Reading Teachers Lounge

7.17 Impactful Interventions

• Shannon Betts and Mary Saghafi • Season 7 • Episode 17

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Shannon and Mary chat with Dr. Katie Pace-Miles about MTSS and RTI, sharing practical tips for delivering effective reading interventions, choosing quality resources, and running efficient team meetings to support struggling readers.   Whether you're a classroom teacher trying to support struggling readers, a specialist designing intervention programs, or a parent advocating for your child, this conversation provides clear, actionable guidance for making literacy interventions both manageable and truly impactful.

LINKS FOR RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE:

  1. Easy CBM
  2. Making Words Stick by Katie Pace Miles and Molly Ness *Amazon affiliate link*
  3. our episode with Molly Ness from Season 6
  4. overview of MTSS/RTI from understood.org
  5. meeting norms
  6. FCRR Fast Phrases
  7. Wrights Law
  8. Caregiver Guide from Katie Pace Miles
  9. Letter Knowledge Guide from Katie Pace Miles
  10. The Reading Institute website
  11. The Reading Institute on IG
  12. The Reading Institute (LinkedIn)
  13. The Reading Institute (Facebook)
  14. Katie Pace Miles' website
  15. Connect with Katie through LinkedIn
  16. Find Katie on IG
  17. McGraw Hill Science of Literacy Library:
    A free resource hub containing blogs, videos, research reports, and more— designed to connect teachers with practical classroom resources and Professional Learning tips.



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Shannon Betts:

Welcome to the Reading Teachers Lounge. Come join the conversation with other curious teachers as they discover teaching strategies and resources to reach all of their learners. I'm Shannon.

Mary Saghafi:

And I'm Mary, and together we bring an honest and experienced point of view to the topics we cover to shed light on best practices. Whether you're a new teacher seeking guidance, a seasoned pro looking for fresh ideas or a curious parent, our community offers something for everyone. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and cozy up in the virtual lounge with us and eavesdrop on our professional conversations.

Shannon Betts:

Listen, learn and immediately add to your bag of teaching tricks. Find what works for your students with us in the Reading Teachers Lounge.

Mary Saghafi:

Hello and welcome to the Reading Teachers Lounge. We are excited to have a new guest sharing with us today. We'd like to welcome Katie Pace-Miles. You may have already heard of Katie and she has a new book coming out called Making Words Stick, which is near and dear to my heart because it's all about orthographic mapping and some interventions. And she has a new book coming out called Making Words Stick, which is near and dear to my heart because it's all about orthographic mapping and some interventions. And she wrote it with a good friend of the show, Dr Molly Ness. So we're so excited to have you today that today we're going to be talking about interventions and effective meetings and making sure that the communication between who is responsible for what within the school, the parents, are understanding what's happening and that we're using quality interventions to really help lift up our struggling learners. So you come with a big variety of expertise, so we're so excited to have you. So can you tell us, Katie Pace-Miles, a little bit about yourself and the work that you do in the world of literacy?

Katie Pace Miles:

Sure. Thank you so much for having me. It's really an honor to be here. So I could sum up my work, I think, in three buckets.

Katie Pace Miles:

The first and my primary role is as a professor at Brooklyn College. I'm the professor and director of the Advanced Certificate in Reading Science at Brooklyn College, which is a part of the City University of New York system. That degree is a post-master's one year deep dive in science of reading coursework, of reading coursework. The second bucket of my work is a part of the City of the City University of New York system. That's my role as the co founder and principal investigator of CUNY reading core. Cuny is the acronym for the City University of New York. Cuny reading core provides training to over 650 education majors, who then provide high impact tutoring to over 2300 New York City public school students each year. These students come from families who overwhelmingly cannot afford private tutoring. And finally, I'm the founder and president of a nonprofit called the Reading Institute, and that organization enables me to share my reading intervention, reading Ready and another program, reading Go, as well as science of reading, professional learning at low or no cost to anyone who needs it.

Shannon Betts:

How did you find the science of reading? Was it during your own course learning, or kind of by doing the wrong practices and then learning about it? That was our, that was our journey.

Katie Pace Miles:

It was during my master's. So I actually I'm trained in elementary education. In my undergrad I started teaching and became very frustrated with the field of education right right out of the gate. And in fact I think I was frustrated with the field of education While I was doing my undergrad. I just found that I wasn't getting straight answers on things I come to come. Much later, I you know, I figured out that's because the answers weren't there in what I was being taught in my teacher prep program.

Katie Pace Miles:

So when I went to do my master's I said I'm not going into education, I'm gonna go into psychology. So I did my master's in educational psychology, which was a much more scientific approach to how we learn. It was all about learning and development. And from there I found the work of Dr Linnea Airy and I sought her out to do a PhD in educational psychology and I'm just forever grateful that she brought me on with a fellowship to complete my doctorate with her. And that is in experimental psychology. So it's educational psychology and the focus is learning, development and instruction, with a specialization in the acquisition of reading. And the way you hone in on the acquisition of reading when you work with Dr Aries. You're trained as an experimental psychologist to test approaches to see which ones are statistically significantly you know more impactful on the young student or emergent reader than others on the young student or emergent reader than others, which is the title of this episode.

