Wiley Blevins spoke at CREST last week. I think he is doing fascinating work. Here's the transcript of my notes:
Early Foundational Skills Instruction: What's Working and Why?
A webinar transcript featuring Dr. Wiley Blevins
- Dr. Wiley Blevins — keynote speaker; author, educational consultant, and researcher; SVP and associate publisher, Reycraft Books
- Tonja Gray — host; president, CREST
- David Webb — Curriculum Associates
- Dr. Anita Archer — author of Phonics for Reading (featured in a video clip)
- Robert Downs — Benchmark Education
Tonja Gray: I hope that you had a great time of stretching your legs and getting some refreshments during our last stop. We are about to leave the station on the fifth leg of our journey today, so I am going to turn it over to our special guest who is here to talk to us from Curriculum Associates. So let me quit sharing my slides here and turn it over to Mr. David Webb, who is going to talk to us about his sponsorship this afternoon.
David Webb (Curriculum Associates): Thank you so much, Miss Gray. I appreciate that intro. Great to be here with everyone. We're very thankful for this partnership with CREST.
A little bit of my background: I taught high school for eight years on the ELA side. I was a speech teacher in the Frisco area, and I left the classroom to get into this world on the curriculum side, the publishing side, and I've been doing this since 2012. So, in some form or fashion, I've been supporting or working in public schools for over 20 years. And my wife is an educator — she is actually the literacy specialist in her district who oversees all the Reading Academies, and she coaches me up whenever I don't understand something about reading. Thankfully, she has to do that not too often anymore, particularly since I've had the incredible privilege of being at Curriculum Associates. We're passionate about literacy, and I think that's evident by the people with whom we partner. Dr. Anita Archer is one of our biggest partners. She is incredible, and we are humbled and so blessed that she authored one of our programs, Phonics for Reading, and it's very powerful. Her big message is that kids need explicit instruction, and that's very much aligned with the science of reading. She doesn't think that's negotiable at all, and I appreciate that.
I want to start us off with a really quick YouTube short from Dr. Archer, and then I'll briefly let you know about some of the things that we do to support literacy, and then I'll let y'all get on to the main event. All right? Does that sound good? Okay, thank you. Let me share my screen here.
Dr. Anita Archer (from video): Children's lives are precious. What they learn is precious. Learning to read and write well is precious and necessary in our society. We must use the best practices every day in every way to make a difference with our students. It can happen. It takes energy, but it feels so good to us as teachers when they learn. The more successful you are, the more motivated you will be to put energy into it. It requires leadership that's tenacious. Using what we know from research makes a difference. Teach them well, and we change lives.
David Webb: All right, thank you. I think we all can agree that was inspirational, for sure. We'll dive right into just a few slides. Again, I'm David Webb. There's my email address if you'd like to get in touch with me — happy to provide you more information. We just heard from Dr. Archer, and I love this quote by Dr. Archer: "I'm certain that you believe, as I believe, that reading is a civil right. It totally changes everything if you are a reader or not. So we've got to continue to use our very best knowledge and our energy to ensure that students are readers." I think we all can agree on that.
Again, Dr. Archer is the author of our Phonics for Reading program, and that is for grades 3 through 12 for striving readers. Not only do we have this solution for striving readers, but we also have you covered on foundational literacy — these are ESSA-proof. We've got Magnetic Foundations, which is phonics for English foundational skills, and then Mosaico: Fundamentos — which is a blast to say; I never get tired of saying that. This is Spanish foundational skills built from the ground up to be authentic — beautiful for a dual-language setting. Really, these two programs, I'm very proud of these. If you'd like more information on these, there are QR codes, or I'm happy to come out to your district or service center and talk more through this.
We also have personalized instruction in our i-Ready platform. I think you guys have heard of i-Ready before. We have an amazing i-Ready assessment that then drives this personalized instruction, and we also have math. But I know that today's focus is on reading, so I just wanted to highlight that we have personalized instruction for reading. Again, there's a QR code there if you'd like more information.
And then here are some helpful resources for y'all. We've got a QR code and a link to Dr. Archer's book on explicit instruction. There's a QR code to Phonics for Reading, and then I put some bonus info here. I put a couple of podcast episodes that Dr. Archer did for us on our Extraordinary Educators podcast — a great podcast, but these are really two episodes for the record books with Dr. Archer. So please feel free to listen to those. Again, I'll put my email address back up. Please feel free to contact me, and I'll put these slides in the chat as well so you have access to those and all the QR codes. They're hyperlinked — if you're on your computer, you can click them, or if you want to look at them on your phone, you can scan the QR codes.
Anyway, I just want to thank you guys so much for this time. Thank you for the opportunity to support such a really fantastic organization that is moving the needle to make sure that every kid is a strong reader, because that opens up tremendous doors of opportunity for children. Thank you for the work that you do. Please let me know if I can help support in any way. Thank you so much.
Tonja Gray: Thank you, Mr. Webb. We always appreciate Curriculum Associates, and we appreciate you being a longtime supporter of Crest. We appreciate you so much. You definitely hit a few things for me — your wife and I could have some fun together talking about the Reading Academy, and then I love me some Dr. Archer.
David Webb: Well, that's great. Thank you, ma'am. I appreciate that.
Tonja Gray: All right. Before we get into our last bit of business this afternoon and hear our closing keynote speaker — who I cannot wait to hear from — I need to let you know that we do have some information on our nominations. You guys had a chance to nominate yourselves for office today. We did not have anyone who decided to nominate themselves for president-elect, but we did have one candidate who nominated herself for secretary, so at the end of our session this afternoon we will reveal her name and vote her in by acclamation. We also have a couple of people who have decided they want to join us as regional reps, so we will share that information with you at the end of our session today.
But I really want to get on to our keynote speaker, because this is one person I have been dying to hear from for a long time. When I read his phonics book, it rocked my world. So I am super excited, and I am so thankful for Robert Downs. He is here from Benchmark Education. They helped us to bring Dr. Wiley Blevins to you this afternoon. We're very thankful for both of our sponsors this afternoon, who have helped to support us and helped us bring in some quality speakers for you today. Mr. Downs, would you like to say something?
Robert Downs (Benchmark Education): Oh, just real quickly: thank you guys for having us. I know you guys are going to enjoy Dr. Blevins, so I'm not going to take up a lot of time because I know you guys are pressed for time. Just want to thank you again, and anything we can do to support your districts — we're certainly here for you. I'll put all my contact info in the chat, but I'll turn it back over to you, Tonja, and let Dr. Blevins keep going.
Tonja Gray: All right. Well, now on to our closing keynote speaker. Dr. Wiley Blevins has a doctorate in education, and he studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and at Bowling Green State University. He is an author, educational consultant, and researcher, and has taught both in the United States and South America. Wiley has written over 17 books for teachers, including A Fresh Look at Phonics, Phonics from A to Z, Differentiating Phonics Instruction for Maximum Impact — awesome book — and Choosing and Using Decodable Texts. He has authored several phonics and reading programs, and wrote the phonics brief for the International Literacy Association, "Meeting the Challenges of Early Literacy Phonics Instruction." Wiley's current focus is on adaptive technology, differentiated professional development, and children's literature. Wiley has written over 100 children's books and is SVP and associate publisher at Reycraft Books, a new imprint focused on publishing books by authors and illustrators from underrepresented groups. So we are very excited to welcome you this afternoon, Dr. Blevins. It is your floor.
