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Read Like Us: Building Fluency Through Repeated Reading & Challenging Texts with Jake Downs & Chase Young

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Episode 245

In this episode, Melissa and Lori are joined by researchers Jake Downs and Chase Young to discuss Read Like Us, a research-backed fluency routine designed to help students reread challenging texts with purpose. Jake and Chase share the findings from their recent study, explain how the routine works in real classrooms, and explore why fluency grows when students have multiple supported opportunities to read connected text.

The conversation unpacks:

  • what makes Read Like Us different from traditional repeated reading approaches,
  • how wide reading fits alongside repeated reading,
  • and why text choice plays such a critical role in fluency development.

You’ll also hear why the study showed especially strong results for fourth-grade readers and how teachers can think about applying this work across grade levels.

This episode offers both a clear explanation of the research and practical insights teachers can use as they plan fluency instruction that supports real reading where skills come together in text. 

Contact Chase Young at https://lfcreading.com/podcast with your questions!

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.

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Lori:

Are your students struggling with fluency? Maybe they're speed reading, sacrificing accuracy, or missing expression. What if a simple, repeatable routine could change that?

Melissa:

Today we're joined by researchers Jake Downs and Chase Young, who recently conducted a study on read like us, a step-by-step fluency routine that builds accuracy, automaticity, and prosody. And it helps students have fun reading.

Lori:

What's better than that? You'll hear what the research says, what this routine looks like in real classrooms, which texts work best, and why students absolutely love it. Hi, teacher friends. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.

Melissa:

We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.

Lori:

We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing.

Melissa:

Lori and I can't wait to keep learning with you today. Hi, Jake and Chase. We are so excited to have two of our favorite podcast guests talking about fluency, who actually did a study together. So we were really excited to see that and bring you on. We have not had you on together, so this should be super fun. Welcome.

Chase Young:

Thanks. It's great to be here again. Yeah. Love being here. Thanks for the invite.

Lori:

Yeah, well, we know fluency is a topic that our listeners love to hear about. We also know that fluency is not just one thing, it's made up of accuracy, automaticity, porosity, all these good things. And in your study, you introduced a protocol called Read Like Us. So, how does this routine, this Read Like Us routine, support all three parts of fluency? Because that's really hard to do. I can't wait to hear.

Jake Downs:

So the the Read Like Us protocol, we designed it to be a repeated reading protocol, but we wanted it to have, we wanted to stack in other things with it. So it is a it's a series of five readings, and it begins with a listening passage preview. So the instructor is reading the text out loud while the students are following along. It is important that the students are tracking there because if they're not, it's a read aloud, not a listening passage preview. Um and uh I mean there's data showing that listening passage preview is great to help warm a text up for students, uh especially for students who are lower achieving in reading or might have characteristics consistent with dyslexia. Um so that's a great sort of introduction read. Then after that, we moved to an echo read. So the uh instructor would read sentence by sentence, the students would echo it back. Uh if the sentence was long, they would do it by phrase. And then we did a choral read for the third read, and then the fourth read was a paired partner read. So partners, the the instructor would sign partners, just whoever was sitting next to each other in the group, and they would choral read, the partners would choral read to increase the volume of text they were reading. So the partners would would choral read, and uh just logistically, it almost they had to sort of stagger the start points. So, like you two start, okay, wait five seconds, you two start, you two start, or else it kind of just all mushed together. But that was a logistic thing that we we did. And then the last one, uh we we alternated between two different approaches with the last read. Um, there was sometimes it would just be an independent whisper reread, so students would whisper read it to themselves. But we also wanted to uh add an aspect of authenticity, an aspect of engagement, uh, you know, leaning off of a lot of Chase's work. So the last one we actually structured it like a uh reader's theater. So the students would stand up and they would perform the text to their uh to their instructor. Uh sometimes they would like uh you know swap and like perform it to the other instructor that's in the room, or they would perform it to, you know, they might have the instructional coach come in or a teacher. I mean, they would perform it to other people. We didn't do that every time uh just to keep it when it's when it did happen, it was high, high interest, high engagement for students, but once or twice a week we worked to incorporate that as part of the as part of the repeated reading protocol. So we we we whipped that together, we called it Read Like Us, and uh it was with a single text, you know, a couple hundred words, uh it took place with about within a half hour of time, uh, and we did it during um in this case it was as it was part of an intervention time, so students were pulled out and they were working with uh paraprofessionals. So that's that's an overview of Read Like Us.

Melissa:

So, Jake, you just said that this um for the study it happened in an intervention block. I'm wondering, um, did I guess that means you did not do the study in a classroom, um, but I'm gonna ask this anyway. Like, could this happen in a classroom? And if so, would there be differences to what you just said, or just maybe just differences in the structure of how the teacher would set it up?