Shannon Betts:

like impactful interventions.

Katie Pace Miles:

So that's perfect. I'm also just kind of laughing. It's like a fancy way of just doing what I was doing before as a reading specialist. So in my practitioner realm prior to getting my PhD, my favorite job was being a reading specialist. They called us a learning specialist at that point in time. I still look back so fondly on that work, and actually my CUNY Reading Corps work is a project that is so near and dear to my heart because I just feel like it's an expansion of what I was able to do at the school level. I'm able to give reading interventions to kids all over New York City. It's just me wearing my reading interventionist cap.

Shannon Betts:

That was my favorite role as well. Like I have, I've kind of gone back and forth between homeroom teacher, interventionist, back to homeroom, back to interventionist, back to homeroom, and then now I'm a reading tutor, but it was like doing action research all the time.

Shannon Betts:

All the time, yeah, and then you know, I would pull from my bag of tricks and I would always get like one or two students which any other trick didn't work and I would kind of invent new techniques from there or dive into more research to find, you know, what will work with this student that nothing else worked with.

Katie Pace Miles:

Oh yeah.

Mary Saghafi:

Yep, and, funny enough, I had similar feelings in my undergrad and I started teaching as well as teaching kindergarten, and I realized that I had kindergarten students who were later diagnosed with dyslexia. But I thought, why did I just get a four-year degree and if I don't know how to teach these children to read? So I knew I could teach readers to become better readers and this is what Shannon and I always say but I had a very hard time learning to teach non-readers to become readers and I just felt like I did not have that skill set. And so I went into special education and I found it even got more complex, and I did. I did get some help in assisting and learning some new, more proper interventions, but I still felt like I was woefully underprepared to really identify what the behaviors looked like within the students and how I could in fact actually diagnose and provide some intervention. That would be most appropriate, and I think that we might get into this.

Mary Saghafi:

But I can also share that I sort of felt like there was some gatekeeping that was happening at the district level, because if I were one, I often didn't even know what to ask for when I came up to the problem of here is the kid. I'm noticing this, you know, and guessing is really just not an appropriate or effective use of my time. And so I was getting very frustrated and I would go and I would ask smarter teachers than me, I would go ask some of the administration and I didn't feel like I was getting answers, and I also would do some research on my own and I would be told in meetings and I like cringe at this, but I was told if you offer or if you would suggest, that that means that the district has to pay for it and we're not going to pay for it, and it just that's so cringy to me.

Mary Saghafi:

Oh make me turn Right, it does. It's just so sadly for the district there was a lawsuit that came out and I was part of training as part of the solution to this. So I was trained in teacher certification for Orton Gillingham, which has kind of sent me on this journey of that. I now work as an advocate to help families ask for what their students need because it's just something that, just like you, it just doesn't sit well with me.

Katie Pace Miles:

It just doesn't. It's amazing that we're already we're going here on educator prep so much of my passion has really it is all it's about the children learning how to read. Passion has really it is all it's about the children learning how to read. But so closely related to that, if not in tandem, is what training has the teacher received to best perform her duties to teach all children how to read. And so at the university, it's become this mission of mine to make sure any student who's in an education major, and that could be at the undergrad or grad level, that they are equipped not just with the knowledge of how the brain learns how to read, but then the practice of actually teaching an emergent reader.

Katie Pace Miles:

Overwhelmingly, we're working with striving emergent readers. So students who have fallen behind grade level and we do this in a very practical way they get training. In these intervention programs that I'm a part of, they get a kit of materials something that I never received when I was being trained as a teacher and they must implement 20 sessions of high-impact tutoring with the student and they have to track data all the way through. It's not just pre post, it's that formative, informal assessment that's happening all the way through and it really opens the pre-service or in-service teacher If they're in a master's degree. It really opens up her mind to the power I think that's within her to teach children how to read, and teach any child how to read. A striving reader is going to make progress through a structured literacy format when you can respond to data that's presented to you.

Shannon Betts:

I hope they realize how fortunate they are to be equipped with that, because I feel so much guilt over, like the students who got away, you know, and I know you know what I mean about that you know, like the ones who I had in the years prior, before I, before I knew better and could do better you know, and I gave them 100% effort of my knowledge at that time.

Shannon Betts:

But once you, you know, have better techniques and you're informed about the science of reading, you know your instructional approaches do change, and so I hope that they are aware of what valuable like resources and knowledge you're equipping them with at the start of their career. That's amazing.

Mary Saghafi:

Well, and I think that this is sort of how I hope that this conversation continues to go. So we've laid a foundation of why you know what is the need right now. We're expressing it right now. So let's move our conversation to a more positive light and, explaining a little bit more about what to do, shine the light on what you know. What are these best practices, what should it look like? So let's lay a foundation a little bit.

