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Benchmark Workshop Responsive Teaching Toolkit Brochure

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Systematic phonics.

Decodable texts,

Accountable texts-what are they?

Why do so many teachers cringe at the thought of them? And how can you use them to improve your teaching? From Benchmark Education, I'm Kevin Carlson. And this is Teachers Talk Shop.
Wiley Blevins:
The best phonics instruction is active, engaging and thought provoking. Children are playing with letters and sounds. They're making observations about where they're thinking about how words work. The best phonics lessons are really fun. They're fun for the children. They're fun for the teacher.
Kevin Carlson:
Today, we're going to unpack one most important elements of early learning with one of the biggest names in the field. We're talking about phonics with Wiley Blevins. Wiley is the author of numerous best-selling books about phonics and reading, and he's joined by Wendy Murray, publisher of the PDEssentials line at Benchmark Education.
Wendy Murray:
Welcome, Wiley.
Wiley Blevins:
Thanks, Wendy. Glad to be here.
Wendy Murray:
Wiley, why do you think Phonics instruction is always a lightning rod for debate. What's-what's at the heart of the divide here.
Wiley Blevins:
It's a really great question, and I'm quite surprised by it, to be honest. I think there are many reasons that could be contributing to it. I think one of the reasons is how teachers are taught to teach reading. There is sort of this bias toward using children's trade books first and not really understanding the process of the early stages and learning to read. I think part of it also is thinking back to how we learn to read our earliest memories. And I ask teachers all the time when I do workshops, how were you taught to read? Because I share with them how my first grade teacher, Mrs. Warshaw, taught me to read. We had Dick and Jane which are sight word readers. But she also gave us a phonics workbooks which taught us about letters and sounds and how to unlock the code. And those two really worked well for me. And when I ask teachers to think about how they learned to read, often they can't tell me. They remember an early reading experience, maybe reading aloud the first time to a parent or sitting with the parent or a teacher reading. So I don't think we are really cued into necessarily how we learn to read, which makes it more difficult to teach children to read. I also think that there's a deep concern about this because we know cognitive scientists tell us that ninety five percent of humans are capable of learning to read. Yet in the United States, only 40 percent of our students are reading proficiently. That's a crisis. That's a problem. There's a great deal of concern about it. And so people get very heated in this debate because they're trying to solve an enormous problem that we have.
Wendy Murray:
So from here, I'm going to ask you some questions we've got from teachers in the field about phonics. Our first question comes from Tonya Sullivan. She asks, I'm currently using patterned texts with my students in kindergarten and they're doing just fine. So why are decodable texts important?
Wiley Blevins:
Well, one of the things we have to keep in mind is that English is an alphabetic language. We have twenty-six letters and these letters by themselves and in combination represent the 44 sounds of English. So when we say we're teaching phonics, what we're doing is teaching those sound-spelling combinations. So children have access to lots of words quickly. The best tool to apply your growing phonics knowledge is through decodable text where there are lots of words that can be sounded out using your growing phonics skills. We want to get children to mastery very quickly so that they can then transfer those skills to all the reading situations that they're at. The problem with patterned text is that there are very few words that can actually be sounded out based on the phonics skills. When children are reading patterned text, what they're doing is they're memorizing words, and they're memorizing the pattern and using clues from the pictures. So that's what they think reading is. And those are the ways they are attacking words when they begin reading. When we actually look at the words in those stories-I'm talking mostly about kindergarten-the early levels that a lot of teachers are using, like A, B, C, D, and you pull out the words that are actually short vowel words which are on the state standards. There are very, very few. And so if your state standards say that your children need to master short vowel words in kindergarten, which they do, and you are using text the entire year of kindergarten where there are very few words, you have children who are not going to master those skills before they move on to first grade. And that's an enormous problem. That's why the decodable text is so critical in kindergarten and first grade and make sure children have enough opportunities to apply those skills to get to mastery.
Wendy Murray:
So if the research shows that these decodable texts are essential learning tools, then why do you hear so many teachers resisting them?
Wiley Blevins:
Because they've seen lots and lots of bad decodable texts. It's one of the most fascinating things in education that sometimes we take a good idea and we misapply it and it becomes a bad idea. Decodable text is a perfect example of that. If you're learning to read and you're learning phonics, the best instructional tool is to use is decodable texts where they can apply those skills. Good idea. So how did that evolve into a bad idea where teachers hate this? Well, if you look back around the year 2000, there were two states, California and Texas, who required the companies who were publishing reading curriculum to put decodable text in their programs. Good idea. We want to have a close match between what we're teaching and the application tools. But then the states went one step further. They decided they would define what an accountable text was in a very hard line about what it was. California said it should be 75 percent accountable and Texas said 80 percent. Right then there should have been some red flags. If the two states are defining in different ways, what it shows you is those percentages are not based on any solid research. In fact, there's no research to support a certain percentage. So you have a good idea that became a questionable application. Then the publishers got their hands on that and they were creating these texts and they were they were being told that they would be evaluated at the state level whether or not these texts were decodable enough. So creating these stories for young readers became a numbers game. They were taking out words like the word "the," which is the most common word in the English language. It counts against you in a decodability because you can't sound out the word "the."
Wiley Blevins:
States were saying, well, when you teach long E and short E like in me, we, he you can count it. But that's not until mid-first grade. So the most common word in the English language, "the" counted against you for all of kindergarten and half a first grade. And we've got these really stilted, unnatural sounding kinds of texts. And to make matters worse. Publishers then decide they would be competitive. So the state said seventy five percent decodable, well, guess what? Ours are 90 to 100 percent, meaning that must be better. But when you looked at those text, they were completely incomprehensible. Bad idea. We have a good idea. It was misapplied. It became a bad idea. And children couldn't understand the texts. And teachers hated them. So there are places I go now where I can't even say the word decodable text. The teachers hate it so much. We have to get back to a point where we're creating high quality decodable texts. And that's why I use the term accountable texts. Teachers understand the concept of holding children accountable for the skills we're teaching them, the phonics and the sight words. If you loosen some of those restrictions, if you if you don't abide by this 75, 80 percent, which are completely arbitrary and not based on any kind of solid research, you can loosen a little bit, give children tons and tons of practice with decodable words. But these are really great stories. You can have a story about an elephant. It's just the long e-word and so on. So I think good idea, misapplied became a bad idea. And now we have a problem.