Jake Downs:

Yeah, I think it definitely could work in a whole group setting. Uh the part of, and I know we're gonna unpack text a little bit later in our conversation, but uh part of the background here was in in this particular, this is our our first iteration of it. We worked with uh third and fourth grade students that were below the 40th percentile on Acadians, so they were receiving reading intervention, but we used primarily um at and above grade level texts, and then we mixed in some poetry with that as well. And so we wanted to incorporate really stretching students and and the notion that a repeated read helps get that text warmer through subsequent reads, right? So, in that sense, I think it it could definitely work in a whole group setting because if you're using at grade level text or even above grade level text, um, you know, for that's going to stretch your students. And so it's kind of widening that zone of proximal development that we have a scaffold that's able to uh support my lowest achieving students, but still providing some push and some oomph and some engagement and authenticity for all my students, but also my highest achieving students.

Chase Young:

Yes, and absolutely. And if you do if you're still working in in small groups as well, this is a great one for students who are identified as uh dysfluent. Um, you know, those kids that are that are decoding well, you know, they've got a handle on their phonics, their word recognition is looking pretty good, but they're reading slowly, monotonously, laboriously, dare I say boring. Um then perhaps this would be a targeted intervention you could have in small group time for for students who need a little boost of uh of fluency instruction. And the thing is, it's it's really easy to do. And I I love how it kind of came about. Uh, you know, it started with like the read to impress that was part of the sport that Jake has been studying, and then it turned into like this read like me, and it was like a one-on-one thing. And the teacher email and he was like, It's cute. Do you think we can do one-on-one interventions? Yeah, you're right. You're right. In a perfect world, you know, we'd have one teacher per kid. Uh but and and that's kind of when nobody when Jake and I were brainstorming trying to figure out how we could translate this pretty intense intervention into something that's feasible for teachers to do in a small group, but also something that's easily trainable. And we also want to be careful though, because you know, if you are doing a small group and you want to have a you know, like a parenteducator or a volunteer come and run this particular intervention, it can be done, but it's possible that you may want to have that parent or volunteer handle the rest of your students while you, the most certified expert, are working with those students that need additional support.

Melissa:

Yeah, I'm really glad you brought up the small group instruction because that's what I had in in my mind. Because, you know, those the steps, the five steps, I mean, I know kids would latch onto that really easily. It was like, okay, this is we go through these five steps, and they would they love routines, right? So, like knowing that routine is going to happen, and then the text is what would change, but you know, you have that routine set up, so it would make we know small group instruction, it's so hard to plan for because all the students have different needs, but to have some kind of routine that teachers can always go back to for the students that need it, I think would be so helpful.

Chase Young:

Yes, you're absolutely right. Like once they get a framework and they know how to go through a framework, so whether it be reader's theater or or read like us, they know how to get through it. And then you just swap those texts. So it's a novel text every time. They don't have to worry about using any of their cognitive energy on just trying to figure out how to get through the steps. They're just focused on that text. So that's awesome that you brought that up. Yeah.

Jake Downs:

And that was part of our like specific design of the protocol, is we wanted to maximize the amount of time that students were reading while still providing some scaffolding for the students. That we know that connected text reading, print exposure, reading volume, whichever term you use, it's it's so important that vocabulary is learned incidentally, you know, through that process that students are able to uh become more automatic with, I mean, not only individual words, but specific letter sound combinations, specific morphology aspects. So, you know, with connected text, uh you are playing a long game, but it's definitely a game worth playing. And so we we really sh we really shot to have like 90% of the time students reading the text. So it's like when they finish one read, it's not, well, let's, you know, like sit and and chat for a minute. It was like, okay, no, we're gonna roll right into the next read. We're gonna roll right into the next read. We tried to just really maximize the amount of time that students were reading. It's true. You know, it was a workout for these kids. Like they were, they were by the end of that half hour, they were beat, but it was good. Doing ladders in the gym. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Chase Young:

You know, and it's amazing because one of the things that we can never really tease out of all these interventions that we that we uh that we investigate and and study is the fact that we in this case, we know those kids were actually reading. Right. You know, that's that's a big factor too. The fact that we're there and we're ensuring that kids are reading. We're providing the support so they feel successful, which is great. But we don't know if they're not are they reading at home? Are they reading in in the cozy note? Are they reading, you know, like they may be holding a book, but are they reading? And in situations like this, we know they are, and because we give them all that scaffolding, like Jake was talking about, they begin to feel that success. And it goes back to the to the mantra that I I just love is that you know, if kids are successful somewhere, they're gonna want to go there. And if they fail every time, they're not going to. So that's how we kind of shift that attitude towards schools, which is helping them become better at the things they're supposed to do in school. And and this was a great way to get the um kids more fluent and hold them accountable for actually reading, but also assisting them and showing them how.