Dr. Wiley Blevins: Thank you so much. Let me share my screen. Can you see it? Yes. Excellent. So, welcome, everyone. Good afternoon. I'm thrilled that you're able to join me today for our brief chat about early foundational-skills instruction: what's working and why.
Since I only have a little bit of your time today, I'm going to forego the humorous and heartwarming introduction that I usually give — that takes about 10 minutes — and just jump right in. And I hope that's okay. Of course, you will be getting a copy of this PowerPoint, so if there's anything that I go through too quickly, you'll be able to revisit it.
I wanted to start with the big takeaway of today's session. The big takeaway is that when it comes to phonics instruction, we know what works. I'm going to say that again: we know what works. The big challenge is getting what works into every single classroom, so that all of our students can benefit from this huge body of knowledge that we have about what works and why it works.
We're going to talk a lot about things centered around the science of reading. Some people call it the science of literacy, which includes reading plus writing plus language development. But some of the things I want to share with you today are really in other bodies of research — around, for example, the science of instruction: how we deliver this instruction really makes a difference. A lot of the work that I'm doing here in New York City is centered around how we are delivering the instruction that we are providing for our teachers and students. And then the science of learning: what needs to be in place? What are the conditions in which the learning actually sticks? There's a new book — if you haven't seen it, it's called The Canon of Literacy, by Dr. Pullen — that really talks about these three bodies of knowledge, these three sciences. I highly recommend it if there's a new professional-development book you want to dig into, because it explains them quite nicely and gives a lot of really discrete examples that can benefit the work that you're doing in your districts.
So when it comes to phonics instruction, there are seven characteristics of strong phonics instruction. I have them listed here; I won't go through all of them, but several of them are related to key instructional routines — such as blending, the primary strategy we teach children to sound out words. There are different ways we can do it, and the research is very clear about the best way to do it; we'll talk about that in just a second. There are also routines around dictation, around high-frequency words — and I do a ton of work here in New York City around the reading of connected text, or decodable text, and all the things that we can and should be doing with these very simple texts to elevate the learning that is happening in our classrooms. We'll touch upon a lot of these things throughout the session today.
The work that I started quite a while ago — I think this work started around 2010 — really led to me uncovering these 10 big reasons why phonics instruction sometimes fails, and many of these are connected to these sciences, these bodies of knowledge that we'll talk about. For example, the first one — an inadequate or nonexistent review and repetition cycle — is connected to the science of learning. What conditions need to be in place for that learning to stick? All the research around cumulative practice and distributed practice, and the intensity of the practice — and we'll dig into some things that we've had to do here in New York City to make sure that's happening for our students.
We know that phonics instruction must be explicit and systematic, but it also needs to be cumulative. It needs to build, and it needs to extend over a longer period of time than what we sometimes find in our instructional materials, in order for it to stick for all of our students.
The paper that Tonja mentioned that I wrote for the International Literacy Association — "Meeting the Challenges of Early Literacy Phonics Instruction" — is available. It's free. It's online at the International Literacy Association. If you can't find it, I can certainly send it to you. It summarizes those seven characteristics of strong phonics instruction and the 10 reasons why phonics instruction sometimes fails. I like using it as an introductory piece when I'm working with schools, because we want to make sure that the materials we're using have that strong phonics DNA, but we also want to make sure that we are consciously, intentionally, and systematically removing those obstacles — those 10 reasons why phonics instruction sometimes fails. Again, I'll touch upon a few of those in our session today.
So, how do we ensure that our phonics instruction is strong? There are a lot of phonics materials out there. Some are better than others. We have what we have. How do we make sure it's the best possible tool for our teachers? Step one really involves us doing what I refer to as curricular surgery, and we do that to strengthen our tier one instruction. We know that if we strengthen our tier one instruction so it meets the widest range of needs in our classrooms, we can significantly reduce the number of students who need tier two and tier three support. I'm going to show you some examples of specific things that I've done in districts — not only in New York but in the surrounding area — where we've been able to accomplish some of that.
As I've mentioned many times, I live here in the Big Apple. You probably recognize this — this is Times Square. I live very close to here; I can actually see Times Square from my bedroom window. It's sort of a loud and busy place to live. But for four years I've been working with schools here in the city as they've been transitioning to structured literacy. This is a massive shift for the largest school system in the United States.
Four years ago I was invited to one of the New York City subdistricts — you don't need to know this, but it's run by a chancellor who's appointed by the mayor. We have all these subdistricts — over 30 smaller districts, each with its own superintendent, that report to the chancellor. I'm actually in a district in Queens — you may have heard of Queens, one of our boroughs here in New York City. What I was asked to do was to set up what we referred to as a lab school: one of the schools was chosen to be my main site — now I have two schools that I'm in all the time — where we would study the first year of this transition, and other schools would visit. We had 10 schools that were visiting us, and we were also studying how we could scale it up so that the second year we could really begin to scale up even more. In our small subdistrict we have about 54 elementary schools, so we're just one of many in New York City.
The school that I am in is in a very challenging situation. When the principal took over several years ago, only 9% of the students were reading on grade level. I go into a lot of schools in New York — it's 8%, it's 9%, it's 15%. This is, unfortunately, not unusual. Most of the students in our school live in poverty. Most of them speak a language other than English at home. So we have some big challenges, and I'm going to share with you some of the things that we're doing to overcome those challenges and really move the needle for our students.
When we looked at that first year and the materials that we had, we wanted to examine our materials with a clear eye against the current research. I'm a huge proponent of finding the best materials possible, but we know that not every material is perfect, right?
Our materials are tools that we need to know really well and to improve if they aren't serving the needs of our students as well as they can. That was my task: to analyze the materials that the district had chosen. We also wanted to do a far better job of utilizing student data, because data was collected, but nothing was being done with it. So we needed to put some systems in place to help teachers do that, and that required me to build in some data-collection points in the instruction and some very simple tools for teachers to use, and some very simple things for them to do with that information. And then, of course, we had to recognize that adult learning was going to be as important as student learning. This was a massive shift for our district. A lot of things were going to be done differently than they had been done before. We didn't want to throw out the great, but we wanted to make some changes for the things that weren't so great, and really start moving the needle for both our teachers and our students, and give teachers those tools.
Here again, I refer to it as curricular surgery, where we look at the instructional materials, compare them to the current research, and look at our data to see what's not clicking, what's not working for us. Our guiding questions were: How does the current research compare to the instructional routines in our materials? And, surprisingly, some didn't connect — I'm going to show you two examples of that in just a second. And what is our data telling us? Are there any disconnects? And there were, that first year. There were some big challenges, because teachers were teaching a lot of X, and the data was showing we're not seeing movement in X. I had to figure out what the problem was. There were things like over-scaffolding. There were things about not spending our time wisely. There were routines that weren't the strongest routines, and all of those things I had to try to fix very quickly for our teachers.
