Literacy Now

Within tiered intervention frameworks, collaboration is an essential key to providing early and effective intervention for students who may lag behind their peers. Stalled and unresponsive to our coaching, it may be time to expand collaboration and invite coaches with unique skill sets and fresh perspectives to join our intervention teams. Our students need these skills to get in the game, yet they’re stuck sitting on the dugout and warming the bench.

Who’s missing from intervention teams?

After reading numerous research articles on tiered intervention, a common theme emerged: Occupational and physical therapists are left out of the discussion. Yet, as a reading coach, I have come to value these roles in my own lineup.

For students in reading intervention programs, therapists have a lot to offer in terms of strategies to get students off the bench and into the game. Therapists contribute unique skill sets when it comes to helping children access reading curricula—especially students with autism, ADHD, sensory processing issues, dyslexia, and writing challenges.

Expanded definition of stamina

The term “reading stamina” is often used when describing a student’s ability to focus and read independently without being distracted or distracting others. From a therapist’s perspective, stamina includes not only the ability to focus for literacy lessons, but also the ability to monitor his or her own behavior and to know what to do when focus starts to wander.

Additionally, the therapist’s view of stamina includes the ability to sit upright at a desk; to understand directional tracking, or to process letters in order from left to right; and to “cross midline,” or to use and move the limbs of one side of the body in the space of the opposite side (for example, holding a paper with one hand while writing with the other).

When students struggle to build reading stamina, they may warm the bench longer than students who do not. Getting students off the bench and into the game is easier when using therapy strategies proven effective for improving literacy skills for the diverse readers in today’s classrooms.

“In the school environment, our jobs are to provide access to school curricula for all students. Going into the classrooms to support students and teachers is rewarding,” says Rachel Gambino, a physical therapist in Long Island, NY. “We help our students to be more available for learning and feel successful alongside their peers.”

Collaborating with therapists taught me that a few simple yet effective techniques can go a long way toward turning passive benchwarmers into active players. Three valuable concepts I learned from working with therapists are deep pressure, heavy work, and self-regulation.

Deep pressure

As mindfulness and meditation becoming buzzwords in today’s classrooms, it’s important to understand that, when deep pressure is added to deep breathing, the routine becomes even more effective—especially for children with ADHD and sensory processing issues.

A simple deep pressure technique is to press into the palm of one hand with the thumb of the other. Press all around the palm on one hand to a count of 10. Stop. Take a deep breath and repeat on the other hand. Stop. Take another deep breath.

Then squeeze 10 times up one arm. Stop. Take a deep breath and squeeze up the other arm. This simple technique activates the vagus nerve and causes the release of serotonin in our bodies, which reduces stress and increases feelings of safety. This is essential for students who become stressed during reading activities, such as timed tests.

For added benefit, children can spell words during deep pressure therapy. This simple activity helps with both word retention and overall focus.

Heavy work and spelling

While collaborating with classroom teachers, occupational therapist Jennifer Vogtmann introduced heavy work—a therapy technique that uses large muscle movement to help children calm down and focus.

She says students’ favorite activity is to do wall push-ups while reading their sight words, which are posted on the wall above. This activity improves postural stability, shoulder differentiation for writing, and visual convergence for reading—all while building that all-important reading stamina.

According to Heidi Bartle, principal at Michigamme Elementary School, MI, this exercise has been effective.

“We have seen tremendous gains in our students' overall academic performance, especially in math and spelling scores, due to the wall push-ups,” she says.

Self-regulation

Therapists have shown me the value of teaching children how to monitor their own behavior and to recognize when they are losing focus or need to move. I’ve learned that there is no point in pushing students through literacy lessons when they are unduly stressed, tired, antsy, or losing focus.

Next time you gather your intervention team, invite the therapists to the coaching strategy meeting. In doing so, there’s a good chance your benchwarmers will be swinging for the fences in no time.

Debra Em Wilson is a reading specialist and collaboration coach and the founder of S’cool Moves. 