Lori:

Yeah, I love that. I know that one thing that is coming to my mind right now is this like classic routine, you know. Uh I want to say I used it where it was like read three times and check for speed. But read like us builds fluency differently than that. And I want to just just pause and and talk about that because there is so much power in routines, but I also think the routines have to be research-backed and really easy to implement, right? For both the teacher and the students. And so Read Like Us, in my opinion, is. Um, and I I think in your research-based opinion, it would be too. So I kind of want to just tease out like, how is Read Like Us different than that? Like, read three times and you know, check for speed.

Jake Downs:

When we were structuring this, you know, there there is an element of gradual release of responsibility there, right? Where the initial reads are higher scaffolding from the teacher, and through subsequent weeds, that transition and becomes to more responsibility on the student. And I I I want to emphasize that the, you know, with the gradual release of responsibility, we sometimes think about that as the specific group configuration, you know, I do, we do, you do. And and it can be that, but we have to remember the way it's been talked about in the research is it's you're actually transferring responsibility for the task. And so in this case, the task was the accurate and fluent rendering of the text. So that that was one, I think, one big part is it's not just students doing an independent read three times, uh, but that there was that element of scaffolding in there. And I'll also talk about we didn't emphasize rate a lot with students, uh, speed. And and you know, my my take on this is uh like we we use rate uh primarily because it's cheap, right? That I can use, I I can do you know three one-minute timings of a student, and it's going to have a pretty high reliability with how that student's performing overall. So, you know, schools don't typically have fMRI machines or eye tracking devices. There are other ways to measure fluency, but rate is one way, but we have to remember what we care about is automaticity. We care about students being so automatic with text that they can devote as much cognitive resources as they have as possible towards comprehension. So rate is just a proxy for that, but it's not directly measuring the student's cognitive load while reading. And so what we tried to do here was well, let's let's load the barbell really heavy. Let's give them some challenging texts that are also engaging. And we'll have Chase talk about like the the we tried to get texts that were fun. Let's give it to them through repeated reads where there's some scaffolding that's removed with each subsequent read, and let's let's see how they do. So speed was not something that was coached, and partially because I'm not sure. I I mean that's that's just not my approach with fluency, is I don't know that you can coach speed. I think it's you put in the reps, and then automaticity is the outcome, and that's manifested by speed. I think a lot of times we put the cart before the horse and like focus on speed, speed, speed, speed, when really it's like scaffolded text volume, scaffolded text volume, scaffolded text volume, and then a faster rate is then the output rather than the input. So I think those are the big areas I see it being different than the, you know, read three times and check for speed approach.

Lori:

Yeah, I love that. I also feel like I want to give um expression a little circle back. Um, that connection to comprehension, that when we hear those students read it out loud. Um I I love the way you explain that, Jake. But also like just is there anything you both want to say about when students are reading it out the text out loud that we can hear in their expression if they understand it or not?

Chase Young:

Their expressiveness is certainly an indicator of whether they truly are understand it. And I think it's a really high-level indicator because they're processing it as they read and they're looking at syntax and punctuation, but they're also thinking about the meaning of the text and how how how how things should be paused, how where to put them, you know, where to emphasize. Um, so there's a lot going on there, grammatically, syntactically, meaning, all of this, all of this, um, all of these things coming together to say, hey, this kid, this kid gets it.

Jake Downs:

And and there's, I mean, this is, you know, we we publish the study, right? But there's other tinkerings that happen, you know, outside of the actual study that that doesn't get published. But one tinkering with it is having the uh, you know, the the Rosinski and Zatelf uh multidimensional fluency rubric and having for each of those four categories, expression and volume, phrasing, smoothness and pace, having that be its own sort of mini learning target or objective. So with the first read, the teacher says, Hey, today we're gonna work on expression and volume. It's a big deal because we want to make sure that we're we're we're putting appropriate uh expression onto the words we read and that we're doing it with an appropriate uh you know amount of sound. And so as we're going through our subsequent reads today, I want you to focus on expression and volume. And I'm gonna show you how to do it in these first few reads. And then each day it's just a different, it's just rotating through expression and volume today, phrasing tomorrow, smoothing the next day, pace the day after that. Or if there's a text that lends itself particularly well to one or the other, you know, aligning it that way. But that's like just a really small way you can slide that in there. But I I I love the prosty stuff because it's it's kind of like sneaking vegetables into dinner. Like the students really latch on to it, like it gives them a reason to practice. And and especially like if, hey, we might be performing this today, it gives it gives some added weight, but they can improve in prosody. But oh yeah, by the way, they're also getting more text exposure, more reading volume, more automaticity, et cetera.

Melissa:

So for this study, you looked at third and fourth graders. You worked with third and fourth graders, and you said that the fourth grade results were particularly strong. I'm wondering if, since we're talking all about these like potential outcomes from this, like what did you actually see, especially with those fourth graders? What actually improved?