One complication in all of this — and I'm sure all of you are addressing this now — is that there are things the research is very clear about, and there are some things we have some information about but we're still learning, and we really have to tease that out. There are things the research is very clear about in terms of phonics: explicit, systematic, cumulative. We know about orthographic mapping — how we store words into memory so we can automatically retrieve them. We have routines now that really can accelerate that. And we also know some things we should avoid. If we're teaching a phonics lesson, the practice reading that the students have should be tightly connected to the skills we're working on. If we give students a book to practice after a phonics lesson where there are very few words they can sound out, it's not a good practice tool. But then there is a lot in the middle — things around decodable text, things around word walls, things around scope and sequence — that people have very strong feelings about, where the research has given us some information, but we're not quite there yet.
What has happened is that a lot of us in our classrooms are deciding what we think is best, and our preference is sort of overtaking our attention to what the research is showing us and sharing with us. That's where some of the challenges I face every day come into play, because we live in a world right now where what we're talking about is sort of above the surface — a lot of it is in these educational sound bites — and the nuance, where the information really rests, is below that surface. We have to go deeper and really talk about: okay, this is what the research is really saying, and this is how we've applied it to these different student populations.
What's working for whom, and what modifications need to be made? That's the work that I do in the schools, and that's the work that I really love doing, because then we can fine-tune that work to improve the outcomes for our students.
I'm going to give you two examples of the curricular surgery that we did. These might be similar to the things that you're doing.
One was around blending — super important. It's the main strategy we teach children to sound out words. When I first started this work here in New York City and walked into my first lesson, the way the teachers were teaching children to sound out words was something called segmented blending, or segmented phonation. Basically, the teacher would say the sounds of the word segmented — /s/ /a/ /t/. What's the word? — and the children would have to put those sounds together. I had never done it that way. I had always done what's called continuous blending, where I would run my finger under the letters and string together the sounds so there were no breaks in between. So we go "sssaat." What's the word? "Sat."
When I saw this, I became very alarmed. My reaction was, "Uh-oh" — partly because I'd never done it that way, but also because the research doesn't support doing it that way. There was a really important study by Linnea Ehri and Gonzalez-Frey that looked at the ways in which we teach children to blend or sound out words — connected (continuous) blending or segmented blending — and found that continuous blending was far superior. In segmented blending, some children weren't able to hold on to the sounds that were separated and would say a word that began with the most recent sound they had heard. Or some teachers were adding a vocalization in between the sounds. If the word is bad, they would go "buh-aa-tuh." Now think about putting those sounds together: "bah-tuh." It's not bad, right? So there were these things standing in the way.
That was the first red flag that the main way this program — used by 85% of the schools here in New York City — was teaching children to sound out words was not supported by the research. Then I looked at the data. We give Acadience here in New York City. I don't know if you're familiar with it; it's just like DIBELS. There's a nonsense-word fluency assessment where children have to read nonsense words as quickly as they can. They might see the letters v-o-g; we want them to say "vog," then "rab," then "zab," just going through those words. What were our students doing? They were looking at the word and going, "vuh... ah... guh... vog? fog?" The strategy we were teaching them was anti-fluency. The scores were horrible, because the way they were attacking words was the opposite of something that would get them to the point where they would become fluent decoders.
So I had to put a stop to that way of blending right away. The students picked it up really quickly. It was a bit harder for some of the teachers, because habits are hard to break if you've been doing something for 10, 15, 20 years. It's hard to make that switch. But once they started seeing how easy it was for the students and how much more efficient it was, they really jumped on board. It was funny: I would go into classrooms, and teachers would get to the blending part of the lesson, and some of them would say, "Now we're going to do continuous blending," and they would look at me and sort of smile. But that was a fairly easy shift. Some shifts in our curricular-surgery journey have been much more challenging. I'm going to share one that's been incredibly challenging, and that's around phonemic awareness.
Oftentimes in education, the research is far ahead of classroom practice, as you know. Sometimes it takes 10, 15, even 20 years for it to make its way down into the classroom. Phonemic awareness is one of these areas that we know is so important.
Being able to understand that words are made up of discrete sounds, and being able to segment, blend, and manipulate those sounds, is absolutely essential to becoming a reader and writer. But over the years there have been a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions about what that looks like in a classroom, and people have very strong feelings about it.
I shared this huge body of research with the administrators here in New York City — and there's a ton of it. Just in the last five years there was a meta-analysis (I'm going to share it with you), research studies, papers, around some of the big ideas that actually make a difference in our instruction. Here's a paper by Dr. Brady, and she talked about the strong benefits in kindergarten of connecting the sounds — what you're doing in phonemic awareness — to the letters. If, for example, we are having children segment off the first sound in sat — they say /s/ — then we have them hold up the letter card for S to make that connection. Or if we're segmenting words — after we segment a word into its sounds, then we build it with letters, making that instant connection. She talks a lot about the importance of that.
She also talks a lot about — and this is the first thing that's underlined; I'll just read it — "One of the compelling research findings is that phoneme awareness can be taught to children who lack phonological sensitivity." What does that mean? When we talk about phoneme awareness, we're talking about looking at words, thinking about words at the phoneme — the sound — level. When we talk about phonological sensitivity, we're talking about bigger units, like onset-rime and syllables and things like that. What the research has been very clear about is that once children get to kindergarten, we need to get to the sound as quickly as possible — we can hop over rhyme. Some children have difficulty with rhyme. We don't need to be clapping syllables, because we're not doing multisyllabic words. We need to get to what's going to make a difference for them to sound out words and write words — and that's the phoneme. The research has been very clear.
There was a paper that came out by Dr. Clemens, Solari, Kearns — a whole bunch of big names in our field — about phonemic awareness that talked about the importance of connecting phonemic awareness to print, and that there wasn't a huge body of solid evidence around doing these more advanced kinds of skills for all of our students. There was a study done in Utah that looked at the materials we're actually using in New York City and mandated to use, and found no empirical support for deletion, substitution, or oral-only phonemic awareness instruction — and also found that we were spending so much time doing these oral-only activities that it was taking time away from things that actually would make a difference. That study was in Reading Research Quarterly back in 2021, so not that long ago.
Some other compelling research connected to Dr. Brady's work around getting to the phoneme versus rhyme and syllables and what have you: in 2022, Raffeld et al. found that phonemic awareness outcomes nearly doubled when instruction began at the phoneme level in kindergarten. That was based on two earlier studies, in 2005 and 2011, that found that these larger units — like clapping syllables and rhyme — weren't prerequisites. We'd always been taught for so long: you start at the big unit and go to the small. The research is saying, "Hey, that's not true." You might do some of these things in preschool, yes, but once we get into kindergarten and we're teaching children to read and write, getting to the phoneme as quickly as possible is super important. Even the International Dyslexia Association changed their fact sheet around phonemic awareness, and they said: begin phonemic awareness right away and focus at the phoneme level. You can skip over those phonological-sensitivity activities and combine this instruction with letters and handwriting.
So we have this body of research that's converging. I shared all of that with the administrators in New York, and not a single one changed anything. Not a single one. We need to have conversations about why that happened at a later date.
But some of what I was told was, "Well, it's a district mandate. Got to do it." Even though the research doesn't support it — got to do it. And some of the problems were in the instructional materials, because state departments of education have required these progressions, starting with big and going to small, so it takes a long time to get to the phonemes — sometimes not until kindergarten, sometimes it's after we're asking children to actually start sounding out words. There's this mismatch between what's happening in phonemic awareness and what children actually need to read and write. So we need to catch up to this body of research. I didn't have much success sharing this information with the administrators here in New York City.
