partner reading instead. And I did a similar thing. But I match students more by their words per minute. So when I would do a one-minute read, I would actually match the top two, then the next two, then the next two, because I wanted them to get challenging books. So you know, my very, very fluent readers would be able to get through a lot more text. So what they would do is they would read aloud together, work out however they wanted to read aloud and they could both whisper read. They could read a page, read a page, you know, like however they wanted to do it. But the thing that I really wanted them to do was to also work on the metacognitive part of knowing when they lost their way. I know some people call it click and clunk, like when you feel like we don't understand this part, and then they stop and they talk to each other about not understanding it. They also decided in the evenings, like for homework, they had to read. So they would decide how much they thought they could get through, like let's read three pages tonight, three more pages or let's read another chapter, if they were really into the book and they wanted to read it.

Lorraine Griffin:

One thing, one memory that I have, is that there were these two students and they were working together on a shark book and they said Mrs Griffith, we just don't understand what this says. We've read it like five times. It like five times, and it says sharks have long fascinated people. What does that mean? I mean that really cracked me up, um and like. But the fact that they were actually monitoring their comprehension, like they realized that that sentence I actually don't think our great minds copy chief would have let that sentence go by, but it's, it's like it's just interesting that they picked up on it. And then they would finish a book, come to me, talk to me about the book, and then they would go choose another book. And sometimes kids would go through whole series of texts because it was part of their self-selected reading, but it was done in a combination of reading silently at night and reading orally at school, because there was so much more accountability and in that way I could take the lowest group of students if I wanted to, periodically and read with them and really look at where they were tripped up, whether it was accuracy, whether they were doing a good job choosing books that they could read like. That was where it was, but then they also, from the books that they selected they did, you know, like, at a certain point toward the end of fourth grade I was looking for Reader's Theater scripts all the time because my students practice reader's theater at night.

Lorraine Griffin:

That was the other reading assignment they had and then they would perform on Fridays. We had dinner theater on Fridays where somebody would bring a snack and then the kids would perform for each other and, um, after a little while, like Lindsay mentioned, I can't copy all this stuff. Like, imagine how many pages. I can't copy all this stuff. Like, imagine how many pages it is to copy all those reader theater scripts.

Lorraine Griffin:

Go through and Mark your reader one, your reader two, your reader three, like on the top where you go through and you do all the highlighting. It was so much paper and at a certain point I remember I was worn out and I just said to them next week. Find your own fluency passage. I want everybody to do a monologue. It has to be written in first person. So they, they, they looked and they found that there were books that were written in first person. There were passages that were really motivating to them. I had one student this is my very favorite he loved, he was like totally into Lord of the Rings and he back then we didn't have as much on Google. I mean, this was probably 2007 or eight and we didn't have that much on Google. So he went and he listened to his movie of Lord of the Rings, the monologue between Smeagol and Gollum, and he copied the entire thing down.

Lori:

That's insane. That's insane. I love this.

Lorraine Griffin:

He performed it probably for three months in a row, getting better and better and better, and it was this really introverted kid. He was not a kid that would have gotten up in front of people, but he had this like dual personality of. It was amazing. And then I had other kids that read like the beginning of, because of Winn-Dixie and you know, the back of the Dear America books. Those were big at that time.

Lorraine Griffin:

So it tell about those were super knowledge building and it would tell about a period of history and they were all written in first person. They did speeches. So they did like speeches by Frederick Douglass, by Sojourner Truth. They would find, oh, that's a first person. And at that point. And then I later went to teach fifth grade but I didn't have to look up any more fluency passages. They were really getting their fluency passages out of the texts that they were reading because we had a very rigorous volume of reading going on in the classroom and that's something that I don't know that you could depend second grader, you couldn't ask second graders to do that kind of choosing. But in fourth and fifth grade they also took so much more pride in what they did because they loved the passages that they chose did because they loved the passages that they chose.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Well, and I love that you were having them, you know, perform these, because that just gives them that authentic reason to do the repeated readings right. So, and that's, you know, reflects you know what Timothy Rosinski says all the time as well, and so I have an idea that I got from him, which is we do a poem a week as well. So on Monday I give them the poem and they put it in there. We, you know, I read it, we read it together, and then they get to practice it throughout the week and on Friday we perform them for the class.

