Reading Teachers Lounge

This is the Reading Teachers Lounge where listeners can eavesdrop on professional conversations between elementary reading teachers. We are passionate about literacy and strive to find strategies to reach all learners. Shannon and Mary are neighbors who realized that they were “literacy soul sisters” at a dinner in their Atlanta neighborhood. Once they started chatting about reading they haven’t really stopped. Come join the conversation.

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Reading Teachers Lounge

October 2024 bonus episode

Subscriber Episode • October 24, 2024 • Shannon Betts and Mary Saghafi • Season 7

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This is our 3rd exclusive bonus episode of Reading Teachers Lounge podcast. In these episodes, Shannon and Mary will share about the students they're helping in reading, the resources they're using, and the books and other materials they're studying to further their practical knowledge about the Science of Reading.

In this October 2024 bonus podcast episode, Shannon and Mary chat about the tutoring and advocacy work they've been doing. Mary shares how she's fostering learning engagement and building relationships with her students. Shannon talks about the new 3rd grade student she's started working with and some of the assessments she used to evaluate his reading skills. Shannon also provides details about the Spelling Out Orthography strategy she's learning about in her Structured Word Inquiry training.

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raw audio October 2024 bonus episode

Mary Saghafi: [00:00:00] Hi, Shannon. Hey, Mary. We're back in the Reading Teacher's Lounge. Reading Teacher's Lounge is here for our October bonus episode. And we're going to just kind of catch up a little bit. So if you haven't had the opportunity to listen to our September catch up this is more of like our informal, we're sharing kind of what we're working on professionally, and we're just trying You know, kind of pick each other's brains a little bit about what our professional practice is like.

And for me, I always think of it as like knocking on the door across the hall from you and, and just trying to catch up professionally.

Shannon Betts: So it reminds me of OG season one, because. For a year before we started recording in season one, I would come to your house and we would sit at your kitchen island and we were talking about the students I was working with in my classroom or in [00:01:00] my I think I was still, I think I was a Title one teacher at that point too.

So I was working on, you know, a bunch of classrooms as a specialist and then I transitioned back in the classroom and you are working on your private practice students, and we were just comparing, Hey, what do you do for this skill? What do you do for this skill? What are you using? What activities? That's why we brought in these bonus episodes, because I think I know we're have amazing guests, and I love learning all the new things.

But then I think it's really fun to meet each month and debrief and talk about the application of all the new things that we've been doing. Right. You know, the other thing I was thinking too, this is really our eavesdropping. on our conversations, our professional conversations that part from our podcast too.

And this one, we can be a little more frank too, you know, like this is our opinion about this program. This is our opinion about this material and we don't have to be so like politically correct or whatever. Yes. And we know that our, our listeners kind of you know, enjoy our frankness.

Mary Saghafi: So I'm going to dive in and tell you, I [00:02:00] think I'm going to start with the like semi negative thing that's kind of been going on with me.

So I've been working on a lot of advocacy stuff and, you know, October is sort of when. Rubber meets the road. All of the you know, the teachers are really have gotten to know their students for the most part. And one grading period has passed the meat of the curriculum. You can kind of tell who your groups, you know, who, who are stables in, in each of the groups that you have and where you want to go with each of those students.

You should really know your data really well. Right. So I have two students, and they are sort of similar and sort of different, but both of them are one is fourth grader, one is a fifth grader, and one is still waiting to have an eligibility meeting for special education, and this has been a long, slow roll from the district, and the parents actually did get a private education.

outside psychological evaluation, which [00:03:00] revealed that this sweet, wonderful, hardworking student it has severe range of dyslexia and dysgraphia and additionally, some severe social emotional issues that do not impact his classroom performance other than last year. Where he was having trouble going to school because of anxiety and, and pressures from school and what has come out.

And it's not just a one time thing where we think, Oh, this could have like possibly contributed, but a major contributor is that the teachers just flat out told this kid you're going to have to work harder. I can't help you. You're not lazy, but you can try harder.

Shannon Betts: And

Mary Saghafi: There was no testing done. There was no recognition done that this child was struggling with reading and asking for help and There's some social things that kind of surround it, but especially [00:04:00] because his behavior is not prohibitive of other students.

I think that they thought he wasn't trying as hard and that is just such a terrible misconception. So it's Dyslexia Awareness Month, and I just want to say, like, this kid has some. Amazing comprehension skills. And he's really good at listening comprehension and has really high vocabulary and really wants to not stand out and wants to do his best and has some perfectionist tendencies too.

So he's going to try his absolute best to be reading. And so his comprehension scores are much higher than his decoding scores. But as a fourth grader, I mean, you, you can't, you can't just fake it till you make it, especially as the work and rigor increases. And so it's just been disappointing. And I think the part that's disappointing about that is that instead of Finding administrators who [00:05:00] are can do, how can we make this better people?

I've been met with a lot of defensiveness and that feels really frustrating to me. And I think that you can probably relate to that too, because you and I are can do people like here's the problem. What can we do to fix it? And You know, well we weren't there at the school the last two years and this isn't me and we're trying to work hard now and they are, but there's just no accountability piece.

So he hasn't been an RTI, he hasn't been in the lower tiers of support, because he was just sort of one of those under the radar kids that we've talked about. And so I'm just, I'm meeting a lot of. Defensiveness. And it's, it's icky to me. And it's, it's it's made me, usually I'm very good at partnering with the committee and, and really making sure that I'm speaking the language of teachers and how can we best support teachers?

