Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ™

[Listen Again] Ep. 150: Science of Reading for ALL Students: Intervention for Secondary Students

Share episode

Secondary educators have students in their classrooms who weren’t taught to read. Because of these reading deficits, students  likely have a difficult time accessing secondary texts and tasks. Our guests today, Supt. Sherry Sousa and Educator Julie Brown, discuss a secondary intervention they developed that WORKS and is totally doable. The best part? Students partake in the intervention in addition to - not instead of - their regular high school English classes. 

Resources


We answer your questions about teaching reading in The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night.

Grab free resources and episode alerts! Sign up for our email list at literacypodcast.com.

Join our community on Facebook, and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, & Twitter.

Melissa:

You're listening to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. We realize a lot of secondary educators have students in their classrooms who weren't taught to read and might have a difficult time accessing secondary texts and tasks. Today we'll be talking with Sherry Sousa and Julie Brown from Woodstock, vermont, about intervention at the secondary level. What does it look like? How do we make it happen? Our biggest takeaway is that this work is doable. Let's dive into this important topic.

Lori:

Welcome teacher friend. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two literacy educators in Baltimore.

Melissa:

We want the best for all kids and we know you do too, our district recently adopted a new literacy curriculum, which meant a lot of change for everyone, lori and I can't wait to keep learning about literacy with you today.

Lori:

Hi everyone, Welcome to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. We are so excited today because we are going to talk about a secondary intervention that works and it's absolutely doable, which is my most favorite part of it. Melissa, I know you're excited for this conversation because you are our secondary person. Yeah, this is my wheelhouse.

Melissa:

I'm so excited we have two incredible guests today. So we have Sherry Sousa and Julie Brown from Woodstock, vermont, and Sherry has worked for many years with adolescents with disabilities and she is currently the superintendent of Windsor Central Supervisory Union. It's a mouthful, sherry. And then we also have Julie, who we met at the Reading League Conference so exciting.

Lori:

We had lunch together. It was very serendipitous.

Melissa:

And she's had, of course, many roles she's been a structured literacy teacher, a literacy facilitator, an EL coordinator, a special educator. There's probably more that's not on that list. She's done it all and she's currently a doctoral student at one of our favorite programs, mount St Joseph University, studying reading science. So super exciting, lots of knowledge. Can't wait to jump in.

Lori:

Yeah, Sherry and Julie, welcome to the podcast.

Sherry Sousa:

Oh, thank you, we appreciate being invited.

Julie Brown:

Very much so. What an honor to be with you.

Lori:

Yeah Well, we know you've both had lots of experience with secondary students, lots and lots and lots. Can you tell us a bit about what concerns you saw with reading and writing?

Sherry Sousa:

So I think the story begins when I started here almost 30 years ago and I was joined the faculty first time as a public school teacher, working with some of our students with the most emotional challenges, and what I noticed right from the beginning that often these students were in my classroom working with me not because of organic or trauma, emotional disorders, but because they couldn't read and write and, as a result, it's better to be the student acting out than the student who can't read. And so they were with me because they had those deficits. They were in middle school and high, and so they were with me because they had those deficits. They were in middle school and high school and they were so used to failing in that environment. And so that began my journey.

Sherry Sousa:

I, over time and working in our middle school and high school, noticed the number of students who were coming in entering seventh grade at a primary, pre-primary reading level and I thought how can they ever be successful on this campus with such deep skill deficits? How can I put them in a traditional literacy class, english class, social studies class, when they could not access the curriculum and, even though many were very bright, understood how the vocabulary knowledge base could not communicate that knowledge in writing, and so that's when we began or I began the journey to think about how do we make sure we're addressing those skills, so not only if they have emotional challenges, but academic challenges. How do we make sure this is a place where they belong, they're cared for and we address all their needs, not just one component of it. We couldn't fix one part without addressing the other part.

Melissa:

Yeah, we love that you saw that connection, because I think sometimes they're treated separately. Right, you have academics over here and then you have behavior happening over here, but I love that you just saw intuitively that these behaviors are because of what's happening over here with reading.

Sherry Sousa:

Absolutely. We do not want to look foolish in front of our peers middle school, high school. We want to be competent. Competency is critical to social self-image, especially at that age point. And if you don't have the skills you're always feeling on the outside, and if you can read and write, you're definitely on the outside, and luckily I found a partner with that commitment in Julie Brown.

Julie Brown:

Well, while Sherry was seeing this at school. I was seeing this at home. Like so many in this space, one of my own children struggled with reading, learning how to read, and we were able to get him this life-changing instruction called structured literacy and reading. Research should come with a warning. Caution can known to be addictive, because one research paper led to the next. How did this work so well for my son? Look at so many things in his life that have changed because of this instruction. So one paper after another and I found myself back in school learning how to help as many students as possible master these skills they need to succeed at school.

