[Listen Again] Ep. 128: Dear Balanced Literacy Teacher with Missy Purcell

Dear Balanced Literacy Teacher , this is an important topic in literacy because we want to normalize the idea that kids can learn how to read with structured literacy instruction , instead of our current norm in classrooms , which is that there are struggling readers . With structured literacy instruction , we can cast a wider net to reach all students .

Feel free to tell us anything else about yourself that we don't already know .

I have three boys and they are all , sadly , products of balanced literacy that's another story for another day Married to my wonderful husband , mark , for over 20 years , and we also have a little puppy that's name is Comet , who's probably sleeping close by and hopefully won't join the podcast today . That's right , we don't mind .

You know everything that you could find . Everything was well-read , well-loved , literacy was just a part of our home . I love reading , I love teaching reading , and so I assumed that he would do just as well as his brothers . He went to preschool , loved preschool and we had a really great preschool .

However , when he left preschool , I remember getting a letter from his preschool teacher telling me how much they loved him and they were so sad to see him leave to go to kindergarten , and I remember the words that stung , where we were a little disappointed that he didn't make more progress , and I thought and that was really the first time I knew there was a

problem and then I'm looking at this paper and he didn't know any of his sounds for his letters . So he had the only letter he knew was M for Matthew , and that was his name , so he heard it all the time , so he knew that mm-mm sound , but that's all he knew . And I knew that was not the same as my older two boys .

So I took that knowledge straight into the kindergarten teacher and I remember her telling me at the first conference fall conferences , don't worry , you know , they all develop at their own pace . He's also a little young for his age . He'll catch up . And so I believed it then . But I was still worried because I thought that's just weird .

The other two , that was not my experience and I kept hearing that he'll catch up . I heard that at the end of kindergarten , first grade was a little different . He didn't catch up . So , even though they weren't worried , they put him in reading recovery , which I didn't know at that point that I knew reading recovery as a former teacher .

So I was excited that they were going to put him in a program that was going to help him , or I thought was going to help him and it's one on one like that feels like .

And about week 10 of that program he got , I got a letter from the , from the teacher , the reading recovery teacher , letting me know that he was kind of stalled and she asked me to give him a pep talk and asked me if I was reading to him at home , and so I felt a little shamed as a former teacher and as a parent , like , oh , we're not , we're not

doing the right thing and he's not making progress .

And just to hear those things about your child , who I'm sure was putting a million percent effort out there .

Coincidentally , these are behavior plans in our district for behaviors in class . They feel serious . They're not really that big of a deal Like the kids don't know that , but it feels like a big deal because you have to go see the administrator . So you know he was getting .

He got an action plan for making armpit noises I can't even say that with a straight face and he couldn't write it . So he had to draw a picture of himself making armpit noises . Um , that was his , his bad deed , and then he got in trouble for that . But it was during reading group and then he started getting sick every day , especially on dictation day .

They had to write , um , they had to dictate words and sentences and he failed them every week and he got big red . I wish you know I could show you , but he got big red ink marks about his letters floating in the air and you know how to write this and it was just . And then he couldn't even read the teacher's notes right .

So , weirdly enough , though he's getting these dictation cheats , he's failing , but in reading recovery he's got this writing book that none of it's in his own handwriting , which I thought was weird . It was like all the teacher's handwriting and little letters that he would glue . So he still wasn't getting handwriting instruction in this very specialized instruction .

I requested an SST , which in our district is a student support team , to discuss the fact that he's in a special intervention and it's not working , and I was told to wait once again , wait till the end .

I'm wondering if you could just talk about those , just those programs , like not even with what your son experienced or anything , but just what are they like , like what's included in those programs ?

It's my nickname for it , it's the phonics band-aid . So when you know the whole language , folks kind of back in the late 80s kind of got called out for having this missing piece .

There was this attempt to put a band-aid on , also to come in alignment with some of the legislation that was going on in the country at that time , and so let's add what's missing . But the unfortunate part to that was that it was really just a band-aid . There was nothing systematic about it .

There was nothing systematic about it , there was nothing explicit about it . So it still depended upon a teacher noticing what a child was missing , which is hard to do in every single guided reading group . Right , you're only noticing what you have , what you're seeing in this particular book you're reading , and then to respond to that .

