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[Listen Again] Ep. 110: Baltimore Secondary Literacy Teachers Talk Fluency

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From June 3, 2022

Today middle school educators from Baltimore City Public Schools join us to discuss their focus on fluency through Continuous Improvement work with fluency using HQC. What is Continuous Improvement? Why is this a useful framework? “Possibly wrong, definitely incomplete”  is a mantra that resonates. The educators share their approach, impact, and outcomes for students. Secondary teachers… this one’s for you. 

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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, about literacy with you today.

Lori:

Hi everyone, welcome to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Literacy Podcast. Today we are talking with four amazing educators from Baltimore who are using improvement, science, continuous improvement principles with the goal of improving literacy for their secondary students. Melissa, I know you're going to tell us all about what improvement, science and continuous improvement means, and I have lots of questions.

Melissa:

Well, I'm probably going to let our guests do more of that, but I will.

Lori:

I will jump in, but I'll tell you who we have today, Please tell us who we have, because I don't want to know about any of it until we know who is here.

Melissa:

So I'm super excited because I used to work with this group of teachers who are amazing, from Baltimore. So we have some Baltimore middle school teachers. We have Tanisha, who is a seventh grade teacher, grade teacher, so we have three teachers. And then we have Zach, who works in the district office, the literacy office, and they all work together in a fellowship. That is exactly what you said, lori. They work, doing some improvement, science, continuous improvement work in this fellowship, and I worked with that fellowship for two years, so I'm really excited to hear what they've done since I'm not there anymore. So I'm going to start by passing it over to Zach. Zach's going to give us an overview, a little background in this work that they're doing, the fellowship, how it all fits together, and then we'll hear some amazing stories from the teachers about the work they're doing.

Zack Jaffe:

Yeah, thanks, hey Zach, thanks, Melissa. Hi Zach, welcome back. Thank you, good to be here and of course, you're going to jump in because really, melissa, you're the one who started all of this work with the fellowship. Yeah, for sure, yeah, we have a great fellowship of teachers here who are all working on this idea of improving literacy outcomes for students in the secondary grade levels, in middle school and high school, and we call that network BSLIC, which is the Baltimore Secondary Literacy Improvement Community.

Melissa:

So when you hear me say it's a mouthful of an acronym, it is and I understand that you're the one who came up with it, bslic.

Zack Jaffe:

So thanks, melissa, that's cool. I wouldn't go that far, so thanks.

Melissa:

Melissa, that's cool.

Zack Jaffe:

I wouldn't go that far.

Zack Jaffe:

So Beeslick is a network of 25 middle and high schools here in Baltimore City and, again, our aim is to improve the literacy outcomes for our secondary students who may have gaps, who may have come into middle school and high school behind where we would want them to be in terms of reading and writing, and so part of what we do within BeSlic is that we have literacy coaches working at all of these different schools and we have a whole program where they're there to support the teachers and help them learn and help them implement the curriculum in a way that really benefits the students, in a way that really benefits the students.

Zack Jaffe:

But then we have this really other cool feature which started back in January in 2019, 2020, the teacher fellowship, and so the teacher fellowship is really exciting because we wanted to be able to work directly with people who are working directly with the students and really get them in on the learning, instead of working like just through school teams or just through the literacy coaches who are helping the teachers, and it's been great how much learning has been done and how much all of these teachers that you're going to hear from have accomplished because we're able to work directly with them and hear how things are going with their students.

Zack Jaffe:

So the Be Slick Fellowship that we're going to be talking about here is focusing on fluency, specifically oral reading fluency, and what we've been doing is trying to help them with these procedures called continuous improvement or improvement science, to really help them learn how the changes that they might make in their classroom are affecting their students positively or not really at all or oh, this isn't really working. We've got to change things up, and that's the lens through which we're working with all of the teacher fellows.

Lori:

That's so helpful.

Melissa:

I was just going to say what I loved about. What I love about the improvement science model is you know, usually what happens in most districts is someone at the district level decides like, hey, this is the thing that's going to work, it's going to make things better. And then they do PD for everybody and everyone goes and tries, it Maybe does or doesn't work. If it doesn't work, we definitely just probably stop doing it. And that's usually how things play out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't Right, but we and we don't know, we just like leave it to the teachers.

Melissa:

But this is really different in that it's the teachers finding like, ok, what, what is not working in my classroom and what can I do to make it better. And then trying it and trying it quickly and keeping data to see should this be a thing I keep doing, not doing this be a thing I keep doing, not doing? Do I need to change it again, do it more and then from what those teachers are learning, that learning can get to other teachers. But they've already tried it with real students in their classrooms and have data to see what worked and what didn't.

Lori:

That's so helpful, melissa, and I want to make a comment, and then I also want to ask Zach a question. I think what is making me excited for this conversation is that the teachers here today are doing this in concert with or I guess, in the realm of with high quality materials, right? So they're using their high quality materials. I don't even know why I said in the realm of, but that's what came out of my mouth.

Lori:

So, they're doing this with their high quality materials with written wisdom, and I think that that is super exciting to hear how teachers are seeing like well, okay, the materials say this, but how can I use the materials that I've been given to help my students in real time? And we're doing this improvement science, continuous improvement to learn about what's working and what's not, and then that's going to help other teachers not just like buy in, but see what's working and pass the good word along. So the thing that I want to know, though, is what is the difference between improvement science and continuous improvement, because I feel like they sound very similar and are used interchangeably, but I've heard through the grapevine that they're not the same.

Zack Jaffe:

Yeah, they're pretty much the same and I use them interchangeably, that's for sure.

Melissa:

Yeah.

Lori:

I do too.

Zack Jaffe:

Okay, that's good to know, thank you.

Lori:

Do you want to define them? Zach for me.

Zack Jaffe:

Continuous improvement is just this idea that we are going to test change ideas, make very small changes and try and monitor them and use data to see if those changes are working. And you hear that like across a wide range of contexts. So it started in industry if you've ever heard of things like Six Sigma and Lean and things like that and what Toyota does in order to make their manufacturing processes more streamlined like it all comes from this idea of continuous improvement. And then there's like specific tools and procedures within that realm that we've learned from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and they call that improvement science, but really it's all the same thing. It's like let's understand the context that we're working in and, by really analyzing the system, let's come up with some change ideas that we think we can use to address the root causes of problems that we're seeing. And let's do some very rapid cycles of testing of those change ideas, gathering data and making changes as we go to try and get to the best possible outcomes.