Lori:

Yeah, can I jump in really quickly and ask? We talked about this on the pre-call, but we know that kids they're hurting when they can't read and I think what you two mentioned that struck me is that the status quo for intervention at the secondary level was unacceptable, and I think one of you used the word disrespectful. I'm wondering if you'd like to share a little bit, just to ground our listeners, and what you saw happening at the secondary level for intervention and just what your thoughts were about what was happening in that space, before we kind of move on. Is that okay?

Sherry Sousa:

Oh, absolutely. I think what we saw was not our best work. We saw that standards were not being met and expectations, our best teachers were not working with our most fragile students. And if we expect our students to do this hard work, that after so many years at least seven years of failure to have the vulnerability to really engage in very challenging work that they see organically happening for everyone else and why not me we really have to create an environment One we have to acknowledge the shame and hurt of that experience for them. We have to acknowledge how teachers in the past had not met their needs because they didn't have the skills or knowledge or experience.

Sherry Sousa:

And I think once we created that common ground of respect and understanding, appreciating what they would have to do to address it at this point in time, then we were able to do the work and we'll talk more. We've tried many different ways of intervention. We talked about, you know, we worked in our resource rooms with caring special educators that did not have that expertise in reading and writing. That is not the background, that's not how our secondary special educators are prepared, and so they had best intentions, they did not have the skill set. We tried to do the work one-on-one Again. We know in middle school and high school, peer culture is really critical, having a shared experience, having partners in the heavy lifting. That was really and we weren't able to do that.

Melissa:

Yeah, I don't know if you want to dig in even more to that. That was where we were going to go next, because I loved in the pre-call when you all talked about because I know everyone wants to hear what you all did right Because you right now have something that's working. But I think we learned so much from I mean I'm going to say failure I don't want to like call you guys a failure. I think we learned from when things don't go well. You know that's a. That's a great learning and I would love for you all to share some of those learnings you had along the way of things you tried that didn't work. I think people, it's really, really powerful for for people to hear that.

Sherry Sousa:

Yeah and we tried the typical models. We, yeah and we tried the typical models. We tried resource rooms where students were working in small clusters with grade-similar groupings and disability groupings. Students did not want to work in these skills with their other peers working on homework assignments. We called it homework hotel, where students were just so hyper-focused on getting that assignment done for the next day that having a time to do the intervention to address those skills that were deficit areas could not happen within that 45 minutes of time. They were so concerned about what was next and what was due or not at all, and saying I'm failing, so I'm just going to pull away and just not engage.

Sherry Sousa:

We tried doing individual classes with teachers special ed teachers. That didn't work. We had specialized caseloads so my caseloads were for students with emotional disabilities. Other caseloads weren't working with that. So that again was very siloed in terms of the work we were doing. We tried pushing in. Many of us know and we're trained in the push in, pull out model. So again in a classroom with other students gen ed students who were moving along, how could I do that level of specialized instruction? These students really need to be on par with their peers and it's not just special ed students that we're working with in terms of this model. We are working with all students that have those significant deficits.

Sherry Sousa:

So we tried for about 15 years lots of different models, and so we finally said let's stop, let's look at the research. And we did do the. We reviewed the national reading conference document in terms of the status of reading and looked at the pillars of instruction that we really needed to focus on, and then we decided we really needed a systematic, sequential methodology that was consistent between our grades, kindergarten right up through 12th grade. We selected a curriculum, we trained everyone so we could have the same language in elementary school as we did in secondary. And then we thought about OK, now we have the professional knowledge. Where does it happen? How do we create the environment? How do we make sure students feel that they have a setting that shows that respect? And that's when Julie Brown came on our team and Julie, maybe you could talk about what you created in your space.

Julie Brown:

Well, our whole department worked together to create a structured literacy programming that included structured literacy classes, a structured writing class. The structure of our program is, we found, grouping students by what they're ready to learn versus their grade level. We teach students grades 7 through 12. So small groups of four to six students.

Julie Brown:

Our courses are credit bearing, so most often they're an English elective. It's important to have credit for your work. In high school they're most often in addition to, not instead of, regular English class, and our classroom, like Sherry said, is right in the middle of things. Over the years, we've crafted a program that focuses on two main areas, which are providing effective instruction, yes, but also intentionally fostering authentic connections between peers and their wider community. Implementation were so simple we wouldn't have 30% of our 12th graders scoring a low basic on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. So figuring out this model of how to create a program that made meaningful differences in the lives of our students was something we had to kind of create as we went, and we're excited to share with you more about it.

Sherry Sousa:

And I think what Julie has done so wonderfully is that her students enter a classroom at the beginning of the year. She talks about why has it been so hard for them to learn since the beginning, what is unique about them that our typical literacy and curriculum doesn't meet their needs. Helping them understand themselves as learners, understanding what is happening in the brain that makes it so difficult. So I think she's lifted the veil on illiteracy and understood. So this is something we can do. And she has become their partner. She will always say we have the same goals, I'm going to help you, I'm not going to give up on you.