Jake Downs:

Uh so we used the academic measures with these students, and then we also had the Gates-Maginity vocabulary and the Gates-MG comprehension. And what we saw with the fourth graders was their words per minute grew um significantly more than the control group. And the control group was uh they they had a business as usual program that they were going through. So there was instruction happening with the BAU. So the business as usual group grew as well. It's just the um the treatment group, our read like us group grew more. Uh so well, just and in words per minute at the beginning of the study, this was a 50-day intervention. Uh the read like us students were started at 93.6 words per minute, and at the end they were at 110.1. Uh so that was 16.5 words in 50 instructional days. And the the effect size was 0.9, which, you know, if you follow effect sizes, that's a pretty, that's a pretty decent effect size to get in a 50-day uh you know intervention. Um, we also saw a little bit of growth in accuracy with the fourth grade students. We didn't see that as much with the third grade students, and uh, but we picked hard text. Like there was a fair amount of definitely upper four, five lexile tech, fourth, fifth grade lexile text, but we also had middle school level text, like in the six, seven, eight range. And so I think there was a proximal, like there is a limit to how much stretch you can stretch students. And I think, you know, the difference between a third grade reader at the 35th percentile and a fourth grade reader at the 35th percentile is actually there's quite a bit difference between those, you know, between that that grade level. So um I think there was some proximal, you know, things happening there. Um, but we also saw that the increase on vocabulary and comprehension was the same uh for the BAU and the read like us group, but we saw increases on maze and retail. So we're we're we're kind of taking that as well. There wasn't broad comprehension gains, but those tend to actually be really hard to get with a study. And we weren't directly doing much with comprehension. So, but with you know, a maze assessment and a retail, I think that shows that they were reading automatically more automatically, so they had more cognitive resources to devote towards comprehension. So the next step would be okay, well, let's leverage those resources better with some direct comprehension support as well.

Lori:

What would how would we test address comprehension here?

Jake Downs:

Um there's a lot of different ways to uh you know approach comprehension, but within within this framework, right, we're trying to provide a lot of fluence. So this is fluency heavy, comprehension light would be sort of the framing within this particular approach. So we want to keep the high amount of text volume. Uh we want to have that st and and have a wide range of texts, have challenging text. Um so I would want to have the comprehension aspect to be as punchy and as abbreviated, but still doing a heavy lift as it could. So, you know, for me that would be doing something like a 10-word takeaway or a gist statement. So um, you know, who or what is the most important thing in this text, what is the thing, what's the most important thing that the who or what did, because that gets at whole level text comprehension, not sort of little itty-bitty chunks and shreds of you know, this and this, but just like what is this text about overall? And trying to structure that in a way that mimics the uh arrangement or the text structure of the text. That would be that would be how I would do it. And there's been some tinkerings with that too, and maybe that'll make its way into a future study, but that's how I would do it. And I'd probably, to make that happen, I think it could condense a read. I'd probably get rid of the echo read, would probably be, especially with upper, upper element. If it was with lower elementary, I might keep the echo read in, but upper the echo just it gets kind of clunky when the sentences get really long. So okay, let's shrink it down three reads, uh listening passage preview, choral read, paired partner read. Let's keep the performance slash independent read at the end, and then let's put in a short 10-word takeaway gist at the end uh with every single text. And and maybe initially that's just being modeled orally by the by the instructor until there's sort of some capacity to like, yeah, like let's write it down. Let's let's make that fit within the half hour.

Chase Young:

You know, that's a great example of how research really works. I mean, you there's only like a little tiny topping of new, right? Because we're so just there's deep into the research, making sure we're sticking with the evidence, and then we just kind of poke our head out a little bit and be like, oh, cool, that worked. All right, now we can kind of think of, you know, test that a few more times, see if we keep getting similar results, and then and then it's like, all right, now it's time to look over the fence again, see what's going on.

Melissa:

I think that's so helpful to hear, Chase, because I think people look at researchers, right? And you think like, well, this read like us must be the way, right? They're saying this is the way to teach fluency, right? So I I mean, it's just for me, it's refreshing to hear. Yeah, and that like one great way. They're testing things, right? Like that's what researchers do. It's not they're saying this is the only way to do it. They're saying, we tried this, this is what happened, but we might also want to, we would even want to try it some different ways, um, especially after testing it, and you learn from it, and then you can keep going. So I just think it's refreshing to hear that from researchers because we put so much stock in the research and what the science says.

Jake Downs:

So Chase and I had the same uh dissertation chair, which is how we got connected. So we both had Kit Moore, who is fantastic. She's now retired, but one of the things that she really instilled in me and the work that she was doing with Chase was stacking protocol. She called it a stacked work. And that's something I've really taken with me of like rather than just having like one thing, how can we take multiple evidence-based practices and we stack them together into something that's coherent? So we're not just doing whack-a-mole across the reading curriculum all day, but it's like, okay, how do we add in word accuracy support plus fluency support plus comprehension support plus vocabulary support in a in a single package? Uh, you know, we we talk about the reading rope a lot and we talk about the individual threads, but we have to remember eventually those threads have to become a rope. Like it's the rope is where the power is at. And we can still be explicit about that. We can still scaffold that directly, but we have to get to the point where we're starting to actually weave a rope together.