Where do you find your teaching inspiration? In our tech-savvy world, chances are, you turn to other educators on social media. Facebook groups and Google+ communities provide avenues for digital conversations about teaching and learning. Twitter connects educators through micro-writing. Pinterest houses millions of lesson plans, activities, decoration ideas, and more. Even Instagram can link us to authors and books to bring into our classrooms. So, which one has inspired you?

Twitter has been a particularly important tool for building my personal learning network (PLN). The virtual support, camaraderie, and inspiration fuels my heart and mind. I tweet for my next book to read, for advice on an upcoming presentation, to request resources, and to participate in Twitter chats for real-time professional development and learning.

Twitter chats have connected me to other teacher educators, have hatched ideas for collaborative research projects, and—put simply—have supported my own professional learning to better my teaching. I have often said that I wished I knew about the power of Twitter much earlier in my career. Therefore, I have woven Twitter and social media into my teacher education classes to introduce my students to the power of social media to build our fellow tribe of educators.

Imagine if we created a support system where education students cultivated their own professional learning networks within, across, and beyond institution walls so that, when they graduated, they were armed with a tribe of supportive teachers to support them on their new journey? Enter #preservicelit—a new Twitter chat where undergraduate and graduate education students and preservice teachers connect to discuss current ideas in the field, share ideas and resources, grapple with teaching challenges, ask questions, and meet new mentors for their own professional learning.

Our inaugural chat was a complete success as education students, preservice teachers, new teachers, literacy teacher educators, practicing educators, literacy coaches, and even prominent authors in our field came together to support new educators as they explored the world of social media and began building their professional support systems.

While #preservicelit was especially created for education students and preservice teachers, all educators play an important role in its success. Preservice teachers learn about the power of growing their PLNs and practice using social media professionally, ethically, and responsibly to further their learning. Literacy teacher educators coach preservice teachers through virtual interactions, collaborate with other faculty across institutions, combine expertise, and strengthen education programs together. Educators, mentors, and guest hosts support the newest members of our profession and even connect preservice teachers to the very authors, researchers, and professionals they are learning from in their teacher education programs.

All educators are invited to the #preservicelit chat. Please visit our website for additional information, including a calendar of monthly topics and a place to sign up for text reminders. Join us in supporting our future educators on the first Saturday of every month at 9:00 a.m. ET for a lively 30-minute chat on all things literacy!

Stephanie Affinito is a literacy teacher educator in the Department of Literacy Teaching and Learning at the University at Albany in New York. Stephanie regularly teaches graduate courses on elementary classroom literacy instruction, literacy intervention, and children’s literature. She has researched literacy coaching as part of her doctoral studies and focuses much of her current work on how technology and digital tools can impact teacher learning and collaboration. You can find her on Twitter at @AffinitoLit.

It’s 3:00 p.m. on a spring afternoon and time for my last kindergarten reading group of the day. The group is made up of five students who know their letters, sounds, and some sight words. I put the bins of books in front of them and let them dive in. They keep lists of the books that they read, building strategies to use the pictures and to stretch the sounds. Though it’s late in the day and they’re tired and wiggly, they’re engaged, finding books that make them exclaim with glee and get to work on learning to read.

I circulate around the table, encouraging them to independently solve new words. Many of the students are also learning English and need some support with new vocabulary. They begin to grasp the patterns of the stories and make their way through the short books, soaking up new words. “You try it,” I say when Johan asks, “Ms. Hill, what’s this?” A moment later, as I make it over to his end of the table to check in, he’s already figured out the word he was stuck on and has moved on. “How’d you solve that word?” I ask. Beaming with pride, he replies, “I sound it out in my heart!”

I am bowled over by the wisdom and poetry of his words. In a simple phrase he has summed up the nuanced complexity of learning to read that the “reading wars” can never quite agree upon—that debate between phonics and whole language I’ve heard about the entire 20 years of my teaching career. He’d been reading Look Up, a book about the things we see in the sky, and the word he solved was “cloud.” Perhaps he used the first letters to connect with the picture clue to solve the word, but the /ou/ vowel pattern was way over his level of phonetic knowledge to “sound out.” He also used his knowledge of the world in his heart to “sound it out.”