So it's not systematic , it's responsive . So you're only fixing the problem before you , not the core problem of . We've missed a lot of skills along the way . I need to take this kid through a systematic scope and sequence so that they can learn all these skills .

And I know they learned them because I taught them with direct instruction and so there was nothing like that in a balanced literacy classroom . When I taught , I had , you know , a mini lesson every day . I had my beautiful anchor charts hanging everywhere , which was probably so overwhelming to all my poor sensory kids .

I wish I could go back and apologize to everyone , but you know so . And then you have time for them to work independently while you're pulling kids in groups and you're working either in guided reading or maybe conferences if you're doing writing time . But so you're not getting even every kid every day .

You're getting a small percentage , and then it's so rushed that there I found that when I was doing kind of reading , when I the part that mattered most , the phonics part , was so rushed and so limited to the response of teaching that I was , I always felt like I was missing something too and that the kids that needed to get better weren't getting better .

And then reading recovery is just I like to call it the stepchild of balanced literacy , but really I kind of think it it might've existed somewhere in the realm first , um , and then some of these other programs grew out of it , but uh , it's .

It's just that the whole idea that I can take a kid in a smaller setting and do more of the same , I can give them more cues , um , you know , I can help them look at the pictures more , I can cue them to the first letter and I can kind of let them look at the context clues and see if they can figure the words out .

It turned reading into a guessing game , which for Matthew was detrimental , because reading really was a game of substituting and guessing or skipping . So he was either skipping , substituting or just flat out guessing what was in front of him , which comes from those cues that are found in both of those programs .

It didn't matter if you were in , you know , tier one , tier two or tier three . You were going to get some version of balanced literacy . So for Matthew , as he continued to struggle , his experience was let me put him in more of the same methodology of instruction and let's see if it works this time .

We had all of these running records , right . They did a BAS every year and he was zigzagging all over the place .

There was some progress that he was not progressing , and even from year to year , like one teacher would say he was a level H and the next teacher would say he was a level D , and I thought , gosh , how can you like , not , how can you be able to read and then not be able to read ? That was one of my first clues .

It's like even the very assessment is somehow handicapping our teachers from knowing that this isn't working .

They're like oh my gosh , now I can see , I see where , where their gaps are , I see what they need , I can help them get what they need and and we can keep moving . Before it was for the teachers a guessing game of where the students were , just like it was a guessing game for the students when they were reading Right .

He does get an assessment from the school and they , although they won't diagnose , they did detect in the testing that they did a full , comprehensive psychological educational exam , that he had an SLD in reading , and I was kind of pulled to the side and said most likely dyslexia . But we don't say that word here , you know .

So it's like the bad , you know naughty word at school . So he was semi-diagnosed , I guess you would say at least flagged at that point , and sadly though , that didn't equal anything different from him .

And he was actually pulled out of his regular ed classroom for language arts at that point to go into what was called a resource classroom where I later learned there were 24 students . There were more in that room than his regular ed classroom and , yes , that's like a whole class of students itself .

Yes , and this was tier three or four , right Special education . And he's getting LLI and which is this , you know , remediation of Fontes and Pinnell . It's another program . It's balanced literacy at its heart .

I was told that it was designed for kids with dyslexia by the teacher when I questioned so at this point I'm starting to wake up and he wasn't really officially diagnosed , though , until fourth grade .

So it would be two more years of him being in a school setting , getting balanced literacy , even in the special ed setting , before he was tested privately and diagnosed , and at that point the sad part was we had now standardized tests that showed that he had regressed in almost every single area , from that test done in 2019 to the one done two years later .

So he had totally regressed . And so there was we had hard evidence that , even though their paperwork said progressing as expected , every single nine weeks , he was not . In fact , he was actually drowning . And I think the hardest part for me I always get a little .

I'll try not to be , I'm going to try to keep it together today but the hardest part for me and that was there was a social emotional screener and he told the psychologist that his greatest goal in life was to learn to read , and this was a fourth grader , and for me that was when I thought something's not right with what I know to be right .

I loved what I did as a teacher and I think my classroom was a happy , joyful place , because I'm just that kind of person and I do think , hopefully , kids felt safe in my room , but they certainly didn't get what they needed , because I was staring at a child who was the product of this and he was not proficient .