No problems with [00:06:00] the teachers at all in this circumstance, the two new fourth grade teachers for this year are so on it and are working with him. Their data is so crisp and clear and they really get and understand and want to give him what he needs. But you know, I just, I'm trying so hard and it just feels like.

There are people whose timelines just do not match up with the expectation. We don't have any more time to wait for this child. Middle school's looming. And the parents are feeling that. So anyway, so I'm trying to figure out a good strategy to not let people just kind of not have accountability, but also have you know, some, some real.

understanding of what dyslexia is and how it can impact the whole child and what this means and how much work we need to do to move forward. But also helping the teachers to feel empowered. And in this [00:07:00] case, like I said, it's not the teachers, it is administrators. And so I think my new. Mission this year is really going to be to partner with administrators in as much of a positive way as I can, because that's really like leadership is, is, you know, taking accountability.

So there's that, that part is has been tricky, and I actually am in two circumstances where that is a similar case at two totally different schools. So one is with a fourth grader and one is with both are male. Students are male students both happen to have a lot of anxiety and just that breaks my heart.

I mean, that's that's the age of my young son. So my youngest son. Yeah, it's very frustrating. And, you know, we know what happens in fifth grade and when teachers And upper grades feel like they can't meet these like foundational reading levels of students at this age. So [00:08:00] anyway, well, and the kids who are in fifth grade right now, we're in kindergarten, the year of lockdown.

So, and, and so yeah, I that's an, the fourth and fifth graders right now are, there really is no time to wait. For them. So I think I'm going to work and you'll probably hear me continue to talk about this throughout the podcast, but I'm working on some strategies for really helping to meet these learners needs.

I feel like I can teach them one on one but that's not really what they need they really need the support all the way through the classroom so. I think that winning over some administrators and helping them really understand that the best way to support their teachers is to use these high quality you know, reading programs that are based in structured literacy and the science of reading.

So there's a lot of education that I'm sharing right now. And, and not allowing people to kind of pat me on top of the head, so to [00:09:00] speak, and say, I hear what you're saying, we'll get to that eventually, because we don't have any time to waste.

Shannon Betts:Well, and as sad as this case, these cases sound, also, they're better off because their parents have the means to get to pay for the private psychological evaluation testing to also pay for you to advocate for them.

Because we know. I know because I've worked in so many Title I schools over the years that there are thousands of instances. of similar cases. And the parents don't have the time or means or even the English language to be able to advocate for their children in the way that it needs to be done. That is absolutely correct.

Mary Saghafi:So if you happen to be a parent or you are working with parents, ensure that they understand their rights. You know, can rights law is a really great resource to of breaking down educational law. Like that in the show notes. Okay. W R [00:10:00] I. G H T L a w. com might be. org. But we'll link it in the show notes to break it all down.

So there's, so that's my one thing defensiveness, however, on the really positive side, my kids for my tutoring practice, we were working on a lot of motivation skills. And I don't know, but it is just clicking in a new way for them. And I think I'm thinking a lot like smarter rather than harder, but we have had so much success in the last week with our dictation sentences.

And I will just turn the paper around and let them read me a dictation. And then I will make some errors and we're correcting my errors. And I think because We've had so much explicit instruction. They're, they're very familiar with correcting sentences, but it's harder for them to find their mistakes.

So my mistakes and being the teacher has been so motivating. And I just love it when some little connection kind of happens like that. [00:11:00] It's just been fun. And that boosts their self awareness. And then he'll transfer that to their own practice. Yeah. Oh, it's just been, it's been so fun. And I've had I was actually sharing the story with you just recently, but I've had brothers who I've been tutoring now for a little more than two years.

And starting off, it was super challenging. They were very unhappy about the idea of coming to tutoring and the work was very challenging and hard for them. And so they would come and it would be like. Pretending to be asleep in the car, it would kind of dead weight and kind of just like ignore mom.

And so we had to work on a lot of ways to motivate them to come. So they know that they always have an opportunity to get a snack at my house, which is in somebody else's pantry. Sometimes it's highly motivating. Absolutely. They You know, like I always kind of have some like fidgets or something that's a little new and novel for them to look at, hold, explore [00:12:00] as we first start.

And we just, I always start off with this question. I always say, what's something new or interesting that's happening to you? And they always say, you always ask that question. I'm genuinely interested. And so it often takes them just a little time to kind of like play with a fidget or explore something new.

And they tend to really open up to me. And so that's been really positive too. So now these two boys. I'm so pleased with this. If you would have told me this two years ago, that they would be like arguing with one another to see who gets to go first. Oh, I, I wouldn't believe it. They are so excited to come to tutoring and they're so excited to do their, their dictation sentences and they're working on their word spelling and they're just, they're feeling the success.

And, you know, we've talked about this. We've said that before, like just write work. You know, builds in that motivation. Yeah. No, when they are sure of something, they know, unsure of something. And we talk about that so often. [00:13:00] So I'm taking that as a huge win right now. And, and I'm really kind of trying to, I mean, there's always little motivating things that I'm, I'm using like this month because it's October.

I have this little witch's fingers. You know that I pull out every now and then, and they're just very simple, but even if I just like reorganize my toys in a different bin, and I put it in a different location, it just makes it fresh. Yeah. So so hopefully that that like, well, maybe it's. Spark you with a little bit of motivation as well because I think like getting your students, you know, ignited is the key, right?

