The Problem with Programs

  Buckle up… this is a long one. I got a little carried away.

The priority of foundational phonics is important. I don’t want you to think I’m saying to stop teaching kids foundational phonological awareness and decoding. 

These are important skills.

I’m suggesting a more holistic approach to teaching kids HOW to read and write.

The problem with programs is that they are, by nature, insular.

To be clear, Orton-Gillingham as an approach is a synthesized way of teaching students to read, write, and think about their reading. Dr. Sam and June Lyday Orton along with Anna Gillingham, Bessie Stillman, and Dr. Paul Rome were interested in helping folks become skilled readers and writers.

Their names have been ascribed to programs whose primary goal is create fluent decoders. Let’s be clear, sounding good is not the same as being a skilled reader.

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Let’s zoom into the problems with phonics programs for a moment, since they are the hot new thing.  

The phonics programs tend to choose high frequency words that don’t help develop vocabulary.

For example, when teaching the FLoSS rule, the words are almost always dress, mess, boss, stuff, fluff, stiff, spell, tell, etc. It would be ideal to also include 2-3 stretch vocabulary words weekly like crass, truss, scuff.  These words should be included in word-level dictation, but students should also be taught how to use these words in their writing.

These programs also tend to teach isolated skills and include very little cumulative review. News Flash: This is why spelling isn’t generalizing to authentic writing.

These programs also somehow manage to move too slowly and yet too fast to make meaningful gains in more diverse populations.

Orton-Gillingham practitioners move prescriptively based on their students’ unique needs and circumstances. Kids who receive dynamic instruction from well-trained OG practitioners make meaningful progress towards becoming not only automatic decoders, but they are skilled readers and writers.

If you are paying for OG tutoring and your kid isn’t working on developing vocabulary and writing skills, in my opinion, you’re not working with a well-trained practitioner. Many of these phonics programs have become exhaustively obsessed with linguistic minutia.  There is no reason to segment blends into individual targets across a series of 8 weeks. WHY would you spend an entire week on fl and gl alone??   

Blends are simply consonant sounds. Anna Gillingham didn’t even have a blend deck because these are phonemes that can be segmented and, at some point, will become consolidated by more skilled readers and writers.

Teach them all. At the same time. Go wild.

Various ones will be tricky for different kids. I know why this is. Does your program explain what to do about it, or are you simply stuck there until Joey gets to 90%? Don’t get me started on these mastery targets.

I had a trainee who wrote in her lesson log the other day, “I was nervous about this [blends]. I didn’t even give these a name. We just started reading longer words. 😊 G [first grader with diagnosed dyslexia] did a great job. In the beginning, I noticed while writing he was omitting the second letter of the blend. Example: plan- pan. We went back to counting sounds and recording in our elkonin box.”  

She didn’t even give them a name! She taught first. She let him encounter success. She error handled when necessary.

For everyone out there hyperventilating over the omission of academic lingo, she did eventually tell the kid he was doing blends. It’s easier for kids to use the verbiage when they actually know what they’re doing. But also – does it impede his ability to read and spell if he doesn’t know what a blend is? Hmmmm…

Back to the problems with programs-  

The sentences used for dictation and targeted fluency practice of the new skills inside programs don’t model natural speech patterns and are often simplistic in nature. Teachers aren’t mentioning grammatical structure of even asking kids what these sentences mean. Yall. Reading connected text is all about meaning!

Decodable readers that come with phonics programs are perhaps some of the most boring books on the market (sorry - but you know I’m right!), and they aren’t doing anything to help kids know how to visualize when they read. Many of these little books contain illustrations that reinforce bad strategies of using images to guess at words. YES- decodable text is important when kids are barely able to read, but let’s talk about sequencing in a way that gets kids into authentic text asap.

Additionally, the dog sat on the mat isn’t doing anything for oral language development.

Teachers are asking kids to reread with expression before even asking a comprehension question because the program says “the kid must read with prosody and fluency,” or he can’t possibly understand it.