Sherry Sousa:

And her classroom is right in the middle of the hallway. Kids are not getting pulled in there like leaving their peers and they're walking you know, doing the walk of shame to somewhere else. They are going to a scheduled class there with older students, younger students. They are doing really meaningful reading, reading that's typical of other middle school and high school students. It's not that book that looks oh, it's not age appropriate. And they're doing really meaningful community-based activities where they are connecting with the broader community like any other English class. And so they don't feel different. They feel like I have someone who cares for me has similar goals, and I'm going to move forward with them.

Melissa:

Yeah, I love that. I just am imagining my you know I had 10 years of middle goals and I'm going to move forward with them. Yeah, I love that. I just am imagining my you know, I had 10 years of middle school. I'm imagining my middle schoolers and I could see if this was not handled well. Right, that the first questions would be why am I in this class, right? Am I stupid? I don't want to be here, right? Those could definitely be the reactions that you get from students. So I love that. The first thing that you all do is not necessarily jump into content day one, right, but have those conversations about why they are there and the reality of you know it's not their fault, it's what the education that they received up until that point. And I'm imagining you talk about what's going to happen in this class and how it's different. So I just love that you all really thought through that and didn't just throw them in a class and say get going.

Sherry Sousa:

And I think that evolved too. Again, we didn't have this special sauce figured out the first time around, and Julie will be the first one to share. First year was hard, but I think what she never gave up. There were some students who presented some very challenging behaviors, but she created a culture of I'm not going to give up on you. I am going to create an atmosphere where you can be vulnerable and I'm going to allow you the space to do that work. And we have students who move into the district that have never known us and don't know this is a safe place. We have students that again district that have never known us and don't know this is a safe place. We have students that again who have failed in so many ways, but she's been a great person to create that. And now that she's doing some other work, making sure that that programming continues, no matter who the teacher is, that's important.

Lori:

I think it's amazing that you attended to the student first and their, their emotional needs. I think kids are so smart. Kids know when they're struggling with something, they know when we're trying to pull one over on them, and I mean even just like even the young, like younger children, they know, and when they're alone with that it feels scary, but when we can explain it to them it feels so much better. It's making me think about our recent conversation we had with Jan Hasbrook and she said I always like to explain to students what I'm doing with them and what's happening here and why we're doing this. And it's just oftentimes we miss that step and that I think at the secondary level, is even more important to remember and to put first and to de-shame and to make those connections.

Lori:

And when kids feel connected you can get so much more out of them. So I know we're going to talk a whole lot more about those pieces, but I'm wondering if you can. Maybe, julie, you can step in and talk a little bit about what did work instructionally. I know you have two focal points, as you call them, which is really clear, but maybe we can dive into what those two focal points are. I know you mentioned them, but just reiterate again and then really diving into that first one, so that we can get a grip on what the effective instruction looks like.

Julie Brown:

Absolutely so to clarify before we go further. Our structured literacy classes are for students with word level deficits in reading. No one is saying that reading ends with reading words, but you can't read for meaning if you can't read the words. And, frankly, you may be just about to turn 18, right, so there's no time to waste. Because our classes are in addition to, not instead of their core instruction, we can dial in to what it is that's holding them back and preventing them from accessing their curriculum independently.

Lori:

So there's-, julie, that's like what strikes me, and thank you for naming that first, and sorry to interrupt that you're doing it in addition to. So they like what strikes me, and thank you for naming that first, and sorry to interrupt that you're doing it in addition to. So they still have the opportunity. You're not like pausing all of the knowledge building, vocabulary, fluency, practice. They're doing that stuff still at grade level with grade level texts and tasks. You are supporting them by backfilling deficits in this additional space. So kudos, I am so excited, I can't wait to hear more.

Julie Brown:

And that speaks to the professionalism and the colleagueship in our department and in our school, where we really do try and wrap around our students to support their literacy and emotional needs very holistically. So you're asking about what does instruction actually look like? So, okay, well, when we started, I would say there was some good news and some bad news. And the good news is we didn't need to reinvent what good instruction looks like. We just needed to trust the decades of research around reading development. We know that if you're seven, 17, or 77, you need to master the same set of skills in roughly the same order to emerge as a pattern seeker, meaning maker, to be a proficient reader. So that part was somewhat straightforward. What are we going to teach? Well, we're going to teach if our students have deficits. We're going to teach phonemic awareness, phonics and fluency so that they can access text. But the challenging part was what this work looks like in a high school. What this work looks like students who are bigger than you.

Julie Brown:

So, ultimately, structured literacy isn't something that we do to or offer to our students.

Julie Brown:

It's something that we engage in with our students. So, as Sherry explained, we make sure they feel safe and respected and a sense of community in our class and once we reach that point, instruction really starts to take off. So the typical lesson includes just what you might imagine we hear words, we say words, we spell words, we read words and use words. Our students again have word level deficits in reading. We focus in on that and put it together in connected text and our instruction is really focused on bringing them this knowledge explicitly. So Anita, archer, archer and Hughes explicit instruction has really guided our work and we maximize our students' opportunities to respond and we plan for success. Students need to feel success at every step of the lesson, every day, every step of the lesson every day. So we plan purposely for that and it's okay to go down to their foundational skill deficit and teach them and build them up from there and as they're experiencing success, they become very invested in the work and supporting each other in their work.