Shannon Betts: Mm-Hmm, and thank you. I went to my storage unit and got those little witchy fingers and I just haven't put 'em in my tutoring bag yet, so I've got to do that. You're so fun. I wanna share a funny story about my little first grade buddy. We're having so much fun. Like now we go to like the little parents office in the backyard to like work.

So we can have more privacy and like not interrupt the family flow in the kitchen anymore. And so it's [00:14:00] so fun because it's just like me and him back there and it's like an hour of us. We can just he can really like talk and chitchat while he's working usually or even sometimes if it's a quiet concentration thing, I'll even start putting on music because he loves to sing aloud for musicals like Vivo and things like that.

But anyway, we're getting to know each other really well just because we're meeting twice a week very consistently and we're having all this time to like chit chat while we're working, but the other day, you know, we work on handwriting and he like is really proud because he can see it. I've been putting it in chronological order.

So we look at it from time to time to see like his growth and everything. But the other day he goes. I got this. Just let me write it in a very precise way. And I was, and I, and I looked at him and he had this little twinkles and I was like, are you make, are you poking fun? Because the word precise . And he's like, maybe ,

Mary Saghafi: like, so cute.

Shannon Betts: I guess…I do say the word precise very often,[00:15:00]

But he was like, lemme do the letter formation. Very precise. It's really cute. I love that he has like the confidence to be able to do that with you now because I mean, I do happen to know this kid pretty well and he and his family, they love to joke around and stuff. So like, that's like. His true like light coming through.

I love it. Yeah. No, I mean, we, we tease a lot now, which is really fun. And I thought it was hilarious because I didn't even realize I used that word a lot, but yeah, they pay attention. They pay attention to our cues, our bumps. Don't they?

Mary Saghafi: They do. I always say like humor breaks the tension. And so like, it's kind of nice to have these like one on one conversations with kiddos and get to really know them.

I mean, don't get me wrong. It was not easy dragging these kids from the car and being like, Hey, let's keep you motivated. They were testing you at that point too. And you [00:16:00] proved, you know, that you're dedicated to their learning and you say positive. And that's the thing. I'm like, you weren't going to give up on them one way or another.

Right. And we can have fun. Or we, or it's going to be hard, but I will, I will say too I've had some times with, with one, one of those kiddos in particular, where I will be firm and I'm never, especially in a one on one situation, like I'm never mean, I'm never like overly demanding, but I'll be firm. And it's very clear.

I think this is definitely the special ed teacher in me. Like I am very black and white. Like, yes, this is acceptable. No, this is not acceptable. And so the one boy, like got really quiet and I was like, what's, what's inside your head right now? I can't understand your emotions. And he'll say, he was like, I think you're mad at me.

I'm not mad at you. What have you done something to make me mad? I don't think I'm focusing as well as I can do. I can. Is that true? Maybe. Are you, are you working on making it [00:17:00] better right now? Yes. Look at my face. I'm not upset. You're misinterpreting that I am always proud of you. If you are trying your best and we can always move forward.

So like the level of being explicit about that or not even understanding your students. I think that that actually goes such a long way, but don't forget that they're just little and they're discovering their emotions too. And that you. Right. I mean, I know I have trouble with my own emotions that way.

So I really do like to phrase it specifically like that and then reinforce and restate to what makes me proud of you, you know, what you do, or I, you know, this is an appropriate behavior. This is not an appropriate behavior and being as like consistent with that as possible is so very helpful.

Shannon Betts: Yeah. Even I'm learning that too, as a tutor, like even if this was a classroom of one, student, you still have to sort of set the expectations for learning. So. Definitely. And when you're asking them to do hard things. [00:18:00] Exactly. Exactly. You know, it's a different kind of motivation and management. Well, and I like what you said, too, when you were saying that, like, all those little, like, conversations that you're having, and they're sharing these stories, and what's interesting to them, and their lives, and what's going on.

All of those answers are really helping me have another new student that's a third grader, and that his answers to those questions are helping me develop reading material for him, like to know which passages to choose, just because we haven't, we don't know each other as well. as I know the first grader, because he and I have worked for like three months, maybe four months at this point together.

But this other third grader is new. But at the very beginning, he told me how interested he is in camping and Boy Scouts, and especially whittling. And so the first passages that chose for him were from ReadWorks, because I'm still waiting for some other resources to arrive in the mail. But [00:19:00] ReadWorks, you know, they're readily available, downloadable, and I found some great survival type stories.

You know, like how to survive in a thunderstorm, how to survive in a snowstorm. And he just was riveted to every detail in every sentence. And the right passage makes all the difference. And if we had not had those conversations, I would have, I probably would have chosen something sports. Do you know what I'm saying?

Just cause he's a boy like, or video games. And I think I do have some video games. Stormstorms printed. Cause he probably. I think he likes, you know, Fortnite Roblox and things like that, so like that'll be okay too. But the really, the outdoorsy ones, so exciting for him, so exciting for him. And then eventually I'm going to do some chapter book studies with like the hatchet and some other survival stories.

And I think that's going to be a really great just like, just like you use the bookworms chapter books to like that baseball book with your client to just embed so many vocabulary and comprehension [00:20:00] skills. That's what I want to do for the student too.

Mary Saghafi: Oh, great. That's so good. The the other book that I really love from bookworms is actually one of the other first ones for third grade and it's Owen foot money man.

And it's all about a little boy who's interested in earning allowance, but he really doesn't want to have to do all the chores. Like he can't be bothered with that. So he's like very He comes up with lots of schemes to try to earn money with his best friend. It's my son. Money is like the biggest motivator to him.