False.

Some kids read slowly because they are actually processing what the text means. Some kids will always read slowly. - see my blog on fluency for more rants around this.  

Ask the questions first. If the kid doesn’t get it, have him reread. Engage the visualizer. Patricia Lindamood and Nanci Bell have been talking about the value of this since 1986.

Inside classrooms they often have a hodgepodge of programs for phonics, phonemic awareness, writing, grammar, and 86 million packets they’ve downloaded from Teachers Pay Teachers.

How much money does a district spend on programs yearly, only to swap for the next new hot thing that promises better, faster results?  

And yet, our kids aren’t being taught how to synthesize all this information to become strong thinkers and writers.  

How many of you work with or parent an older child or young adult?

How is their written expression and comprehension of scientific or academically dense text?

Here’s the issue: To become a skilled reader and writer, kids still need to be decoding, spelling isolated words with rules and generalizations WHILE developing vocabulary, background knowledge, and writing skills.

I know. There’s not enough time to do all the “programs” that do this. I’m arguing that there are more efficient ways to teach ALL this inside a single day.

I’ve talked about the re-imagined ELA block. This is why it’s essential to rethink how we teach kids to read. There isn’t enough time to do all these programs and somehow knit them together.

Remember- Reading is not just about sounding good. 

We have loads of kids who make it to middle school, and they sound great- BUT- they can’t answer the higher order thinking questions.

Why?  

They were never actually taught HOW to read.

We were so focused on fluency and decoding accuracy that we forgot the actual purpose of reading. Skilled readers visualize while reading.

Skilled readers stop and highlight when they’re learning new complex information.

Skilled readers ask questions about words they don’t understand.

Skilled readers take notes.

Skilled readers read slowly when reading complex text.

Skilled writers know how to craft various types of sentences.

Skilled writers know how to maintain verb tense.

Skilled writers know how to craft arguments and how to answer questions.

Skilled readers and writers aren’t created from a hodgepodge of programs.

Skilled readers and writers develop when they are TAUGHT from kindergarten onward that words matter. The words you choose matter when you write. The words chosen by authors inform the images that you make in your mind’s eye.

All these skills have to be explicitly taught but also authentically modeled and practiced time and time again.

No program can do all this.  

Teachers have to be trained to reach the unique diversity of the students in the room.

Teachers have to be trained to meet kids where they are AND move them forward.

Teachers have to be trained how to read aloud and model notetaking and highlighting techniques from 1st grade onward. (Yes, my first-grade teachers do this in their classrooms.)  

No program takes the place of knowledgeable teachers.  

To be a strong teacher, you have to understand a concept so well that you can teach it simply. 

This type of training is more than a self-paced online learning experience.

It’s more than a one-time training.  

My trainer told folks it takes at least three years of active practice with mentorship to do this work confidently and successfully.

Programs will inevitably come and go- training lives inside the teacher for a lifetime.

Training can’t be siloed to ONLY focus on decoding and foundational phonics.

Mentorship is a foundational piece of training. I worry that my own accrediting body and all the other phonics oriented accrediting organizations out there are so focused on procedural precision in the decoding/encoding lesson that they’re missing the opportunity to provide mentorship on how to teach the skills necessary to develop strong adult readers and writers. They’re definitely missing the opportunity to mentor folks who work with more complex kids. Programs don’t meet complex learners where they are, and they rarely help them get where they need to go.

So many of my own colleagues, who I know do more inside their personal practices with kids, are only training teachers to think about reading and spelling accuracy alongside fluency metrics to reach the mastery benchmarks.

I’ve spent years thinking about and worrying over how to provide mentorship that reaches ALL kids. I think I’ve finally designed a mentorship model that works for me and helps teachers integrate all the necessary skills in meaningful ways to help kids become skilled readers and writers.

This kind of mentorship goes beyond the standards of my certifying body, not because I’m required to, but because I am driven to help all kids reach their full potential.