Melissa:

Julie, can I ask a quick question? Jump in before you keep going. So I'm just curious. But you said that you work in groups of four to six students. Do you all do an assessment of some sort beforehand to find out roughly who would go with whom for which purpose? Tell us how that works.

Julie Brown:

So often our students are identified through some sort of process. The educational support team might come together. An individualized education plan might be written with word level skills on it, such as phonemic awareness or phonics or fluency from AP English where they aren't able to read fast enough to keep up. And the first thing that you check for is fluency. It's the easiest thing to check and rule out. So let's read together how are you doing with this text? And if the student is struggling with their fluency, with their prosody and expression, then we start to look a little deeper. What is the cause of disfluent reading? Is it that there's just some letter combinations that you don't know? Is it that you have low phonemic awareness and could use some support there? Is it that you just need more high-quality guided practice reading out loud with someone? Often what we'll find is students don't know what sounds the letters represent and students can't pull words apart into their individual phonemes and blend them together to make words and build meaning as they read.

Sherry Sousa:

I think what's important too, and Julie will share, is that we're not grouping by age, we're grouping by skills, and so, because of the assessments that Julie does, she's able to identify groups of students who are working on the same needs, and so she'll have students that are in eighth grade with students who are juniors in high school, and that's okay.

Julie Brown:

So we'll group them by what they're ready to learn. So if we have a group of students that are really at the beginnings of phonemic awareness and phonics, they're ready to learn the same things together and celebrate their successes in community rather than hide, even in a small group. If we have a group of students in front of us that year that are really ready to work on fluency, we're going to focus in on putting miles on the page and use every minute that we can to build their foundational skills Because, again, we want them to be able to access their education independently. This course allows them the time to work on those I love that.

Melissa:

Can I just comment real quickly, Because I often get a question about what assessment to use and people always want, like a you know the magic bullet assessment that's going to give you print out some report that's going to tell you everything. So I love that. Your first thing you said to do, Julie, was have them read to you and listen.

Julie Brown:

And so for Magic Bullet we would do, or Magic Wand we would do, brzezinski's multidimensional fluency rubric that is going to look at not just words correct per minute but their prosody and phrasing and accuracy as they read. And then we use that rubric with our students. They use it to reflect on their own reading, they use it to give each other feedback on each other's reading.

Lori:

That's such a window into what's happening in terms of comprehension in their brain, so I bet that's like such an incredible experience for the teachers to be able to hear how students are comprehending out loud as they're reading. I know I always appreciated that when I taught fifth grade it was. I always said it was one of the most intimate experiences I could have with a student and it was the short one, of the shortest and fastest ways I could get to know if they what like, what, what they needed in terms of like, where I needed to dive in more to find out more information. It was, I think Jan Hasbrook. Melissa said it was like a what is it Like a temperature check at the doctor.

Julie Brown:

So we spend at least a third of every lesson reading connected text in pairs to each other out loud, and we'll use. You know we'll often have a focus for our reading, so remember and we'll use. You know we'll often have a focus for our reading, so remember. This is a new. We've added a new skill. We're focusing on accuracy. Today. Or you might have a pair that are out there to read out loud, knowing it's challenging, and you're respected and rewarded in a way that you're understanding what you're reading. For the first time. You're feeling that success that brings people together and builds a sense of belonging.

Julie Brown:

Our students come into the classroom. We always start a lesson with a handshake and a connection and I do like to have routines that keep things flowing. I know your listeners would be interested in what is actually happening and I'll say we follow roughly the Reading League's six-step lesson plan. Our students come in their agenda's on the board, they grab their resources, we sit down and we get started. We do phonemic awareness exercises, mostly with letters, and we focus on almost three things at once that way, with handwriting, phonemic awareness and sound symbol knowledge. We do so much word chaining and Alconin boxes of phoneme graphing, mapping, pulling words apart, blending words together, blending sounds together. We do dictation pages, we do oral reading out loud and we follow age appropriate themes depending on the year, and I'm sure we'll get into that in a little bit.

Melissa:

Yeah, that's exactly what I was about to ask you. How do you make that something that these middle schoolers and high schoolers feel comfortable doing and don't feel like it's baby work, as they might say?

Julie Brown:

Well, we have a lot of fun with it and the most powerful thing that has helped us get over that fear that this isn't age appropriate is we have our graduates come in and speak to our current students. Hockey champion heading off to college, coming in to tell you you guys are so lucky that you're in this class. It really helped me. Here's my notebook. I had this exact lesson Stick with it and trust your teacher in the process. That makes all the difference in the world. For our young people. To have examples of kids just like them in their high school, happy about their reading, proud of their reading, thrilled that they can call themselves a structured literacy graduate, has made all the difference for our program. So I think that's how we use peers to help break that ice.