Not only was he not proficient , he was regressing and no one knew it . No one knew it and that's what was always so perplexing to me . Was that balance , literacy . You know really , champions , that we're responsive , we're responsive . You got to know the kid and respond . Well , we had five years to know this kid .

He'd been the same school for five years and he didn't know how to read and no one knew it . That test was shocking to everyone in the room and I think , even the school for that meeting . We had to discuss those individuals that you know . The private evaluation there was . It was silent . No one could say anything because the numbers spoke for themselves .

I found these amazing people that I later learned were called advocates , and and then I learned through that about this whole world , this term that kept coming up , the science of reading and structured literacy . And then I'm just reading and reading and I found this one blog that compared the two and I thought , oh my gosh , like I was wrong .

And there's a moment as a teacher especially when you care so much about people's kids where you're like they went through my years of classroom and I was a fourth and fifth grade teacher , so I was kind of like a last hope before middle school and they didn't get what they needed .

They left , they came in not reading , in the left , not reading , and I learned that Matthew didn't need that anymore than those kids needed it . He needed something called structured literacy , which I call like the . It's like the , it's like a oh , my brain just stopped working An antonym , right , all right , yeah , there we go .

It's an antonym for balanced literacy . So when people try to blend it again , like you can't , because it's literally the opposite , it literally is not connected at all . You almost have to deconstruct what you know about literacy . You have to break it down and say that . Right now I'm going to put it over here in a corner and let me just see what this is .

And I learned that it was explicit . That means someone directly teaches my kid what he needs to know and they follow a scope and sequence . I learned the term systematic phonics , which was different than balanced literacy , because that's analytical phonics . That's where I look and see and I teach you what I notice you don't know .

And systematic was that I'm going to test you on all these skills and then I'm going to systematically walk you through all of them to make sure you've mastered them .

So it's a , it's knowing the science first and then applying it to your students in a systematic , structured way and then filling in gaps from there , versus looking at a child which , to be honest , as a former primary teacher , is so much more manageable .

Yeah that's so daunting I need to know the science , and then I can teach students in a systematic way , and then I need to fill in small gaps versus let me see what 30 kids need to know sitting in front of me and they all need something different Like I'm just setting myself up for failure .

Like I've got kids who aren't reading on grade level in the fifth grade and I've got to , I've got to get them to be proficient leaders , readers before they go to middle school . Um , you're right , yeah , it's yeah . It's like you try to play the game without knowing the rules , right .

So you're just kind of all you're doing all these things for trying to figure it out . And if you just known how to do it to begin with , you could have had the systematic approach to it . And Matthew needed that . All kids need it because it ensures that all kids get a strong foundation in the skills or the code , the English language .

They get all of that . But dyslexic kids need it times 100 . They need more repetition and more time to review and reverse drills and someone who's really kind of approaching their learning from a diagnostic approach approach . But I think that a kid like my kid and many other dyslexic kids .

If they had gotten a foundation of structured literacy in those early years , the need for such intense remediation later in life would not be there , because they would have a better foundation to start with .

And when you get a kid like mine , who's had five years of balanced literacy and finally stumbles into like real structured literacy with a highly trained teacher , um you know he made , he's making progress , but it's slow and it is um hard and frustrating , and it didn't have to be that way for him and so many others .

And she said no , I only have LLI and I'm not trained to work with kids with dyslexia . This was the special ed teacher .

I just want to make sure for our audience we're really clear . Like it , is the structured literacy all that a student with dyslexia ? Not all , but is that mostly what a student with dyslexia needs to to meet their needs ? Or or or is it more than that , or is it beyond just the structured literacy ?

Um , that the program the OG program that you choose or structural literacy program that you choose um is great , but in the hands of an untrained teacher , it's gonna . I think there's a tendency , if we don't train our teachers , for them to keep blending and to lean into what's comfortable and what they know .

So I think I think there's a tendency there where we can really do some harm meaningful , we mean well but we can still do some harm . The teacher is our greatest resource , literally , and what they know and how they can take those tools . I've watched Matthew's private tutor teach him how to read with a whiteboard and a dry erase marker .