It’s not a program. It’s an ever-refining, constantly shifting mentorship model that is centered around building a community of seekers-  Folks who are invested in helping ALL kids be successful.

This type of mentorship takes years. It’s not fast. It’s not cheap. It’s not easy- but our kids deserve the very best we can give them.

Imagine a world in which at least 5 teachers at every public-school K-12 in America were trained deeply to develop strong readers and writers. What could our world look like if that level of knowledgeable teaching could live inside every building.

For now, let’s start small. When you read aloud or your kids read to you, ask, “What do you see? What do you imagine?”

Our Obsession with Fluency

What is our obsession with speed?

Fluency is a super hot topic in the reading world.

Fluency is defined as a metric that includes accuracy + speed/rate + proper expression.

Here’s what folks will say:  Kids who read fluently, have better comprehension.

This is false.

Kids who read fluently MIGHT have better comprehension.

Fluency is impacted by a variety of factors, and like comprehension, is an OUTCOME.

Here’s the really puzzling thing to many, but this is perhaps one of the MOST important things to know:

Slow readers can have excellent comprehension.

Read that again.

Slow, robotic readers can have excellent comprehension.

Comprehension is influenced by strong vocabulary, background knowledge, decoding abilities, knowledge of language structures, and verbal reasoning skills.

See my blog on the Comprehension Conundrum for more information.  My webinar in January 2024 will go deeper into these aspects of the reading rope and appropriate interventions.

Back to fluency…

Fluency is also impacted by your “hardware.”  Kids who are slow processors or have poor working memory may read more slowly.  Kids who have struggled with articulation may read more slowly. This is actually a GOOD thing.  This gives them time to fully absorb what they’re reading.

Some kids who are engaging in metacognition while reading, will read more slowly because they’re forming the visual images in the mind’s eye and monitoring their thinking.

Students who stop to make connections to real world experiences, ask questions, or reread complex sentences, will score lower of fluency probes. 

HOWEVER, these are the strategies used by our most successful readers. 

When we put fluency interventions in place, the emphasis is almost exclusively on reading more quickly.  This is problematic for a multitude of reasons. 

Kids are being trained that speed is more important that rereading, asking clarifying questions, or reading slowly enough to visualize and make sense of complex text.

In my experience with struggling readers, my fastest readers often have the poorest comprehension, especially as it relates to the ability to answer inferential questions.   

WHAT?!

In my experience across 15 years and over 15,000 hours working 1:1 with struggling readers,  my kids who read quickly, often need more explicit instruction to read deeply. 

Many of these students have had exposure to programs that reward faster reading. Although fluency by definition includes “reading with expression,” the bulk of the metrics on the market simply score accuracy and rate.  These fast readers often blow through punctuation. They don’t reread when text is confusing, and they don’t stop to ask about novel vocabulary. 

Although Oral Reading Fluency is a metric that many folks are using to demonstrate progress, I caution that it is simply one metric that measures outcome and tells us very little qualitatively about how the child is reading and understanding text.

I’ll take a clunky reader with incredible comprehension any day of the week.  We can always supplement with technology to support timed reading assignments and to help kids stay on pace with novel study in classrooms.  We can accommodate for slower reading. There is no substitute for poor comprehension. 

Click to listen to a kid whose teaching team wanted a fluency and comprehension goal on her IEP.  When you listen to this 6-minute clip, you’re going to do some serious head-scratching regarding those goals.

She’s not fast. She has a decoding deficit, and her whole being moves slowly. It’s not about speed- it’s not even necessarily about sounding great while you read. 

The purpose of reading connected text is to understand.

Let’s shift our priorities to cultivating strong comprehension and save moving fast for the interstates in Atlanta.

school isn't for everyone

Some kids aren’t made for school. 

That’s ok.

If we’re really honest, public school, especially, is not made for all kids.

Our goals should include literacy, basic math skills, and most importantly raising good humans.