Julie Brown:

At the beginning of the year Our graduates will come in and talk to our current students, sort of like an interview. We'll have sort of 21 questions in a basket that the students write and my graduates will come in and read the questions and it's a little bit of a formal way to break the ice. And then we have an open-door policy where they'll graduates come in and play soft C and soft G cahoots with us, for example, they'll come in and play word bingo. They'll come in and say hey, I just wrote a creative writing piece. I'm really excited to share it with you. Would you guys like to hear it? Yes, we'd like to hear it. So that peer connection is the secret sauce, as Sherry Sousa would say.

Lori:

I love that. I actually think it might be. I know that, like I felt a little surprised when you named how long your students were reading for fluency, I'm wondering, can we dig into that a little bit more? And I mean surprised in like a good way.

Julie Brown:

So so as far as a third of every lesson is reading out loud.

Lori:

Yeah, Maybe a little bit about why and what exactly happens, Cause I think the other stuff is is very clear. Right, Like there's, you know we're we're doing dictation. That looks like dictation, where you're filling in foundational skills gaps. You're using, now, Conan boxes. That's that. Stuff is pretty clear. But I'm wondering, like to me, the part that I were a listener I'd be like, oh, I want to really know more about this thing. Can you tell us about that?

Julie Brown:

Well, we do a lot of partner reading. So there they turn and read with a shoulder partner. It's at the end of a structured literacy lesson. So if the students are still working on accuracy, our reading will be a decodable text. If they're reading accurately, they'll do a decodable text to practice the pattern they just learned and something else. We'll get to that. So the habit, we talk about it first, we don't just drop it on them. But I'll say you know, we're going to read this together as a class and in a week or two you guys are going to be ready to start reading in pairs. And just to prepare them that they know this is coming and I'm with them. And if you would like for me to be your partner, let's start there and we will set an intention for our reading. So, like I said, it might be that it's slowing down reading for accuracy, it might be reading for phrasing and prosody, it might be reading for, like the whole package fluency. Like the whole package fluency.

Julie Brown:

Sometimes I'll set a timer. So I'll set a timer for, say, eight minutes. Ready, go and they'll turn and take turns reading. We've got the echo reading and the choral reading and the timer will go off, so they'll see. So we build up. Eight minutes seems to be a magic number where to start. And then we stop and we talk about it. I'm so impressed looking at the work that you just did. You put that together. You resisted that urge to predict and read just what was on the page. What did you guys notice? What did you learn? And then another cycle of eight minutes and slowly you build it up where you're reading authentic texts for at least 20 minutes with your partner.

Lori:

I love that. And just to kind of stamp, you're not speed reading in those eight minutes. They're reading authentically correct?

Julie Brown:

Yep, we'll read slowly and accurately. We don't measure words correct per minute very frequently in our class. We know that adolescent emerging readers, their fluency is going to be the final frontier, if you will First, as you mentioned Jan Hasbrook first, as Dr Hasbrook would say, accuracy is first foremost and forever the foundation for fluency. So really they know that quote, it's on our board and we really work towards that accuracy. Another thing we do is we watch a Senate testimony.

Julie Brown:

A wonderful advocate and actor, amir Baraka, gave Senate testimony. It's about six minutes long about the First Step Act and he talks about his challenges with reading in middle school and he talks about crime and incarceration and finally coming to reading and our students are blown away by his story. And then we watch it again and I'll say now I would like you to notice how is Amir reading. And every year we do this and they notice the same things. He's connecting with the text, he's following along with his finger, he's tapping out the syllables. He has Sally, sally Shaywitz, I believe this is right.

Julie Brown:

Next, I hope I'm not missing a researcher right next to him in case he needs help. Several times he stops himself from predicting and reads just what's on the page he taps out. Oh, I mentioned, he taps out the syllable. So the students notice that themselves, and here's this strong, successful man using these strategies that they're practicing to find success in their class, and so that gives us an example of what fluent reading looks like and what it sounds like for them as they're emerging as readers.

Melissa:

I love that, julie. We have Amir on our list to ask to be on the podcast, so I have to watch that video.

Lori:

I know that's what I was going to say. Can you send it to us? Yes, I can.

Julie Brown:

So I joined Twitter because Dr Hasbro told us to at the end of the webinar, joined Twitter. I said, okay, I'll try. And then I sent Amir, I tweeted him some work from our class of students reflecting on Amir's story and his success and he tweeted back to us and we were just so excited.

Melissa:

So powerful.

Julie Brown:

But again, that speaks to giving them examples of success. Yeah, in real life right.

Melissa:

This is real. It's not made up, yep.

Julie Brown:

And my students will say. I asked one young man if you could say anything to educators interested in adolescent literacy. What would you tell them? He said the first thing educators need to do is make sure their students know it's going to be OK. And that doesn't just happen. That requires careful, thoughtful planning from a teacher who has the time and space to do this important work. Because they've tried. They've been trying to read for decades not decades, at least you know up to a decade where they come in. They've had 10 years of intervention. That hasn't worked.