Yeah. It's an, I would recommend it for anybody who, you know, girls and boys, but it's just very, it's more like 1980s, maybe even seventies in the setting. And so You know, he's kind of has a sister, they don't get along, but that one is, is really, I liked that one a lot. And I would have never chosen that as a, as a book for my students outside of the bookworms curriculum.

Shannon Betts: So, you know, I think we can really like look into these book lists and, and really like kind of hone in on some of our students interests and get some [00:21:00] high interest books. Mm hmm. and use that as the hook and the anchor for like the rest of the learning. And so that's the other thing that's really interesting with this new student.

So I did I started at the end of September and did just a battery of assessments to do the evaluation for him. And it was, different assessments than I had chosen for the first grade student, right? You know, because first grade student was a ton of phonemic awareness tests, sight word assessments, things like that.

I did do the third grade beginning of the year dibbles with the student, but otherwise I gave the core vocabulary assessment. I found a free morphology assessment online. Don't know if it's, you know, It's legally free, but somebody nice posted it up and I downloaded and printed it. And it was really interesting because it tested, like students composing and decomposing of transparent and opaque morphemes.

And there was definitely a difference between what my student could and could not [00:22:00] do in terms of the type of morphemes. What does that mean? I don't think I've ever heard transparent. So, Mike. So opaque would be like catch and caught. So like you can't recognize because it changes form, but transparent would be like like, and dislike because the best is the same.

Well, I've never heard of it classified that way. Okay, cool. Yeah. I didn't know until I gave this assessment. Yeah. But and I'm not really, I'm not really going to use that. I'm just wanted to get a baseline. using that assessment, you know. I'm not really using it a ton to drive instruction because it's not, this assessment is not from the Morpheme Magic curriculum that I purchased and so to use with this student.

And Morpheme Magic has their own sort of little progress monitoring assessments to go lesson by lesson. So I'll use those, you know, to, you know, To mark some progress and then I might give this the preassessment kind of as a post assessment, you know, after like a year of morphing work just to just [00:23:00] to compare the scores, but also the dibbles and some fluency assessments.

And also the spelling assessments I gave. I gave the World's Third Way one, of course, and then after reading Spelling for Life by Lynn Stone, and we talked about that in an upcoming episode about spelling with Mindful Teacher Rachel Lynn Stone recommended a spelling inventory called the McCall Morrison or Morrison McCall spelling test, which is really old.

It's from like the first half of the 1900s. Oh, and it's. I didn't know it that. Oh yeah, so there is a lot of research behind it, and now that I wanted to give it and I thought this would be a good opportunity to give it so that I could compare the Validity of the results between the words their way, which I've given so many times and kind of can predict the instructional information I get from it.

And then I wanted to compare what I got from this Morrison McCall one because it's double the length, but still the 50 words didn't take that long to [00:24:00] give, you know, and what's interesting about the Morrison McCall one is it will give a great equivalency. Which,

Mary Saghafi: oh, great.

Shannon Betts: Yeah, which they where's their way does not… it just gives a developmental stage of spelling.

And then it also gives like a spelling age of like sort of, okay, they're 10 years old and five months old, you know, 10 years, five months old or something

Shannon Betts: like I thought that was interesting and they have just a lot of data because this is an old test behind it. So, that was interesting information, but then also the dibbles, some of the scores were high, some of the scores were low in terms of where the students should be according to his peers, and so he has some good foundational phonics knowledge, but he's not making meaning based spelling choices.

Like, for example, he spelled team as T E M E. [00:25:00] Which is a good choice. I mean, that shows that he knows the magic E rule. I don't know why he didn't choose E E M.

Mary Saghafi: Mm hmm.

Shannon Betts: Versus, you know, the correct one, which would be E A M. And so, when I was looking at those results, and I was crafting an, you know, intervention plan for him, I thought I would start with the syllable types.

And especially looking at all the different choices for the long vowel spellings. Yeah. You know? He's really good with his CVC, he's pretty good with CVCE, then you know, he can do his blends and then you look to see that like, Oh, he's really struggling with vowel teams. Okay. I'm with you. And so, you know, there's all these different choices.

At the, at the age where he's at, there's lots of spelling choices for the sounds. And so, because he's really has to know all of them, you know, like all the different choices [00:26:00] for the long O sound, all the different choices for the long A sound, and he's got to remember which homophone is which and which one do I choose.

And we're on thought break right now. So like, I, I just finished the assessments. I kind of had two kind of trial intervention sessions with him. Like while I was waiting for the. assessment results and evaluations kind of to be done. And so when we get back from fall break is when I'm going to actually start like the full intervention plane with the student.

And so I'm just sort of crafting all the lesson plans and my scope and sequence and kind of what I want to do each week with him. And when we come back from fall break next week, I was going to immediately start syllable types in addition to the morphing magic with him. And then some different kind of passages, like I said, from read works until I get some of the bookworms longer things to do.

But to prepare for a new episode that we're going to have that comes out. Middle of season seven. I wanted to get some training in structured word inquiry, which is this.

It's a, [00:27:00] it's a way to instruct students on how the English language works. That's a good way to describe it.

Mary Saghafi: Mm hmm.

Shannon Betts: And. That's what we, these episodes have not come out, but when our listeners hear them we're going to have episode seven season seven, episode four, it's going to be about word knowledge.

And season seven, episode five is going to be about spelling. And in both of those episodes, we talked about, you know, like how English is more logical than we think, but then how do we get students to really understand that for team you use E A instead of E E or E magic E, you know, how do we get students to like, Without memorizing all these words, how do we get them to, like, make these orthography bindings in their brain, you know?