But then in 2024, a meta-analysis — which is sort of pulling together all that we know about a topic in a really impactful way — looked at the optimal cumulative dosage of phonemic awareness. I thought, okay, let me share this with the administrators. What they found — you might be familiar with this research, because it's been out for a couple of years now — is that after 10 hours of oral-only phonemic awareness instruction, the effects declined. However, when you combine it with letters, the effects continue to increase, even after 16 hours. That was really powerful. But what does that mean?
What it meant for us here in New York City was that we were mandated in kindergarten, first, and second grade to provide 10 minutes a day, every single day, of oral-only [phonemic awareness] — the materials that we had been given. That means we were doing 50 minutes a week, almost an hour a week, of oral-only. We get to the 10 hours by mid-kindergarten. That doesn't mean there isn't more phonemic awareness to be done — I'm not saying that — but the point is, are we getting the most use out of that time? And when I looked at the phonics materials, phonemic awareness was embedded in so many activities. When the children were sounding out words — they can't sound out words unless they can orally blend — they're showing that they can do that through the application of it with the print. So I don't need to do that oral-only anymore; if they can do it, we've gotten where we need to go. When we were doing dictation, the first thing they had to do was orally segment the sounds, then attach a letter or spelling. Phonemic awareness is embedded. We would do word chains — go from sat to map, map to mat. What are they doing? Orally segmenting and manipulating sounds. It was already embedded. When we looked at that and the minutes we were spending, we were losing up to 12 and a half hours in kindergarten and 25 hours of instruction in first and second grade that could be spent doing other things — other, more impactful things.
I was very frustrated, because we would have these conversations about what our students really needed: "We need a lot of support in spelling and encoding, and I need more time to do dictation and other things." "I can't create minutes." So I was like, "Can I take some of the time from the oral [phonemic awareness]?" Having these really intense conversations about where we get the minutes to do the things we need to do.
So, what we did the second year — just to show you the progression — is that in kindergarten we kept the 10 minutes, but we looked at the activities and only did a subset of the ones that were really impactful, and we tried to connect to print where we could. Then the second half of the year we cut it to five minutes, and we spent the other five minutes doing dictation, doing the spelling, which was super impactful for our kids. In grade one, we cut it to five right away. We focused on just the high-impact, high-priority skills that were connected to reading and writing, and we used that extra five minutes for dictation and doing some writing about decodables. And in grade two, we stopped it. We just assessed the students at the beginning of the year; any students who had phonemic awareness deficits received that during small-group time.
We spent the 10 minutes that had been dedicated to that other work on dictation and writing about the decodables. We had a whole plan in place for writing constructed responses and just some really meaty things that were meeting some needs of our students. In year three, we stopped altogether, because our teachers felt comfortable with the phonemic awareness that was already embedded in the program.
This is what curricular surgery is all about, and it's challenging. Some are easy fixes, and some are more challenging. We had a ton of things that we discovered. I'm not going to talk about these — I just want to show you the enormity of the things that we found. You'll have the PowerPoint, so you can take a look at these. The point is, it was really important for us to look at these things to make our tier one instruction as impactful as possible.
I'm not saying that high-quality instructional materials aren't important — they're absolutely essential. You need to find the best tools you could possibly have. But it's just step one; it doesn't solve everything. I did a two-year study in Ohio, which I'll talk about a little bit later, and they published sort of how the schools were doing. These are schools where less than a third of the children in third grade are able to read at any acceptable level, and almost all of them have high-quality instructional materials in place. So it's more than just the materials — it's what we do with them, and how we look at them, and how we make any modifications that we need.
My philosophy has always been: implementing flawed programs with fidelity ensures failure. I know that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but my responsibility is never to the materials; it's to my students. That requires us to implement with what our superintendent calls "integrity." What does that really mean? It means that we start with fidelity. You can't make any changes to materials unless you know the materials incredibly well, and how long you stay there — how long it takes you to discover those issues — is certainly up for conversation. But once we start finding things that aren't working, then we make those modifications. We use our student data, we use our teacher expertise, and we start implementing with integrity. And after that, it's just build and refine.
We've created a lot of tools ourselves to help us do that. We have what we call integrity checklists around the routines — just the key steps in a routine, the things that we want to see. Sometimes teachers will leave out a really important part. For example, if we want students to write a word, we make sure the students repeat the word you said, so we know they are actually hearing the word we said and pronouncing it correctly — because some of the errors are around articulation. Making sure all those steps are in place. As soon as we can videotape a teacher who's doing the routine really well and efficiently, we get those videotapes up and shared.
And — this is sort of a make-believe slide, but it's similar to the slides we're using — we also put the routines on our slides. At the beginning of the year, we're doing high-frequency words; we have a read-spell-write routine. It's on the side of the slide to remind the teacher of all those important steps. But it also means that all the people from the district and the administrators from the school who perhaps didn't teach phonics are also learning those steps with the teachers and with the students. It's really helped us accelerate every adult who's visiting those classrooms — their knowledge of these key instructional routines. After four to six weeks, we can remove them when everyone is very comfortable with those routines. We also began creating refinement checklists for our administrators.
Not all of our administrators have taught phonics, like I said, so part of my responsibility is to bring them up to speed on the things that we want them to know and the kinds of conversations we want them to have with the teachers. A lot of them will start out conversations that are very surface: "You followed the lesson well" — which is fine if it's a good lesson, but not so fine if it's a bad lesson. Or "Your students were highly engaged." They were just very surface things. That's not going to move the needle. What's going to move the needle are things connected to the science of instruction and the science of learning.
So we just start. We've generated this list that we keep building and building from. For example, if you go into a classroom and the teacher asks a question, calls on a volunteer, and moves on — that's not really good, because she has no idea if the other students would have answered the same thing, if they have any misunderstandings. So we have on this checklist: that's the time for you to have a conversation about every-pupil response. When do you use choral responses? When do you use every-pupil response? Those kinds of conversations are really important. I'll show you an example in just a sec.
We were encountering a lot of discovery learning in phonics lessons, where the teacher would say, "What do you know about... what do you know about re-?" I'll never forget that day. We walked into the classroom, and the teacher was like, "What do you know about re-?" And the children were just looking at her, and she was just trying to get it out of them — when she could have just said, "Re- is a prefix. It means again." Just very explicit, and then get into the practice of it. If you're seeing discovery learning, we need to have those conversations about explicit instruction: when is it appropriate to ask questions where we're getting some of that information from the students, versus when it's more efficient just to tell them. A lot of this comes out when we look at the pacing of the lessons — a lot of wasted time, a lot of extra verbiage from teachers. When they start seeing that and trimming down, it gets more efficient and explicit. Routine steps are missing — we can share the integrity checklist and the videos. Pacing is off — timers are our best friend at the beginning of the year.