Lori:

That's so helpful. Thank you, zach. I feel like I can relate to this on so many levels, not just in education, but like as a parent. All right, I tried that. That didn't work, I'll try something else tomorrow.

Zack Jaffe:

Yeah, and just to add to what Melissa was saying, like learning from what's happening in teachers' classrooms instead of being directed from you know, the district office.

Zack Jaffe:

Like, we know that teachers are trying things every single day in their classrooms, and the question is, can we learn from what they're doing things every single day in their classrooms? And the question is, can we learn from what they're doing? And most of the time, like, the information stays with them and they learn how to make their class better, or they think it's getting better but it's actually not. Or maybe, in the best case scenario, it's getting better and they share it with a couple of their teachers at their school. And so we're just trying to, like, put these processes in place through the fellowship, where it's like all the learning that you're doing, we're going to make sure we have the data to support it. We're going to make sure you're going to talk to other teachers from other schools to spread that learning and to get ideas from each other and then eventually say, okay, school district, like, this is what we learned and let's share it with the rest of the school district yeah, I think that's the exciting part for me.

Melissa:

It's really exciting. Laura, if you don't mind, I'd love to start talking to our teachers. Are you ready?

Lori:

I would love to start talking with our teachers too. They're patiently waiting.

Melissa:

So I would love to start just by asking you all what made you want to be a part of this fellowship, like what was appealing, what were you seeing in your classrooms? What made this something that you wanted to be a part of it, because you all are in your, like, third year of this work now, so it was definitely a commitment. So let's start with Emery.

Lori:

And I think we should also let Emery tell his special story, too, about where he is. So, yeah, not to jump in, but Emery, emory, you need to like make sure that you share your cool story I don't know if it's cool, but it's.

Emery Uwimana:

It's definitely relevant to where I am currently uh. So I am. It is currently 10, 30 in uh the evening. Here in zambia, in Lusaka, I have been teaching half the year remotely in Africa. It's been an experience, but the fact that it was very important for me to continue doing this work while I was here was the reason why. So shout out to Harlem Park. We got permission to do this because we didn't want to stop.

Emery Uwimana:

The reason why I decided to join Be Slick and I love, lori, how you said what's the difference between like the improvement community and improvement science Well, for me it's like. For Be Slick, it's easier to say the acronym because it's an improvement community. There are different ways to say it out loud, but like for me. That's why it was. The reason I joined is because I think the first six months of my first year I realized that I wasn't really teaching English. I was teaching literacy, teaching English, I was teaching literacy and I just I. There was no way I could sustain this position by doing what was was kind of the status quo. So I looked for every opportunity to to kind of do something different in my classroom and it's been a godsend ever since.

Melissa:

That's great. Thank you, Tanisha. How about you?

Tanisha Dasmunshi:

So I was a I don't think I was even a first year teacher yet when I joined on to be slick, I was a resident teacher at my school and my literacy coach and Zach has kind of talked about literacy coaching but my literacy coach put me on to Beeslake and it was really exciting because I was a new teacher very overwhelmed by like the millions of things we have to do in an English language arts classroom and you're trying to master writing and reading comprehension and reading literature.

Tanisha Dasmunshi:

So this was exciting because I could really zero in on this one strand of literacy fluency and deepen my understanding with it. And as a secondary teacher I really had no training in doing fluency work with students at all through my teacher prep program. So I felt like this is where I can get that learning and I did, and so I stayed on because I found the continuous improvement framework really useful and because it's exciting, because the cool thing about this kind of professional development is I really get to deepen my knowledge about this one topic over the course of a year two years at this point.

Melissa:

I love it and Emily.

Emily Jaskowski :

So I have to think back, because I've been in Beeslake, I think, since the creation think back because I've been in peace like, I think, since the creation.

Emily Jaskowski :

You can correct me if I'm wrong, no, I think you're right. And so the program as it looked like in its first iteration when I applied it just looks so different now, and that's been part of the cool process of seeing like the improvement process actually happen to this improvement community. So it's not just like the teachers within the classroom that are seeing this or, um, you know, at a school level, but also the improvement community within itself has also, I think, kind of gone through these cycles as well and and trying to hone how to make our improvement work improved, um, if that makes sense. So, and when I joined, there weren't any kind of specific projects that we were working on yet. We were actually brainstorming in the process of like creating what these focuses would be, and I remember that the first improvement project I'd kind of brainstormed with the group of teachers that I was working with was around teacher efficacy and how to get teachers to feel more confident in their practice and, in turn, helping their students feel more confident in themselves as well.

Emily Jaskowski :

That we went into virtual in the spring, the first year of the pandemic, and then these other iterations of being able to focus specifically on fluency or writing, came out of that first cohort and so kind of seeing the improvement process, work on Beastlic in general has been really cool, because kind of funneling this lens into fluency has helped me understand the improvement process more, because I think when the net was super wide and we, you know, had all of these different things that we were looking at, it almost made it too overwhelming.

Emily Jaskowski :

But now, if I'm just thinking about okay, how can I improve fluency within my students and which students is improving fluency with going to have the most impact and be the most, be the right fit for what those students need, has really helped me understand the improvement process but also just the importance of fluency instruction and you know how to be more impactful.

Emily Jaskowski :

As a middle school teacher and someone that's trying to prepare, you know students for high school as well. So it's been a. It's been a cool process to kind of look back over what this has looked like and being able to pull a lot of this off virtually and still have an impact was also really cool last year. But seeing seeing all this work like happen in the classroom this year has also. I feel like every year has been a different learning experience, which is one of the reasons that I've, you know, really enjoyed continuing, because I don't feel like it's been the same at any time that I've done it and that's also been unique, to have a very like, new and informative experience every time that you're doing something.

Lori:

That's super helpful. I know I love that Thanks.

Zack Jaffe:

Emily.