Wiley Blevins:
And there are also some really old notions about phonics that it's boring and it's rote. The best phonics instruction is active, engaging and thought provoking. Children are playing with letters and sounds. They're making observations about where they're thinking about how words work. They're using them to write words and to build words and to sort words and think about all of these aspects of English that will make them better readers and writers. The best phonics lessons are really fun. They're fun for the children. They're fun for the teacher.
Kevin Carlson:
Wiley has talked about why decodable texts are important. But what are some of the best ways for you to use them with your students? That's coming up, after the break.
Announcer:
If you have a question for the Teachers Talk Shop Podcast, you can email it to info@teacherstalkshop.com. You can even record it as a voice memo on your phone and send that to us if you like. Now, back to Wiley.
Wendy Murray:
Our next question comes from teacher Marissa Thomas, and she asks, I'm using decodable texts with my first graders. We read them together and then I have them reread the books to partners later in the week. Is that right? What else should I be doing with these books?
Wiley Blevins:
I'm really glad to hear that she's rereading the decodable texts because rereading is going to help build fluency. We know that for most children, they need to see a word between four and twelve times and connect a text to committed to memory. There are some researchers who think it's less, but there reading really, really helps. The one thing I don't see that I think is absolutely necessary in terms of follow up for decodable texts is writing about that text. So for example, if I'm reading a book that has lots of words with a long A spelled AI / AY and I ask you to write about that book, what kinds of words are you going to have to use? Lots of words with AI and AY, which is our target skill. So these kinds of follow up writing exercises are perfect opportunities to force children to think about how they can apply the new skill that they're learning to accelerate the use of that skill. So if I'm reading a decodable text that happens to be fiction, maybe the follow up will be writing a retelling or putting the characters in a new setting or writing about what might happen next. If it's informational, maybe I create a list of the things I learned or just write the most fascinating thing that that I that I read.
Wiley Blevins:
The other thing I think that's important to understand when she talks about having her students reread, just be very, very careful about who needs that rereading. So if I have children who are a bit above level, who are further, I think can handle skills further than the phonics discover sequence. I will read the decodable text within the first time just to confirm mastery of those skills. I won't make them reread it. I will use that time when the other children are rereading to teach them a skill that's further in the scope and sequence and really accelerate their learning. If I have children who the first time they're reading that text and they're really struggling, then I know I need to take that text to small group, slow down and go through it in a different way and maybe even have them listen to an audio recording of it to become familiar with it and have more exposure to it when I can't be when I can't be with them. So there are a lot of things that we can do in terms of getting more instructional impact out of the use of those decodable books.
Wendy Murray:
Yeah, I'm really happy to hear about the writing follow up because I feel like they're reading the authentic writing and authentic reading piece married to Phonics is really important and I know that in your book, Meaningful Phonics and Word Study, that's a real hallmark at it. I'm curious, when would a teacher do the follow up writing? Would it be kind of right after the phonics lesson?
Wiley Blevins:
Yup.
Wendy Murray:
Would it be guided?
Wiley Blevins:
Yup.
Wendy Murray:
Would they do it independently?
Wiley Blevins:
I always give students a writing prompt after we read a story. Always. Now the structure of how some teachers are doing phonics, they may not have enough time to complete a writing experience during the phonics lesson per say, but we can start it and have children completed during independent work time. They can take the book with them to have that for support. So if you don't have enough time to think, why can't do reading, get it started and have them complete it during independent work time when you're meeting with other children during small group. So make sure it's happening. It's super, super important. And we have to keep in mind that writing is such a great look at where children are in terms of their phonics knowledge. So we know that writing lags behind reading. So when I look at children's writing and I see that they are consistently applying these phonics skills, I know then that they can read words with those skills because of it lagging behind. One of the things I do want to caution teachers about there is this unrealistic expectation that the week we introduce the phonic skills, children should be successfully implementing it in the writing. And that's going to happen for most children. It's going to take some time, which is why it's great to have all of these writing pieces as follow up to what we're reading. So you can look over time at how students are incorporating those skills in which they are starting to use consistently. It's a wonderful assessment tool as you evaluate all you know about what where children are in terms of their phonics knowledge and what they might still need. So if I see some skills that aren't consistently applied, then I'm adding more words and dictation with those skills and I'm paying more attention to them in other areas of my phonics instruction.
Wendy Murray:
And I would imagine for the students, the writing application is so fabulous because it makes it so meaningful to them. I mean, it just empowers them with that reading - writing connection.
Wiley Blevins:
How exciting is it when you learn these skills that not only can you read longer, more complex books, but then you can communicate what you're thinking about books in a more precise way Children know when they're struggling with how to spell words, they know when they got it and when they're sort of picking from the air, what they've learned and making some guesses or what have you to have that confidence that that builds. And children need lots and lots and lots of opportunities to do that. And the best way to have that, those opportunities match the phonics instruction is to do follow up writing about decodable text where they have to use those words with target skills.
Wendy Murray:
And it's writing every day, pretty much?
Wiley Blevins:
Every day.
Wendy Murray:
Yeah?
Wiley Blevins:
Yeah.
Kevin Carlson:
Used thoughtfully, decodable texts help students build phonics skills and make a reading/writing connection. But how can decodable texts also help students build comprehension and vocabulary? We'll find out, after the break.
Announcer:
Interested in learning more? Benchmark Education is releasing Wiley's new professional development book on phonics in September 2020, titled Meaningful Phonics, Fine-Tuning the Powerful Practices That Maximize Student Learning. This book simplifies the complexity of phonics and helps educators take their foundational skills instruction to the next level.