Melissa:

Yeah, because that I mean that's what teachers have, that's what our reading teachers need to do, right? They have to weave those together. So for research to weave it together is really helpful.

Chase Young:

Right. Well, I've got one thing to say about the intervention, and then I've got a beautiful segue into text. Uh so there was an active control, meaning that this district had adopted a particular tier two intervention. Ours is free. The other one's not. And ours was slightly better. It was free. All you need are some text and a little bit of training, and you got it.

Lori:

Yeah, and it's it's actually this is an open access article. Yeah. Yeah. And we will link it in the show notes. So everybody will have it. We will share it widely everywhere as we love to do. But yeah, it's not only free, but it's really clear. And there's, I don't know who did the cute little graphics. Was that you guys?

Jake Downs:

Uh that would be my doc student, Alicia Cole. So shout out to Alicia Cole, who has great aesthetic taste. She uh she did a fantastic job with that.

Chase Young:

So uh in a in a kind of a segue, um uh Jay talked about kit and how. So the first thing that the the first study I did to stack instruction was um in 2014. A school called me and said, Hey, we have some serious automaticity issues. I was like, oh, pick me, pick me. And I I loved being there. I ran the study, I was on site all the time. I even had, I even participated as one of the tutors. Um, and when we wrote that study up, we had some wonderful results. Um, we already talked about those with uh sport, but one of the reviewers, so our protocol was choose something hard, choose something like challenging and engaging text, right? Because we, if we're gonna spend this kind of time, if we're gonna do this kind of scaffolding, it better not be easy, right? Um, so so we would have kids, we'd start at two years above kind of where they're supposed to be or where they were. Uh, and this was a great time for us to follow that whole we need kids in grade level text. Great, we can do that, but we're gonna have to give them some serious scaffolding to get them there. And read like us and uh read to impress was this particular study. And I submitted it for review, and reviewer two said, no, you can't publish this because it doesn't follow the research from the 60s about neurological impress and how text should be easy. In 1966, there was this whole, yeah, neurological impress came out, and uh its original intent was uh to help uh stuttering.

Lori:

I did read this. You talked about this before at some point, and I read it. I went and read it.

Chase Young:

Yeah. And so and it didn't start that way. So the science has progressed, right? Now we, you know, we enter the two enter the 2000s, and we're looking at you know, close reading and text complexity and things like that. So we're a long way from the 60s, but whoever this reviewer was, I don't know who it was, but they were like, no, we can't publish this, it doesn't follow the research. Well, it doesn't follow the research from the 1960s, and thank goodness we have we have actually evolved over time and we have learned new things and better practices. So, in this case, using these extremely challenging texts for these kids is far more beneficial than putting in them something that they can already read and put them through this read like us protocol.

Melissa:

There is research about using texts that are above their grade level, right? I know I I know I wrote that in our book somewhere.

Chase Young:

Yeah.

Lori:

We're having we're both having a meltdown now. We're like, we put this in the book and we know we have it cited. So no, no, we we know, we know where you're going. So it's a good thing.

Chase Young:

It's a good thing. Um, but the the texts themselves we knew were going to be very important. And uh that actually took that took a long time. Took like a month to put together these 50 texts, and uh they uh the whole purpose was to have them at about 100 to 200 words, and they had to be engaging. Um, you know, I used a lot of giggle poetry. We use like, you know, the aliens have landed, it's distressing, but they're here. We use food fight, um, things, poems like Clear as Mud, where it's all just kind of jumbled and things. Um, we had short stories with a twist, like use a lot of Elvin Short scary stories because a lot of them, you know, the shorter ones, they'd have like this little twist at the end. You're like, oh dang. Um like crazy facts, like science facts. Like if you were to, you know, you could drive to space if if you could drive directly um into the sky for an hour. In one hour, you could drive to space uh if you're going 60 miles an hour. And it's true, it's it's weird to think about, but so we had all of these, and also like the strange state laws. Um, and then we um we had a whole section on like engineers, like computer engineers, um, we had um classic stories. Um what was uh oh, some of the just these intriguing stories, kind of like, you know, why do we have daylight savings done? Who is the real Dracula? And you know, Jake said that these kids were they get done with their intervention, and they'd ask to bring the intervention text home.

Jake Downs:

Yeah, we had reports of that.

Melissa:

That's what you want. I love that.

Jake Downs:

We also incorporated about 10 texts from the core reading program as well as part of the fluency practice, trying to like have some continuity for students.