Like, I have the sounds, I have the meaning, okay, let me, let me know that I need to use E A, [00:28:00] For team, but EE for beat the vegetable, but EA for beat, like beat the drum, like how do they keep all that in their mind? How do you help them categorize this correctly in their brain? Exactly, because there's so many long vowel words like that.

Yep. And there's so many long vowel choices. And. What I, so I'm taking, I took, I purchased a webinar about structural learning inquiry, and then I'm taking some small group classes on the weekends with the Dr. Pete Bowers, who is the creator and doing the research for this program. He's been doing structural learning inquiry.

Mm-Hmm. with a colleague. I think Dr. Kirby is his name, but I'm, I'm doing the class with Dr. Bowers and I mean. Almost from the get go in the class, like, which the first one was last Saturday, he was, I was having to unlearn information. And he was basically telling me, like, do not teach the syllable types with this student.

There's a lot of [00:29:00] information that's, that's come out more, I would say on the more recent side. to not teach syllable types as explicitly. It's, it's helpful for kids to notice these things. It helps for some of the structure, but it, it doesn't always help them. It helps them decode, but it doesn't always help them with spelling.

Right. And this student, he does have some fluency issues. But I think as I help him with the fluency, the spelling, as I help him with the spelling, the fluency is going to increase. And I think that that will get more bang for my buck working on the spelling and the English language structure. Instead of just trying to do the syllable types and get them decoding faster.

I will say I've done the syllable types with like my fifth grade readers who are reading at a kindergarten, first grade level, and I've got to like teach them short vowels, long vowels. Now I have to teach them all the vowel sounds really, really quickly. That the syllable types has worked really, really well.

So I'm not going to like throw it away from our repertoire completely. [00:30:00] But. What I'm learning about structural order inquiry, and I am a noob at this, and like, I am still like, but what about this, Dr. Bowers? I don't understand this! Like, like, I am really gonna have to do a lot of training and delve a lot into this.

I've ordered Dr. Bowers book, which is like, How the English word works or something like that. And so that's coming in the mail. And then he told me, yeah. And he told me during the training that someone has just released just in the last year a book about like sort of a scope and sequence for doing this with students.

And so that book is arriving Thursday. And I'm very excited about that because I, I think this is the right approach for the student because I'm going to teach you a technique that he taught us when I've looked at structure word inquiry in the past. Okay. And I like having the Facebook group about it.

What I've just seen is like sort of word matrices where it's like got this box around the base and then there's a box around all the choices for the prefix and then all the choices for the suffixes and maybe there's extra suffixes behind those [00:31:00] basic suffixes and then from that sort of word matrix the students can build like 20 words, you know, and some of them might have spelling changes.

You know, with the suffixing and things like that or not, but I'm like, where, what do you just start introducing a matrix to a kid? Like, where, where, where did those come? I have to admit that's, that's the piece where I've been more intimidated too. I've also attempted to build it on my own with students and I, It is not in my wheelhouse.

It's not something that I was doing very well because I was a little unsure. So I'm like with bated breath. Tell me, tell me what you want. So going less like less big picture of that. So go into a smaller lens, you know, kind of zooming in is word sums. So let's say you have the basis play. Okay. And you might have play mate, play plus ed, play plus ing, or whatever, and a bunch of other choices and I guess [00:32:00] there's replay.

Okay, there's all those choices. So let's say now I'm going to choose re plus play plus ing. Mm hmm. Is rewritten as. replaying. And then that's called a word sum. Word sum. But then, wait till you hear this, when you have the student write the word sum, they are going to be spelling out the orthography. Now you and I, since season one, have tapped out the phonemes, you know, like cat, at, we've done it on our arm, right?

From our elbow to our wrist. He does the spelling and orthography where he'll are E P L A Y. Oh, so he's still tapping it on his arm and they're spelling it out loud. He only spells, he only [00:33:00] taps the base with his hand on his arm. He's saying the prefix and the suffix as pieces before the tapping. And also if they are a meaningful piece.

Which is a morpheme, right? A meaningful, smallest piece of language is a morpheme. Re is a morpheme. I N G is a morpheme. Because they give meaning. We want the students to link those in the brain. Not as loud, not like a consonant cluster or anything like that, but it's just this meaningful piece. So you say it with a fast voice.

And then we also are doing A Y as a vowel diagraph kind of fast. So it's R E P L A Y I N G. Whaaaaat? I'm in. Like, when I saw that spelling out orthography, my jaw dropped. Yes. Because that is like the tapping on steroids. That is exactly [00:34:00] what my third, fourth, and fifth graders need to know so that they can use it multisensory.

And so the tapping Oh, he was all about multisensory in this training, yes. Essential for these students to connection. So I love that. You know, I, I saw you had like a very distinct like hand, not a hand signal for for what you're doing, but like a place. Oh, he even had like, for the arrow is rewritten ass.

You even do that. Multisensory is re written ass. I love it when people can give me this explicit language because this is what I'm missing or, or what I'm intimidated by. And so I need that language to bring it directly to the students. And this isn't ignoring phonics. Like, he's like, we, the AY is teaching that diagraph, right?

Oh, yeah. And then you even, let me do [00:35:00] dislike for you, and then disliking. Okay. So, dis, so like would be L I A. Okay. So you're actually gonna tap out the E. Okay. You're, like, you're gonna kind of slap it out on your arm. Each letter you slap, if it has a grapheme on the base, you, you, you tap it out. Okay.