We do a ton with videotaping. Every year we have new teachers. We partner them with a mentor teacher that first week. The mentor teacher, who's familiar with the materials, will teach while the new teacher is watching and taking notes, and works with them to plan their second week. The second week, they teach the materials. I go in and visit the classrooms to take a temperature check and see what support they need. In the third and fourth weeks, their mentor teacher films their lessons every day and gives it to the new teacher; they watch it and replicate it. So they have like a month of intensive support from us. After a month, almost all of our teachers have the pacing down and the routines down, so we can focus our time on refining and just building their capacity. We have a lot of things in place that have helped us accelerate that kind of work.
Here's an example of every-pupil response, what I was talking about. I would go into classrooms, and it was always children raising their hands; one person is called on; the other children are frustrated. I have no idea if the other children have the same understanding. Now, what our teachers do regularly is: if they ask a question where there's one answer — like, "When we see the letters s-h, what sound do we say? Everybody!" — that's a choral response. But if it's something that requires some discussion or talking — maybe they'll talk with a partner, and one volunteer will be called on to answer, and the teacher says "Everybody," and the children have to give a nonverbal response.
"I agree," "I disagree," or "I want to add on." So now I see if some children disagree with an answer that was correct — I have some misconceptions I have to resolve before we move on with the lesson. We're checking at every point, and the children are interacting at every point. They're engaged. They're on the edge of their seats, thinking about everything. There were a lot of questions that came in, and the administrators would say, "Oh, they're so engaged! They're so engaged." But what they were really doing is just repeating, parroting, what the teacher was saying, and they weren't thinking deeply. This requires deep thought and requires some extended conversation if some things arise.
These aren't the only signs we use. We have a few others — like the one for the bathroom, which is one of the most important; then no one disturbs us. We just nod, and things are taken care of as they should be.
This is an evaluation form that I'm happy to share with anyone, that I'm using this year. It has three parts. We're doing a study this year where I'm looking at the different phonics materials being used in our district and really evaluating which are having the biggest impact, so we can address issues that are arising with some of these materials. On the first page, I just write down everything: when they start, what they do, how many words they're reading, how many words they're writing, when they get to the next part — because I'm looking at coverage and pacing. If they give me the lesson plan, I don't need this page; I can just mark on the lesson plan. The second page is really the most important. These are the areas that had been the focus of enhancement over the previous three years. Like I said, I count the number of words read and the number of words written — the intensity of the practice really matters — and if the teacher doesn't have that in place, that's something I can work with him or her on very quickly. Explicit instruction versus discovery. You see all these things that we taught. Where are they using supports and scaffolds? Where should they be but they aren't? Those are areas I can quickly address. And then there are lots of things around decodable text that I've been working with the teachers on for years — about adding more vocabulary and more systematic oral-language development, and syntax and text cohesion, and lots and lots of other things that really enhance that work. This is where I record all of those things. On the last page, I just look at the issues I saw: are they around science-of-reading knowledge? Science-of-learning knowledge? Or science of instruction? A lot of times they're around instruction and learning, because we get the information about the routines and the materials down pretty quickly. This helps me identify specific areas of professional development for groups of teachers or individual teachers, very discreetly, and connect that to the materials they're using.
So what impact is it having? I'm going to share just some examples of the work I've been doing in schools, either with materials the district has provided or materials I've helped to create. I'm sharing with you schools that have a lot of challenges, because I want you to see the reality of what is possible in some very challenging situations. You might be doing better than some of these schools, but this is the truth of where we are and where we're going. For example, here in New York City, at my main school: we looked at what was happening in those first three months — and keep in mind, several years ago only 9% of our students were reading on grade level. We were doing this intensive work those first three months. This was our first-grade composite data: we had 51% of our students above grade level and 20% on.
So we had 71% on or above, which was a massive shift for the school. This really helped our teachers believe in what we were doing. It's really important that they see movement — and see some movement quickly — to really dive into this journey with us. This was just the beginning. We had a long way to go, of course, and we still have a ways to go. We're still not where we want to be, but we've gone from 9% several years ago to, last year, up to 84%. So we are moving the needle, but we're not giving up.
One of the things I will say: the district has asked us to focus on K–2. I refuse. We focus on K–5, because our 3–5 students were drowning. They didn't have structured literacy. They couldn't sound out multisyllabic words. They didn't have the fluency. So we've taken a K–5 perspective, and we've been working with teachers in all those grades, not just limiting it to K–2. I understand why the focus is on K–2 — it's super important — but those 3–5 students need a tremendous amount of support, and those teachers are the least trained in phonics and word study, syllabication, morphology. So that's been a much heavier lift for us, but we're seeing a lot of movement on our state assessments with students in those grade levels. That's been really encouraging.
I do some work with the Catholic schools here in New York City. I'm always nervous about second grade. It's much easier to see quick movement in kindergarten and first grade than it is in second, as you know, because these students have had several years of failure. These were students last year, beginning of the year — you see all the red and the yellow on this particular assessment. By midyear — I was there the day they got this data — we screened, and we eliminated the red, so we knew what we were doing was working, and we had to just stay the course and keep digging in and make sure we were doing everything possible for these students.
The resistance is real; it is intense. And New York City teachers are not shy. I don't know about Texas, but they're not shy. This was a teacher last year at a school in the Bronx — another borough in New York City. I was working with her just on decodable text. She didn't want anything to do with it. This was her data at the beginning of the year: every child was in the red, way below where they should be. Keep in mind, with this teacher, all of her students were learning English as an additional language, so it's not entirely surprising that she had this data at the beginning of the year. Some of them were just learning basic English words and so on. So this was a challenging classroom, and she was not eager to have anything to do with decodable text. By midyear she was doing it, and starting to pick up a little bit — you see her results. She's starting to move about half the class. But something clicked at midyear, because her colleagues were starting to notice things happening that they had never seen before, and this teacher, who was incredibly vocal, decided it was time to dive in the deep end and really see what was going on. I was there the day she got these results as well. This was the end of the year. I screamed. She cried. The administration was crying. Like — we know what to do. We know how to move the needle. But it also requires a lot of work in terms of really showing teachers that what we are doing is not just another thing, that it's really having an impact. I couldn't just tell this teacher, "Well, it's working in the kindergarten classrooms at the school in Queens." She had to see it. She had to live it. And she had to feel it. And now it's just tremendous what she's doing in her classroom.
I talked about that study in Ohio using some materials that I created. This was a two-year study where we were looking at the impact of double-dosing, and I talk a lot about this here in New York City. This was in a very rural area, very high poverty. It was a two-year study, started in 2023, in first grade. At the beginning of the study, 47% of students — almost half — were assessed as requiring intervention or urgent intervention. They were way below, and they were put in this double-dosing situation. By spring, we had it down to 16%, which was phenomenal. When we looked at the students who were on or above in first grade that year, only 11% started on or above. We were able, by spring, to get them up to 68%. Now, that's not where we want to be, but we saw movement, and that was encouraging for us.
Our goal, like I said earlier, was to strengthen the tier one instruction. The students who needed intervention were getting this double-dosing, but the teachers who were teaching the whole group were also being given training on the science of reading and instruction, and all of that.