Chase Young:

That was Jake's idea.

Jake Downs:

I have the boring ideas, Chase does the aliens have landed.

Chase Young:

Now he has the very practical and reasonable ideas of hey, if we're gonna do this intervention, we might want to tie it a little bit to what they're doing in the classroom, which is certainly something that a lot of researchers are looking at right now.

Lori:

So like one to two hundred words and what, how many to one to two above one to two years above grade level?

Jake Downs:

And this one we had, um uh, we actually had quite a few that were in the six, seven, eight grade lexile range. And we didn't, when we were curating these, we we didn't like have the lexile filter on. Uh we were just let's find texts that we think are going to be engaging for students that look like they have a reasonable degree of challenge. And then it was after the stuff, I was after the study was done. It was after we had the results that we went back and if we could find the Lexile for the text, we found it. And then otherwise we put it through the Lexile analyzer and got a score. So um I mean, and that was part of trying to um, you know, we were we're we're testing an i hypothesis here. So we're not saying that we should put below grade level readers in exclusively above grade level text. Like I don't, I don't that's a bit uh, you know, extreme. Although we did have above grade level text, but you know, we're just the the the hypothesis here is well, can you know readers that are are lower achieving can they succeed in texts that we would typically say that they probably can't be successful in? And you know, the the their ORF data is showing that yeah, they they were able to, you know, over the course of time. So I you know, I I think for most students, grade level text is challenging enough, uh, but we can support students in hard text was was what we were really trying to get at as part of this fluency protocol.

Melissa:

Yeah, because you have all that scaffolding and support built in, that's how they end up feeling successful with those challenging texts. I am curious about just because this you know conversation always brings up the old leveled texts. Um and you already mentioned it, Jake, with what I was gonna ask is like, you know, if a teacher has like a book closet full of books, how do I know, you know, what what level this is? Like I don't, you know, I just I don't know. Um but you mentioned the Lexile levels is what we're looking at here, and looking at grade levels, right? We're looking at grade level, not necessarily a student's reading level and trying to match their reading level to the book. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jake Downs:

Yeah, well, I'm I'm pretty level agnostic these days. Uh, you know, uh I mean Lexile is the coin of the realm right now. And and I I I think it's an improvement. I think there's limitations to the Lexile formula, but I think there's a lot of let's try and curate a text that like we're sort of putting old wine in new bottles of like taking some of that level text philosophy and saying, okay, I need to find a Lexile that's between you know 700 and 750 for my students to read. And and the reality is the the gradient is so finite that there's more variation across a whole bunch of texts that are all at 700 than there would be between 700 and 750, right? Like depending on the content of the text, the students' background knowledge, et cetera. So I guess I'm just a proponent of let like rather than like putting the Lexile filter on first and then seeing what's there, flipping that around and saying, well, what text do I actually want my students to be reading? You know, what what social studies knowledge do they need that I'm not getting to during my day? What science knowledge? What world knowledge? What like what is information that I think or what what types of narrative stories, right? Like saying, you know, can I find texts that are interesting, that are engaging, that are helping me advance my learning goals and starting there. And uh, you know, and there's obviously limitations, right? Like to, you know, too not challenging at all versus way too challenging, right? But just being a little bit looser with like trying to like be arrow precise with trying to like curate the exact lexile of text and just saying, like, there's a reason why the state standards are having lexile bands, right? Two, three, four, five, six, seven. Like the implicit assumption there is six. Oh I didn't uh see, we're gonna look back on this podcast in five years and be like, oh, that was such a fun.

Lori:

Nobody's gonna remember it, and they're gonna be like, why is Chase singing 6'7?

Jake Downs:

So but the the but the notion there is that like there is a range, and the students can handle our range, you know, if we're scaffolding it. So if I'm in fourth grade and there's a great science text that's really explaining very like clearly how energy moves through an ecosystem, but it's in the upper four-five lexile band, you should still use it. And it's the scaffolding that's gonna make the difference, not the exact text lexile level that it's at.

Melissa:

Yeah, that's really helpful. And and thank you for for saying it that way. I just think that's really important that levels do usually come first, I think, in a lot of teachers' minds. So thank you for shifting that mindset.

Chase Young:

Jake is absolutely right. We got to think about what what do I want my kids to read? And then you think kind of generally as an expert in reading instruction, you go, Do you think I can? Probably. Let's give it a try. You know, it's like, you know, my my kid brings home these nightly readers that are, you know, water sports. And that was okay, you know, talked about wakeboarding, blah, blah, blah. But like what he wants to read and then brings out later is the grossest joke or joke book in the world. And it's so complex. I mean, it is adult level reading. He's in first grade. We're seeing he's reading words like restaurant and all of these, because he really wants to. And this whole book is separated by bodily functions. And all the chapters are he you pretty much know the answer to all of them based on where he is in the book. But anyways, it's it's really about that want-to, uh, and it to some degree. Obviously, there's limitations, but um I I I get teachers email me because of my reader's scripts, and a lot of times they're like, Do you have them leveled? I'm like, no. Just read through and see what your kids will like.