Lori:

Did you all opt into this? Did you apply? Okay, they're nodding their heads. Yes, All right. So I'm curious like you applied for a reason, right? So what were you seeing in your students that that made you want to apply for this opportunity? Does anybody want to go first? I hate to say raise your hand, but I know you're all on mute. Do you want to raise your hand? Who?

Melissa:

wants to go first.

Zack Jaffe:

Yeah, I can just jump in Emery, you want to go?

Lori:

Tanisha wants to go first. Go ahead, tanisha. Sorry, emery, she raised her hand first.

Tanisha Dasmunshi:

I was prepared.

Lori:

It's 1030 for Emery. All right, he's like exhausted right now.

Tanisha Dasmunshi:

Right? Well, my obvious answer is just disfluent reading. So, as I said, I had been a resident teacher and then schools closed in March and we shifted virtually. But my takeaway in those first few months of teaching in Baltimore City was just seeing a lot of students in the seventh grade reading disfluently, not reading with automaticity, and it felt like we were all kind of figuring out what do we do when this is so many students in secondary school struggling with the grade level text. And so that's part of why fluency was really appealing, because I knew at least the teacher prep program taught me at least that it was an essential branch of reading automatically.

Emery Uwimana:

Yeah, To jump with exactly what tanisha said. It was just kind of assessing my students orally and realizing how much I mean you, you, you, when you start working in baltimore city, you kind of already hear, like you know, you go through ntis ntisc is the new teacher like institute, which is where I met Emily for the first time and you, you kind of get this like big picture of what some, some of the skill gaps that are here in Baltimore city, and not just because I mean obviously, the store, the story of the city itself has there. There's so much, there's so much trauma to unpack when it comes to why this exists. But yeah, when you're teaching, especially middle school in Baltimore City, you realize that a lot has to do with a lot of the literacy skill gaps that are missing. And even in my first year I was lucky enough to be hired not as an English teacher but as a literacy intervention teacher, and this is where I met Zach.

Emery Uwimana:

My first year is we did a story intervention together. I don't know how much I can name check. It's a curriculum that specializes in secondary students' literacy intervention. But I learned so much that you know. And then, with my involvement with Beastlic, I realized that this wasn't necessarily a common approach to most first-year teachers, where you don't know what fluency means, you don't know what literacy intervention is, you don't know what phonics is, you don't know how to teach reading to secondary students, and so I think it was fortunate just how my path laid out, where I was just like that's all I sought out as soon as I got that introduction, where I was just like this is what I need to be doing, and I felt, as soon as I got into the beastly community, it was uh, it was nice, it was very refreshing. I found, I found my people, and so it was really good to be there.

Emily Jaskowski :

That leaves me right where I could make the most impact in thinking about okay, what is it that I can do to help prepare students for the next thing, especially as, like an eighth grade teacher, I'm always like, okay, how am I making sure that they're going to be successful in high school, that they're going to, that they have the skills that they need coming into ninth grade so that they can get through ninth grade and be on a trajectory to graduate.

Emily Jaskowski :

And I think that one of the reflection points I always had was that I could have these great class discussions and we could be talking about text and referring them back to text, but there was a level of independence that my students were getting which was doing them a disservice for what they were going to see in the future. And so I thought improving fluency would directly impact students becoming more independent, because they would have more confidence in their reading and that they, you know, feel like when they see a complex text, they have the skills that they need to tackle it and make meaning from that. And so I think that that was one of the my main goals in kind of diving into this fluency thing was just how do I build more independent readers at a middle school level, so that when they get to ninth grade they're not shocked by a text or they're, you know, disengaged because something seems too complicated. And so that's really kind of the basis of why I thought fluency would be a good fit, for you know how to push my practice.

Melissa:

Yeah, I'm going to jump in a little bit and give like a history of Be Slick for everybody. That goes along with what you just said, emily, because I want people to know, like, like some of you mentioned already, but we didn't start with fluency, right, that was not the starting point, but it is where a lot of the focus is now. So how did we get there? I'll give a little bit, but then you all jump in if I miss anything or you want to add.

Melissa:

But you know we started in a place, like Emily mentioned before, which was like almost a little overwhelming of like trying to figure out what is the root cause of students coming in to middle school and still being on a third grade reading level or even lower.

Melissa:

There's like a million things and it can feel really overwhelming. And we're like how do I, how do I even tackle this? But going through all of those and just like throwing them out there and then really starting to. You know we talked to different experts and started to think like what will make the most impact for students, like what and what do teachers have the most control over? Like what can I actually do in my classroom and see results quickly? And that's where fluency sort of became the one. We talked a lot to David Lieben about it and you know he was the one that says like you can make some pretty quick gains with fluency that really do have lasting impacts for students, like Emily just mentioned, and that's kind of how we ended up. There are still some other fellows working on writing correct, zach, but then we do have the fluency focus. Did I miss?

Zack Jaffe:

anything. I think it's interesting how that sort of all came together to focus on fluency, the work that the fellows were doing here in the first year of the fellowship, and plus things like what Emery was talking about, where it's like oh, here's this really cool reading intervention specifically for secondary students and we don't know what to do for secondary students, but here's people who are finding it out and the research of David and Meredith Lieben. Like all came together to point to, hey, fluency would be a great thing to work on.

Melissa:

And we had a really good starting point in wisdom with fluency, right, but you all saw that it wasn't, wasn't perfect.

Emily Jaskowski :

That's what I was just going to add in that, like there were elements of the curriculum and I and I think it scaffolded through sixth, seventh and eighth grade that there are different opportunities for fluency practice.

Emily Jaskowski :

But if I'm an early career teacher or I'm worried about pacing or I have like other priorities that, whether that's like at a school level or district level, are given to me, those are the kind of things that people have to make instructional choices about, like, do I spend time setting up routines and procedures around fluency homework, or you know how am I making sure that all students are practicing fluency at home, um, or do I need to make decisions that are going to impact things that are happening in the classroom, um, to make sure that that practice is happening? So it's like it was. There were a lot of high quality materials there, um, but thinking about how that actually played out instructionally and even as someone who was I, was I don't know, I guess I'd been teaching Witten Wisdom for three or four years at that point still hadn't figured out the best approach to how, like to still incorporate something that was in the curriculum but not necessarily at the forefront of my mind.