In my years of teaching in the era of balanced literacy, I have read many articles on the phrase “sound it out.” Though it is on the lips of nearly every parent in the United States as they support their children to read, I’ve worked to take the phrase out of my own vocabulary. Because English has so many irregular word patterns, we can’t “sound out” every word. Instead, I have students look at the first letter and ask if they can remember the patter or if they have seen the word elsewhere or if there is anything else on the page that can help them understand the meaning.

However, because I work with many struggling readers, my background is a combination of phonics and whole language methods. I’m trained in Orton-Gillingham and Reading Recovery, among other programs, and use every tool I can find to help support my students who do not easily understand or retain the way text represents language. Orton-Gillingham helps students who benefit from the use of repetition to remember the symbols and patterns within words. In Reading Recovery, which follows a whole language approach, students build reading skills by reading books.

When I returned to school this fall, I kept thinking back to that spring afternoon and Johan’s wisdom as I waded through planning which interventions might be effective for a struggling second- or third-grade reader. How does a child who has worked her hardest to avoid putting her eyes on those black squiggles on the page feel about reading in her heart? How do children proceed when, no matter how hard they work, they still can’t make those letters hold still, or when they continue to confuse the “b” with “p”? I begin to doubt my commitment to choice and learning within context and start thinking I just need to drill those phonetic patterns into the students. I carry around a heavy bag of books and curriculum for weeks, searching for the right approach and start impulsively ordering new tools and books online to find that quick fix.

But then I remember Johan's words from last spring and I know we can’t forget the heart in learning to read either. In addition to understanding all those vowel digraphs and irregular spelling patterns, students also need to be able to connect with the word’s meaning. To find stories that speak to their hearts and represent something they care about in their lives. The heart brings in the importance of critical pedagogy and ensuring that students see themselves and their lives in the content we are teaching. The heart brings in the importance of choice and autonomy—the need for students to choose what interests them and makes their hearts beat a little faster.

Educators can and will debate for decades to come about the “right way” to teach reading, as if one way exists. Science can tell us a lot about how our brains work, but there remains a bit of mystery in the part the heart plays for each of us. Johan helped me remember that, as long as I help my students listen to their hearts, I am OK with the phrase “sound it out.”

Julia Hill is a K–3 reading specialist in St. Paul Public Schools.

In the face of high-stakes mandates and policies, the time has come to shift our conversations by balancing cognition—what a reader “knows” from reading (e.g., literary devices, themes, and vocabulary)—with emotions (e.g., perceptions, experiences, and the physiological nature of reading).

Over the past five years, I have jumped into the lightly tread psychology of shame. My work with members in the field, combined with extensive reading, has led me to believe that there is an opportunity to shed light on a hidden crisis in our schools and classrooms. Many psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists acknowledge the need for more school-based training and professional development focused on reducing shame among young readers.

When a person of influence deliberately imposes power or control to force a comparison or to create inferiority, the act of shaming occurs. For example, imagine a line of students in the hall.  Two students in the middle are talking. The teacher stops the line and says to the students, in front of the class, “Can you boys act like Sara?” In such an instance, shaming occurs because those students are being made to feel inferior.

Shame, on the other hand, is an embodiment; a conceptualization of self. Shame emulsifies from interactions, events, and other environmental factors—impacting a person’s confidence, competence, and self-perception.

What does this mean for reading practices? 

Although educators may not be able to control feelings of shame, they can control the act of shaming. For example, many readers feel embarrassment when they read passages aloud and make decoding errors in front of their peers. When a strong interpersonal bridge is in place, temporary moments of humiliation can be laughed off because we, as the teachers, can empathize. In order to build a strong interpersonal bridge, we have to show interest in the reader’s experiences and feelings.

If I call out a student’s poor reading habits in front of his classmates or tease him about his unending range of excuses for not reading, I commit shaming. Why? Because I am not looking at each day as a new opportunity, but rather, locking the reader in his transgressions. Through shaming, I destroy the interpersonal bridge between me and the reader for a sense of power, moral authority, or for the sake of “teaching him a lesson.” Reading becomes about me, the teacher—not about the student or his potential to interact with text.