Go to www.benchmarkeducation.com/PDessentials to purchase your copy today.
Wendy Murray:
Our final question comes from Amelia Rodriguez. She asks, How can we take decodable books to the next level? What do you often see missing from the instruction with these books?
Wiley Blevins:
When I see teachers use decodable texts, one of the things that concerns me is what feels like word calling: sort of marching through the text and not doing much with it. The whole purpose of reading is meaning making. And so we aren't asking comprehension questions if we aren't digging in to the meaning making of these stories. It sends a really negative message to our young learners. So in my workshops, I walk teachers through a very simple decodable text in all the layers of meaning making we can make. So I might start with a very simple question that has them find a word in this story with the target scale. And then I might ask a very simple recall question but ask them to support their answer with evidence, the exact words from the text that show that. So we all go there and we read it and we find it. And then I might ask a more sophisticated question that requires maybe an inference or some higher order thinking. And then I might ask a final question that connects the story to their lives. We can really go through a very simple text, questions about the texts, questions about the illustrations. If it's very, very simple and build out deeper meaning making and also develop the kinds of skills that we want children to do with any books that they read. So supporting evidence. We can ask children to support and support their answers with evidence in a text that's as simple as a decodable texts.
Wiley Blevins:
The other thing is vocabulary building. I really worry about the lack of vocabulary and background knowledge building that's happening with our young learners. We know how critical that is. Equal amounts of time should be spent on phonics as on vocabulary, background, knowledge. So one of the very simple things that a lot of teachers that I train will do is they will choose a sophisticated word about the story to introduce and use when they're having conversations about the story. Let me give you a very basic example. There was a story about a little boy who bought a dog and--he didn't buy a dog. He got a dog. And so he is taking the dog home and he's given the dog food and water and building it a home. So I thought, what is the boy doing? He's helping the dog survive. So I introduce when I introduce the cover of the book, I introduce the word survive. We're going to read about how the boy is helping this dog survive. And as we read the story, I kept asking questions using the word survive. I prompted children to use the word survive when they were talking about the text. It's very easy. Every single day to choose one sophisticated word about the story, not in the story that I can build vocabulary even in something as simple as a decodable text. I think we need to think more broadly about these instructional tools and all the meat we can get out of them.
Wendy Murray:
And I imagine that vocabulary building is a boon to English learners.
Wiley Blevins:
Well, that's the other thing. A lot of these decodable texts have very simple words, but there are a lot of English learners who don't know those words. I was reading with a little boy in New York City and he was a native English speaker, but he came from a background where there weren't a lot of literacy experiences. And the stories about a tan dog had no idea what the word tan meant. He had never heard the word. So with English learners, I will pull out some of those words that I know that they might struggle with and do some additional vocabulary building before we read the story, maybe as a follow up to the story. So even those basic words. So we're talking about often tier one words that they will need a lot of support with. So that is a focus of the phonics instruction and something that can happen certainly in small groups. But certainly by the time they get to the end of an instructional cycle, which might be a week, I want them to know how to sound out the words, but also the meanings of all the words that we've been talking about and using throughout that week.
Kevin Carlson:
After the break, Wiley summarizes what he's shared about decodable texts.
Announcer:
If you want Wiley's 3 takeaways from this show sent straight to your inbox, sign up for our updates at TeachersTalkShop.com
Wendy Murray:
Wylie, you've provided so much useful information for teachers and educators and parents for that matter. And I think it would be great if you could send us out with the three things to know about decodable texts, to kind of summarize all you've said,.
Wiley Blevins:
Three things that I would want teachers to know about decodable texts. One, it is an essential early learning tool. It must be a part of every phonics lesson. I talk to teachers all the time about a phonics lesson. At least half of it should be applying the skill to authentic reading and writing, so that encompasses the use of the decodable text on a daily basis. The second thing is writing. We want to follow up all of our reading with writing. We want to incorporate more writing into the phonics lessons. And the third thing is make sure that you are using those decodable texts to build deep comprehension, meaning making, and also to develop vocabulary.
Kevin Carlson:
Thank you, Wiley! Thank you, Wendy! And thank you for the questions, Tonya, Marissa, and Amelia. Next time on the Teachers Talk Shop Podcast...
Wiley Blevins:
It's a really small, targeted period of time that we have in which to do right by our students in terms of introducing these skills and getting them to mastery. The bulk of it's happening in those first two years. We need to get in there, get it done, do it well, and move on.
Kevin Carlson:
For the Teachers Talk Shop Podcast, I'm Kevin Carlson.
Thanks for listening.