Lori:

Can I just add to to frame for those listening. And Emily, please, you know, please jump in and clarify as needed that the fluency passages in Witten Wisdom in middle school are sometimes given for homework. So students have to do them at home. And what I'm hearing you say is that posed some challenges for middle school students and I don't think you're the first teacher or teachers to have that concern that middle school teachers, middle school students, are not necessarily doing the homework that is given to them.

Emery Uwimana:

You know I've read that no no, they all do their homework.

Emily Jaskowski :

I mean my fourth grader does her homework every night, but there was also an assumption that there was like a fluent reader at home that you were reading with, and so it was also, you know, there are some equity issues there and some other things that you know, and it's an intent, great, great idea. The passages are high quality passages. They're definitely passages that are worth being read multiple times, passages that are definitely passages that are worth being read multiple times. But assuming that you know you have a family structure that would support the way that those are supposed to be done is making an assumption about our students, and that was always something that I, you know, just didn't sit right with the way that it was, like, expected to be rolled out as well.

Lori:

Yeah, so you all took it and made it workable for your classrooms, for your schools. So you all took it and made it workable for your classrooms, for your schools, for your students, most importantly, can you share?

Emery Uwimana:

a little bit about like what you're doing. Yeah, to the podcast. In listening to zach and melissa speaking some of the origins, like they were like the uh, the origin story of beast lick, I didn't realize that it didn't start with, like this teacher improvement fellowship.

Emery Uwimana:

Like I didn't realize that that was not from day one you missed all the messy parts emery right eventually, like somebody in that think tank was like we're going to place teachers at the center of learning and improvement and elevating their practical expertise to improve the problems, and I didn't realize that's how it started. And so when I think about the journey Beathlick had even learning about it I guess we can talk about Carnegie soon enough, but like even learning about how that journey started. And so when I'm thinking about our journey, like Tanisha and Emily's, like our journey as being teacher fellows, like it all started maybe with like one question and like how do we improve a certain thing? That like this is our outcome, this is our goal, and for me it was. For me it was just like Lori said is like how can I use these wit and wisdom, fluency passages that are already instilled in our curriculum, but how can I use that to benefit my students in a great, especially in a virtual, environment? Because, again, this started last year completely in a pandemic and for me it started with how am I going to get my students to read out loud online to me, virtually like that? That was the first question and you know I don't we don't have a lot of time, which is kind of the worst thing is just like every time I I get to explain this, it's like I never have enough time to give you the processes.

Emery Uwimana:

But three years later we I well, the change idea was basically to use existing wit and wisdom, uh, uh assignments and administer them through different mediums. First it was flipgrid, now it's microsoft teams to hear my kids out loud, to hear them read out loud, and as a teacher, they they always tell you you you assess orally. But now, like we have these like very intricate apps that will tell you you assess orally. But now, like we have these like very intricate apps that will tell you how many words you're reading correctly in a minute, how many omissions you're taking away or how many insertions. It's like it calculates your accuracy, your correct words per minute, calculates your accuracy, your correct words per minute.

Emery Uwimana:

The only thing that it doesn't calculate, which Melissa provided me at the time, was a fluency rubric to judge or to give you a good, accurate score of how your fluent reading is, your volume and your expression, kind of that oratory sense. And so that was basically my change idea, and using that data to have conferences with my students, maybe twice a month, and then being able to show them and share that data with them and then track that individually over the course of these cycles, and to me, that's where they took onus of their own responsibility for their own learning and you saw the improvement once I shared that information with them. So again it's. It's a lot more intricate, there's a lot more to it, but basically that was that was the gist of it.

Melissa:

Yeah, and what I love about that is like what Emily said about you know, sending it home. And yeah, they might not have what they need at home to do all those things. You're putting something in place to make sure that everyone's getting the same thing right. And this not only are you ensuring that they're actually doing the fluency work right, because you can see that they've done it, but also it's giving you so much valuable information and the students valuable information and data, because you're talking to them about it right. So, instead of just like go home and do it, you checked off the box, you did your fluency work. There's like real conversations happening about are they improving? Where are they improving, where do they still need to improve, and I think that just makes it like you said they, they can own it, and it makes it so much more valuable than check I did my homework, I got my grade or I didn't.

Emery Uwimana:

Oh, yeah, the initial with wisdom joys is basically like a box and you're like did I read this with somebody? And like I did that the first like week or so, be slick. And I realized that the students were hip. They were just like, oh yeah, I checked yeah, I did it give? Me credit yeah, they were very. Yeah, they got smart real quick.

Tanisha Dasmunshi:

Tanisha go ahead um, our first step, so just like what Emily and Emery have said, was to figure out how do we make this part of our in-class routine and do it quickly without losing a ton of instructional time to this intervention that's not supposed to happen in the curriculum, quote, unquote. And so we decided to do choral reading and echo. Well, we split off into whole group, small group and Emery and I were whole group last year and we decided we would do a quick choral read with our students, an echo read, and then they'd get a chance to practice the passage together. And that's pretty novel to do with secondary students, secondary students. What I think is also really novel is to be able to say I've heard each one of my like 147th graders reading out loud which is something I probably wouldn't have done.

Lori:

Absolutely, tanisha. Can I ask when you say that, it resonates so deeply with me? Because my first two years I taught high school and I thought this. Then I went back and taught elementary school. I was like what the heck is happening in elementary school, that all these kids are coming to me without being able to read. Um, so I'm so curious. What when you say, like you you heard them read, like what were you hearing, what were you thinking, what was going on in your mind and what did it tell you about your students?

Tanisha Dasmunshi:

Yeah, at the beginning of the fellowship, that was the thing that was brand new and really exciting to me, because suddenly I was getting all this knowledge about, you know, the shy seventh grader who usually never speaks up in class, and now I know that it's because actually they're really struggling to read automatically and I think that's knowledge I maybe would have. It would have taken me a long time to get to, you know, I had their iReady score, but that's a very limited picture of what they're, what they're really capable of, and so this was exciting. I feel like I got so much knowledge about kids. Like you can tell now that student A, um is not a disfluent reader, can read automatically but reads, you know, without a lot of expression, and so that might be limiting their comprehension, as opposed to student B, who's actually just struggling with like phonics and is struggling to read each decode, each word quickly, and so that kind of information I don't think you can get as quickly with middle schoolers without doing something like an ORF process with them.