So, what now? 

Unfortunately, there is no linear approach to addressing shame among readers. Believe it or not, much of our shame can be found, felt, or experienced through archetypal stories. To better understand shame, I suggest students read Parzival by Katherine Paterson—a story about a young boy who overcomes massive failure, finding redemption and self-actualization. In my opinion, the crucial moment Parzival faces is his failure to ask the ailing King, “What happened?”

I would argue that educators tend to overlook shame and readers’ emotions because of our high-stakes learning environments. If we take time to establish an interpersonal bridge and to ask the reader, “What happened?” the world will open wide. Within the reader’s own story, we can reveal the means to build resilience. 

Throughout the year, my job is to make young readers comfortable with their reading style and level. As their confidence grows, stress and anxiety declines, resulting in greater willingness to engage with text and to share perspectives.

Even before we look at the data, look compassionately into the eyes of the maturing reader and convey, “We’re in this together.”

Justin Stygles is a fifth-grade teacher in Wiscasset, Maine. He's taught for 15 years in various settings. You can follow him on Twitter at @justinstygles.

Many teachers confess that they struggle to dedicate 90 minutes each week to vocabulary learning. The most commonly cited reason is that their pacing calendar, among other demands of the reading program, does not allow room for more time with vocabulary.

I’d like to address this challenge with what might be a paradigm shift for you or for your administration.

At first glance, it may seem like asking teachers to spend less time on comprehension and more on vocabulary sounds like asking a runner to spend less time on training and more time on exercise. The two approaches are working toward the same goal. In the one case, a self-sufficient reader, in the other a strong athlete.

So why am I suggesting this challenge? Because I feel that teaching comprehension has become synonymous with reading activities in many schools. In the process, learning goals and objectives are often forgotten.

As Timothy Shanahan, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chi­cago, states, "…schools are dedicated to promoting particular activities and practices—not to teaching children. There are particular activities these principals and teachers want to see in classrooms, and they are not particularly focused on what they are supposed to be engaged in: teaching children to read."

He continues, "Instead of focusing like-a-laser on what they want kids to know, to be able to do, to be, they are promoting favorite classroom activities. Instead of thinking about how to get kids to a particular outcome, they are wondering if they can somehow align the required activities with useful outcomes."

I remember when new reading comprehension strategies arrived at our school, I was excited to have a concrete list of skills to prioritize. I quickly became occupied with teaching activities around those skills.

Each of my students held a checklist of these strategies, and I had one on the wall. Our goal became “covering” all of the items on the list, and in turn, learning took on a formulaic nature. It took a few years for me to recognize that this practice rarely helped my struggling students to become independent readers.

This was in part because reading comprehension is intimately dependent on knowledge. Strong readers typically enter school with a broad knowledge base and can apply “formulas” for reading comprehension. They do not have to familiarize themselves with the content and vocabulary of each reading selection.

I had to take a step back and reexamine my teaching against current research. Two key elements repeatedly appeared in my search for “how to build competent readers.”

• The importance of building a broad knowledge base with a focus on word knowledge: According to academic literary critic E.D. Hirsch,“When children are offered coherent, cumulative knowledge from preschool on, reading proficiency is the result.” He believes schools and educators should be “imparters of language in all its aspects: vocabulary, syntax, knowledge, etc.”

• The importance of challenging students to think deeply: The first College/Career Readiness anchor standard within the Reading strand of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for ELA/Literacy states, “Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.”

Is it possible your curriculum is focused too heavily on reading activities and not enough on thinking? By spending more time with word learning processes, you are building—not detracting from—comprehension.

Effective approaches to word learning ask the learner to understand how and why the word adds meaning to a context. Combine a strong word knowledge base with critical thinking skills and you have a winning approach for building competent readers.

Learn more about the 90 Minute Challenge here.

Carla Kessler is the director of learning at LogixLab LLC and along with her husband, Richard, co-creator of Word Lab Web. She was formerly a Title I coordinator and learning specialist, and has been recognized as an Outstanding Educator by Delta Kappa Gamma Society International.