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Systematic Phonics:  Hey, Language is a System, So Why Wouldn't We Teach it Like One?

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Systematic Phonics:  Hey, Language is a System, So Why Wouldn't We Teach it Like One?

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Check, Please                                 Quick Phonics Assessments So Learning Doesn't Decay

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Check, Please                                 Quick Phonics Assessments So Learning Doesn't Decay

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This podcast is produced by Benchmark Education.
Kevin Carlson:
Are your students moving toward mastery of their phonics skills?
Or is their learning decaying? How do you know?
You can find out through good assessment.
From Benchmark Education, I'm Kevin Carlson. And this is Teachers Talk Shop.
Wiley Blevins:
I need to know very quickly if there are any issues with building that foundation. I can't wait to mid-year. I need to make those course corrections. I need to modify the whole group and the small group instruction to make sure every child gets to mastery.
Kevin Carlson:
Today, we're sharing some easy-to-use, efficient ways to check that your students' understanding builds swiftly and surely towards mastery.
We're talking about phonics assessment with Wiley Blevins.
Wiley is the author of numerous best-selling books about phonics and reading, and he's joined by Wendy Murray, publisher of the PD Essentials line at Benchmark Education.
Wendy Murray:
Our first question comes from James Everett and he asks, What are the components of a strong Phonics assessment?
Wiley Blevins:
Well, when I think about phonics assessment, one of the things I want teachers to be really aware of is that all the assessments need to be viewed through multiple lenses. So I often see teachers, for example, provide a list of words with an array of skills that the students have been taught and they get a check if they're correct. That's really only providing you a small piece of the information you need to make some important and critical instructional decisions.

So when I look at a phonics assessment, I not only evaluate accuracy, I'm also looking at automaticity or the speed with which children are answering these questions or reading these words. Let me explain to you in a very sort of simple way why this is so important. Imagine if you are teaching kindergarten and you are doing an alphabet assessment, and you have the letters of the alphabet in random order, you call over a student and you ask them to say sound for each letter. A child gets through that assessment. All correct. You write 100 percent at the bottom. You call over the second child. The same thing happens 100 percent. What do you do next, instructionally? You might not know.

But if I told you that that first student was able to say the sound for each letter very, very quickly, it took about 30 seconds for that child to get through all of those S T F and so on. But the second child who came over still got 100 percent, but really struggled with that. It took maybe two or three minutes to get through that. Now you have a piece of information that's actually actionable. We know that that second child hasn't mastered those letter sounds. And so we know what to do with that child, what that child needs instructionally versus the first child.

So every assessment I give check if it's accurate, I you know, I circle if it's automatic. And I have all these pieces of information about what students know and whether or not they're at mastery with those skills. So for me, that's sort of the baseline when I think about phonics assessments and how I can use them to affect or impact my instruction.
Wendy Murray:
Terrific. For newer teachers who are just starting out with all this. Can you define what you mean by mastery?
Wiley Blevins:
Yeah, what I'm talking about with mastery is, they can recognize a letter sound automatically. Or they can read a word with the phonics skills you've taught automatically. It's like "sat," "top," "rod." It's that quick. That's mastery. Because if you're at that level, we are processing those letter sounds, putting them together in words that quickly. Then you can transfer that skills to other reading experiences.
Kevin Carlson:
Wiley has explained that phonics assessment has to be looked at through multiple lenses-for accuracy and for automaticity.

But what kinds of assessments should be used for different measures?
And what about DIBELS?
That's coming up, after the break.

Announcer:
If you have a question for the Teachers Talk Shop Podcast, you can email it to info@teacherstalkshop.com. You can even record it as a voice memo on your phone and send that to us if you like. Now, back to Wiley.
Wendy Murray:
Our next question comes from Isabel Torres and she asks, "My school uses DIBELS. Is that enough in terms of phonics assessment?"
Wiley Blevins:
So DIBELS is widely used and I get a lot of questions about its use. And it certainly has a place in our phonics assessment system. But for me, in terms of impacting instruction, I need more frequent and more granular information than what I can get from DIBELS. Let me explain.

When I think about phonics assessments there really two types that I use. There is one type called comprehensive phonics assessment, another called cumulative phonics assessment. With a comprehensive phonics assessment, it really is a survey of all the phonics skills. So, for example, if I have students coming into second grade, I will give them a comprehensive phonics assessment to see if there are any skills they should have mastered at kindergarten and first grade that they haven't, which tells me there are some holes in that foundation. And so part of my work at the beginning of second grade is to fill in those holes to make sure the foundation is as solid as possible. So that's the role of a comprehensive assessment. You might provide that at the beginning of the year, maybe the middle and the end as well.

