>> I don't know if it's an elephant in the classroom
in the sense that people are seeing
that there's a problem and ignoring it.
I think people are trying their best to support kids,
but I just think that there has been an information lag
or gap that the translation from research to practice,
for a number of reasons, has been problematic.
>> And from out perspective,
that's also the good news is
because there is a gap between research and practice,
and so there's something to really lean into
in terms of those literacy rates.
There are things we know that we can do differently in classrooms
to really make a different for kids.
>> It does feel solvable.
It does feel certainly improvable.
>> And it is painful.
It's hard to face the fact that there are some things
we really haven't gotten right in our classrooms,
and Jan and I are part of that. When we say, "we," we mean we.
We, ourselves, have engaged in and advocated for some practices
that we now realize weren't ...
They were actually making learning to read harder
rather than easier for kids. The goos news is that gap
because if we then can support teachers
and find ways to shift our professional practices,
then we can make a difference for kids.
When our practices are more reflective
about what we now know about how the brain learns to read,
and some of it is not what we now know
because we just learned it. Some of it is like, "Oh.
That information has been around for a while,
but we haven't enacted it
in ways that have made the right difference for kids.
Our classrooms are more diverse
than ever and diverse in all sorts of wonderful ways
but also diverse in terms of the learning needs of students,
and teachers are trying to reach students
who are literally all over the map,
and as Jan was saying,
we haven't gotten everything wrong.
We have so many practices we should hold on to.
I was just thinking at that moment about differentiation
and all of the intense investment primary teachers
in this country
have made in providing differentiated instruction
over the last decade or decades, and that should be recognized
because that takes a lot of work.
This commitment to small-group instruction is no small thing.
Now, we think one opportunity we have
is to think about some ways to do that differently,
starting with even the kinds of text
that we're using with the most beginning readers
at the small-group ...
within small-group instruction that we're going to think
about how to differentiate differently,
but there's still that opportunity, I think,
to celebrate what we've already been doing,
which is, we've already been trying to build structures
in our primary classrooms
that recognize have got a lot of needs,
and we're going to have to reach different children
in different ways because the reality is,
we've been thinking a lot lately about vocabulary.
Kids come to school all over the map
in terms of vocabulary and background knowledge,
and we've go to do our best to meet kids where they are,
but kids who come with lower vocabulary, boy,
they need us to invest in their vocabulary development
in some really powerful ways.
>> I was thinking about
what challenges teachers are facing
in terms of supporting children in becoming proficient readers,
and one of them, I think, is a little bit of assumption
that they're all going to have to be curriculum experts,
that it's on them to take lots of varied resources,
figure out how they fit together,
figure out what in them is really grounded
in the strongest science
and what is not and all in a 30-minute planning time.
I think that there are a lot of resources out there,
and we've yet to encounter a school
where there's not an abundance of resources,
but something about the cohesion of the resources and teachers
truly having some support in understanding the science
that would inform their decision-making,
but they need some help with that.
That's a lot to ask teachers to be complete curriculum
experts in all the subjects that they're teaching.
>> If you are a
district-level leader or a school principal,
you have a lot of control over how the time is spent
and how the money is spent,
and both of those kids will be better off
when we use both of those resources to really think about,
how do we provide teachers the additional
in-service professional development,
opportunities that they need, whether that's through coaching
or ongoing professional development,
and how do we make sure they have the time
to kind of lean in to what Jan was just saying a minute ago
about pulling together a good,
cohesion plan for instruction day after day?
That requires time,
and it requires quality access to your peers,
so working in professional learning communities
or groups to support each other and really figuring out,
what does the day look like?
What does instruction look like day to day and over time?
Those are two important, I think,
and that might seem like a simplistic answer,
but we know there are models all over the world
where teachers have a lot more time to plan
for what will unfold in the classroom
than American educators typically do,
but if we want quality instruction,
we've got to position teachers to be able
to prepare for it.
>> There's research to indicate that literacy rates will improve
if we do a better job of doing those things
that maybe have been gaps in our instruction,
as we mentioned, like teaching sight words
differently or high-frequency words differently,
teaching phonemic awareness more systematically.
We've been teaching phonics all along,
just not with the same intention that we need
and not necessarily in a cumulative way.
So there are indications, research indications,
that we can affect student outcomes
by changing these practices. I think the trick is ...
Or we really have been thinking a lot about,
how do we sustain what's working
without diverting our attention completely
and also make the shifts that we need to make?
And so, for example, there really is a trend
towards more attention to systematic awareness
and instruction, very conscious attention to phonics,
more consideration of the scope and sequence
behind our phonics instruction
and, of course, a move to more decodable text
that are aligned to that scope and sequence,
but if we're not really nurturing
that whole language comprehension piece,
which doesn't get ...
It's not getting the real estate or attention,
in a few years, it's entirely possible
that we'll be dealing with a different kind
of mirror problem. So it's tricky.
We're in a tricky field. We're in a challenging field.
>> Yeah, but I think that really
speaks to the importance of: We do need ...
As we reflect on the research, and for Jan and I,
when we did our deep, deep dive into this body of research,
there were times when we're like, "Oh.
Those, we've got some serious work to do,"
and you're like, "some things that really need to change,"
but we equally had moments where we're like,
"Hey, this is actually very affirming of practices
that we already have in place,"
and I think that the work that we hold ...
we can support educators in doing is,
let's look at the research,
and then let's really think about which practices
we should celebrate and hold on to,
like Interactive Read‑Alouds addresses one of the things
Jan is talking about right there.
We really need to continue
to support children's development of oral language
and help them build background knowledge,
and that Interactive Read‑Aloud as a bread-and-butter practice
of the early literacy classroom is some to really hold on to.
But there are also practices that may be ...
We used to do them, but we don't do them anymore,
but we need to bring back or spiff up or freshen up
because we now see like, "Oh, that's so critical."
Phonemic awareness, we've done some phonemic awareness.
It's not completely new,
but, oh, we've got to get more systematic.
We've got to get down to the phoneme level.
We've got to get segmenting
and blending going even early in kindergarten,
and then there are some practices
that we've got to recognize.
We did them with the best of intentions,
but they are not helpful to children,
and we've got to do the hard work of letting them go
and replacing them
with more effective practices.