One of the things we did for our kindergartners, in terms of double-dosing, was go right to what was going to make a difference. We went right to the phoneme. We went right to the alphabet. We got rid of rhyme. We got rid of clapping syllables. We got rid of all these other things. The minute we had a couple of letters, we taught them how to blend those sounds together, and then we would have them segment the sounds and rebuild it. We just took words apart and put them together over and over and over, and created the structure. Even in phonemic awareness — if we were having them segment off the first sound (because you can't start with full segmentation) — just beginning sound. Then we went to beginning and ending, then beginning, ending, and medial. We would say, "What's the first sound? Sad." "What letter do you write when we hear this sound? Hold up that letter card. Now trace the letter with your finger as you say it. Now write the letters." These were the kinds of things we were doing — really making it concrete and intensive. Any child who started kindergarten who knew fewer than seven letter names and sounds, or couldn't segment beginning sounds, got this double-dosing. No one was labeled. It didn't matter why. Some of them just didn't have preschool experiences. Some were learning English as an additional language. Some had other kinds of issues or concerns. It didn't matter why. We wanted to double-dose that first half of the year very intensely, and then we could evaluate at midyear who needed some additional support — for whom did that double-dosing really matter? The kindergarten curriculum is very aggressive; it goes very fast, and it really worries me if we aren't giving our students everything they need.
This year in New York City, we have a 10-to-15-minute double-dosing plan for our kindergartners. Tons of alphabet work — the entire alphabet, we're reviewing it every day — and then oral blending and oral segmentation at the phoneme level. We're just trying to get them caught up to where they need to be. In terms of accelerating the alphabet, we are taking advantage of some research, again by Linnea Ehri and Adina Schmidman, about the embedded mnemonic alphabet. You see here, like, there's an apple and the letter A, and so on. This work was done in preschool — which is why we're using it for the first part of kindergarten. What they found with this embedded mnemonic alphabet — you see it here on the screen — was faster acquisition of letter-sound knowledge; it reduced confusion, had long-term memory benefits, and more easily transferred to reading. So we're doing all of these things to fine-tune what we're doing to help our kindergartners get caught up.
I hate the mantra "reading by third grade" that we hear in the media all the time. We're replacing that mantra with "reading in first grade." We're doing everything humanly possible in kindergarten to get students where they need to be as quickly as they can, and continuing that work in first grade, so that by the time they leave first grade, everyone's reading. That requires a tremendous amount of effort, as you know.
A couple other examples, then I'll get to some other things. Oh gosh — I need to speed up. Louisiana, two years ago: the schools that had the highest scores in the state were using some materials that I created. 90% of their first graders were on or above grade level, whereas the state average was 69%. These were schools doing exactly what I'm talking about: curricular surgery — looking at what's most impactful, trying to move the needle, and being very honest about what they were doing in the classroom, what was and was not working.
I really like this data a lot. These were the third graders. They started at the 53rd percentile. After three years, they made it to the 88th. The reason I like this is that if you start doing what's really going to move the needle, and you stay the course — and sometimes it takes time; I mean, it always takes time. Let's be honest. You're not going to see miracles in a month or two — but they stayed the course, and they just kept at it and added. This cumulative effect of year after year of these children getting this great instruction is starting to pay off, and it's really exciting to see.
So we did this curricular surgery — I've talked a lot about that. Now we had to look at some even bigger things. Like: we have everything in place, but are we getting enough practice? It is shocking to me how little practice students are actually getting during a lot of our phonics instruction. I'm going to share some actual classroom-observation data here in New York City. I've seen this every year for four years now, where I've gone into classrooms in New York City. The phonics lessons most of the teachers use are 40 minutes. Whenever I go to visit a school, they always show me the best teachers and the best classrooms, so I know where we're starting. Here's a second-grade classroom I went to visit — this was in the Bronx last year. I watched 40 minutes, and the students read three words on their own and wrote one word. They repeated a lot of things the teacher did — you know, "I do. You do. My turn, your turn." But they didn't actually have to sound it out and work through it. You might think, "Well, that's extreme." No — this was what I saw regularly, school after school after school.
So I went to the next school in the district — I was doing my temperature check at the beginning of the year — and the first school called the second school and said, "Uh-oh, he's coming. Don't show him a whole lesson, or he'll freak out." So they just showed me two routines: blending and dictation, because those are critical. I just saw 10 minutes of each. In second grade, the blending — you see — the students read four words in 10 minutes, because the teacher was doing all these other things and doing all the work and talking, or just having them repeat what she had done, and the children weren't even looking at the word. And then dictation: she would say some sounds, and they would write the letters — you see two or three of those. When it came to words, it was only one or two, because it was so slowed down, and there was so much talk about the routine — put your counters here and what have you. Then I shared with them — this was week seven — what was happening at my school in kindergarten. Five minutes of blending: you see, we have the children say the sounds for some letters, and then they're reading about 20 words — some new, some review. When it came to dictation — let's compare apples to apples.
Our second graders, in week seven, were writing 13 to 14 words in five minutes. In some classrooms it was a little more — about seven minutes, to be honest. So five to seven minutes. You see the difference in the intensity of the practice. My school started out where the schools in the Bronx were. So really setting goals and getting the routines efficient, and really establishing routines where we could increase the intensity of the practice, made a significant difference. That's why I think people make fun of me when I say I count how many words they read and how many words they wrote and all that. I want to see the intensity of practice. We can't move the needle if children aren't doing more during the phonics lesson. Doing this kind of accountant-type work can really have an impact.
We know that all practice is not equal. We need lots of repetition and high engagement — I've talked about that. Limiting the volunteer and making sure we're doing every-pupil response. We want to make sure the students are generating, not just parroting the teacher. That was a big shift for our teachers. They would have blending lines, and the teacher would sound out every word and just have the children repeat or echo it — and the children, many of them, weren't even looking at the word. The students need to do the heavy lifting. When it comes to blending work, the teacher models two; the children do the rest. The teacher will tap on a word and say, "Whisper." They have an opportunity to sound it out. She taps on it again and says, "All together" — and she hears them and can make corrections if there are any issues. And interleaving that practice — making sure it's not only cumulative but distributed. We keep coming back to it. We keep connecting it to previous learning. We want to make sure we give students the amount of practice and the amount of time all of them need to master those skills. As I always say, it's in the application where the learning sticks. That is the piece that has to be corrected in a lot of classrooms I visit. If we want the phonics instruction to work, we need to pay attention to what the students are actually doing and how much they're actually doing.
Then step three: we need to differentiate the support based on data. I have a whole thing that I do with differentiating phonics instruction during the whole group, and there are tons of things embedded in the routines, like the blending lines. There are new words; there are review words for the students who need practice; there are challenge words for students who need acceleration. All of that is embedded in the routines. What I want to share with you is something different that I did in a district in Connecticut. For the last two years we've been working on small-group time when it comes to phonics instruction. This was a district that was getting decent results, but they were flatlining. They just couldn't bump it up, so the administrators wanted me to focus on what was happening during small-group time. We knew that whatever we came up with had to be pretty easy to implement, because the teachers are incredibly busy, incredibly taxed for time. We needed some kind of simple routine that the teachers could implement without a tremendous amount of prep time and effort.
We started out two years ago with K–2, and then last year with 3–5. I want to share with you what we did for both, because it is a bit different. The teachers had data, because they had given these phonics surveys looking at skills that students were lacking, and they had a software program they were using that gave them data about specific skills. So they had data they could use to organize the children by skill needs.