Lori:

Yeah, I think that's like a great transition Julie to Sherry. I can't imagine how many things needed to go into making this happen. There were a lot of things to consider off the top of my head. I'm thinking scheduling. I mean curriculum. How do you get credit at the high school level, Teachers training, I mean, we could keep going. So I'm wondering if you would like to take some time to share very practically how did you support making this amazing work happen?

Sherry Sousa:

Well, I think you know the heavy lifting was as heavy as it sounds. It was having conversations with individual teachers and administrators to say how can we expect these students to be successful in your class if they can't access the curriculum? How can we ask them to write a five-paragraph essay when they don't know how to put the first word down and they can't spell the words? And recognizing taking a five-paragraph essay and say you just do a couple sentences and you still can participate, that's so humbling, that is so insulting, and so I think it took some conversations with with teachers for them to realize wow, how can I? I need to make space if we are truly going to meet the expectations of us as teachers in terms of graduating literate individuals and I talked to Julie there many times. I sat at graduation and I saw students walking across the stage and I knew they couldn't read and write and how horrible that made me feel and how much of a failure as an educator. And so, bringing that back to our teachers, we you know, in middle school it's easy, you don't have to have credits for graduation. So let's take two years and let's say let's really focus it on those deficit skills so that when credits are needed. We can make that happen. And so, depending upon what the skills or the level of the need is, they're going to do structured literacy literacy instead of their seventh grade English class. Let's build that success, let's give them those skills. And so, what often happens, if that's the case, by the time we enter ninth grade they are in ninth grade English and they're doing structured literacy, and Julie's shown us the data usually one to two years and sometimes three years. We are on par. Students are able to access students who you know I know these students well. I was the special ed director where evaluations came from hospitals saying your child will never read, do not. They may not even graduate from high school who are now, after working with Julie in structured literacy, are in AP English classes and they're planning for their college future. And so we can turn that table and I think success breeds more success.

Sherry Sousa:

Teachers are seeing, you know, that group of students who were in the back of the classroom, not turning in, work, acting out, finding ways to get out of the classroom, now have the entry-level tools to be a member of the class and conversation. How that changes the demeanor of the student, their presentation, their commitment to their learning. It addresses truancy issues. It addresses so many pieces of what we see for school failure, many pieces of what we see for school failure. You know we talk about in our district that when I came on as special ed director we had about 17, 18% special education across the district. When we provided our special education teachers with the skill set and saw ourselves as learning specialists, not as homework hotel monitors, we were able to move our special ed numbers to about 11%. And so that's what happens when you have the right level of specialized instruction and the right environment and students are.

Sherry Sousa:

You know, we say being on an IEP is not a life sentence. Our job is to make sure that schools have the skills. We address those skills needs. We move them on. We, you know we have productive and I've seen Julie Brown at graduation with a bunch of boys who are towering over her, giving her hugs, bringing her flowers, in one case smoking a cigar with her. But they love her, they love her and they know she gave them the key to a lifetime of success, gave them the key to a lifetime of success. So I think that that success, seeing those transformations, made our administration and our teachers incredibly supportive of this program and just as proud as we are of these students succeeding. I know I was looking the other way when the cigar came out.

Sherry Sousa:

To know our students.

Julie Brown:

To know them really is to love them. They are incredibly brave people. They are wonderful young people and it's not just the efforts want to know about their reading. We have directed studies for them to practice applying their skills in other contexts. We really teach them as a department the skills they need to succeed, and when you teach they learn. So many of our questions we get really center around. How do you get the kids to walk in the door? I am here to tell you I've not met a single young person who doesn't desperately want to learn to read.

Melissa:

Well, yeah, and I love just hearing there's so much mindset shifting that I hear across everything you all are talking about with the students right, shifting that mindset of like them feeling like they're a failure to. I can change this right, we can change it and we can move it. But also, sherry, you talking it feels like a mindset shift for the district, of like these things are a priority right, like some things are going to have to take a backseat until our students know how to read and write.

Sherry Sousa:

Period and thank you, melissa, for highlighting that. Something that we're working on right now is developing a district-wide policy on teaching and learning which really captures our dedication to foundational skills for all students and then making sure that as a school board, as a community of educators and families, we will begin with foundational skills, because when we don't, we are not going to provide the students with the kinds of learning and experience and future that we know is possible, and so that those foundational skills, opportunities for deeper learning, commitments to how we see ourselves as educators. We've done lots of professional development, but until there are policies in place that we can stand on and say this is who we are and what we're going to do, it becomes not just a special ed program or a 504 program. All learners and for us as a district belonging and all learners are all learners and you may come in reading, but that doesn't guarantee you have the foundational skills.

Sherry Sousa:

You know you may have come in from a family that has lots of experiences, but that does not define you or predict whether you're going to be passed by. Our district affirms that commitment, that literacy, reading, writing, mathematics is our core focus in the beginning years of a student's life experience, and what we're seeing is that we're continuing. Even with COVID pandemic, our special education numbers have really remained at that lower level, and so, because we're a pre-K, elementary school, onto secondary, we all have the same focus.