But the assessment that affects instruction most readily is a cumulative assessment. And a cumulative assessment is you are each week assessing a group of students and you're looking at the week's skill and the previous four to six weeks. So over time, you're hanging on to those skills and your assessments so you can look at mastery over time. You can look at decayed learning over time and so on.

Let me drill down a little bit. I know it's sort of hard to talk about without seeing and I know that we're going to post some of these assessments for the listeners to take a look at. But imagine you've taught a skill week one. OK, so that skill would appear on the assessments for the next six weeks. So if I'm testing a group of students and I can't test every student every week, you simply don't have enough time. It's not practical. And you don't really need to if you're if you have cumulative assessments in place. So I might have maybe 10 minutes or 15 minutes at most at the end of the week.

So I'm going to call over maybe seven or eight students have them read this word list. They get a check, if it's correct, circled if it's automatic. And then I do the next week, the next week, and so on. So about every three to four weeks, I'm checking on students' phonics skill mastery. So if I tested a student week one with the week one words in a few weeks, I want to test them again because it's going to be on that assessment because I'm looking back for five or six weeks and then the next assessment, it might also be on there. So I can look at progress over time. And if they got a lot of checks that first week for accuracy, but then by week four some of those checks disappear, it tells me the learning is decayed. So I have a problem. I need to continue working on that skill for that student or a group of students. If they didn't get many checks for automaticity that first week but by week four it's. Check, check, check, check, check. I know they're at mastery.

And the reason I do this is because I need to know very quickly if there are any issues with building that foundation. I can't wait until mid-year. I can't wait until the end of the year. I need to make those course corrections. I need to modify the whole group and the small group instruction very quickly to make sure every child gets to mastery. And so these these quicker assessments and these cumulative assessments give me the simple tool to do that. And they're really easy to administer.
Wendy Murray:
Wiley, I really appreciate that you define mastery for teachers because I think that a lot of teachers hear the word, but it's so helpful to have it clearly defined. And I was thinking similarly, the word automaticity is one that is talked about a lot, but would you help us define it and how it relates to accuracy, whether it's a natural follow up to accuracy or something different?
Wiley Blevins:
Yeah, it's a great question. It develops over time based on the amount of opportunities students have to apply the skill. So you're applying it when you're reading your decodable reader, for example. Well, you should be rereading that decodable reader and rereading previously read decodable readers to build that automaticity, to build the fluency with those skills and the words using those skills.

So with carefully constructed phonics instruction that builds on all of that review and repetition, you can get children to mastery more quickly. If you're just teaching the skill and moving on the next week to the next skill, not holding on, then it's much more difficult because some of the stories, the follow weeks might not have many words with the new skill or the words they do have. And I've done this analysis. The words that you sometimes see are really simple words that some of the students have already committed to memory, so they aren't having to use the skill. So there are a lot of issues associated with getting children to mastery, which is why so much review and repetition is necessary for much longer than what I generally see in a curriculum.
Kevin Carlson:
Using both comprehensive and cumulative assessments will provide the most useful and accurate assessment of whether your students' phonics knowledge is moving towards mastery or if their learning is decaying. And that will help you make important, critical instructional decisions.

Next, Wiley shares a way to broaden your data about where students are in terms of their phonics knowledge, by going beyond simple phonics assessments. That's coming up, after the break.
Announcer:
Interested in learning more? Benchmark Education is releasing Wiley's new professional development book on phonics in September 2020, titled Meaningful Phonics, Fine-Tuning the Powerful Practices That Maximize Student Learning. This book simplifies the complexity of phonics and helps educators take their foundational skills instruction to the next level.
Go to www.benchmarkeducation.com/PDessentials to purchase your copy today.
Wendy Murray:
What does the teacher look for in the student's writing? You talk about, you know, the importance of having them write in response to a decodable text. I imagine the child's writing has lots of wonderful clues, even if it's formative assessment. What are you looking for?
Wiley Blevins:
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that, because if we want a comprehensive look at where students are in terms of their phonics knowledge, we need to go beyond a simple phonics assessment. So, for example, when we listen to students read, obviously we get a lot of information from them in terms of the words they read with ease and the words with skills they're struggling with. But writing is one of the best tools and it's under-utilized in a lot of classrooms. We know that with our early learners writing lags behind reading.

So once I introduce a skill, I start monitoring students' use of that skill in their writing. I know it's going to take them some time. They're not going to be able to masterfully use it that first week it's introduced, but over time with the consistent work, they should be able to. So when students begin to consistently use skills in their writing, I know that they can read words with those skills with relative ease.

So one of the things that I like to do is in my students' writer's notebook, maybe on the inside back cover, I'll just post a chart with all the phonics skills for that particular year. And when I'm looking at their writing, when I start seeing consistent use of a particular skill in writing, I will circle that skill on that chart in the back of their writer's notebook. So it gives me a sense very clearly of skills that students still need work on.

So during my phonics lessons, I can in my dictation exercises, which has guided spelling, I can include more words with skills students aren't consistently using in their writing. I can more effectively monitor that. But writing is a tool that you can even use at the beginning of the year.