Shannon Betts:

Can we also maybe lay a framework of like what you, Mary, you called intervention, what students need? I really like that and I had a training that somebody said intervention equals instruction. I equals I. So, there's a difference between data collection and the intervention lays within. Because, like you and I both just talked about, like jobs that we've had as interventionists, where does that even fit in within the school? Can you give? And I know that some places call it MTSS some places. Call it RTI Can you just explain all that for us.

Katie Pace Miles:

That's right. So MTSS, rti. Mtss stands for multi-tiered systems of support, rti stands for response to intervention. I have been working with schools that really have gone back to this simpler name response to intervention. Multi-tiered systems of support means that it's both the academic and the behavioral. Response to intervention is focusing more on the academic. It's really pretty much all about the academic, but of course you need to have that awareness of the social, emotional piece that's going on with the students.

Katie Pace Miles:

So RTI starts. It's a triangle and at the base level, which is the largest level, you have your tier one or core instruction. Some schools call it the universal instruction, and this should be highly effective instruction that all students are receiving, and we're going to focus on literacy here. So in their English language arts instruction and the vast majority of students should be successful with meeting benchmarks, performing well on the unit assessments, whatever at that moment you need to assess they should be responding well to what that instruction is. At tier one, students who do not respond to or find success with the core or tier one instruction move up a level in the triangle and they should be receiving targeted small group instruction based on the skill that needs support. And here you really need to start thinking about. What is that instruction? What's the dosage? Who is providing this and at what point does the student go? At what point does the student not need to be pulled out in small group instruction?

Katie Pace Miles:

So assessment is throughout this whole model. But I won't be too romantic here, I'll just move on to it. Typically, the last tier in the triangle is called Tier 3. And for students who are not responding well to Tier 2, they move into through assessments. We determine they need even more intensive intervention, which is hopefully one-on-one, so the students move into that top tier, tier 3. And again, this has to be, it's got to be well-documented, there's got to be assessments. We need to be even more precise with the skills that we are supporting and the dosage that we are providing in that type of instruction. So I could go on and on about this, but maybe I'll stop there.

Shannon Betts:

What came to light for me? Well, first off, when I was an interventionist, I was part of tier two, and also here in Georgia we considered considered, like English, the ESOL instruction for English language learners as tier two as well and so we were providing that small group.

Shannon Betts:

But then once I kind of went back from being an interventionist to being back to a homeroom teacher, I realized and I kind of saw in my classroom kind of all those tiers at the same time that a student, if they're at tier three and they're getting that one-on-one, they should actually still be getting all of the triangles, parts of the triangle underneath it.

Shannon Betts:

So you don't like stop a small group once you do the one-on-one, you're actually adding another layer of instruction to see okay, even more dosage. And it's not just throwing spaghetti at the wall, but it's a targeted like we are going to find the biggest weakness to try to target and close that gap and give the biggest impact so that then everything else of the learning can start to stick for the student. You know.

Katie Pace Miles:

That's right. That's right, and and it would. Nothing would be worse than that student missing the core instruction. Exactly the background knowledge building that's happening in core instruction has to be a part of their education.

Shannon Betts:

Feeling overwhelmed about all the demands of your students, looking for more resources and strategies to help your readers.

Mary Saghafi:

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Shannon Betts:

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Mary Saghafi:

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Shannon Betts:

And then also here in Georgia. What we did is, like, if they were not responding to the tier three at a certain timeline, then we would, and we would have meetings with families as well, like when we move into tier two, into tier three, because tier three intervention and the like the data showed that you know they weren't meeting their, their goals. Then we would have a conversation as a team, including the parents, um, about possible testing and evaluation, and so we, like, merged the, the tier three with the sst system yes, yes, yes, some schools call that and we had mentioned this before when we were chatting tier four.

Katie Pace Miles:

Some are calling it their special ed services, whatever your district refers to it, as that's absolutely right, Tier three doesn't become the stagnant point in time where you're just constantly delivering tier three.

Shannon Betts:

They shouldn't be in tier three for three years, like that's horrible.

Katie Pace Miles:

They should not. Yes, tier three is like the other tiers. Right, it's how is the student responding to what's being provided? If there is progress, keep going. If there is not, we need to make the next move.

Mary Saghafi:

I will just share too, because what happens in under my professional circumstances a private tutor and an advocate I will have parents come to me and say we noticed something's wrong. The school is saying they're doing okay and they keep moving from tier two up to tier three but then back to tier two. Should we get a private evaluation and the reason for a private?

Shannon Betts:

evaluation I was about to mention that because that's what I had to do for my son Mary, because he kept meeting his academic goals.

Mary Saghafi:

Right. So this is where it becomes a little bit confusing for parents, so I'm going to try to shed some light on what this means. So when a student is showing these behaviors and moving from tier three down to tier two, then back to and back and forth, it's showing that there is still a deficit, that they don't have a strong foundation, and what I am noticing is usually that there's gaps in their learning and those gaps haven't yet been closed by what's happening at the school. So, as a professional tutor, what I suggest is that I'm going to do some informal evaluations, I'm going to take some observational notes and I'm going to let the parents know I'm noticing some of these. This could warrant a private evaluation or go back to the school and say I'm still concerned about this.