Lori:

Thank you for sharing that. That's really helpful, and I'm going to ask you one more question, and if anybody else wants to chime in, you're more than welcome as well. Do you feel like it helped, or how do you feel like it helped with classroom management or connecting with your students?

Tanisha Dasmunshi:

Yeah, I mean, this year this was a little. This was different, virtually because we had the kids record themselves on Flipgrid, so it wasn't like a personal moment where I, like, took them aside and listened to them read. This year, though, coming back after this sort of year of disconnection, I think it was really, really important that I had all of these. I measured their reading seven times this year, so it's really amazing that I had like seven opportunities with these students each student through the year where I, like, took them aside and, for two minutes, listen to them read. I think it meant a lot, and I feel like I could diagnose issues much earlier on. You know where, suddenly, I know why this student might act out in class and it's because I know from my September or that they're struggling with this component of reading. Yeah, yeah.

Lori:

Would anyone else want to add on to that? I don't want to limit, yeah.

Emily Jaskowski :

Would anyone else want to add on to that? I don't want to limit. I would just also say, like, which I learned a lot about which students felt apprehensive about reading, which students felt confident with their reading, like within those first couple of passages, and just learning a little bit more about their attitude about reading, without even having like a full conference, like how do you feel about reading, which would actually be a really great question, but, um, you know, just by the way that they're approaching the first couple of passages, um, was really interesting too. So it wasn't even just about the, you know, getting that score and then being able to use that data to make decisions, but just some other like their attitude and confidence levels as well yeah, I completely agree to me.

Emery Uwimana:

it's a break over the routine. It's like, but it is. It is something that we've introduced as part of the routine, so it's like we've been. For my, at least, for my seventh graders it was which I concentrated on this year. It was a break from doing whatever district mandated tasks we were supposed to do. That day when it's just like now, we get to have a one-on-one conversation about how we're doing, which I think they look, really, really look forward to Again, like these conferences, I think, were the basis of how do I get better?

Emery Uwimana:

And there was another colleague of mine shout out to Mr Snook, who also did five and six, who was also on the fluency team. He made it more of a part of a classroom connection, where it was more of a classroom competition, where I tried to kind of like steer, to weight that and wanted to have an individual conversation, especially when I live overseas and like the only way I can really talk to these kids is like these one-on-one conversations online, and so I thought they look forward to that because it was a personal metric on their own success and so they knew that this is our time to deal with my own personal development, which I think they kind of just naturally like gravitated towards.

Melissa:

I love that because we know there's so much conversation on like social emotional learning right now and sometimes you can think like that needs to just be not related to learning and content and instruction, but just hearing you guys talk about how you know how much you can relate to a student by talking to them about their reading and whether, like you, seeing them and what they need and having that conversation with them can be really powerful on an instructional level but also that social emotional level as well.

Emily Jaskowski :

Emily, I'm going to pass it over to you because we haven't talked about what you did and I know you did some slightly different work around fluency a test with coming up with a way to practice fluency in small group, which was actually great because we shifted a lot of the district priorities to small group learning as part of our learning acceleration model. But traditionally small group wasn't something that was really emphasized in middle school. I've been teaching in sixth, seventh and eighth grade for 10 plus years and so that was something that I was even like I you know, I know how to do a writing conference, I know you know these specific contexts in which I can create small group opportunities, but hadn't done anything with fluency before. And so it the last year I was kind of tasked with creating a small group protocol for what is a structured way that you can practice fluency with a small group of kids within, you know, a 10 to 15 or not 10, I'm sorry a 15 to 20 minute timeframe. And so really looking at what some of the best practices for fluency um Tanisha mentioned, doing choral reading, echo reading, um and taking some of those processes and then taking that wit and wisdom fluency passage, which um was easily accessible and also a high, high impact material, um, and taking that fluency practice uh passage and using that for small group instruction. So I created a protocol that I used just with five kids that I pulled during virtual instruction and then they kind of graduated out of needing the fluency practice they're getting from that first protocol. And so I was like, well, they've kind of graduated, so now they need a fluency.

Emily Jaskowski :

I call that fluency 2.0.

Emily Jaskowski :

We have a different name for it now, but we have a fluency 2.0 protocol which concentrated more on okay, now we're reading fluently.

Emily Jaskowski :

How are we making explicit connections to comprehension through that another resource from Witten Wisdom, the question sets, which already have another high impact passage with comprehension questions that are all standards aligned.

Emily Jaskowski :

And so the protocols grew from having okay, I have one protocol for students that are reading a little bit below that 50th percentile and then, once they're reading above that, okay, how are we still pushing these students and not kind of keeping them within the same place? So then this last year we created three protocols so that now, based on students, we take two scores, that we two data points that we have for students and the I-ready diagnostic, which gives students a specific scale score based on their reading comprehension and then also their ORF score, their oral reading fluency score, their correct words per minute, and, based on those two scores make a decision about which small group protocol would be most appropriate for that student's needs, and then have been using those based on student levels and trying to, you know, regroup students as we get data and continue to kind of push students in growing their fluency and their comprehension in conjunction with that.

Melissa:

Emily, what is the difference between the three groups? Like what happens in the three groups.

Emily Jaskowski :

So the group A protocol is typically your students that are probably reading somewhere below 100 words per minute. And then these students typically have some deficits in phonics. They might be the kids that are just reading really slow and you can tell that they're not making a whole lot of meaning from the passage because of their rate. A lot of times in middle school this will look like kids that, like you'll see, that they'll read the first like two or three letters of a word and then just fill in the rest of the word. So they're not actually looking at the whole word, they're just looking at the first couple of letters and then um, trying to create meaning from that. Um, these students might not even know all of their um, word, word parts or sounds, um or how you know, have that like phonemic awareness instilled in them. So that fluency or the A protocol kind of focuses on looking at specific vocabulary words and then building strategies for how, my, when I see a word I don't know, what do I do? How can I break it into word parts? What word parts are recognizable? So creating some of those kind of early literacy skills, but still with grade level text. And then the B protocol is more about building automaticity. So these students probably have the full range of phonics that you would hope that a middle school student would have, but they're still not reading in a rate that comprehension is quick for them. So we're trying to build up automaticity. So that's actually working on sentence level work. So taking a complex sentence and practicing that to help kind of build the automaticity for the whole passage.