Okay. Now it could be a two letter grapheme, which would only get or a three letter grapheme and it would only get one tap. Like if it's TCH or something, it would just get one. But that magic E has a grapheme. So you are going to, and that's different than like just tapping out the sounds, which would be like, right.

And then notice we're spelling. So he does this when a kid gets to an unknown word in their reading or writing, and he'll [00:36:00] say, Why don't we spell it out? Great. Instead of, why don't we sound it out? Why don't we spell it out? Because there's something with that spelling that's like activating the letterbox as well or something.

And like, you know, like the re in the reading triangle, like the orthography phonology, meaning connections. And the brain connections, right? Yep. So it has to spell it out. So I'm going to go back to like, okay. So L I K E. Now if I do dislike, I'm gonna say D-I-S-L-I-K. mm-Hmm. . Okay. And again, you're having the student, I would say dis plus like is rewritten as D-I-S-L-I-K.

Okay. Okay. And so I would have the student say all that as they're writing out the word sum. Okay. Okay. I'm what? So now if I say dis [00:37:00] plus, like plus ING is rewritten as DIS. L I K.

No, replace the E, I, I, and G. No, replace the E, I, and G. Sorry, let me do that again. Oh, it's fast. D I S L I K. Replace the E, I, and G. I'm with you. Okay. So Shannon is doing some movements and I can see her on screen. So I'm going to break it down for everybody. So she has her fist in the air. She's almost like by her elbow and she says, D I S really fast.

And then she taps out L I K E E take away the EING. So she's like taking, it's replace the E. He said it's better to say replace the E. Replace the E and IG. mm-Hmm, . You're pulling it back. Okay, I'm with you. And he says like, and you're teaching them, so then you can teach them at that time, [00:38:00] once you teach them that replace the EING, you know, that goes into like all those suffix and spelling changes.

I know you do a lot of that with your Orton-Gillingham prescriptive teaching. So, that would be like a good introduction as an anchor lesson, like let's say you're doing a whole word sum on like, okay? The, the base, like, and then you're doing all the prefixes that could go with like, and all the suffixes that go with like, and that could be an anchor lesson where you're teaching some skills about suffix changes.

You could teach about vowel suffixes. And when there's the vowel suffix, then you have to do some of those spelling changes. Or you can look at if it's something like you know, drop. Okay. If you do the word drop as a base, then you can start teaching the double letter suffixing changes and things like that.

And then what he says is that students, it gets them curious to find where [00:39:00] that situation might occur in other words. And so it promotes the transfer of learning because it's inquiry based. It's, it's, I almost don't even want to say that it's inquiry based because I get it, but what you're help, you're helping students to see a way to apply this on their own, right?

So like, that's why it, you can teach it on the fly, but you can also like throw these things. I think what I get get a little like, I don't know what the word is tense about structured word inquiry itself is that I don't feel as that I'm as familiar with the words or as familiar with the language, but I could see that, you know, you get to a tricky word and you stop the classes, you're doing like a shared reading and you say, Oh, here's our word.

This one is tricky. It's tricky. Who can, who can teach me this word, but using structured. And there's four different questions to guide you through that curiosity piece of inquiry, whether it's [00:40:00] during a read aloud or if it's a student that's like, I don't understand why team has EA instead of EME. So he says, what is the sense of meaning of your word?

How is it constructed? What related words can you find? And within that question three, you have to look at morphology, morphological relatives and etymological roots. So you have to go to etym, etymyonline. com to really look at the history of the spelling. And then how are the graphemes functioning in your word?

And so it is some sort of guiding steps into doing that inquiry.

Mary Saghafi: Sounds great, Shannon. Yeah. And I don't know enough about this either. Like, I really need to, like, I hope.

Shannon Betts: I'm not being an ambassador for this yet because like we're gonna have Dr. Bowers on later in the season to like explain it in his own words because I don't think I'm explaining it. I hope I'm not misteaching anything about it.

I'm just explaining it to the best that I understand with one webinar, two webinars of instruction. You got it. Yeah. And we have homework to [00:41:00] do this week and I haven't done it yet, but. What, what this is just fascinating to me is what he says is, and this is based on like shares, like self teaching hypothesis is that like, we're not actually teaching kids how to read, we're teaching them how to teach themselves how to read.

Yes, yes. And so this is like teaching the kids instead of not just it's not just decoding strategies, it's like, it's in I guess it's encoding strategies, it's just teaching them how the English language is structured, like And we've said that before, well I don't know, we've said it on like the new episodes that are going to come out that basically like we've been lately calling ourselves instead of reading teachers calling ourselves English teachers because we are trying to teach the students like English has a stable structure of spelling so that it's stable across the UK and Australia and Boston and the South of [00:42:00] the United States versus the Western United States versus the Northern United States versus Ireland, you know, and all the different accents, which accents are going to affect phonology so much.

But English has to have a very stable spelling system and there's a reason why. They chose all of these different spellings, like the reason they put an O in people has to do with the etymological root of populous, you know, or whatever. And so it's they, that O is there to remind you that it goes with all these other words like popular and other things like that.

Amazing. Right. And so I think that this third grader, because he's a curious person, is going to do well with this instruction. He's And so I'm kind of pausing my scope and sequence of teaching the syllable types to doing [00:43:00] this type of instruction instead, but I don't really know where to start. I mean, I interrupted Dr.