I did a study in a New York City a long time ago, but there weren't any assessments given at all at the beginning of the year. So I needed something that I could quickly figure out where my students are to start differentiating instruction on day two. So on day one. I gave them a five word spelling test, and the words got progressively more complicated. And when I looked at the results of that test and this is something we can provide for it for the listeners to take a look at. Children fell into five distinct categories of instructional needs. It told me which students were above level. It told me which students were having difficulty segmenting words. So I knew I needed to do some work with oral segmentation and sound boxes and more precise dictation. It told me those students who are below level, who weren't even thinking about words in the way we expect at the beginning of first grade and so on. So for each group of students, I had an instructional plan in place for day two to start meeting their needs as I continued to learn about them as readers and writers. Writing is such a powerful tool in relation to phonics instruction. We need to do more with it.
Kevin Carlson:
After the break, Wiley summarizes what he's shared about phonics assessment.
Announcer:
If you want Wiley's 3 takeaways from this show sent straight to your inbox, sign up for our updates at TeachersTalkShop.com.
Wiley Blevins:
The three things I'd want teachers to know about phonics assessment, is number one we need to look at the assessments through multiple lenses. Both accuracy and automaticity, they give you valuable pieces of information. The second thing is that we need multiple measures, we need both comprehensive assessments and cumulative assessments. And the third thing is that we need to broaden the data we use to evaluate students' phonics knowledge, so we need to include looking at their writing and we also need to listen to them read to see the kinds of words that they might be struggling with.
Kevin Carlson:
Thank you, Wiley! Thank you, Wendy! And thank you for the questions, James and Isabel.

If you are looking for more ways to connect with other teachers, please consider joining one of our Facebook Groups. Go to the Benchmark Education Company Facebook Page, and find the best group for you. Once you join, you'll be able to learn with other teachers, share teaching tips and updates on your students' progress, and have access to free resources, mini-lessons, checklists, and more. Build your learning community by connecting with us on Facebook today.

For the Teachers Talk Shop Podcast, I'm Kevin Carlson.
Thanks for listening.

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This podcast is produced by Benchmark Education. Kevin Carlson: Are your students moving toward mastery of their phonics skills? Or is their learning decaying? How do you know? You can find out through good assessment. From Benchmark Education, I'm Kevin Carlson. And this is Teachers Talk Shop.

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The Science of Reading               What Brain Research Says About How We Learn to Read

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The Science of Reading               What Brain Research Says About How We Learn to Read

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This podcast is produced by Benchmark Education.
Kevin Carlson:
The Science of Reading
What is it? What does it mean? And what does it mean for your teaching?
I'm Kevin Carlson, and this is Teachers Talk Shop.
Wiley Blevins:
This whole conversation about the Science of Reading really is about what materials and what practices meet the needs of as many students as possible.
Kevin Carlson:
Wiley Blevins is the author of numerous best-selling books about phonics and reading, and recently he recorded a presentation about how to know whether or not the materials and practices that teachers use align with the Science of Reading. Now, here's Wiley.
Wiley Blevins:
Recently, there's been a national conversation about how we best teach young learners to read. This conversation has been couched under the umbrella: the Science of Reading. We certainly have a large body of information about how to teach children to read. This information has come from educational researchers, cognitive scientists who do brain research, linguists, school practitioners like yourself, and so on. So all of these sciences have come together to show us how best to get children to the fastest and smartest start to learning how to read. During this conversation, a lot of districts around the country have been looking at the materials they use to teach children to read, to see if they are aligned to the Science of Reading. So today I'd like to talk a little bit about what we mean by the Science of Reading, and how we know whether or not the materials we are using are actually aligned to this body of knowledge. There are a lot of terms you're going to hear in this conversation. For example, you might be hearing about Scarborough's Reading Rope, which plays an important role in our conversation today. He says that skilled reading requires decoding, plus language comprehension. When we look at the decoding piece, we're really talking about foundational skills like phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, concepts of print, and phonics.

When we talk about language comprehension, we're really talking about the role that vocabulary and content, or background knowledge, plays. We're going to explore both today.

I'd like to start with the area of decoding and how you can tell whether or not your instructional materials, where you're teaching these foundational skills, where you're teaching children how to decode or sound out words, are actually aligned to the Science of Reading. And there are really four guideposts that we use. The first guidepost is related to scope and sequence. The second aspect or the second guidepost is that the instruction needs to be systematic and explicit, and that gets to our third guidepost: daily application to reading and writing. The fourth guidepost is assessment.
Kevin Carlson:
Now that you have an overview, it's time to dig a little deeper.
Coming up, more from Wiley about those first three guideposts, after the break.
Announcer:
Looking for more ways to connect with other teachers? Consider joining one of our Facebook Groups. Go to the Benchmark Education Company Facebook Page, and find the best group for you. Once you join, you'll be able to learn with other teachers, share teaching tips and updates on your students' progress, and have access to free resources, mini-lessons, checklists, and more. Build your learning community by connecting with us on Facebook today.
Wiley Blevins:
We know that in order to effectively teach phonics, we need a clearly defined scope and sequence. This is a scope and sequence that goes from easier to more complex skills. Confusing letters and sounds are separated, and so on. This scope and sequence really provides the spine on which all of the instruction rests. It is really a roadmap for you as teachers. What to teach. When to teach. How much focus to give each of these skills. Having a defined scope and sequence really allows you to determine whether or not children are where they need to be in terms of building their phonics knowledge.