Emily Jaskowski :

And then the group C students. These students are probably reading at least 115 to 120 words per minute. So they're reading at a rate that comprehension can be expected. So it's not really the fluency, the speed, but maybe are they being expressive and thinking about what the words mean as they're reading them and that's why we're making that connection to comprehension. So they have a level of automaticity but they're missing that kind of expression and prosody that's also expected with fluency. That's probably creating gaps within their comprehension because they're reading things fast enough but they're not necessarily making meaning as they're reading and so kind of building out strategies of okay, we read this, how are we making sure that we understand what we read before we're moving on? So those are the three protocols.

Lori:

That's so cool and, emily, I am like 99% sure that there's a listener out there thinking how do I have access to these protocols, or are they for sale? Are they anywhere on any website? Anything that I could link as a screenshot.

Emily Jaskowski :

So this is one of those things that we've been trying to like slowly share resources with the district because it's very systematic. But then, as like the other fellows have been using them, they've been tweaking the protocols to work for them and their students that are actually have created a process where they're using like each of the protocols over the course of a week so that, like a student that's receiving like intensive intervention is actually getting the a protocol, the b protocol and the c protocol to, you know, create this more holistic picture for them. Um, I don't know about sharing resources.

Zack Jaffe:

I'm gonna defer to zach on that so here's here's the great thing about the continuous improvement, laurie, is that we are trying to gather all of this knowledge from as Emily said, it's not just her, it's all the other people who are trying similar protocols and tweaking it.

Zack Jaffe:

And what we've discovered because we've been studying this and looking at the data and conferencing around it for over a year now what we've discovered is it's not necessarily a strict protocol, but there are certain elements within these protocols that, not only in the small group, but the whole group as well, seem to be keys to success. And so we're at this point right now where it's like what have we really learned from this network about what's important and what's not so important? And so, for example, everybody says echo reading is important right, and so we need to make sure that, like when we're taking this idea and bringing it to a wider audience, such as the rest of the school district or beyond, that we have people understand. This is when you do echo reading, this is how you do echo reading, and so it's things like that. That is really exciting to learn is what are these components that make the most difference for the kids?

Emery Uwimana:

Yeah, yeah, sharing practices is hard because it's like even doing the district pd on friday, it's like I've we had like 60, 70 people in each you know professional development course and it's like you're you're doing a lot of broad strokes and so I ended up you know people who you know, we shared our contact information and so what I ended up doing you know people who you know, we shared our contact information, and so what I ended up doing and Mr Snook, who was also at Harlem Park what we ended up doing is like whoever emailed us, we just send us, we send them an individual presentation through their email, where it's like you want to share our processes, share some of the materials that we used processes, share some of the materials that we used, because it's, you know, unfortunately, if you're not a part of the improvement community, there's no way to like be this.

Emery Uwimana:

You don't have access to some of the knowledge that we've had, and we've tried to share this information in the past year and we've had the opportunity to do so in various ways. But ultimately, I think it's up to the district to decide whether or not that this is something that they want to do or share.

Lori:

Yeah, that makes sense, and I just think the biggest takeaway for me is that you're all learning from each other. So you're coming together, You're saying we're going to try this. It's backed by research. And then we're going you know, and we have these high quality materials we're going to use, but there's a little thing we need to tweak to use them. We're going to come together and try to find out what works.

Emily Jaskowski :

And then how often do you come back together Like what does that look like in with an advisor where? And I have two other fellows on that call as well. So I mean I'm basically like chatting with other people about once a week, but I also know like I can think of other times where you know Tanisha or Peter, or you know people that I've worked with through the fellowship over the last couple of years have just reached out and been like, hey, I remember you talking about this one thing that you used to use a confidence scale last year. Could you send me that? And so it's not there's like consistent touch points with people. But then also you're building your network of people that you trust and you you know you have collaborated with um that you can reach out and get really quick answers to things, so it's been cool to see that network grow as well.

Melissa:

I love it.

Lori:

It's like a real-life Facebook for literacy.

Melissa:

I'm wondering if you all could talk. Zach brought up a little bit of you know. What have we learned from all this that you've done? And I'm wondering if you all can talk a little bit about you know. You can definitely talk about data that you've seen, but I'm wondering more to like, what have you just seen in students as in terms of you know, how have they changed? What has changed in students from doing these things that you've done?

Tanisha Dasmunshi:

At least. I mean, for me everything is brand new, but I feel like I'm learning that students love performance and I was thinking about this because we just heard Tim Rosinski talk to us about performance and the value of it, because it's just authentic in itself and students immediately recognize the value in that. So I think part of it is it's just exciting to do something with students that they see the value in. It's not something I have to convince them the importance of, and I feel that way about fluency and the whole performance aspect of it. It's just fun for students and it's exciting to be able to bring them that opportunity in class.

Lori:

Tanisha, how do you get them to perform? I'm curious what that looks like. I'm imagining like a karaoke microphone or something at the front of the room.

Tanisha Dasmunshi:

I mean, I don't know, maybe it's just seventh grade, but I think they're really excited At least some kids are really excited about being able to like master the passage, and right now we're. The passage they just did was like, uh, squealer speech in animal farm, which they found hilarious, and they're they were, you know, super excited to deliver that to the class. So we really just I mean, we practiced it a bunch of times and then a ton of kids are excited to to perform it for everybody else.