Lori:

I love that. I'm so glad you mentioned that, because that is often an excuse, if I'm being honest, that I hear and I just feel like there's not really a need for that excuse. We know how to do it. We can fill in the gaps and we can do it. And I really just love like both of you have a. You tried different things. You were like this worked, I'm imagining, along the way you took little pieces of each thing you tried and you just really have a no nonsense approach to this. You're like. Our students deserve better. I can't sit here and allow myself one more day to watch a student walk across the stage that I know is unable to read and write and you did something about that and it's so inspirational and it's so. I don't want to say easy, but like we can do. This is the message that I'm getting from you Like we can do it, it's doable, it's practical, it's we should do it. There's no reason not to do it.

Sherry Sousa:

And it didn't cost us huge amounts of money. We reshifted caseloads and we said, okay, I'll take a few more of your students, we'll take a few more and, julie, you will do all their specialized instruction and reading. So that took the responsibility off the other case managers who were helping in executive functioning and the other tasks that needed to be done and that serious work was having in one space. So it didn't increase any of our costs and we made sure that we had highly trained teachers and we used our grant funding for that. We're a very small, rural district. We only have a thousand students. We have five elementary schools and one middle school and high school of 450.

Sherry Sousa:

We don't have a lot of resources and we're in Vermont, so it's not. We're a suburb and it's very affluent. We really are struggling with the same financial challenges as all districts. What do you have for resources? What are your priority needs? Reappropriating those resources? It did not. I mean the curriculum materials we use from talking to writing. It was a twenty dollar textbook that we read. I mean, if this is not a huge financial shift, that should not be an obstacle, and so we really made sure that was true.

Julie Brown:

And success breeds success. We know that that's true for students, but it's true for school systems as well, and teachers as well. And teachers so we've, you know, every year, as we're graduating students off of individualized education plans, as we're preventing identification of disabilities by working with students who have deficits to teach them what they need to know, this is so empowering to see the work, work. We're just at a little corner of central Vermont. It's such an honor to be able to share our story and we do hope that in our story your listeners hear themselves. Sherry's refrain is always why not? Why not engage in this work? Why not get started? Why not work on developing colleagueship amongst your department to solve this problem together? Do we trust the research? Do we really really believe that 90, 95% of our students can be taught to read well? Do we believe that, if we do, there's no reason why not to do this work?

Melissa:

So, julie, you mentioned success. We want to give you some time to brag, sherry, jump in too, but we want to hear about your results from this program. I know you might have some qualitative data as well to share with us. As quantitative, you know it mostly is qualitative.

Julie Brown:

So our students graduate from our class and go on to be teaching assistants in English class, they go on to their dream class of AP history, they go on to college, they go to trade school. They can access their education independently and all the agency and dignity that that brings to their life and to their families it changes. Dr Whedon talks about how literacy can change the family tree. So with a little bit more statistics, we've had 53 students. Just looking at students with individualized education plans, we have many students that don't but one little substep right. There's many ways to measure success. About 65% of our graduates with an IEP have had a chance to go through that three-year re-evaluation process. The rest are awaiting the process or graduated before they had a chance. But of our re-evaluated graduates, 65% have exited special education entirely graduates, 65% have exited special education entirely and 90% no longer qualify for a reading disability None in basic reading, but one or two or three in reading comprehension or fluency. So when we gathered up that data we were pretty amazed. So when students first started graduating off of IEPs and off of their educational support team plans, I thought it was a fluke. But then the next year it happened again. And the next year it happened again. And during COVID. We're picking up speed. We had 75% of our re-evaluated students exit special education entirely During COVID.

Julie Brown:

Well, after the three years 1920, 2021, yeah, the three school years, yes, so we had 12 students. Our numbers are small. We had 12 students really struggling. Our students often come in below the first percentile in reading. That is not unheard of. When you dial down, you realize their phonemic awareness and basic sound symbol knowledge is what's preventing them from accessing print. So I lost my train of thought. Oh so during COVID. So we had 12 students graduate off of their IEP. Sorry, 12 students graduate from structured literacy and nine of them exited special education entirely.

Lori:

It's just astounding, like I mean throw the numbers away in terms of like if they're small or large or whatever it might be. It's provable that this is scalable, right.

Julie Brown:

Absolutely, it might be. It's provable that this is scalable. Right, this is, it's scalable, but there's there's not much research showing on a large scale that this work can be done. And, sherry, and I think the reason is folks are leaving out that building belonging piece and focusing only on the intervention. These students deserve a champion. I am able to say to them I am with you, we're going to walk this together, we're going to figure it out until you reach your goals. I am with you. I could really only promise that to them because Sherry made that promise first and our whole department coming together to support our students has made all the difference, providing them with peer support where they see what success looks like. They know that it's within reach, they know it's going to be okay. That's the missing piece. Also, the small groups. For us, that is essential. This isn't a one-on-one pull out.