Mary Saghafi:

How are you meeting my students' needs? You know, when it comes to, let's say, orthographic mapping, I'm still concerned about this. How are you meeting my students' needs? You know, when it comes to, let's say, orthographic mapping, I noticed that they're continuously spelling their high frequency words wrong. I noticed that their spelling is really inconsistent. They're not choosing appropriate vowel sounds when they're spelling their, their words. They're not at grade level spelling skills, yet they're reading high frequency words or reading grade level words, but mostly just calling, and often I will also see in this behavior that they're reading the first part of a word and guessing the end part of the word. So those are behaviors that I'm looking for as a tutor but parents should be aware of, teachers should be very aware of, and then that should signal to them oh, there's a gap, that's that's in this skill that the student is not able, you know, to fully master yet, and moving forward with that student means that they're still not going to have mastery and they're not going to probably make as much progress.

Katie Pace Miles:

That's such a huge point too, and I want to acknowledge the privilege of the private evaluation. This is really important to call out. All three of us have lived in this space. Some families can quickly go towards the private evaluation, but we want to acknowledge it. I'm in New York city. It costs thousands of dollars here to get a private evaluation. I paid $7,000.

Katie Pace Miles:

Oh there, Okay, and you're in Georgia. Yeah, thank you for being so transparent, shannon. I mean, this is that's an enormous financial burden for a family. It was a burden for our family, oh yes, my goodness. And that's not a one-time cost either for families who are considering this right. Every couple of years you're going back and doing a re-e will come up on the private evaluation. But also, if the reading specialist, the interventionist, is deep in the knowledge of the development of literacy as well as the knowledge of structured literacy they can put, they can very likely diagnose the issue and put forth an effective plan and avoid the seven thousand dollar price tag. I'm not, I don't want to deter families from getting the private avail, but I want to acknowledge that's out of that's out of the realm of reality for so many, and so there's a way you're not doomed without that. Mary just put together a great plan.

Shannon Betts:

Yeah, and if the go ahead and if the tier three intervention and goal are very clear, like we're going to improve students' word accuracy, especially the endings of words you know, and so that's what the goal is, that's what's going to be measured as a starting point and all the progress monitoring.

Shannon Betts:

They're going to set a goal for improvement. And then also every instructional session of intervention is going to be targeting that one weakness, because they're still getting the lower levels of instruction. So it's not like you're ignoring, you know, all the other aspects of reading. You're just trying to target this one weakness to see do they respond to that intense intervention.

Katie Pace Miles:

That's right, and it's the frequency and dosage of the intervention aligned to the needs of the student. That has to be a universality when we're talking about both tier two and tier three. It can't be once a week.

Mary Saghafi:

It can't be once a week. I love that and that's, I think that, the frustration that comes from parents as well. Parents think that getting a private evaluation will equal getting their students special education, and this is a misconception and it's very confusing and very upsetting to parents because it makes this.

Mary Saghafi:

I hear this from parents often, and so the overwhelming thing that I hear is the school doesn't understand my kids' needs. They're not meeting my kids' needs. If you have a student who gets a private evaluation, they receive a diagnosis. That means that the criteria under these tests that they have provided in a private setting can give a medical diagnosis, let's say for dyslexia. If there is not the educational curved need within the school system, the school is not seeing that. It is what is the word I'm thinking of? It's not impacting them to the degree that it does within two standard deviations below. Let's say, then, that student may not qualify for special education interventions, and that is very frustrating because what the parent hears at that meeting is well, your kid's not performing well, but they're not performing bad enough, so we don't really need to give them anything, they just need to try harder. And that makes parents' heads explode.

Katie Pace Miles:

Oh, my goodness, I feel like my head's going to explode just hearing you say that.

Shannon Betts:

My son fell in that gray area where he has never qualified for special ed. He kind of goes back and forth between into tier two with early intervention support and some years he gets it, some years he doesn't, depending on his test scores on the state test. But he did because we had that private medical diagnosis we were able to get accommodations through 504. And so he does have some special accommodations like extended time for testing and small group. He uses special kind of pens because he has dysgraphia. There are a couple things through 504 that parents can do, which is 504 is sort of like this adjacent area to the triangle. That's sort of tier four, but not really yeah.

Katie Pace Miles:

And it's amazing, you're talking about accommodations versus interventions though, right. So, and Mary, this goes to your point of what is the right of the family and the child, what is their right to receive. Accommodations are much easier for schools and districts to provide than interventions. Interventions take capacity, they take effective programming, they take capacity of individuals at the school to offer the interventions and they take a lot of scheduling support. And you know, maybe I was.

Katie Pace Miles:

As we're talking, I'm just thinking about I don't want schools, I want schools to hear us talking about this and think, oh, I could do that though, right. Like COVID is showing that high impact instruction, where it was short lessons delivered multiple times a week, so three to five times a week, that moved the needle for vulnerable populations of students. Also, if and I think Shannon was talking about this this pinpoint, diagnostic approach to interventions or maybe, Mary, that was your, both of you right, but you're going with these interventions, there is no time to be wasted. The support is needed in. You provide that support and you ensure that the way you're doing it is through a structured literacy approach which, as I'm sure your listeners know, is explicit, systematic instruction with targeted feedback, prompt, targeted feedback. That is data-driven. That is what we know to be effective.