But having a scope and sequence isn't enough because what can happen if you have a scope and sequence is you can just treat it as a way of marching through skills, exposing children to skill after skill after skill. And that's not going to be effective. A really smart, effective, impactful scope and sequence has a built-in review and repetition cycle. Once we introduce a new skill for most of our students, it takes a significant amount of time to get to mastery and we have to get to mastery so that they can then transfer those skills to all reading and writing situations. So for me, when I introduce a phonics skill, I want to make sure in the instruction for the next at least four to six weeks, there is consistent review and repetition activities. So in the blending work that I'm doing, in dictation and the stories, the decodable texts that children are reading, all of that is absolutely essential.

The second aspect or the second guidepost is that the instruction needs to be systematic and explicit. We hear these terms all the time. Certainly systematic is related to having a scope and sequence. We teach those skills as a system. We go from easier to more complex. But teaching as a system means that we have really rich, impactful conversations with our students about how that system works. So great phonics instruction is engaging. It's thought provoking. Children are making observations about words and thinking and talking about how words work. They're engaged in activities like wordbuilding, where they're playing with letters and sounds and developing and deepening their understanding of how English words work. If we're doing word sorts, they're talking about what they notice, what they observe about these words that will help them when they read and write. When we talk about explicit, we're really talking about the initial introduction of these phonics skills. We explicitly state the sound-spelling connection. We explicitly state that the Sss sound, for example, is represented by the letter S. That is what is aligned to the Science of Reading. An explicit introduction to the skill where the teacher is modeling how to sound out words with that skill and then giving children direct opportunities, guided practice opportunities to apply that skill in words and also in connected text. When you look through the lessons, you'll also see opportunities for them to apply it in writing through dictation, which has guided spelling, and through the reading of connected text, what you'd call decodable text or accountable text where a high percentage of the words are decodable, based on the phonics skills students have learned.

And that gets to our third guidepost: daily application to reading and writing. During the initial part of the phonics lesson, you absolutely will be having children sound out words in isolation, but that needs to directly be followed up by having them sound out words in connected text, decodable text, like I said before, where a high percentage of the words can be sounded out based on the phonics skills that children have learned. These texts can also have some high-frequency words like the word "the," the most common word in the English language. Having these high-frequency words in there allows the text to be natural-sounding and comprehensible. And this text might even have a few story words, some really interesting engaging words, so that the stories really excite children and stories that children want to read and reread to develop fluency. So, for example, if we are working on the phonics skill short u and we have a story about an animal getting stuck in the mud, we might choose to have the story about an elephant. It's a story where really interesting children love reading about elephants. It can make the story really funny. The elephant is stuck in the mud where "it" "is" "stuck" "in" "mud." All decodable, a high percentage of decodable words, but the word "the" is a sight word, the most common word in English. And the word "elephant" would be your story word.

Now it's not enough just to read these stories. The most impactful instruction has students write about these stories as follow-up. When we ask children to write about the decodable stories that we have them read, it requires them to use words with the new skill in writing. That's putting all of their learning to the forefront and really forcing them to think about how to use that new phonics skills to communicate their ideas. So if it's fiction, we could be writing a retelling. If it's informational, maybe we're listing some facts that we've learned. But this kind of reading, writing, follow-up practice, this application should be an enormous part of a phonics lesson. We teach the skill in isolation and then we immediately go to application, and that should be at least half of the lesson. Writing gives us a really great insight into where children are in terms of their reading progress because we know writing lags behind reading. So if children are starting to apply those skills to writing, then we know that they can use those skills in reading.
Kevin Carlson:
So, let's recap. In order to align with the Science of Reading, instruction and materials need to meet 4 guideposts. The first guidepost: instruction needs a clearly defined scope and sequence. The second guidepost: instruction needs to be systematic and explicit. The third guidepost: instruction needs to include daily application to reading and writing. That brings us to Wiley's fourth guidepost. And that's coming up, after the break.
Announcer:
If you have a question for the Teachers Talk Shop Podcast, you can e-mail it to info@teacherstalkshop.com. You can even record it as a voice memo on your phone and send that to us if you like. Now, back to Wiley.
Wiley Blevins:
The fourth guide post is assessment. So assessment needs to inform instruction. We know that. When it comes to phonics, there's some very specific kinds of assessments that are required and some very specific ways to look at those assessments. The first thing I want to talk about is how we look at those assessments. Any phonics assessment that we do must be viewed through two lenses: the lens of accuracy, and the lens of automaticity. Certainly if we give children a list of words to read with the phonics skills that we have taught, we want them to accurately be able to read those words.

But the automaticity, the speed, the fluency with which they can read those words is another key indicator. So, for example, I can have children read a list of 10 words and get them all right. I can have other children come over, read the same list of of 10 words and get them all right. If one student is able to read them in 10 seconds and the other student takes a minute, it gives me the type of information I need to know what to do next instructionally. So looking at the assessment information through these two lenses is critical.

We also need two types of assessments. Comprehensive phonics assessment and cumulative phonics assessment. Let me talk about each of those. A comprehensive phonics assessment is really a survey of all the skills that you would learn in a phonics continuum, starting with just identifying letter sounds, going to reading short vowel words, long vowel words, complex words, multisyllabic words, and so on. Giving a comprehensive phonics assessment is absolutely essential at the beginning of a school year. It's great to give mid-year and at the end of the year because you can then determine which students know the skills from the previously taught grade or grades. That really helps you in terms of determining the types of instruction some of your students might need during small-group time and allows you to make sure that you're plugging in any holes, any skill deficits that your students might have so that you build the strongest foundation possible.