If there were skills that the students had yet to master — it might be the skill you're working on; it could be previously taught skills for some students; maybe it could be skills further in the scope and sequence for those students who are ready for that acceleration — whatever skills they needed, they got this intensive decodable-text practice during small-group time. It was just three days a week, 15 minutes. That was all it was.
This is the form we use. We'd list the students' names so the teacher could take anecdotal notes. I'm going to share with you the sort of CliffNotes version of what we did. In the 15 minutes, the first five minutes was spent on dictation, and the next 10 minutes the students were reading from the decodable, and the teacher was listening in, providing feedback, taking observational notes. They might end it with a quick write. But almost the entire 15 minutes, the children had a pencil in their hand or a book in their hand and were doing something. That was the point: this kind of practice with a skill they needed.
During the dictation, one of the things we were noticing in the whole group — because it was a wide range of student needs — is that the teacher would have to slow down and do some modeling. Some children needed sound boxes and supports and what have you. Really important, but they weren't getting through enough words. So we wanted to flip the switch during small group and do high-intensity practice. We had this routine they call "slash the trash." It sounds like a New York kind of thing, but it's actually Connecticut. I'll show what it means in just a second. The teacher is now taking a step back, because they've done all the "I do, we do" in whole group. Now it's the "you do" — the students do. The teacher would just say the word, and the students have to do the work, very much like the assessments in Acadience and DIBELS, if you're using those. The teacher would say sat, for example, and what the students would do is put a dot in each box as they said each sound. So the students would go /s/ /a/ /t/, and then they would slash the boxes they weren't using — slash the trash. The teacher would say nothing, because they got it right; the teacher would just tap on their paper or nod. They'd go back and write the spelling for each sound. They got it right. The teacher would say nothing, just tap. And then they would write it in their best handwriting. The teacher would only jump in if a specific child made an error. This way we could get through a lot of words quickly.
We were looking at oral segmentation fluency: how quickly can they segment the sounds? We assess that, but we never really check on it during whole group. Sound-spelling fluency: how quickly do they connect those sounds with spellings? And handwriting fluency: are they quickly and accurately making those letters? We know that's super important. We would do this with a bunch of decodable words, and we'd throw in maybe a high-frequency word the children were struggling with, like said. They would go /s/ /e/ /d/ — slash the trash — nod — they'd go back and write the spelling. We knew some children would make a mistake with the sound spelled a-i, so the teacher would jump in and provide support. Then in their best handwriting. That activity — five minutes of that — we get through a bunch of words, and we can check on all these really critical fluency-related things as well.
Then the children would read for 10 minutes, and the teacher would just sit there and listen in — a few minutes per child — give them some feedback, ask some questions, take some observational notes. Just listening to children read is the best data you can get. I think you would all agree with that.
This gave our teachers the opportunity to do that every week. It was a three-day plan on a decodable text based on a skill they had yet to master. Some students would get the teacher every day, and some would just get a few days, based on where they were and how that schedule worked out. When the children weren't with us, we would have them reread decodables or read other things, but we found out there was no accountability system in place, so some of them weren't doing it. So we started giving them these response frames to fill out — response frames from my spelling books. If they were reading a story, we'd give them a response frame like this: they would fill in the who, the did-what, the where, and the when — so they would write the gist. They had that support, so they knew they had to go in and find the information that told who it was about, what that person did, where it happened, and when it happened. If it was nonfiction, maybe they would use the frame where they're writing details. If it was a text structure — like in second grade, we want to highlight the text structure — we'd give them a frame like that. That would happen one day, so we would have an accountability system. We could talk with them about it. They would draw a picture and add details, that kind of thing.
The next day we would maybe do something more sophisticated, especially as we were moving into the second half of first grade and second grade. You see here this frame: the children are filling in the who, the did-what, the where, the when. "The boy ran to the park yesterday" — let's say that's the sentence the story's about. We'd have them flip to the back and say, "Now I want you to start that sentence with when." So they would write, "Yesterday the boy ran to the park." Oh my gosh — now you wrote like a book! Book-like! So we'd go back and forth with oral book language, because our children really struggle with book language. It just doesn't sound like how they talk, and it's harder to understand. We started giving them this practice, going back and forth. Sometimes we'd have them combine sentences — just lots of things. We had some really simple accountability things we could do with them.
So how did this work for us? One school used DIBELS instead of Acadience — same test, different reports. Some classrooms were able to eliminate the students in the red for the first time, which was exciting. This high-intensity practice, a few times a week — all the classrooms decreased the number of students in the red. What really made us happy is that when we would see students in the red after we started doing this work, it started to make sense: "Oh my gosh, this child is in the red, but this child has an IEP. We have a plan in place. This child is new to us and is just learning English — oh, we have a plan in place; we're going to monitor to see if we can get them." We were able to really focus our attention, because we had removed some of those children who were previously in the red who shouldn't have been there to begin with.
And then we looked at whether it was sticking — this was what was so fascinating to me. At the end of the first year, we looked at our second graders. This was one of the schools: 82% of the students were where they needed to be when we sent them to third grade. We tested at the beginning of third grade, and 81% were still there. So we knew it stuck. This past year, we got it up to 90% leaving second grade, going to third, where they needed to be, because they had two years of this work. I'm really curious about how that's building over the years — how we can build on that.
Part of it was changing the small-group mindset. A lot of our teachers who were doing small group were just doing basically a whole-group lesson — shorter, faster — and it really needed to switch. Small group is about high-intensity practice, and I kept telling the teachers, "I need to see the students sweating, not you. I need them to be doing the work. This is the time — you've done the 'I do, we do' in whole group. This is the 'you do' — for them to do the work." That was a big mindset shift in getting them used to that.
Last year, like I said, we did the same work for 3–5, which was a bit more challenging, as you can imagine. We assessed the students at the beginning of the year — any students who were below the decoding threshold. The decoding threshold: if you're below it, then the things we're doing with comprehension aren't really having the effect. You're not able to access grade-level text. You still have some basic decoding needs with one-syllable words, or your fluency is so low — with some assessments, if you're below 100 words a minute, you're below the decoding threshold. So we had that three-day plan. We taught it to our three, four, and five teachers who had students below the decoding threshold, and we found some decodables that were more appropriate for older students, where they could focus in on sets of skills they were working on. There were some students in that bucket, but there were more students in the "I need fluency and vocabulary support" bucket. We created another simple three-day plan for them, where they were doing repeated readings of grade-level text. Some programs have sort of short reads and things you can use for that, but when teachers didn't have that, we would take an excerpt from the text they were reading — whether it was a novel or a passage or what have you. We would take a portion of the text that was really important but particularly challenging, and we'd do repeated readings. They would monitor words correct per minute, and we did a heavy focus on vocabulary knowledge, and also some explicit fluency instruction around phrasing and things like that. That was really powerful for those students.
My point is: the needs really vary in terms of what that small group can be, in terms of high-intensity practice, and our data really teased out the specific needs for those students. The other students, when they had small group, it was just springboarding off their grade-level content — or students needed to be advanced; they would have book clubs and read novels and things like that, and they would have conversations around those as well.