Shannon Betts:

Correct. Yeah, and you were talking about like being doable, and I'm looking at the side, like I think this is a good time to pull up my calendar that when I was teaching second grade this is the I had bought this at like the dollar tree at the beginning of each school year and it kind of had it was like a month long calendar for the whole school year that I would use and I would write down all the students' initials and then when I met with them for Tier 3. And this was what my documentation was so that I could. Then we had to, because it was Tier 3 and I was at the school level we had to type it all into our Infinite Campus school, you know, learning management system, and so I had to keep very good records and this was a system that I landed on and you can see through my notes here I mean, this is from 2018.

Shannon Betts:

So this is many years ago, but just from my notes you can see that what I was working on with the students so I have like SJA letter sounds- so, I just started with letter sounds because this was in the fall and I worked on letter sounds for the first month and I also marked the different dates that I did progress monitoring.

Shannon Betts:

I would write down PR on my. I would print them all out at the beginning of the month from EasyCBM is usually what I used, and so for this letter sounds I would print out the you know letter sounds probes and I would have them all in a folder. I would go ahead and write the student's names on it and then maybe have the expected date when I wanted to give that progress monitoring probe, you know in pencil, and then I would circle it on my calendar, the date I actually did it so that I had it dated, and then I would mark and you can see I did it one week, I did it four times that week for this student. Oh, four times again the next week, four times the next week, three times the next week. Then I have that the next month that one of the students went to short bowels from there.

Shannon Betts:

So then we were only working on short bowels. Um and not um, the letter sounds anymore. I also would write down when the students were absent or when I was absent, so that would go when um, I had marked all the times when I contacted the parent, um, when we had meetings, and it was just in like a one stop job where I had all my data collected and you're right that I found this is even before I really knew the research.

Shannon Betts:

but it was just sort of my own experience that I realized that it was better for me to meet with them four to five times a week for five to 10 minutes than it was to have a great lesson for 30 minutes once a week and I could pull them especially. Some of these students came to me first thing in the morning. They were like the first off the bus students and I could get my intervention done before the bell rang you know before announcements, so I got real creative.

Shannon Betts:

Or if they were end of dismissal students, I could do it at dismissal, you know, or I'd pull them, you know, in the transition between lunch and specials or whatever I found time to do it, or sometimes I would keep them, like I would see their small group, and then I would dismiss the small group and keep those one or two students, like you know to do the intervention at the five at the tail end of the small group.

Katie Pace Miles:

That. What a great way to do it right there. That is fantastic. What I could tell from that calendar is that you were probably on the edge of your seat with all of that documentation ready to jump to vowel sounds, right. You were like, okay, as soon as I know they've got it, I'm going and I always talk with my university students who are even if they're pre-service teachers I call them now interventionists, right, because they're providing high impact tutoring. I always say keep it walking, keep it walking.

Shannon Betts:

I'm sure you know Wiley Blevins in New York. I've always followed his scope and sequence because it's my favorite. So yeah, you're right, I knew where I was taking them.

Katie Pace Miles:

You knew that's a great approach. You know where you're taking them. You're not languishing in this certain group of letter sounds longer, even a minute longer than that student needs If they're a striving reader. Time is of the essence and so we're pushing it. It takes us back to our early teacher prep days of zone of proximal development. That really comes into play when you're a reading interventionist. Right, you are pushing the edge of that zone of proximal development, moving them, getting them ready for the next piece.

Shannon Betts:

Well and they responded very well to it. You know, like these students these were second graders we were doing letter sounds they felt very ineffective a lot of the school day.

Shannon Betts:

But when I had them in that safe space around the kidney table they responded so well to my intervention because they were like, oh my gosh, you're giving me just right work. Thank you so much. Oh, this is in pieces that I can actually learn. Yay, you know, and then they were okay, you can push that ZPD gently if it's the right level. But a lot of times I've been in we're going to talk about ineffective meetings a little while but I've been in some ineffective times where they've actually said the intervention to do would be like a grade level one, which that's not appropriate.

Mary Saghafi:

Like if there are three grade levels behind.

Shannon Betts:

You can't give a grade level intervention. You've got to meet the students where they are. Absolutely.

Mary Saghafi:

I'm going to share a little bit about kind of coaching parents up, because I know we have some parent listeners and one of the big things that I hear from parents is we don't have time to wait, we don't have any time to waste, and they are absolutely correct. That is not an invalid statement at all, but I think the answer then is what Shannon just provided you have to allow the school to provide interventions that are targeted, that use valid data and I'm going to just carefully say that really valid data providing these appropriate interventions, because if a student is then not making that progress, we need to have that documented, because then the student is then entitled to a free evaluation from the school for special education services, and that is just an evaluation to see if they are found eligible for special education services. Again, once those special education services are then received, you don't stop this intervention. You are still providing tier one instruction because you want to be making sure that the student is receiving grade appropriate education. But, just as Shannon said, providing the intervention in a systematic, explicit way.