Bowers in the class and was like, I need a scope and sequence. Like, how do I do this? What do I do week one, week two, week three? Like, where's the first lesson? Where's the second lesson? You know? And he's like, their curiosity is the scope and sequence. And I'm like, I need more than that. That's hard for me to plan.

I'm a planner. I'm a curriculum mapper. So I'm still working all this out and trying to figure it out. But I'm, I'm very eager to talk about this and all these monthly. Appointments that we have, and just as I learn this and apply it with students and like what it, I really can't wait to see, like, to do some of these anchor lessons and see how the student takes to it and start transferring the learning.

And I really, he swears that that student is gonna get more and more curious about words and start to bring me situations why [00:44:00] is this word spelled this way? And then that's, that's, that can send us on an inquiry path. Amazing. Oh, I can't wait to hear more. Yeah. So to be continued, like that's just sort of just an intro.

I'm sorry, people. My dog is, my dog is barking. My dog is in the reading teacher's lounge with us. Oh, well

Mary Saghafi: Yeah. I love when you learn and you like bring me along for the ride. I'm so into it. And, you know, we do this, but I think this is an opportunity to kind of share with our listeners as well. Kind of how we are together.

Shannon Betts: Well, and I think this will set the stage for the rest of the season. You know, like this episode we'll talk about or some structured word inquiry, not going to be, we're going to have a lot of episodes come out between now and then that episode is probably going to come out halfway through the season.

And we usually do about 18 episodes. And as the day we're recording this, we only have three episodes aired so far. So it's going to come like maybe six months from now, but stay tuned people. Yes. But I think that that'll give [00:45:00] us some time to try this out. And like, I, I feel like I'm a new learner too.

Like I'm a student in this, you know, and I really, this is what I told him. One of the things I said in the class, I said, okay. Okay. Have I been doing the students a disservice by focusing on one to one correspondence?

Mary Saghafi: Hmm.

Shannon Betts: Because It's English is not one to one correspondence. I mean, like, I'm like, should I be starting teaching CH before I even teach C?

You know, so that they, I already get them on a stage of like, you know, there are two letter and three letter graphemes so that I don't get, because we always have talked about how we've had to do some unlearning with our students, where it's this big transfer of thing with like, one letter can stand for more than one sound, and they've got to switch the sounds and things like that, and like, if Maybe if we didn't have so much, he just says with the reading triangle, we're so [00:46:00] focused on the connections between the orthography and the phonology.

that we're, we're leaving off the top part, which is the meaning. And then what's inside the reading triangle is the morphology, which links all those things. And if we work on two parts of the triangle more than just one part of the triangle. So if we're not just focused on sounds or we're not just focused on letters or not just focused on meaning, but we focus on two of those we're going to strengthen those bonds.

And if we put. morphology in there, we actually strengthen all three areas of the writing triangle at once. And that's going to strengthen those orthographic mapping bonds and make every word a sight word for this, for these children, every word a sight word for decoding and spelling, which it seems like we're,

Shannon Betts: this is what I brought up in the thing too.

I said, we're, it seems like, you know, structured literacy is coming around. It's science trending. There's a lot of different, you know, really good, like phonics programs. Structural literacy programs being implemented around the country at the school that these students go to. They're using a strong phonics program, and I [00:47:00] see that the student does have good strong phonics bass but he is not a great speller and I'm worried if we don't do some of the structure word inquiry or some other kind of thing that's gonna help students understand You how English is constructed, and not just, oh, this word's irregular, you got to memorize it, this word's irregular, you got to memorize it.

They're not all irregular. There's a reason why they're spelled the way they are, and so we've got to sort of teach that in a structured way, or else we're gonna have an epidemic of bad spellers, even with all the structured literacy going on. And even with all of the spell check going on, because if you can't use the correct spelling, because you still don't know the meaning behind it.

Mary Saghafi: Right, right. Like when spell check comes up on your computer and it gives you like three to four choices, which they're apparently, there's some assessments like that, that you can give. Yeah, spelling. I, I used to work with a teacher who actually would create her own that were like that. And she would do similar spellings.

And actually David Kilpatrick in his book, [00:48:00] he often would share that you should offer students similarly spelled words and, and have them choose the correct word for that purpose to, to kind of Really work on that. I will say I have heard this structured word inquiry, and this is my own, like just honest thing.

I have heard this for now 10 years and it just hasn't caught on. And I think it hasn't caught on. Cause it feels complicated, but I don't think it is that complicated. It's just that teachers have not been trained in a way that's not to just wrote, follow a curriculum, right? There is no curriculum for this yet.

And I think that's something that keeps cropping up with our conversations too, is that we're English teachers, but we're really poor English teachers because we haven't been trained with the opportunity to really investigate the language ourselves. Right. I'm not sure how else to put that, but like, yeah, so I do, I'm, I am definitely in favor.

I'm also [00:49:00] intimidated by, well, you and I are both intimidated and we have both have a baby. Each of us have about 20 years of experience, so we have 40 years combined and we're still nervous to try this. Okay. And this is going to be an experimental time. You know, in this school year, right. With trying this out, but I'm feel like this is the missing piece that I've been looking for for a while.

I think it is like just exactly explaining it this way. And yeah, I'm very curious to see how this goes. And I am noticing the same trend that you are too, especially with the kids who have had some really good phonics instruction. And they're still missing a lot of the spelling because they're really good decoders.