She and I know she has a scope and sequence hidden somewhere that I didn't know about , but she's following , but she's just , you know , doing this thing and it's amazing and it works . And so she didn't have some fancy manual or book . She had a very simple tool at her hand , but what she did have was this knowledge of how the brain learns to read .

That's what she had .

I'm like , hey , what are you using to teach math to you ? And I was told oh , lly , because it's great for comprehension and we're going to use Wilson on the side to teach him symphonics .

I mean like you're doing the not anything helpful , yeah , and you're doing something kind of helpful , but it doesn't really matter , yeah , still doing things that aren't helpful , and then the kids getting a complete mixed message and I'm not sure that it really actually works .

Yes , we can focus on listening comprehension through some great read-alouds in a rich literature environment , which we should have as teachers .

But if we're putting such an emphasis on comprehension and we're totally ignoring these poor decoding skills in the background that are leading to a lack of comprehension , then we are doing the child a disservice , also the teachers , because there's a false sense of achievement and success that's not there and I heard it over and over from so many teachers .

Like I'm doing this and this , I'm blending this and this , and I kept saying but this is a comprehensive program over here . It really does work . Like there's all these really smart people who researched it and studied it and they know it works and they've seen does work .

Like there's all these really smart people who researched it and studied it and they know it works and they've seen it work . And I think we should just do all 10 parts of this lesson and they constantly kept blending and I at one point said this is harming my kid because during the pandemic he was digital and I was watching .

This was the special ed , you know , remediation class , and it was just basically the first 20 days of reading workshop from the Fontes de Pinel book , where you teach kids that reading is thinking I can recite those lessons because I taught them so much and I was like whoa , wait a minute , like his goals for decoding and fluency and accuracy .

And then I started asking , like what decoding goals are you working on ? Which ones is he missing ? And I couldn't get the answers . And so I started seeing right before me this is not working . And I'd see him substitute and skip and be praised for reading so good when he did a running record . He would be attaboy I'm so proud of you , you've come so far .

And I thought , no , he's just learned to guess and play the system . He's been programmed to use these cues and , yeah , I guess , if you taught him the cues and he's doing that , he actually is doing what you're looking for .

But that's not equaling a proficient reader , because what they couldn't see is that he was reading , his legs were shaking uncontrollably , which I now know was anxiety , and as soon as the class ended he'd shut the computer down and have a complete meltdown , just overwhelmed with all this information . Or I had teachers call me and say he knew this .

This morning we were working on these word patterns . But when I tested him later in the day he didn't know it and that was this great mystery to them . And I was like that's called dyslexia and it means it's not mapped in his brain .

So and I didn't have a degree in this this was just me , you know , reading all these books and just educating myself on what my kid needed . So yeah , it was an eye-opening year and it just ignited in me this passion to be like . What would I want someone to tell me if I was still in the classroom ?

What would help me change from what I thought was the best way to what I now know right in front of me is really actually hurting kids .

And some of these things are pretty easy to do . It's kind of what I did in this process . I think the first one is listen to stories of failure . I am one of thousands of parents of a kid like Matthew . That was shocking to me . I started listening to parents .

I found groups you know decoding to support groups and decoding advocacy groups and our stories are eerily the same .

I mean waiting for them to fail , years of interventions that did not work and it's almost like in some circles it's easy to pretend like we don't exist and that this isn't happening or that we're rare , like she's just the exception because she's that mom .

Like you kind of end up like being a nudge , like being , oh well , here comes that mom , and really you're not like , you're not being that mom , you're just trying to get what you need for your , for not only for your kid , but for lots of other kids who maybe don't have parents , who have that information , or maybe who are acting out in other ways and who

are presenting in other ways Right , and they're misdiagnosed , I would say Misunderstood .

I need help , I need you to teach me how to read . I need you to teach me how to do this , because I'm not getting it the way you're teaching me . And , um , I mean , I know with my own child there was a focus on behavior action plans , you know , and then his own behaviors if I'm sick , and then he became obsessed with what he was wearing .