Mary Saghafi:

I think what parents need to hear is well, what is the next step? And that's what Shannon was just talking about with her scope and sequence. In a meeting you should be able to share. This is what I'm looking for, this is what you can also be looking for, and then this is where we're going next. So if we have mastered consonant sounds, we're looking for vowel sounds. I noticed that your child is having difficulty with the eh and the ih sound, which is very common in the South.

Katie Pace Miles:

Very common yeah.

Mary Saghafi:

And so you know when you are. Maybe you're driving in the car. Here's an example of something that you can do in the car give them a word and ask them what vowel sound do they hear? Giving parents just a little bit of insight to that provides so much more trust and it sounds and is received very differently than well. We need to take some more data. That is a very nebulous kind of thing to say, so I would recommend in meetings giving the parents something to do next or sharing with them what the next expectation is will actually save you so much in the long run because it does provide trust and they know that if they're not also seeing the progress, then there is still going to be another plan as to what can happen next.

Mary Saghafi:

So this framework is in place for a big reason. It is not a let's wait to fail kind of methodology and that often gets like a soundbite and gets shared. But I have seen very real circumstances where parents do feel that way and students feel that way, and Shannon and I often talk about that too. When you're not receiving what you need, you're going to demonstrate some behaviors, you're going to demonstrate frustration, you're going to feel very othered, and that doesn't provide a safe learning environment for you to take risks and move forward. So I just wanted to share that piece because I do think, again, parents are entitled to free evaluation. A private evaluation is not necessary, but it also may not speed up the process either. It may identify the areas of weakness and it may provide some recommendations and some targeted recommendations within the classroom. However, what we're talking about is what's actually happening in the classroom, and the school does and is responsible for sharing that information with teachers and parents. Right, Okay, so soapbox had to. Just I love it.

Katie Pace Miles:

I love it. I'm just going to add if any parents need a resource for emergent readers, I have two free resources, of course, that we give out through the Reading Institute. One is called the Caregiver Guide and the other is the Letter Knowledge Guide, and they're very simple activities. The Caregiver Guide mirrors the structured literacy tutoring in Reading Ready and we distill it down into a fun, easy to implement games. I'm a parent of two young children and so we really and my colleagues that worked on this with me we really wanted to make it parent friendly, and it gives what Mary was just saying, like what words should I focus on? So it gives you the list of words and what you should do with them, right before you eat dinner, as you're sitting down, as you're driving in the car.

Shannon Betts:

Thank you, we'll link to those in the show notes. I just noted those down. I will say too, to add to what Mary said as well, that it's easier to have a scope and sequence when the clear area of weakness is decoding, and that's typically where I start with intervention.

Shannon Betts:

If the data is showing that you know they can't decode, then that's usually what I target before I can target any of the other areas of reading. But if they are mastered, if they have mastered decoding. And then another area is the struggle like vocabulary or fluency comprehension. That's a little bit more challenging to have a clear scope and sequence but you can find, you know, the biggest weakness within those areas. You know like maybe in fluency it's phrasing. So then you choose, you know FCRR activities based on phrasing. You know, and those are your intervention activities that you follow, and then you measure it by giving words per minute assessments regularly or something. Or you know if it's a comprehension, comprehension is typically going to be improved as they're decoding, influency improved. But then also if you have a strong tier one curriculum, especially one rooted in a knowledge based curriculum, then hopefully their comprehension will improve that way.

Katie Pace Miles:

It's a really important point, Shannon, too, because we're making this sound, like you know, in a way simplistic of like, okay, you figure out where the problem is and you jump in there. But there's a big part of this that support the development of reading and in structured literacy, right, these are oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, morphology, syntax, semantics. Of course, comprehension is an umbrella over some of those. You're providing an intervention that hits on multiple components at once. So you need a really strong intervention program that does that. And then from there, while you're providing that intervention, maybe in a small group, maybe one-on-one you're seeing oh, wait, a second, that's where the weakness lies, right, it's the phrasing. It is very difficult to determine that in your tier one instruction unless you've reconfigured your tier one instruction to look more like tier two, which I know some teachers have. So I just want to acknowledge this idea of multi-component intervention versus diagnostic intervention, where you're just going to hone in on phrasing.

Mary Saghafi:

I agree and I think that if you have a student who's a struggling reader, you should know those areas and it should be if you have.

Mary Saghafi:

If your student is in tier two, you might not be meeting with the school regularly, but if your student is in tier three, they likely need multiple components to make sure that they're processing through. So you should be aware of multiple areas. So if you are already involved in MTSS or RTI meetings, parents' ears, teachers' ears should perk up for these multi components of literacy and a lot of times that is fluency vocabulary, including some of these phonemic components. So maybe it's understanding the alphabet and knowing the alphabetic principle that would be in the earlier grades. You would likely see that happening If you are noticing some more decoding. What I really like to emphasize as well to parents is the encoding piece. Absolutely there should not be a huge gap between their ability to read words that are grade level and spell those words. As long as morphology is provided, as long as phonics instruction is provided, those students should be able to chunk words, choose appropriate phonemes to spell those words, have their brain working in an organized orthographic mapping process.