Emery Uwimana:

Yeah, oh, tanisha man, you hit it on the nail because it takes me back to carnegie and chris emden speech, where it was just like teaching is a performance art and then your kids are works of art, right, and it's like it's it's being able to recognize, recognize that in us and recognize that in our students. And I always go back to that, that keynote speech, because it's like this is what I love about teaching, right, and it's what I love about instilling that into the kids. It's like these for me, it's like these anonymous readings is only because it's anonymous, right. It's like we deal in a population that's their middle schoolers or 12 to 15 year old. They're very, very self-aware about what that self, that self right yourself, you're realizing what yourself looks like through the rest of the world and you don't really want to share that with anybody except for somebody that you trust. And so when you allow them to just like it's just read something anonymously and then track your progress to know that you're getting better, it's like they really really get into that, they really like, they really respond to that.

Emery Uwimana:

And I love what you said. It's because it's like you're a trusted, like steward of that right, and they go to you to say, hey, ms D, like how am I doing? And to hear that, right, like when you hear that. And I have a video that I showed at Carnegie where I was just like they see that, and then they see the improvement and you see that they see the improvement where I was, just like they see that, and then they see the improvement and you see that they see the improvement within themselves within you.

Zack Jaffe:

It's awesome. It's like that's my favorite part.

Lori:

And it's such a better answer than than like when they say how are you, how am I doing? Like I mean, kids ask that, right, like I remember. I remember being a first year teacher and being like good, you're doing, great You've, you've turned on your work.

Melissa:

What does that even mean?

Lori:

And so, yeah, now you can say well, you're reading blah, blah, blah words per minute and my, you know? What do you think would be a great goal, maybe you know to master for in the next couple of weeks.

Emery Uwimana:

Okay, You're going to and it's so much more exciting.

Lori:

I you know, yeah, imagine if you can hear yourself here like, hear themselves read from the like january, and then in like march, you're like, oh my god, I'm so much better, I'm dope, I'm so dope yeah, and they're reading grade level texts over and over and the important parts of those texts that they need then to access some writing tasks and maybe some, you know, deeper close reading tasks and things like that.

Melissa:

So it's like like some of Emily's students actually talked about that.

Emily Jaskowski :

Yeah, that was fun interviewing them. But yeah, because the passages are, you know, these kind of high impact passages that you're rereading with students, especially in small group when you get to elevate more voices. You know, because you're able to have that smaller discussion, students say really insightful things in small group that might not necessarily share in whole group all the time and you'd be like, oh hey, frida, can you remind me what we were talking about in small group or can someone fluently read this sentence for us, because this might have some great evidence for us for this task. But there's definitely a lot of high leverage engagement strategies that just come out of that. But that idea of this taking ownership in your growth, I feel like and we're in the middle of doing iReady testing and MCAP testing and these very heavy tasks that I think a lot of times make kids feel like they're not growing and they're not doing. You know they're not meeting expectations or something. But having a kid be like hey, at the beginning of the year you were reading 88 words per minute when you're reading a grade level passage and now you're reading 125 words per minute and being able to say that you did that work, you grew there.

Emily Jaskowski :

Um, I think just lighten the mood a little bit when you're sitting there talking about iReady or MCAP or whatever these other assessments are. So I just love it, as there's so many good things that that having these quick check-in and the nice thing is like these, when we're assessing this, it's a minute, like we're not taking a, a 90 minute assessment, like it's literally a minute, and they're like boom, like let's look at your scores. Real quick, awesome, that's great, like okay. Next one, you know, and I can conference with 10, 12 kids in a day and get that, you know, popping up their chest feeling good, feeling confident, and have that in two minutes, versus having someone feel really overwhelmed and defeated by taking some of these other assessments. So I think that's one of the things that resonated with me as I'm watching kids take iReady. I'm just like okay, maybe we need a little self-esteem boost right now.

Melissa:

And Emily, I remember your students in those interviews talking specifically, they were able to say they felt more confident and that they felt more confident in the conversations in your regular class because they've already read these passages, so they felt really good about it. But also the just like I remember you saying, like they're the ones that were always volunteering to read in class now, right In front of their peers, even though they were the ones that needed that small group intervention, they were like they were confident now and that's that's so huge, like that, you know. I mean I I love all the numbers too and like seeing that they're growing with the numbers, but that confidence is that's just going to change the way they think about school for the rest of their time there.

Emily Jaskowski :

And just like as a teacher too, like you want to hear something, like you want to hear your kids saying that they feel better about things, or that you know that they are engaged in participating and you know that something that you did had an impact on them. Like hearing that is kind of what keeps you going, especially, you know, when you're in the midst of testing season and stuff, it's not all rainbows and sunshine being a teacher. So those little, those little wins definitely make it worthwhile for you too.

Lori:

That's a good point, and I do. I feel like we are going to have to come back together and record a second, second podcast, because we didn't get to like half of what we wanted to talk about. Um, but before you all leave, I do want to quickly mention you did a Carnegie presentation in San Diego, which that's like a bad ass. I just have to say that you are amazing and I just I wanted to make sure that we bragged about that. Does anybody want to share, like very quickly about that, because I think it's so important to talk about that? You all flew to San Diego, presented, rocked it and lived to tell about it.

Tanisha Dasmunshi:

Well, we're lucky to have such wonderful leaders in Beastlike who think that teachers are really important and want to bring our voices into these rooms. So I'm grateful to Amy and to Zach. And we got to go and we spoke about our process with Fluency Improvement. We spoke about how we came up with change ideas. We spoke about the ideas that we did come up with and the process that we did, and we got to talk to a bunch of people from all over the country and, yeah, just a super rewarding experience I'm so happy for out.

Emery Uwimana:

Zach Amy Natanya Jared.

Melissa:

I used to be there, emory, don't forget about me.

Emery Uwimana:

I know.

Zack Jaffe:

Melissa.

Emery Uwimana:

It was because of them and we got a shout out from two national speakers, because I think we we're doing good work and it was really nice to be recognized for it and it was nice, it was very nice.

Emily Jaskowski :

And yeah, just I thought that the most interesting part was that I don't remember the actual numbers on this, but there are very few teacher presenters and I remember people coming up afterwards and being like how do we get, or how did you guys start, teacher fellows? And so to me I was like why is this some kind of groundbreaking idea that you are including teachers and investigating and researching and trying to, you know, make change to impact a problem, and so I guess that's just another shout out to be least like for being innovative and including teachers.