Um , so we had a lot of behaviors and , um , I learned that so many kids are just like Matthew where , and they and they have been delayed the right to read for years , and it's no wonder that by the time they're in third , fourth and fifth grade that they're so frustrated Kids biting their fingers to the point of bleeding and acting out in rage or shutting

down completely . It looks , you're right , it looks so different for every kid , but it's there nonetheless . And if you heard just a few of our stories , I think that there's an empathy that's created there that is hard to ignore and I think , can become a catalyst , for let me find out more , let me see how that happens .

And do I have any Matthews in my room ? The chances are you do , because you know . Some studies say that as many as 20 percent of our kids have dyslexia , and so at least one in five in every classroom is in this , but they're often not identified and they're silently struggling .

Regardless whether they do or don't , or are on some kind of like spectrum of the dyslexia spectrum , they are struggling to read , right , we know from nationwide data that what a third of our students across the nation are reading proficiently . So you know you have even more students who are just not getting what they need in the classroom .

So there's stories of failure that go , you know , beyond just dyslexia and really hit probably majority of students and families .

I actually thought I was so good at what I was doing that it was me right . I read him so much and I did all the things right and he just magically learned to read . And then I have a middle child who's actually in the middle of the ladder . He needed direct instruction , never got it , and now we're seeing that play out a lot .

He's learning a second language in the ninth grade and he's struggling because he doesn't know some of the basic nuts and bolts of the English language . He doesn't know what nouns and verbs are in the ninth grade , or articles , and so when he's trying to conjugate those into a second language he's running into some barriers .

So I mean he fits very much into the middle . He needed this . You can see it very much in his writing and his spelling . And then my youngest falls into that bottom where he has to have it . It's not negotiable .

So , yeah , this affects so many kids , which is why this conversation needs to happen outside of a special ed setting , and it's why every teacher needs to get professional development in this area so that , even across content areas , we all have to hold our piece of the reading and writing instruction , regardless of whether this is our primary subject that we teach ,

and I'm totally biased , but when I took letters training , I was just like I think every single teacher , no matter grade level , content area .

I was Lucy Calkins and Stephanie Harvey and Nancy Atwell , because I had a kind of some upper , you know , grade experience , and so all of the greats at that time were who influenced me .

Our school when I moved to Gwinnett County that's my district that I taught in and still live in we are about literacy so we moved into Fontas and Pinnell actually got to attend a training with Lucy Calkins , you know , and so we were very much for reading and writing tapped into that .

There was this lady in our state that provided these reading instruction , professional developments , and I had written all these notes , even like about dyslexia , and the word decoding was there , which I didn't know for my college instruction . I didn't know that word . I called it , word calling which I now know is a sleight of hand for kind of ignoring that .

But anyway , I was shocked because I thought this was all right in front of me . But here's why it's important to join a community of learners . It was there and I got great training . I went back to my school and that was not anywhere on my school setting . It wasn't . No one was speaking that language .

There was no place for me to implement it or no support , no one to help guide me in the process . And so joining a community of learners is huge , to start reading some books . I think the Dyslexia Advocate was one book that I read and that was a game changer for me .

Just join some community books , facebook pages , start reading if you're really into some really hard stuff to read some of the cognitive scientist reports and I think once you start realizing and finding that there are some friends in this world and they're on the same journey as you , it changes the game , because you now feel like you're not one like an island at

your school . You have a community and if you're frustrated at your school , take it to the community and share with them and you're going to find a ton of support in those groups just to cheer you on as you learn .

But I feel like we're not going to make any progress if we continue down that path . We've got to find a way to come together and talk and get some common ground and then , when you are that person who has finally had a kind of a turnaround right and you now see , your eyes are opened , I call it like your saw to Paul moment , right .

But when you see , oh , my goodness , this is so different and this is so critical and I want to move toward this and I'm embracing this Start being that voice of change in your environment we have we are in my district this is kind of exciting . We're beginning to make this change Right .

So this past year we met with some of the district leaders and we proposed what this would look like . Surprisingly , they had their own plan already after a lot of conversations . That was very similar to what we thought would be the perfect world for change .

And all the teachers over the summer had their first introductory course into OG just pure Orton-Gilling and um , and they're all now moving into letters training and of course , there's a lot of chatter online and the teacher groups of you know oh , more training and this . I'm overwhelmed already .