Lorraine Griffin:

Have you done any work with songs?

Lindsay Kemeny:

Lindsay yeah, I've done a little, because sometimes we'll do, uh, not a ton, but sometimes for our poem we've done a song instead. And then on Friday we performed the song for our principal.

Lorraine Griffin:

It was kind of fun. I think it's interesting to think about songs because the chorus always especially as like a folk song or something the chorus always repeats. So for the students that may be struggling, you have to have it on PowerPoint. I mean, I've seen teachers do it where they just listen. But if you have the songs where students are, they're displayed in some way or on a sheet of paper and they're reading the lyrics.

Lorraine Griffin:

There's something about the rhythm of the song that keeps the students going. You can't stop, you can't slow down, you might skip over some words. But it's also very authentic repeated reading, because you want to sing the song again and again. The chorus allows students to catch up. So I also think that that's a really interesting way of looking at how repeated reading because Tim Rosensky talks about standing around the piano at home and singing together and looking at sheet music and he feels like that really helped him to understand the way fluent reading works and how he orthographically mapped now that I didn't know the term when I was working with fluency but he was orthographically mapping words as he was looking at that sheet music probably. I mean, I think that's the way our brain works, right.

Lori:

That's what I was. I was thinking I could give a quick tip to parents who are listening. If there's any parents in the audience or in the listener base, we on our TV turn the TV on and always, always have music playing in the background, like we're a family that just always plays music and Amazon or Spotify they, if you play those, they list the lyrics to the song, so they'll run through the lyrics on the screen as the song is playing. And I've noticed a huge difference in Presley's fluency since she's been like reading the words to the songs and just conversation starters. Like hours later at dinner she'll say you know, I heard this lyric in this song. I'm confused about what it means, and then she'll just like repeat it off, just, or sing it and we'll be able to talk about it. But it is really like.

Lori:

To me that's a super easy way at home to keep fluency going in the background, if you will, as you're supporting your child or supporting your children. I don't know. I'm curious to what you both think of that. Like if you were, if you were the teacher and I'm a parent, saying, hey, this is what we do at our house. Um, just what do you think?

Lorraine Griffin:

Well, ironically, my husband and I adopted our daughter while I was working on fluency, and a word of advice again from Tim was to start from the beginning with your captions on. To start from the beginning with your captions on. Never turn the television on without captions. And we started, like from the time she was one watching Baby Einstein I don't think there are words on that, but like probably Paw Patrol or Handy Manny always had the words on and you, it's very, very interesting. Like kids, will our older kids would rebel against it and say why do you have the captions on? We don't read the captions. And then they would tell you it's, it's very, very interesting. Like kids, will our older kids would rebel against it and say why do you have the captions on? We don't read the captions. And then they would tell you look, they just said something different than what the captions said. Well, obviously you saw the captions, so it's, yeah, I think it's fascinating.

Lori:

We listen to a lot of like good, you know, PG, like music, but every now and again there's a naughty word, not too naughty, but that is. Her favorite is to like catch that word, of course, and be like, oh, there was a bad word and you know, and then. But it is funny because it's so attention drawing the captions are key, though, I've noticed that's important too, and Tim is again the nicest guy with the best advice.

Lorraine Griffin:

I'm wondering. Can I say one more thing about performance, though, that Lindsay mentioned. I do feel like we do a lot of things with kids that feel like practice without really a purpose. And when you do regular performance, not only do they gain confidence standing in front of people, but the students compliment them and they say I love that passage you chose. Or I really liked the way you made me feel what the character was feeling in the way that you said that, or I understood the speech better when you read it than when I read it silently. It's like they're giving this interaction. It feels much more purposeful than just giving our students endless practice. More purposeful than just giving our students endless practice.