Mary Saghafi:

And I know that these are some jargony words, but these are all kind of red flags that the school is doing or green flags that the school is doing the right thing. If you are just hearing. Oh, we're just working on fluency and we're doing oral reading, fluency, one minute timed, which means that they're reading a grade level passage and we want to see how fast they're reading and how, and they're not even talking about the errors that the child is making. That's a big red flag, that's a I want to know what are the errors? Why are those errors occurring? Is my child reading slowly? Because it's taking them a long time to process that information.

Katie Pace Miles:

So I want to really kind of just dig a little bit deeper into this and just let parents know that there's a lot that goes into this, but you should also be getting this feedback in real time. It's reasonable to ask those questions. And then, where are you going next? It's that for parents. I would always advise them to ask those those three questions. Where were they? What are we doing now? Where do we go?

Mary Saghafi:

next, I want to share too that oral reading fluency. A minute time thing is still an appropriate intervention. Let me just share that. The data collection, data collection, the data collection, yes, exactly, but the intervention aside from okay phew.

Katie Pace Miles:

I'm glad that we're clearing that up. It's a really interesting point you're making, because there has been some research about repeated readings that hasn't been favorable, so we have to be careful with what we're saying here. What Shannon was talking about was this effective approach to working on phrasing right and phrasing. You do have to have a moment where you're actually putting it in context. You're reading a full passage. Anyway, we're getting very nuanced here, but we're checking ourselves.

Shannon Betts:

I think this is a good time to bring up how we're communicating to stakeholders about all this stuff. So let's talk about we always had a meeting that happened with families and the grade level team and usually like the counselor or maybe assistant principal when it moved from tier two to tier three, and that was sort of the initial meeting, and then we would communicate. I mean, ideally, the homeroom teacher had been communicating to the parent this whole time where kind of the small group instruction had been going on and saying you know what? I've noticed? Your student is behind in reading. This is what we're working on. I've set a goal for the student that they haven't met their goal, even though we've been doing it in a small group like two or three times a week, and so I'm now going to be bringing it to the school level, and so then we would have a meeting. What would happen at that meeting? And then what would happen ideally, at subsequent meetings?

Katie Pace Miles:

Yeah well, shannon, I think you're asking me this and I'm going to kind of pull out for a second, tell us what not to do.

Katie Pace Miles:

I'm actually going to just talk for a second about just the structure of meetings. Mary Shannon and I were having quite a chat about different types of meetings that we have been a part of across our careers and I'm in academia, as you all know, and I have been a part of so many spiraling, dysfunctional meetings, and so I don't mean to make this my own meeting therapy session. But I do just want to talk about effective meetings in general and acknowledge that professions often outside of education have meeting norms for groups of teachers at schools that may create more effective instruction for students before we even get to the point where we are in a tier three, potentially tier four situation, and so let's just go through a couple of these principles that I've learned over the years. The first is that any meeting at a school should have an agenda that's set in advance and published ahead of time, and that everyone has a deadline to contribute to that agenda prior to the point a reasonable point in time prior to the meeting starting. So everyone feels like they have a voice. The goals of the meeting need to be stated at the top of the meeting, and the success of the meeting is based on whether those goals were met. So you're stating these goals at the beginning and the very last thing you do at the top of the meeting and the success of the meeting is based on whether those goals were met so you're stating these goals at the beginning and the very last thing you do at the end is ask the group have the goals been met?

Katie Pace Miles:

You will need to appoint a facilitator. Sometimes that facilitator rotates. Other times you all agree that this one person is the person that should be running the meetings and they're effective at doing it, and that person needs to be very good with time management. Or you have a facilitator and you have a different person that's going to deal with the time management. Time management needs to be done appropriately and considerately. So sometimes a topic does need another minute or two because you can't progress to the next bullet point unless you resolve this. So there has to be consideration and flexibility. But the time management also needs to know when are we going to put a pin in this? Because we're spiraling here.

Katie Pace Miles:

When it comes to student learning, it's got to be all about action items. What are your next steps? Learning it's got to be all about action items. What are your next steps? How are we going to take action with regards to assessment and instruction? And then every meeting towards the end, you've got the summary of next steps that align to the action items. Then you go back to the goals and at the start of the next meeting then you address what the action items were, were they met, and then you jump into the meeting for that week. So I think sometimes you know, in my work I've had to, because I have these different projects going on, I've I've had to, a little bit like master. I think the art of this efficient meeting protocol, as well as the documentation of meetings over time where you can really conversations about what an efficient and effective meeting would be to improve student outcomes, is worth everyone's time.