What's really interesting to me, when we talk about the science of reading or the science of literacy: we have these models of reading that you're all familiar with, like the Reading Rope and the Simple View of Reading. More recently, Nell Duke and Kelly Cartwright created their Active View of Reading. I know it isn't as commonly known, but they took those big buckets in the Simple View of Reading — word recognition and language comprehension — and they looked at the things that overlap, and they looked at other things, like executive functioning, that have an impact. When we look at the things that overlap — I don't know if you can see; it's a little small for me — reading fluency, vocabulary, morphology, and being flexible in using our decoding skills. These are all things we have discovered our 3–5 students need a lot more support with. So phonics doesn't end in K–2; it graduates into word study — combining phonics and vocabulary. Morphology helps with the spelling. There's a lot of meat there that our students still need help with, and we've been working hard to provide that meat for them. And we've been doing a ton of work — and I don't have time to go through it, because we only have five minutes left.
But I have a lot of slides, and I want to just share with you what the slides are so that you can explore on your own. I've been doing a lot of work around enhancing the work with decodable text. Yes, we use decodable text to apply our phonics; we reread them to build fluency. But all the things on the bottom of the slide — I've taught our teachers how to use them to build vocabulary and oral language systematically, how to develop early reading behaviors around comprehension, how to springboard off to writing and spelling work, and how to do work around syntax and text cohesion. In the slides, you're going to see some slides around text cohesion — connecting ideas. You're going to see some slides that talk about the work we do with syntax — not only in the lower grades, but how we advance it to the upper grades: how we'll pull out really complex sentences and divide them and ask questions — which part tells us when, which tells us what, which tells us where? Let's move pieces around so it sounds like how we talk, so we can understand it. There are examples on the slides of how we do this, and I'm happy to follow up with anyone who wants that. And then how we use that work to connect to writing.
In grade one, we only have a few minutes to do a quick write. We will give them a frame: "The girl went..." and they have to fill in the where, the when, and the why with information from the story. No first grader is going to give me a sentence that complex, but when I give them a frame, it's easy for them, because they know the pieces of information they have to find. So now, when they write on their own and they're just giving me the who-did-what, I'm like, "Erase the period. I need to know where. I need to know why. You haven't given me your whole set." You can do this kind of work and really elevate their writing. Decodable texts are really easy in terms of doing this work, because they're simple stories, and you can do these quick writes that don't take a lot of time but can really develop sentence comprehension. Even chunking it into these parts helps with fluency — how they chunk sentences into phrases, all of that.
We started in kindergarten, and I have some slides that talk about the different levels of support that we do. I'll show you the second level. We start out with just giving them the gist: "The ___ got stuck," and they have to choose a word and fill it in the sentence, and they write the sentence in their best handwriting. But they have to draw a picture that shows where and why the bus got stuck in the story — they're not able to write that yet. Why do we do that, giving them a very specific thing to put in their illustration? Because when we're circulating and talking to them, I can have them read their sentence — "The bus got stuck" — and say, "Where? Show me in your picture." They'll say, "In the mud." I say, "Let's put that whole sentence together: The bus got stuck in the mud." So I'm systematically building oral language before they're able to use that in writing. There are slides around that.
And then there are some examples of how we teach our second graders to write constructed responses using decodables. That was a big challenge. Our third-grade teachers were, when I first started, like, "They can't write constructed responses — help the second-grade teachers!" So we did it with decodables. We didn't have a whole lot of time, so we would just do, like, the first day write the gist; the second day we'd add details, and so on. You'll see some examples of that work.
The other thing I want to share with you is some work with encoding. I'm just going to flip through this, because we've already talked about it. I want to show you the one slide.
In grades two and up, we started doing dictation chains, just like you do word chains. We started doing dictation chains because spelling was all over the place; students were struggling with spelling grade-level words. In this particular chain, for second grade, we want children to write words like retaking and mistaking. But we have kids who aren't there yet, and that would overwhelm them. So we back-map to the easiest skill. We have them write take, which we put on the board. Have them check and correct. Underneath that, they write taking. If they don't drop the e, we very quickly say, "Don't forget to drop the e before the -ing." Check and correct. Underneath that, they get to the grade-level word, which is retaking. They just have to focus on the prefix. And under that, it's mistaking. They just have to focus on changing the prefix, and they're rewriting taking, so it's reinforcing that skill they might have struggled with, which is the spelling change.
Here's an example of a fifth-grade one where we built to a science word, echolocation, which is super hard: local, locate, location, relocation, echolocation. We decide what we're going to say — what's the teaching point? With local, locate, we did a quick vocabulary: what does locate mean? Location — it was all about, what's the base word? Locate. What's the /s/ sound you hear? What letter do we write? T. So are you going to use t-i-o-n or s-i-o-n? Those kinds of conversations.
Oh gosh, I'm out of time, so I'm just going to flip through. This is the routine we use, focusing on fluency. Let me get to the very end — you'll see some of the forms we use.
Change is hard? Yes, it is. So we had to flip the switch: we're not going to focus on teachers and programs; we're going to focus on our students. Then elevate our programs by fixing anything that needs support, and elevate the work of our teachers by really giving them the tools they need and the professional development we always need. Of course, we need to return to our purpose, and this is our purpose. It's all about them, and the work that we do.
I want to thank you for joining me today. I'm completely out of time. I always say, giving the gift of reading is one of the greatest gifts we can give children, because it's a gift once given can never be taken away, but will forever transform a child's life. I want to thank all of you for the hard work you're doing to give the gift of reading to all of the students you work with, and thank you for joining me today. I'll stop sharing and turn it back over to the team.
Tonja Gray: Thank you, Dr. Blevins. There was so much meat in your presentation, and we're still all chewing, so we appreciate you, and we cannot wait to hear from you again. Thank you so much for everything that you did. And I definitely want to thank our sponsors for helping us to bring Dr. Blevins to us today.
I'm going to share really quickly. We are almost done with our day. I have one last thing for us to take care of, so I'm going to share that screen with you guys, and we're going to do our last little bit of information. First of all, I've got to thank our sponsors — Amplify, Curriculum Associates, and Newsela, who sponsored all of our sessions today — and Benchmark for sponsoring Dr. Blevins today.
We did not have anyone put their name in the hat for president-elect. I was joking with the team earlier: I guess you're stuck with me until we can find somebody else. But I'm loving what I'm doing for you guys. This is an honor and a pleasure to serve you as your president this year. Dr. Shona Rose has put her name in the hat for secretary, and since we only had one name, we can invite her to become our secretary by acclamation. If everybody wants to cheer, we can celebrate and accept her by acclamation.
And then Jackie Root from Region Six and Ashley Certevell from Region Four have asked to put their names in the hat as regional reps. We will bring their names up at our next executive board meeting and vote to put them in as regional reps, and we will get information out to you.
Our officers will look like this going forward: Past President Tony Perez; President Tonja Gray; President-Elect is still open; Treasurer Latanya Robinson; Secretary Shona Rose; Webmaster Jennifer Ackerman; Social Media, Shona Rose; and Strategic Partnerships, Karen Sharp. And we absolutely could not do this without Venture — they absolutely are amazing. Jen and Amy have been so instrumental in helping us to get this conference put together, and I could not do this without them.
One last thing for you guys, and then I'm gonna let you go: this is a reminder that we have our winter conference, "All Aboard the Change Express: Leading at a Time of Change
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