For middle and high school parents, I suggest this mantra

 It only a test/paper/assignment.

He’s going to do the best he can. 

 The kid is going to be a good human as long as we, the adults who ground him and love him, don’t make him feel like his academic struggles make him less than.

Kids need to be literate- meaning that they can read anything they want, and they can make sense of text. They need to be able to write in a way that conveys what they intend to say. 

They don’t need to read quickly or even, dare I say it, love to read.

They need to understand basic consumer and life skills math in order to survive in the world. They don’t necessarily need algebra or calculus to be successful.

Some kids who have struggled throughout their K-12 experience actually thrive in the right colleges. I have multiple examples of this. My friend, Ashly Cargle-Thompson runs a college consulting firm here in Atlanta, and she recommends that families, especially families of kids with neurodiversity and/or athletes, begin the consultation process by 9th grade.

My best friend’s son was fine in school, but he knew college wasn’t for him right now. He felt called to join the marines.  He’s studying to be an in-flight helicopter mechanic.  Holy smokes.

One of our dear friends never went to college and found his calling in the food and beverage industry.  He’s now a James Beard Award winning chef who owns his own Michelin Recommended restaurant. 

I would argue that you don’t need a college degree to do the work I do. I went to a top ten school for my graduate degree in special education, and I got all my training in literacy while working in the world under the guidance and support of incredible mentors. 

Vocations present in all kinds of ways.  School is simply a construct in which some kids merely need to survive, literate and whole. 

It’s our job as teachers, therapists, parents, friends, and community to support and love WHO they are, not HOW they “do school.” 

High Quality Services?

What do high quality services look like for kids who struggle to read?

This is a question that comes up time and again from friends, clients, teachers, and trainees.

My go to answer that drives everyone mad is, “It depends.”

High quality services should be tailored to meet the unique needs and circumstances of the child sitting in front of you in order for that child to make meaningful progress. 

Those words are taken directly from federal law. 

How that’s translated into classrooms and clinics varies widely.

Each child deserves access to literacy. Full stop.

In classrooms, teachers should be directly and explicitly teaching phonics in primary grades to ALL kids. All classrooms kindergarten through twelfth grade should be actively engaging students in content through direct instruction. Students should not be tasked with the job of teaching themselves through reading complex text. Students should be taught content through read aloud and thoughtful engagement with text and information through multimedia.

The instruction of phonics should include reading REAL words in isolation and spelling REAL words that follow rules and patterns. These rules and patterns should be explicitly taught, and students should be given ample time to practice these skills in isolation and in context.

I emphasize the word real because in recent history, benchmark assessments have begun to utilize nonsense word probes to assess decoding skills.  In turn, teachers have begun teaching to that assessment.  Teaching nonsense words has layers of negative ramifications. People are going to disagree with me here, and I’m ok with that.  In my experience, the two biggest issues are: a missed opportunity to develop vocabulary, and the input of illegal patterns that don’t occur in the English language. To be clear, I think these assessments are excellent tools to measure underlying decoding skills. I do not think these words should be used, taught, or practiced as part of daily instruction. If you’ve ever worked with English Language Learners or kids with ASD, you know these nonsense words are truly problematic.

I realize many folks have opinions regarding the lack of importance of spelling instruction. I know, with absolute certainty, that all students benefit from explicit instruction in spelling AND that it accelerates reading gains. I am constantly referring to Dr. Sylvia Richardson’s motto, Teach a child to read a word, and he may never learn to spell it. Teach a child to spell a word, and he will learn to read it.

If you’ve never taught spelling in an incremental, sequential, and cumulative way, you might not have experienced its power.  Whole group spelling lessons are transformative and provide daily opportunities to introduce new vocabulary and practice grammar and mechanics through sentence dictation.  These activities should be part of any private clinic experience claiming to provide science of reading based interventions. 