I have too many kids , this is a hard time to teach , this is post-pandemic , or actually we're still in the middle of it , and so all that to say , it's easy for people to get negative and for this to go off the rails before it even gets going in the right direction .

So if you have already made that change and you're one of those teachers , be the voice of positivity , be the voice that's listening , that hears and kind of , then re-explains it in the way that they can hear it of .

Then re-explains it in the way that they can hear it , and champion for a full , hard , right turn in the opposite direction and not a re-blending . Because that's my biggest fear is that , in order to pacify some of the uncomfortable tensions , that we're going to try to keep re-blending , and that is not going to work . We've been doing that for decades .

It's time to make a hard turn and embrace a new way to teach . I took a . I did the read 360 from Tennessee , the first level of training that all the teachers were getting , which is kind of cool . If you're in that state , you're doing great things .

But one of the questions to get my final certification was what I would do if I was like at the lunch table and people were speaking negatively about the science of reading .

Your voice is critical in those spaces . When you get up and you say what we're saying and you're on the ground floor , the district leaders listen and they listen to these teachers and I think that's one of the biggest reasons this began to change is that we came together to make the change versus fighting against each other .

I remember being again a primary teacher , a fifth grade teacher , and thinking of course I'll have struggling students . Wouldn't it be an incredible world if the norm was of course most of my kids can read . Like that should be the thought , right , and I think that that's what we're stepping into .

You know , 95% of students have the cognitive ability to learn to read , so chances are , every kid in your classroom can learn to read . And we for so long me included , I accepted failure . I wasn't happy with it . I wasn't .

I remember having big conversations with my principal about how the fact that I was giving kids A's in reading but they were in fifth grade reading on a second grade reading level and something felt weird about that because I was communicating . I completely understand that . Yeah , I get that too Right .

I was communicating to the next year's teacher that I had a proficient reader Right , but I didn't . And you know I was like , can we like have truth in grading here ? Can their reading level drive their grade ? And then it was all the hell we're going to . You know that was not a good thing .

also . I just feel so strongly about this . But my son shouldn't be a unicorn in this world of trying to make sure that every kid can read . Every kid deserves the chance to read , regardless of how they arrive at our classroom doors .

I don't know what their prior knowledge is , I don't know what they've been exposed to , what their home life is like , if they've gone on a thousand trips , if someone read to them , if they happen to have the right teachers the year before me , but I do know what's before me If that kid can't read .

If I'm equipped with great teaching skills that are aligned with science , that are evidence-based to produce proficient readers , I know that I have an opportunity that year to move that kid toward proficiency . And my child is super lucky this past year he was afforded structural literacy all day , even his math and social studies and science and even his connections .

Teachers are all trained at Orton-Gillingham and he learned to read in one year One year . It took five years to get there . That could have happened in kindergarten . He had the ability all along . You guys have kids in your classrooms every year who are sitting there waiting for you to know how to teach them and then move them there . It is possible .

So let that be your mantra this year that every kid can learn to read , and I want to pursue training or take the training I've been privileged to get and give it to every kid in front of me . That's the best skill you can give every kid because it affects every part of their future life .

We want to be kind of those bridge builders , because together we are so much stronger and together we can really ensure that every kid can read .

But then I also love a good historical fiction , a good trashy beach novel so um , yeah , does it yes oh my gosh , I'm gonna make sure I link that .

It's not exactly like that , but it has that underlying theme , that feel of all these layers , of there's a lot going on with all the , all the sisters . And they got everything from like affairs to murder to just narcissistic behavior , to mystery detective . I mean , it's just all over the place .

It's great it takes place , I think , maybe in Ireland or England . So they have a little bit of an accent , which I always appreciate .

But I mean on a personal level , I got into , I started listening to Dr Death a few years ago , which is that terrible doctor that you know paralyzed a bunch of people in Texas is awful , but that led into a whole series of just murder mystery podcast Weird things .

And we have a solution and I want that word to get out and I think the more people that know it , the less chances of his story being repeated we want to create I've said this before in another blog , but there's that whole term of the Matthew effect .

I've said this before in another blog , but there's that whole term of the Matthew effect and um , but I want to rewrite that and let the effect be that every kid learns to read , that we don't keep widening that gap . So that's what pushes me All the kids left behind who still aren't getting what they need .

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