Lorraine Griffin:

So I do want to talk about that a little bit, because David Lieben, when he had his school in Harlem, his second graders I think I have this right he would give them a passage at the beginning of the week. They would practice the passage each evening, and then on Wednesday he the third. The third day whether it was a Wednesday or not, but let's pretend it's a five-day week and on Wednesday his top third of readers would read aloud and they would perform it. Top third of readers would read aloud and they would perform it On Thursday, the middle third and on Friday the lowest third. And the lowest third were usually better than the Wednesday group.

Lorraine Griffin:

The reason for that is that they got to hear those performances and they had extra days of practice. But he believed that it was those performances of complex passages in second grade that allowed him to send his students I mean they also had a very strong systematic phonics, explicit phonics instruction in that school. So I'm not saying fluency alone is enough by any means was the performance of having a point where you have to be able to read these words correctly with prosody, with expression, not with a timer, but where students are really doing a beautiful job of interpreting the text. That's what got those students ready for third grade. And remember that his school scores had like the highest increase in New York City, but his school scores had like the highest increase in New York City.

Lori:

Lorraine, you're making me think about not just doing it one time, like this aspect of performance. I think often can be like, ok, the last Friday of every month. But what I'm hearing you and Lindsay both share is that it's very important to do this weekly, to do it daily, daily and then maybe do a performance weekly, that it is something that through regular practice, we get better at, and so I just I can't underscore that enough that that is my critical takeaway today as an educator and as a parent that you know how can I continue to do this on a regular basis and include those opportunities for fun, for engagement, for performance, for collaborative feedback. Lindsay, is there anything you want to add?

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yeah, one thing is, if you're worried about time like how do I have time to have every student perform, then put them in groups. I do that a lot of times with the vocabulary, I mean with the poem a week where I put them in groups of maybe six and they're going to perform it in the group and then also I wouldn't force anyone to perform that doesn't want to, because we know that can be really damaging for students if they're struggling readers already and it's kind of self-conscious about that.

Melissa:

Great. I'm wondering if you guys could talk a little bit about why we need to do this. Why is this so important? And I think you've touched on a few things, but maybe dig in a little deeper around the data that you both saw in your classrooms. How did it actually help your students? And then I think, bigger picture, what was happening with that orthographic mapping, what was actually going on for your students? And then I think, bigger picture, like what was happening with that orthographic mapping, like what was actually going on for your students with fluency and why do we even care that our students are fluent readers? Like why is it important? Bigger picture.

Lindsay Kemeny:

So fluency is so important because it's this bridge right. It connects our word recognition with comprehension. It's how we can get meaning from the text. So it's really and that's our overall goal when we read right Is to understand what we read, and so I love that. And then you're talking about that orthographic mapping and all it's important to remember with fluency. There's so many underlying things that go into that.

Lindsay Kemeny:

We can't just say, oh, we are going to work on fluency. It starts with the foundation. So you need to have that very explicit phonics program and be building those phonics skills and then lots and lots of practice opportunities right. So we can't just do the phonics in isolation.

Lindsay Kemeny:

And one of the first things I need to focus, for example, when I'm doing small group, in order to promote that orthographic mapping, is I need those students to keep their eyes on the words and sometimes, with some of the strategies that they've learned, their eyes are going off all the time and they're guessing and they're looking at the picture and they finish the sentence and guess from context, and that just impedes the process.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Their eyes have to be on the words in order to orthographically map it, and so and that's one reason why I love decodables because I mean I have really high decodables in, high quality decodables in my classroom because there's some really terrible ones out there, but they there. But sometimes the language is just enough off a little bit that it forces them to really tune in and look at those words. And if you put them in a text sometimes that's too hard and they're not ready Then they're going to fall back on those guessing strategies that they know of. So I have a student like that right now where I'm like OK, let's go back and make sure we are breaking those bad habits and creating new ones where we're decoding the words left to right that's so helpful, lorraine do you have anything you?

Lori:

want to ask or add to that, no, okay.