They're not great encoders yet. And, and the decoding is the easier piece of that. So we're not really talking about kids with dyslexia here. We're talking about like a lot of the tier two kids, although apparently he says this, this. The structure word inquiry is very helpful for dyslexic students because it gives a [00:50:00] reason, it gives sort of a structure, takes away the memorization requirements for all these words.

Shannon Betts: Yes. I'm going to pause for a second. My child needs me.

Okay. Thanks for pausing with us. I don't probably y'all didn't notice a pause, but we did. Okay. I'm going to put in the chat for you and I'll put it on the show notes. Dr. Bowers has a free weekly office hours. It's on Mondays. Which we're recording this on a Monday, so you can actually go. I think it's at 5pm Eastern, so you could actually drop in really soon if you wanted to or go a different week where you can just pick his brain and ask questions.

Oh my goodness, what an amazing resource. I know. Wow. So and then he's got like a great website. The website's called word, wordworkskingston. com and yeah, he's very generous with sharing his knowledge and [00:51:00] I think this is going to be an interesting journey. So I'm glad to be able to share it with you.

And then I always learn more when I talk about it with you. So I appreciate you listening. I didn't mean to take so much time describing it, but I'm still trying to understand it. So it helps me be able to say it out loud to try to define it. To someone as well. So the other thing I've been up to, I've got to finish my Cox campus.

I'm still in the first course, like, it's, I think it's going to take me the whole school year to take this because it's just a lot more information than I thought. Like, it says, like, the oral language class is just four hours, but, like, it's going to take me, like, 16 hours. Four hours. Because I'm pausing and I'm, I can only absorb about half an hour information at a time out of that four hours.

And I'm taking tons of notes and defining words and, You know, downloading extra resources and printing them out and things like that. So it's going to take me a long time to, I think, get the structured literacy certification. That's okay. But it's, it's really good information. And so I'm glad I'm learning it.

And then I've really enjoyed I've been going [00:52:00] every, every Friday I've been going to the lunch and Lits. Yeah, that's been phenomenal. The last few weeks have been focused on a lot of coaching models of like how they have made effective school improvement. By doing student focused coaching, you know, and like building relationships where it's not just this like top down PD, you know, but it's more like where the, the teachers are really interested in driving it, you know, and then.

Based on the data of the students, and that's made it really effective for school improvement. And then there was an interesting one, too, about the research done behind knowledge based studies. You know, like the, the famous baseball study with, like, they, they, you know, a student who was a poor reader but knew a lot about baseball.

Yes. You know, performed better on the passage than better readers who didn't have prior knowledge about baseball. And somebody, like, [00:53:00] really delved into that in, like, You know, okay, how many baseball studies are there, you know, like, are there any kind of other kind of knowledge based studies, it was really interesting to kind of go really deep into the research and say, you know, like, okay, we're drawing a lot of conclusions from this research.

But let's make sure that we're like really understanding this research before we draw those conclusions from it.

Mary Saghafi: Cool.

Shannon Betts: Yeah, yeah, totally nerding out with like all these amazing literacy professors and everything that are on the I love this. Oops. I'm so glad that I can learn from you as well. This is so exciting and

send me some patients your way like meaning like You know, grace, blessings. I don't have as many clients as you do right now, so I've had time to to delve into all this professional learning for myself, but I needed this, like, especially because, like, it's different to You know, Oh, you're hired by school [00:54:00] and that school is trusting you to teach the kids, you know, and trusting your expertise and you're kind of giving it to a classroom or a small group and hoping that the things you do work out, right?

It's another to like, look at a parent in the eye week after week and say, I'm sending you the bill for this hour. And every minute of my time is going to be teaching your kid how to read. It's so true. And so I'm really, like, wanting to be on top of my game and on top of, like, all of the instructional and curriculum choices I'm making.

And you clearly are. To provide value. I mean, truly. Because the way we talk about it, how do you make your instructional decisions with data? And so you've got some really good data and then you dive into, okay, is this a research based, is it evidence based though? You know, how am I seeing the progress? Am I able to explain the progress to parents?

And I think you're right in a classroom setting, it's a very different [00:55:00] scenario. Because Of the amount of students that you have, the resources that you're, that are tied to your classroom. And like the, the different expectations, but I think that at the same time, like it's it is still similar, you know, you still felt that way when you were in the classroom.

Oh, I did. I took my accountability very seriously. Right. But I don't want to just rely on what's worked in the past, you know, to like, just, okay, I'm just going to try that Start with this like I really want it to be the best intervention choices for each of my individual clients. So I change and modify my curriculum choices a lot.

Mary Saghafi: And, and I think like when you think about it as a more prescriptive. Approach. And you know, you are building your own words. You are built, you know, I might be using some curriculum you know, from one thing, but I know which choices I'm making and why I'm making those choices. And it does. It [00:56:00] has a different level of accountability.

For your practice, but it also helps, I think, tremendously because you have an opportunity where a classroom teacher doesn't to really, truly explain to the parent why this is helpful and, and give them insight into, you know, what teachers do when making instructional decisions. Well, we're also seeing pretty immediately.

Oh, this thing is working or not, you know, like you can't always see that even in a small group of three, you know, but like one on one, you're like, Whoa, we did this last week. And like before last, and now they're still consistently applying it. And now they've mastered it. Oh my goodness. You know, like I had impact, and I made a difference.

You know, so that's very rewarding. I love that. Yeah. Man, good stuff. All right. I know this was longer than we expected, but I just geeked out on structured word inquiry and kept talking. Me lady, I like it. Thank y'all for joining us. The Reading[00:57:00] Teachers Lounge. All right. See you next month.