Lori:

Yeah. And I think that like you're kind of bringing up this idea of like different types of texts have different nuances, different purposes. Like, for example, with the jokes, right? In order to understand a joke, you have to understand so much background knowledge in order to get the joke and then actually fully understand it and laugh at it. So there's a lot of knowledge that's required there, right? Just in that one example. But I think we're kind of working our way from texts into this idea of wide reading. So in your study, you compared repeated reading with wide reading, right? So for listeners who might not be familiar with these terms, can you explain the difference? And then I think we want to talk a little bit more about each one.

Jake Downs:

Yeah, so repeated reading is is just what it sounds like, right? It's it's reading a specific text multiple times. And then wide reading is trying to get a very large sampling of lots of different kinds of text. So informational text, of narrative text, drama, poetry, but even informational texts in in different domains of basically like whatever syntactic and language patterns exist, we want to give students exposure to those in text. And as we were going through this, I found, you know, in the in the literature, when people have written, they've kind of like pitted those two against each other. Like here's repeated reading, and here's wide reading, and here's the trade-offs of them.

Lori:

That seems like an unnecessary battle.

Jake Downs:

Yes, it does, right? It's it's like cutting off the nose to spite the face. It's so like the approach we took was like, well, let's do repeated reading in a wide array of texts. And so that's like with what we talked about a minute ago. You know, we had poetry, we had weird state laws, uh, we had folktales, we had stuff from the tier one core reading program. Like we just tried to get a really wide sample so it was repeated reading across a wide array of texts. Maybe we should call it like wepeed weeding or something. I don't know. We need to come up with a catchy name.

Lori:

Uh that is really difficult to say, though. I'm not sure I support that.

Chase Young:

It's gonna be really hard to do repeated weeding.

Jake Downs:

No one will take this seriously. But just the I just the idea that those two don't have to be in opposition to each other, that it's more of the, you know, repeated reading is what I'm doing today with the text. Wide reading is what I want to have scaffold for my students over the next 160 instructional days.

Melissa:

Yeah, and I'm thinking like a lot of times when people say wide reading, I feel like the first thing they think of is like independent reading or self-selected reading. And that I feel like what you're talking about seems like a more teacher-controlled way of doing wide reading. So it doesn't have to just be like, okay, here's every book that's in the whole entire library, pick one. Um, but like we're still doing wide reading, even if the texts are still controlled, and it's not every book, but it's still a lot of books.

Jake Downs:

I think if we let students like exclusively self-select, they actually won't get a wide diet in. I think students I think students tend to pick like they have their niche that that they're interested in, right? I'm thinking back to a a Ray Reitzel study from the early 2000s, but like they had a genre wheel for students self-selecting text, right? But just, you know, the notion that I I just I feel wide reading is more an aspect of what I, the instructor, bring to the table. It's how I scaffold the reading interaction for my students over the course of a year. I I'm not sure that we hit we get wide reading by just saying, all right, student, you've got it. Go rock and roll with text, and that's wide reading.

Melissa:

Yeah, that's a really interesting point because I think I think do think a lot of teachers when they think of wide reading and think of the benefits of wide reading, the first thing that comes to mind is self select. But you're absolutely right. I mean, my son brings home this minerals books and rocks and gems and every time. Um, so yeah, it's the it's not very wide in the text that he brings home. It's very narrow. So yeah, the teacher actually is more helpful in picking a wide array of topics for them for students to read.

Jake Downs:

Like which is which is great. Like we want our students to get super interested in a single area. Like, and if they just want to go an inch wide but a mile deep, like go for it. Like that, like that's really exciting, you know. But with our instruction, like we can complement that, right? Like with being able to scaffold and structure a wide array of texts.

Chase Young:

And that's because you are the instructional designer and the teacher, isn't that correct, Jake? Where you set these experiences for them and you have control over that and and what they choose later on is up to them.

Lori:

Yeah, and I'm I I think what we're saying is like we're not we're not ever going to give students the opportunity to self-select. Like that is also, you know, should have its day in the sun. However, there's a specific purpose for each component here of wide reading, right? Like when we have students self-select, that could be during library time, during um a station in our classroom where they're having access to a library. But when we are asking them to read for this specific purpose, we are scaffolding text, we are controlling that text so that they're really maximizing their experience, right?

Jake Downs:

Yeah, like like most things in reading, it's not either or, right? It's both and. But the big question is when and how much. Those are the those are the questions we need to get better at talking about and not just sort of like bashing at each other in you know, in in different pedagogical approaches.