The second kind of assessment is even more critical. And it's a cumulative assessment. It's the kind of assessment that's missing from most instruction but is so critical for phonics instructional success. The cumulative assessment is an assessment that looks at the target skills and previously taught skills. I like to go back at least five or six weeks. So every week I'm pulling a few students and having them read a list of words with the skill from this particular week and the previous five to six weeks. Over time, I'm revisiting these assessments and these students. So I will have an assessment from one week, maybe a couple weeks later I'll assess these students again. And those skills are still on the assessment and a few weeks later and so on. Why is this so critical? It helps me determine whether or not students get to mastery of skills. So if they have some checks for accuracy on week one, when I assess and then week three, those checks for accuracy start to not be there. That tells me that the learning is beginning to decay. Decayed learning is one of the most critical issues in phonics instruction. If we don't hold on to a skill long enough, often that learning begins to decay or slip away. These quick assessments every few weeks with with my students really alerts me to these issues so that I can fix that before they become serious reading problems.

The same thing with mastery is if all of a sudden these checks appear more and the checks for automaticity appear more, I know children have mastered them. They can transfer those skills and so on. So when we look at the decoding piece of the Reading Rope, we know that we need a clearly defined scope and sequence. We need to have instruction that is systematic and explicit. We need daily application to reading and writing because it's in the application where the learning sticks, and we need both comprehensive and cumulative assessments. And we need to also look beyond those assessments: data from student reading and writing to inform our instruction, both whole group and small group.

Now let's look at the language comprehension piece of the reading rope. This is where we're talking about vocabulary and content or background knowledge. Certainly in order for us to comprehend what we read, we need to know the meanings of the majority of the words in the text that we are reading. We also better comprehend text when we have a lot of content knowledge about the topic we're reading about. In this conversation about the Science of Reading, you'll probably hear a lot about the Baseball Study. There was a study where they had the participants read an article about baseball. The participants who came to that text with a lot of background knowledge comprehended it better, more deeply, had a more nuanced understanding. Those who didn't have that content knowledge didn't do as well.

It would be no different than if I gave you and your doctor an article from a medical journal. You both would get something from that article, but your doctor would get a more nuanced understanding, a deeper understanding, would notice connections among ideas, and so on that you would not. What this means for us and what we're teaching beginning learners is that we need to spend equal amounts of time on decoding and language comprehension, vocabulary building, and background knowledge. We can do that through, for example, the read-alouds that we provide children. So while they're reading these very simple decodable stories, every day we should be reading aloud to them. Maybe read fiction in the morning, informational texts in the afternoon, and lots of texts around the same topic so that children have exposures to the same words and the same ideas in slightly different ways so it deepens their understanding of these words. This has to be an essential and critical part of early reading instruction. This is building that deep knowledge core so that when children progress through the grades and encounter more complex texts, they will have the decoding foundation as well as the vocabulary and the content knowledge to handle those more complex texts. And that's what we need to do as educators.
Kevin Carlson:
Coming up after the break, Wiley's final thoughts about the Science of Reading.
Announcer:
Interested in learning more? Benchmark Education is releasing Wiley's new professional development book on phonics in September 2020, titled Meaningful Phonics: Fine-Tuning the Powerful Practices That Maximize Student Learning. This book simplifies the complexity of phonics and helps educators take their foundational skills instruction to the next level.

Go to www.benchmarkeducation.com/PDessentials to purchase your copy today.
Wiley Blevins:
So this whole conversation about the Science of Reading is really important to us, not only our knowledge about how we teach children to read, but our evaluation of the materials we use to teach those children. And it's not that these materials are all bad, and no child has ever learned using them. Or these materials are all good, and all children learn reading them. The conversation really is about what materials and what practices meet the needs of the majority of students, as many students as possible and as efficient and as effective as possible. We have a very short timeframe in order to build that foundation. We want to do it rapidly, and we want to do it well.

I always say that teaching reading is one of the best gifts we can give a child. It's a gift that once is given it can never be taken away, and it will forever transform that child's life. I consider it an honor to be able to do that every year, to teach children to read. But I also think it's an enormous responsibility to do it right and to do it well. And I thank you all for the conversations you're having now around the Science of Reading to do it right and to do it well.
Kevin Carlson:
Thank you, Wiley.
If you want more information about scope and sequence, systematic instruction, daily application of reading and writing, and assessment, please check out the first 3 episodes of this podcast.
We are shifting our focus for the next several episodes and turning to an issue all you teachers are dealing with daily: distance learning. Some call it remote learning or online classrooms. But whatever you call it, schools, administrators, teachers, and students-and parents-have had to adapt, radically and quickly. We'll be exploring several aspects of this new reality of your teaching life in the weeks to come. One thing is certain: We're all learning together.

For the TeachersTalkShop podcast, I'm Kevin Carlson.
Thank you for listening.

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This podcast is produced by Benchmark Education. Kevin Carlson: The Science of Reading What is it? What does it mean? And what does it mean for your teaching? I'm Kevin Carlson, and this is Teachers Talk Shop.