Melissa:

We've worked with a bunch of experts throughout the whole process and I remember specifically Tim Brzezinski and I can't remember her name, but the head of the National Writing Project. They were both experts that presented to us but after they heard, they heard your stories as well. They said to me like people need to know what they're doing, what you guys are doing here, and not just like learning about fluency from you all, but the how you all are doing it right, the way that you all are being leaders and learning and sharing that learning is is very unique and different. Even those experts saw that.

Lori:

That is so cool it is. I'm so glad that you all came on today. I have a very quick idea to finish this out, that I know it's pretty late right now in the day and we're trying to close out, but could you all think of either a word or a short phrase about your time in the continuous improvement space and one thing that you'd like to leave the listeners with to think about? So like I'll share one that I was thinking just to share, you know, an example for you, because I know we didn't talk about this ahead of time. I was thinking about the word consistency, and I just think doing this consistently over time has made such an impact, and that's one thing that I'm taking away today, so I'm going to pass it to to Tanisha. I was like I was trying to do alphabetical order real fast, but Emily and Emery, I was like.

Emery Uwimana:

I can't not not quick enough. She raised her hand again Reverse alphabetical order.

Tanisha Dasmunshi:

Um Lori, I love that you said consistency. Consistency because the word that popped up in my head was discipline, and I've said this all year. But I just think the PDSA model is so helpful because you have this discipline structure to experiment with new things in your classroom, figure out if they work or not, and it's, yeah, incredibly valuable. So I will reiterate that an overwhelmed new teacher having like consistency, discipline around the way you're experimenting in your classroom is essential.

Lori:

And I think Emery's up, if I did my backwards alphabetical order accurately for me, it's uh, accountability always, uh.

Emery Uwimana:

My why has always been a student having someone holding them accountable. I feel like that's always been the reason why I've done this is they just need an adult who's there to see the possibility of what could be with them, and so that's always been my why, and this work just reinforces that. I'm here every day to hold you accountable of how great you can be, and I realized that to me even before I started teaching. That's always something that I've always sought in mentors and teachers, and I realized that that's why I keep doing what I do.

Lori:

That's so great. Thank you, and I'm going to pass it to Emily. Bring us home.

Emily Jaskowski :

I think the word that's coming to mind for me the most is grace which I kind of got sick of this word last year but just the idea that we can take time and figure out a process and hone that process and figure out what are the best parts of this process, but also not that this has to be done the same way across the board.

Emily Jaskowski :

But we know these are the key lever points and being able to have the time and the autonomy to figure that out and spend time and say that teaching is a very nuanced practice.

Emily Jaskowski :

That's kind of the thing that the fellowship has always meant to me and the thing that I've appreciated the most about it, because it's not some kind of dictated mandate. You have to do this by this, follow this pacing guide, do this this many times, but we have the ability to learn, we have the ability to change, we have the ability to say, hey, I was mandated to do a week of testing and I wasn't able to learn anything this week. But that's also a learning point, just having that kind of autonomy. But also there are expectations for us as well, because I think sometimes people think autonomy means like, oh, I can do whatever I want. No, we still have things that we need to get done and expectations around what we're doing. Um, but like understanding that our profession is nuanced and things come up and things happen, and having the grace to um hear those as learning points and not as negatives, um, I think as as one of the best parts of the fellowship of the ring.

Lori:

No, just kidding, I love that we're zooming in and we're hearing your you know key takeaways and your your thoughts.

Zack Jaffe:

but, zach, I'm wondering if you could zoom us out and just give us a word or a phrase for continuous improvement in the big picture, I think that you've been hearing it in different ways from everybody, but there's a phrase that we use in continuous improvement a lot Melissa definitely knows this one it's the phrases possibly wrong and definitely incomplete, and it's something that we always try and keep in mind when you're thinking of what do I want to change? I have an idea and the goal is to say I'm going to try it without being sure that it's perfect, and we live in a world in education where, like, accountability is such an important thing and compliance and everybody trying to do it the same way, and I think it's freeing to have that mindset of oh, it doesn't have to be perfect, let me just try it out and see how it goes, and I love being involved in something that is freeing in that way, in that you are allowed to make mistakes as long as you are willing to learn from them.

Lori:

I'm obsessed with all of you. One of the things that this is bringing up for me is you know Melissa mentioned earlier how this truly connects deeply to student social, emotional learning. And you know, not only that connection with you all, that one-on-one time and being able to see their growth like very tangibly and their data, but just by this willingness to be wrong and in fact probably be wrong and then find out some things that are working along the way, I feel like you're truly modeling and being powerful models of being okay with failure for your students and knowing that in life you're going to have lots of things that go right and probably equally as many things that don't go right. But when things don't go right, you can learn from them and make an opportunity from them. You know, I just your students are so lucky to have you as these powerful models of change and I just can't say like I'm going to cry.

Lori:

I told Emily that I, like in the beginning, I was like the only rule of podcasting is don't cry. So I might cry, but because I am just so honored to be able to talk with you all and I have a whole list of questions that we did not even get to today. So I really truly mean this. I hope that you come back again, emer, really truly mean this. I hope that you come back again. Um, emery, I know it's so late there, so thank you for giving us your time.

Emily Jaskowski :

Is there anything else anyone wants to add or say I was just going to say I appreciate like having people elevate our experience, um, uh and what whether it felt really good at the conference to have people so excited about teachers and hearing teachers and thinking about how they can involve teachers in this process more. So I think any opportunity that we can share what's?

Tanisha Dasmunshi:

working just feels really good. Yeah, same for me. Just thank you for you know, recognizing the work we're doing, it feels wonderful and is really motivating and makes us want to keep going.

Lori:

Thank you, I feel like we just had our own like one-on-one conference for an hour. Yeah Well, thank you all for being here so much. We hope to have you back again soon and we're just so grateful for the work you're doing in Baltimore. Thanks for listening. Literacy Lovers we release a new podcast episode every Friday and share more resources in a newsletter on Tuesday. Sign up for our newsletter at LiteracyPodcastcom. Each week, you'll receive important information, resources and connected content.

Melissa:

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Lori:

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