Chase Young:

Right. Yeah, just expose it to them all. I mean, what if my parents had only smoked chicken? You know, I wouldn't know how awesome smoked ribs are. Like, come on, you're missing out. Only white meat? There's this whole other room full of amazing beats.

Lori:

I can't wait for all the vegetarians. That's what I was gonna say. All the vegetarians listening are like, like, I'm gonna click me. No.

Chase Young:

Yeah, we like this podcast.

Lori:

So, okay, so what you're getting into are the benefits of wide reading, right? So with or or maybe wide eating, but um, maybe we could do the benefits of wide reading. Uh, what are they?

Jake Downs:

The goal with wide reading is we do want a breadth of exposure. And and there's there's research of how the language of different styles of text are different. In informational text, uh, you tend to get the same words repeated over and over again. So talking about you know, energy, how energy moves through an ecosystem, you're gonna have words like photosynthesis and respiration. And those words are gonna be repeated over and over, and they're long, challenging words to read, but they're very uh content, very dense, content-wise. Whereas uh, you know, narrative text, it's it's it's often going to use shades of meaning. So the main character is frustrated and angry and peeved, and there's a lot more inferencing load that kind of has to happen uh about motives and things like that. So the way that language is that just language is structured, it varies across different genres. And once we get into poetry or drama or like uh a biography versus uh you know, like something that's like detailing like a specific event in history, you know, like there's different things that at there's different vocabulary, but there's different sentence structures, but there's different like overall text structures, text, you know, genre alignment as well. And so the idea there with wide reading is well, we want to expose students to all of this, and we know that by doing that, there's going to be some incidental vocabulary learning. But also, I think about trying to like like covering terrain with a vehicle. We want students to get really used to be like driving through the sand, driving through the snow, driving through a dirt road in the mountains. That we want them to be able to navigate the terrain adequately with whatever text is thrown at them. So I think that's that's the goal and benefit of wide reading.

Lori:

Wow.

Chase Young:

Jake wins metaphor of the day.

Melissa:

That's one of my favorite things about Jake's podcast listening to his metaphors. They're also always really helpful.

Lori:

Well, and he also says, uh, you say this often, Jake, on your podcast, and I love it. You say the juice dude the juice isn't worth the squeeze. The juice is worth worth it. And it just makes me, I'm like, yeah, you're right. That's it's just very an honest approach. I love that phrase. I've been using it a lot more, thanks to you.

Jake Downs:

I'm flattered. Jake isms.

Melissa:

Jake isms. Jake isms. That's great. All right. So to wrap us up, what is like if I'm a teacher listening to this and I'm like, this all sounds really great, but you know, I don't I don't even know where to start. What can you tell them for like if they can't just do the whole thing with the wide reading and everything? Where should they start? What's one small thing they can start tomorrow in their classrooms?

Chase Young:

Well, first of all, you can email me because I have all of the text that we use for the intervention. They're on the back side of my website because copyright's kind of a gray area, but I'm happy to send you the link.

Jake Downs:

And I would add in like, what text are you reading tomorrow? That's the text you start with. And if you're reading a longer text, okay, where what what 200, 300 word stretch of that text has the most oomph? Where if it's a narrative, it's the most complex with the most things going on. If it's informational, where the most information is stacked, like what portion of that text, you know, 200 or 300 words, is is worth harvesting, is worth mining, is worth excavating a little bit more. And start there. I I I don't think I mean that I mean, yes, we curated text for this, but I I part of what we're trying to say is also like you can bake with the flour you've got. The text you already have in the classroom, provided that you know their grade level have some some stretch capacity for them, like those are gonna work great. So you don't need fancy text. What text you have can work great. It's the design of the instruction that actually is gonna make the difference in the end with how students access that text.

Lori:

And the design of the instruction can be found in the Read Like Us uh protocol that we're linking in the show notes. So you can just pull it up. It's cute, color-coded. Thanks, Alicia. Also, the the texts are you know great recommendations in there and you'll you'll see some named. Um, but the protocol I think is like the structure to implement. Yes.

Chase Young:

Yep, you can put any text in there. Just make sure it's not super long. That's kind of one of the things. You don't want to do a choral read and an echo read and a partner read of you know, a tale of two cities.

Lori:

And I mean, I'm looking at right now that scary stories to tell in the dark. It looks very scary. It's in the horror genre. So if you have students who you know are going to love this, uh also others who might be scared by it. Don't let them read that.

Chase Young:

That's true. That happens as well.

Lori:

But these are great recommendations, super practical, super easy. Um, we love a routine. We love this routine. We love you guys. Thank you so much for being here again and again and again. We love you both.

Chase Young:

We love it. We love being here. Thank you. Always good to see you guys.

Jake Downs:

This is always always great to talk shop with you all.

Melissa:

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Lori:

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Melissa:

Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees.

Lori:

We appreciate you so much, and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.