Sherry Sousa:

it's a group of students that form a community and help each other reach their goals together right and I think what's important is that even you know, it's interesting that even with the high level of skills of our special educators at the elementary level, they had fewer opportunities to bring students together and so they were using the one-on-one model, maybe one or two students delivering, you know, systematic, sequential instruction with fidelity. It wasn't until they came to Julie's class in middle school, where we're talking four to six, maybe more developmentally appropriate, that they began to see those real successes. And these were some students with really significant language-based learning disabilities, organic. This was not a lack of instruction, this was really based on organic dyslexia. We were successful. Those students who I knew really well moved off an IEP.

Sherry Sousa:

It's just phenomenal and it didn't take a lot. It really isn't. There is no, you know, there's no silver bullet, but it's a commitment, it's an understanding and it's a passion for secondary. And I don't know, when I was in grad school, no one wanted to do secondary special education. They had to and I went to school in Tucson Arizona big school district. I was the only one who wanted to do. They couldn't even find a place for me to do student teaching because, like, no one wants to do secondary and I think you have to find those individuals that are that committed to middle school and secondary, like Julie, who can see the joy and energy and feed off of that, and she has really embraced this student population. They're quirky. I like the quirky, me too.

Lori:

Yeah, secondary kids are Well. Julie, I know you had mentioned that you might have a college essay to share with us, A student who wrote about structured literacy. Would you do you have it? Would you like to share it? Do we have?

Julie Brown:

time. I guess you wouldn't ask if we didn't.

Lori:

Yeah, I mean if you're OK with staying on a few extra minutes, are you OK?

Julie Brown:

OK, so this is an essay that this particular student I just saw a month or two ago after her fourth semester of college third semester of college Excuse me, who almost half of our students come from out of district sophomore year walked into our class, looked around three young men reading and she didn't know what was happening. She was nervous, apprehensive, wondering, and it took her two weeks to settle in to tell her first story. She struggled with reading for quite a while and the first thing she talked about in our class was Mrs Brown, what even is this class? No one ever taught me to look at words like this. My younger sibling I wish they could be here with me. They really need this too. And two years later she graduated from structured literacy. So we still talk about those first few weeks at Woodstock High School and that first story she told. Here's an excerpt from her application, shared with permission.

Julie Brown:

Ever since kindergarten I could tell I was different. My reading level was always lower than everyone else's. The school thought I would grow out of it and they didn. Level was always lower than everyone else's. The school thought I would grow out of it and they didn't see the need to test my reading. First grade was different. I was still struggling and my mom had the school test me to see if I had to go into a reading class. This was just the start of my struggles.

Julie Brown:

She goes on to retell stories and trials and tribulations from grade school and middle school.

Julie Brown:

I moved before my sophomore year and it was probably the best thing that has happened to me. At this point I was just giving up on school, but I was determined not to be known as a high school dropout, so I gave this school one more chance. I was blessed with the best reading class I could ever ask for and a teacher who never gave up on us. Structured literacy helped me become fluent and confident with what I was reading. It gave me hope that I could obtain a higher education rather than just finishing high school. I struggled with reading for so long and I'm so glad I was able to get real help before I gave up. Going through this showed me that having a reading disability doesn't mean I'm any less of a student and PS. Her younger sibling, graduated from structured literacy class too, and I think that's a great illustration of what many of our students feel. Great illustration of what many of our students feel they find success, they find dignity and agency in their education and they go on to independently access their education so powerful.

Melissa:

I mean not only becoming a reader, but the things that she mentioned in there the confidence, the hope, the self-worth that all of that gave her the humbleness to admit like I'm so glad I got help Right.

Lori:

I mean, what powerful lessons we're teaching young students. It's never too late to learn new things. It's never too late to even if it's something I've been struggling with for a long time. I can learn how to do it. There are people out there who are willing to help me, and I can trust people and it'll help me in the future, and I just heard so many things in that. Thank you for sharing that, julie. I was tearing up so I was trying not to cry.

Julie Brown:

She like all of our graduates are incredibly special.

Lori:

I can't think of a better way to end this podcast.

Melissa:

I know it's beautiful.

Lori:

I know. Thank you so much for sharing that and thank you for that student who wrote that. Thank you for giving your all to a student so that they could write that.

Melissa:

Yeah, and thank you both for giving your time today to share with our audience and for everything you're doing and I know you're sharing sharing not just with our podcast but with other webinars and conferences and we just please keep, keep going, because other people need to hear what you're doing and that it can be done.

Sherry Sousa:

Thank you for the invitation Please.

Julie Brown:

What an honor. Thank you so much for having us. And, on a last note, I would just like to remind folks that this is urgent work and it can feel heavy and there's so many problems to solve, but it's joyful work and get started and get in there for your young people. It's the most purposeful, joyful work there is. Hear, hear.

Lori:

Thank you both so much for this joyful work you do. Thank you. Thank you, thanks for listening. Literacy lovers, to stay connected with us, sign up for our email list at literacypodcastcom.

Melissa:

And to keep learning together. Join the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Podcast Facebook group and be sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

Lori:

If this episode resonated with you, take a moment to share with a teacher friend or leave us a five star rating and review on Apple podcasts. Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees. We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.