Lindsay Kemeny:

I'm just thinking, you know you want to develop that automaticity too. And then you know we talk about fluency. We always want to focus, focus on accuracy first. And sometimes you know, if you give students you know a measure and they do really poorly on accuracy, then we're not just going to say, hey, let's read faster, right, we've got to go back and focus on that. So just making sure that you're hitting those underlying weaknesses they have and sometimes it is just a fluency, like if they've got really high accuracy but they're still slow, then you know, oh, we're just need to was working with fluency as well.

Lorraine Griffin:

And I think there were times to be totally vulnerable here. There were times when I would just have the student go back and instead of me looking at where is the phonics breaking down for them that they cannot read this accurately and think about what patterns they may not have, thinking about filling in the gaps, it was more like no, this is how you say that word, and then helping them say that word instead of knowing how to read that word. And I think that that difference is strikingly different in hearing the way that you talk about it. As far as listening as students are reading, for what is it that's keeping them from being fluent? Because I too believe, like I think it's been really interesting lately, I've been reading a few things about do they comprehend because they're fluent, or are they fluent because they comprehend?

Lorraine Griffin:

Comprehend because they're fluent or are they fluent because they comprehend? Like it's really chicken and egg? Because you can't interpret, like you can't notice a prepositional phrase as you're reading, unless you realize that in the garden goes together, in the prosody or at the farm like, or in the wintertime, you know, like as a reader, you're seeing that as like a clump of words that go together, but you're comprehending it and reading it fluently at the same time. So I think I think that's also interesting. I don't think I worked enough on making sure the students could comprehend the text before they tried to read the text and then try to read it fluently and I'm not sure like if it's if they really. I know I go to a deeper understanding of something the more I read it. So I think it's also the repeated reading. But, Lindsay, what do you think? Do you think that the comprehension comes first or the fluency comes first?

Lindsay Kemeny:

I just think it's reciprocal and it's like this circle. And the first time I really thought of that, like what you're describing, lorraine, is when a couple years ago I did Dr Deb Glazer's training the top 10 tools and she had mentioned that where you know, and I just oh, that kind of hit me because you always think the fluency leaves leads to comprehension, but it also goes the other way around.

Lorraine Griffin:

I definitely think it's really interesting, and when you start adding in, like thinking about the emotional context of a character that you're reading in a reader's theater, you really have to comprehend the flow of that character before you can interpret it well as well. So that is one thing that I've thought about some is partner reading, when students don't go back and repeat the reading, like. Sometimes I think about how I set my students up to partner reading with just their friend in a book and was I really doing the best thing for them when the partner reading wasn't rereading a passage? Were they able to really interpret and use it toward comprehension? Or was it such a low stakes reading because there were just two of them that it was practicing seeing new passages all the time? But they already knew the flow. Most of them were in chapter books, so they already knew the flow of the character.

Lori:

I wondered that too, lorraine, because I taught, I was thinking of my time in fifth grade and I was thinking did I choose the passages that were really meaningful for them to reread, or did I just choose any passage? And how did I pair them Like, were they just reading with a buddy? I mean, I know that they were at some points, you know, admittedly. I have a question for you both, though that I feel like will kind of dive us deeper into this. It's very specific. When students are like can you take us to the place where students are listening to their peers, either in partners or in performance opportunities? Do they have their text in front of them and can you illuminate the importance of them either having it and tracking it? I'm assuming that it's very important for them to do that. As we've discussed right, like closed captioning and seeing the words are important, so not just getting that auditory piece. I just want to make sure we're like being as specific as possible for those listening. Since this is a podcast, any thoughts on that?

Lindsay Kemeny:

When I do my partner reading, yes, I make the partner who's the coach and not reading right now. They have to track with their finger and then I can see and that keeps them in. Oh yeah, I've got to be following along and we talk about. You've got to be ready, because if your partner struggles with the word, you have to be ready to jump in. And I watched this one little boy who was just oh, it was so amazing to see in my classroom because he was just I could see him kind of tracking on his own copy of the text and then he's ready to lean over and he's about ready to point to the word on his partner's page that she was struggling with. But then she got it and so he goes back over to his text and it's just so cute to see he was just jumping and ready to help or point and he had seen me a lot of times. I don't have to say anything when they miss a word. I just point and they read it and that's what he was doing.