Phonological awareness skills, particularly phonics, segmenting sounds, and blending sounds, should be included in interventions for students with weak foundational skills.  These activities are ideally not programmatically based, but rather prescriptively tailored to support the errors seen in reading and spelling. 

Many students will need direct and explicit instruction to read and spell high-frequency non-phonetic sight words like said, thought, was, etc.  These interventions should focus on tracing and saying the letter names, and then reading the word. For highly verbal students, a mnemonic saying might be helpful. For highly visual students, marking the part of the word that doesn’t play fair might be helpful.  These words should be taught slowly. Often four at a time is the maximum for a student who struggles with rote memorization tasks.  

Some students do not need comprehension or vocabulary interventions. When examining a student’s psycho-educational evaluation, those with high listening comprehension scores, high vocabulary scores, and high oral language scores do not require goals for comprehension on the IEP.  These children who struggle to read, are likely on this particular struggle bus because of a decoding deficit.  See the interventions listed above.

Students with weak vocabulary, poor background knowledge, and low listening comprehension, and/or low oral language scores will need thoughtfully tailored interventions to improve these deficits.  Fun fact, handing a child a packet of passages with questions at the end is not a thoughtfully tailored intervention.

These students require direct and explicit instruction in how to visualize content.  This most often looks like a therapist or teacher pre-teaching necessary vocabulary, multiple exposures to particular content, and instruction in monitoring thinking while reading.  Aspects of high-quality programs like Lindamood-Bell’s Visualizing and Verbalizing™️ could be employed to support students with these weaknesses.

Students should be asked to retell content using their own words, generate main idea, and use the retell to support higher-order thinking questions. In my own practice, many students need to go sentence by sentence for quite some time before moving to more text. It’s stunning what they can’t recall after reading even a simple sentence or two. They aren’t seeing the mind-movie. This has to be taught.

Students who struggle with executive function will likely struggle with comprehension and written expression. These students need interventions tailored to support their weak organizational skills. They will likely require explicit instruction in note-taking, organizing their thoughts, and planning for long-term assignments.

Learning to read is a complex task, progress towards remediation is slow-going. The progress of a child with dyslexia is often consistently inconsistent. It’s crazy-making.

I counsel parents that it will likely be a year before we see any lasting, meaningful changes. Most of my clients are with me for 2-5 years twice weekly. I typically reassess every 50 sessions. Anything more frequent will only be maddening since data will likely ebb and flow.  Also, if I stop to reassess, that’s time I’m not running intervention. Classrooms lose so many precious hours to data collection that could be better spent on actual meaningful instructional time.

Progress monitoring should include word level reading, word level spelling, a writing sample, phonological awareness monitoring, and a connected text on the child’s level scored for accuracy and followed up with retell and comprehension questions.  In schools, these assessments should be repeated three times per year.

Remember that words per minute is a precarious predictor. My clients who are trained to stop and ask questions or reread confusing passages will “fail” a fluency probe but may have stellar comprehension. Students with depressed processing speeds will likely always be slower readers, but that doesn’t mean they lack comprehension capabilities.

Our schools have a long way to go to meet the needs of all readers. Schools are filled with well-meaning teachers truly doing their best. Continued advocacy and support for trainings and mentorship in schools is my great hope. Training isn’t enough. Teachers need support within mentorship communities to grow these complex skills. A certificate in xyz isn’t going to make the magic happen. Teachers need support within their unique community of learners to best hone their skills to meet the needs of these specific microcosms.

High quality private therapists should be able to speak knowledgeably about each of these elements as they relate to your child.  A certificate or lack thereof is not a way to choose a therapist. I highly encourage parents to ask for references and find a therapist who has a strong, longstanding reputation in the community. If she’s full, ask her for suggestions for other folks to try. You can also ask if she’s ever heard of Ms. So-and-So. Many of us will do sleuthing for you to determine if the person you’re hiring is up for the job. 

A webinar series for parents is coming in early 2024. If there’s a topic you’re yearning to learn more about, drop a comment below. #untileverychildcanread