Mary Saghafi:

Louder for the people in the back. I could not agree more Oftentimes, as an advocate, I am initiating an agenda for the team and you know I really shouldn't be you, it shouldn't be me. It should be led by the school. And the reason it should not be led by me as an advocate is because it comes in as adversarial rather than partnership, and what I my goal is is to make it a partnership. I want the teacher to partner with the parent. I want the parent to understand what the school's perspective is. I want the support to be a bridge for that student and so making I mean there are some people who are very good at meetings.

Mary Saghafi:

There are some people who are not. I am a person who goes on a tangent I it is not my as many of our listeners might know, um, but it is not my um preferred choice to be a facilitator within a meeting. So I think this is just it's important. I want to keep going to make sure that we are are talking about this, but we'll make sure that on our social media feed we also reference what are these effective pieces for running a meeting?

Shannon Betts:

Sorry, shannon, go for it. No, thank you so much, for I think you basically answered my question of, like, how all this should be communicated to the family, when you described how a meeting goes, with the agenda and things like that. And so then there's clear action items of this is the intervention that was chosen, this is the goal for the next meeting, these are the data collection probes that are going to be given and how many of them are going to be given between this meeting and the next meeting, and that's how it's all communicated, and then everybody knows their responsibilities between that meeting and the next meeting, which I think is fantastic. Is there anything else you want to share with teachers, like, while we have you with us, of just favorite interventions to do, what else they can do to make these interventions just more possible and feasible and then also impactful?

Katie Pace Miles:

I want every person who's working with a child on the development of literacy to think of themselves as an interventionist. And what's bothered me about higher ed again, I'm a part of higher ed and so I'm going to throw some critiques that way is that we insist that people have to come back to the institution to get a specialized degree and sit for the state test and then become the reading interventionist, and I really want to challenge that mindset.

Shannon Betts:

I've never done that actually. Oh, thank you, Shannon, that's how I don't have the paper behind my name.

Katie Pace Miles:

I love your transparency. That's so great. I have all these pre-service teachers that are making a huge impact and we know this from looking at pre post data. They're serving as a tier three interventionist right now, and that's because it's all about the quality of the program that they have received, the quality of the training that they have received, the support and oversight that they are getting. And then it's all about what we had talked about before the bond, the social, emotional piece of ensuring that striving readers feel comfortable and safe in that moment with that individual who's providing the intervention. And so I just want everyone, anyone who's working with students in an intervention setting, to think of themselves as having the most elite degree.

Katie Pace Miles:

You know you've got this If you know how to move through assessments and read assessment data, which really is just about. Has the school conducted a screener? Have they interpreted that screener for you and helped you figure out who needs the support? Is there some type of diagnostic data? Who is doing the progress monitoring? What type of informal assessments are you giving each lesson to know what to do the next day? That sounds fancy and complicated, but once you're in it, it's not, and you're not in that part alone. The assessment data should not fall all on one person at a school. It should not fall all on the reading interventionist.

Shannon Betts:

I'm going to add one extra thought that made it a lot easier for me to do RTI without taking too much time was to have my own printer.

Shannon Betts:

Like I bought an HP printer and I got like the Insta ink, you know. So I would pay like a few dollars a month and the ink would just sort of show up like the Insta ink, you know. So I would pay like a few dollars a month and the ink would just sort of show up. And that was a way I was able to batch a lot of my work. Like I was able to print a month worth of probes. You know, I'd walk out that meeting or I would know in my own mind what probes I was giving for the next month, have them already in the folders ready to go. They were at the front of my desk, right by my monitor, and that just really, really helped. And then I could also print interventions, because a lot of times the interventions I would choose were from FCRR.

Katie Pace Miles:

Yes, wonderful, and they're easy to.

Shannon Betts:

I mean, that's what you were saying Like anybody could be an interventionist. They have such clear directions and those are research-based as effective, so you could give anyone that intervention to implement, as long as they're implementing it, you know, with integrity and fidelity.

Katie Pace Miles:

That's right. I love what you're just saying about a printer. That's so practical, and I've never actually reflected on the fact that when I was a reading specialist, I had my own printer as well. That's a huge point. And also what, now that I'm distributing these interventions for free to these fleets of tutors? We print everything for them. We do not expect them to print anything, so great point.

Shannon Betts:

It was very. It made things a lot easier than you know. Some days the copy would be broken and we were out of paper and things. It was just if I had paper and I had my own printer, I could do all these things and it wouldn't take up too much time or energy.

Mary Saghafi:

What a great thing to ask for at the beginning of the school year as a teacher wishlist. You know, even if it's you know, to contribute to buying that printer or contributing to ink, something like that. Parents are often willing to provide things like that that can make a teacher's life easier. So great suggestion. I love that. Katie Pace Miles, thank you so much for this information. It's been lovely to share this with you.

Shannon Betts:

I hope we can do a return and chat some more, maybe even get we want to talk to you about orthographic mapping, because I know that's your major specialty.

Katie Pace Miles:

I have my favorite, my favorite topic. It's my North Star of my intervention work, so I'd love to come back anytime. Thank you for having me.

Mary Saghafi:

Thank you so much, and we appreciate your knowledge and your ability to share it so genuinely, authentically and communicated in such a nice way for our listeners. All right, till next time, take care.