Lorraine Griffin:

And so it was really great to see. So, yes, when I make them track along, and if they're not tracking, they're not doing the work. So to me it's. That's why and this is just kind of a tip for teachers, but I never ordered one copy of a book for my classroom library. I always. I would rather have less choices and have double copies because students, if they each have a copy, you can use any materials in your classroom for fluency work.

Melissa:

That's such a great tip, pardon.

Lori:

I just put a question that nobody can see it but us. So I just put a question in the chat that said what does tracking look like?

Lorraine Griffin:

well, I I used to use you know when when we used to have overhead projectors and then we had all those overheads left over, but now we had document cameras I took all those overheads and I would use highlighting tape and put highlighting tape at the top. I would cut the the um overheads into like rectangles and then I would put highlighting tape across the top and then I could tell, when I was working with a small group with tracking, if they were moving their highlighting tape down. I could tell that they were following along. Because it's really hard if you have a small group that I was working in intervention at that point and I would have four or five kids and we would be choral reading and you you can't really tell when a child is tracking or not tracking, but I could tell if it was moving down. So maybe that's just teacher control. You know all the things that we do to feel like they're doing the right thing.

Lorraine Griffin:

But I just have no, you go ahead. What do you do? Sorry.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Oh, I was just gonna say I just have them use their finger and their fingers just kind of gliding underneath as they read. And then you know we didn't get into what I do small group. But and then in small group you know I will put the point of my pencil over the top if I'm reading with them or you know whatever, and so they're kind of going along. Sometimes you can get fun little I don't know gadgets to kind of have on point with, but they also can become more of a like a management issue. And then one time at Halloween I got those little witch fingers and I was going to have them use those but they started leaving red marks on my books.

Melissa:

I was like oh no.

Lindsay Kemeny:

So I'm like we're just sticking with the finger.

Lori:

What do you think about scooping? How do we feel about scooping? What's scooping?

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yeah, I think that's great for some some kids who are, you know, to help with the fluency, where you kind of scoop underneath like a chunk of words, yeah, and that really helps too, because part of you know prosody is that intonation and phrasing, and sometimes they're going to read things just weird where they don't pause at the period and then they pause at the word after and it totally changes the meaning.

Lori:

Yeah, Lorraine's examples earlier in the wintertime reminded me of the scooping.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yeah, that's where you kind of scoop it and pointing out use poetry and we want.

Lorraine Griffin:

We wonder why don't students comprehend poetry, like why do they struggle with it so much? It's so beautiful. I did a workshop once where we did two roads diverged in a yellow wood and put the poem up and I had the teachers that were in the workshop read it to the end of the line. And we read the whole poem to the end of the line. Then I went back to the beginning and I had them read to the punctuation An absolutely completely different experience. And a woman came up to me afterwards and said that is my very favorite poem of my entire life and I understand it now, of my entire life and I understand it now. She'd been reading to the, she'd been reading to the end of the line and she loved the images. She loved it. But she didn't realize that that flow of an unfinished idea to the punctuation. So that's another thing that I like over the years, like not just performing monologues, readers theater, but also performing poetry. That linkage to comprehension is so tight because poetry is really intended to be read aloud, like I would play recordings for my students.

Lorraine Griffin:

I found a recording of Robert um, oh, his name just left me, no, robert Frost, thank you. And how, when he would perform his poetry. He would perform it as if he was just thinking it up, like I just thought about this line and when he performed it was so beautiful and you can, there are. Like now you can hear all the poets and the speeches. Like think about the impact of students practicing a speech and then hearing JFK or then hearing Martin Luther King Jr. Like do the same speech. Like there's, there's so much of realizing.

Lorraine Griffin:

I can interpret it one way, but someone else, when they were performing that speech or saying it for the very first time, like I think about my students would perform what's the American slave, is the 4th of July and that one has such high vocabulary and they would learn what that like, what that felt like and what that meant. But that the whole vocabulary impact of doing this work is huge because the students are saying the words in context repeatedly and so they're like putting a whole set of words around a period of history or around a story which we all know that vocabulary, familiarity with vocabulary, and if they're tracking text they're also looking at the word. So they're not just hearing the vocabulary, they're also seeing it.

Lori:

I really want to get into what Lindsay does in her small group, but we've literally talked the entire time about the whole group, which I thought might happen based on our your time about the whole group, which I thought might happen based on our conversation prior to this.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Well, let me, let me just share about the texts I use in small group really quick, because I was going to say this when we were talking before. But I have, you know, this is where I can really differentiate, and so I have different groups where you know they're small group. I have different focuses for different students, and so I love so. I was mentioning decodables before, so I have, you know, decodables that I have access to, that my students can use, but the goal, of course, is to get rid of these. They're like training wheels, right, and we want to get them into authentic texts, and so I love that.

Lindsay Kemeny:

I just have this variety of texts to work from, where I have some students, you know, especially at the beginning of the year, are in very decodable books, and then I love to transition them into some that are not as decodable. So, you know, I have geodes in my classroom which I love because they're a little harder. I think the decodability is like more, is it 80%, is it less? I don't remember so and and. So I love that because I just think it helps transition them into regular text, and that is my goal to transit, transition them into, to normal, authentic text.

Lori:

I love that you said that that is the goal not to stay in decodables stay in decodables.

Lorraine Griffin:

Yeah, when we were, when we were working on geodes, we struggled to make them 80% decodable at the beginning but by the time they got to second grade we had books in the end of second grade that were 95% decodable, because then we had so many more sounds to work with. That it made it so much easier to stay. And when we moved into multi-syllabic words and we could, like, have the parts be decodable, it just made it so much easier to write those. So ironically, there are probably more highly decodable at the end of second grade than in any of the others.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Well, and I don't follow the scope and sequence because I don't use the phonics program that they're paired with, but it still works. You know it's close enough and, like I said, that just makes it maybe, you know, a little less decodable, and that's okay because my students are ready for that challenge.

Melissa:

So, Well, we've reached the end of our time, Unfortunately. I think we could keep talking to you for a long time about fluency, but we always end with our guests leaving a piece of advice for our audience. So you've given a ton already, but if you could give just one last fluency piece of advice for everybody.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Okay, I'll share a tip that I do in small group that I learned from um Nora Shabazi, you know from Ebley. She's been on your podcast where I have the student read and then I read the same part and then they read again. So they're getting multiple exposure and and they can work a little more on fluency that second time. So you know, if it's kindergarten, you know maybe they're just going to read one or two sentences and then I model those same two sentences and then they read them again. And you know, in second grade those passages could be a little longer. They read their paragraph and then I do, and then they do that is such a good, quick, easy tip.

Lorraine Griffin:

And my piece of advice would be practice, practice, practice, but also perform.

Lorraine Griffin:

I feel like without the performance aspect, at least, the higher, the older the students get, they're not really seeing a reason for doing it. And you know you're, you're shaping students' futures of speaking in public, of performing, of like there are so many things that they're going to build confidence around if they're given the opportunity on a regular basis to perform, as opposed to it just being here and there. You know, I I feel like adding that performance element is really, really important for students to perform what they've worked on and it gives them an end point and a celebration of all of their hard work and allow them to perform the same thing week after week after week, because they just realize it gets better and better and better the more I perform it. So, with older kids, I think it's really important for them to have some choice and for them to perform great works, because we believe in knowledge building, so the more they can get the words of really important documents in their head. You're also doing primary source work, even while you're doing fluency work.

Lori:

Thank you both so much. We know we've run over time. This is a wonderful conversation. We're so grateful to have had it with both of you, so thank you for being here.

Lorraine Griffin:

Thank you, thanks for having us. Thank you, thank you.

Lori:

Thank you for listening. Literacy Lovers, remember we have a new episode out every Friday and we send a super helpful newsletter with follow-up content each Tuesday.

Melissa:

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Lori:

And please reach out with questions or ideas for podcast episodes. We love hearing from you, melissa. What's our email address? Melissa and laurie at literacypodcastcom we are so glad you're here to learn with us.