[Listen Again] Ep. 154: Science of Reading Beyond Phonics Series: Fluency Instructional Routines with Nathaniel Swain

So when students read fluently , you know that they can accurately identify words you know automatically and they have a sense of sounding like they're speaking when they're actually reading . And that basically allows working memory to be freed up , so they don't have to think about decoding anymore .

They can focus on language comprehension and the understandings of the text , which is the whole point of reading .

You know , we don't want to do too much phonics , or we don't want to do the wrong kinds of phonics , and really you just want to do phonics really well , really early , so that we get students moving towards automatic word recognition and fluent reading as quickly and as easily as possible .

So that's what I was getting at before , of making it sound like as if you're speaking so nice and fluent and with expression and pausing at the right times and providing good intonation and things like that .

And that's the more artistic sort of part of fluency , if you like , because it's the part that's harder to measure if you're going to track someone's fluency . But also the bit you like oh , that's a really fluent reader , so you can hear in the way that they're reading . It sounds like natural speech .

The other purpose of fluency , though , is for students to be able to read quickly in their own heads , and as students progress with their reading , more and more they're actually going to read in their heads , and there is no limit to how fast you want them to read , as long as they don't impact the amount of words that they can process or understand , so

they're not sort of skimming to the point where they lose meaning . So in some ways , we actually we don't want to hold students back from reading quickly , but if we're reading aloud , there is a limit to what you want them to do . You don't want .

I've seen extreme situations where you've got kids who are literally trying to beat the clock and go as fast as possible .

But when we're reading aloud there's probably some limits to how fast we can read , because it becomes a bit incomprehensible and it means that you're deliberately skipping over pauses and full stops or periods when you really should , so that it makes sense for the listener but also for the reader .

When I think of fluency , I think much more of teaching students and them reading out loud and glad you brought that up of like what happens in your own head , because I was thinking about I do that sometimes when I'm reading and you know I want to try and read something quickly and then I get to the end like I read that way too fast .

You know I need to go back and slow down , but that's my own fluency and you know my silent reading fluency in my head .

flicking , you know , scrolling through pieces rather than actually reading them start to finish , and the skill of actually sitting there with a novel or with a long article and reading it properly and completely is somewhat being lost over time as we've actually changed our reading behaviors .

So we have to think about what kind of purpose do we have in mind when we're developing students' fluency ? Is it because we want them to read deeply , or is it maybe in this particular lesson or in this group of lessons we're actually trying to get them to read efficiently , and there's sort of two competing goals there .

So if we want every student to reach their potential with their reading um fluency for the purpose of comprehension , then there's always going to be a balance between how fast we want them to go , but then also how well we want them to read , whether in their head or out loud .

But my big question is what we really want to know here from you is what are some things that teachers can do with students for them to practice their fluency in the classroom ?

So having a text that's shared with the students , whether on a document camera or on a PowerPoint slide or , you know , on a worksheet in front of everyone or a copy of an actual book or a text Students might have a class novel that they will have a copy of , for instance , actually reading together , and it's sort of been painted in a really negative way

saying oh , it sounds so annoying when everyone's having to read at the same time and it sounds really old school . But there's actually something really powerful with the ability to track along with what other people are reading and also to hear fluent reading at the same time .

It's also a really good engagement norm that helps everyone to stay focused and listening to the meaning of the text .

So you can just embed an incidental reading fluency just by doing some choral reading and you might do that in your social sciences classes , you might do it in your civics or your actual science , or you might do it in your literature and sort of English language arts classroom , and the reason it's helpful is because every student is basically supported by one

another to follow along with the text to hear fluent reading . Whilst they're also producing fluent reading , the other one is tracked reading . So when the teacher is reading aloud or one student is reading aloud and the students are tracking along , that's also a really nice opportunity to hear what fluent reading sounds like .

And there's opportunities for you there to say well , you know , Joanne , you read that really beautifully . Can everyone go back now and read the portion that Joanne did and see if we can get the expression that she had , and so almost practicing it together ?

And the benefit of doing those things whole class is that there is a lot of accountability so you can see whether everyone's tracking and whether everyone's on the same page . The other big one , I think , is there's a real focus in Australia at the moment of getting paired reading fluency happening , so you might set aside 10 or 15 minutes .

I'm not sure if you're doing this a lot in the States as well , but basically getting 10 or 15 minutes , you've got students paired with each other , usually one slightly higher , one slightly lower in their reading fluency or their reading accuracy and they have a text in front of them , usually a shared text that they're both looking at and they can take turns

reading the text together and the idea is to read for fluency but also for expression and ideally they're actually understanding what they're reading as well . So it's not just for the purpose of getting the words right .

So you might build in that some Teach Like a Champion strategies like accountable , independent reading strategies that you might have in there that allow you to check in with students to make sure that they're actually understanding as well , or have some questions that you get students to ask each other about the text .

So they might all be on different texts or they might go on different portions or different versions of the same text . One of the great things about ChatGPT at the moment is that you can take a passage , put it into ChatGPT and say , can you generate a hundred word version of this or can you give me a grade three version of this same text ?

So you could have all the students reading the same content or the same topic or the same excerpt from a book but you might have graded sort of different versions that you have across the class if you did want to have that shared comprehension in this activity as well .

The benefit of the paired reading fluency is that they have turns , going back and forth , of hearing the fluent reading and then having the turn themselves and producing fluent reading , and you might get them to read the same text multiple times so that you have that repeating reading effect , which does have some research behind it as well .

I remember in my classroom especially , it looked different in the primary classroom versus an intermediate classroom , but students still jumped right into fluency as an activity that they knew they were going to get big wins from , and it excited them to work together in this way .

So I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit about I know you mentioned it the texts that we might use .

So it was usually 10 or 15 minutes set aside and the text that we chose did vary depending on the age level and the reading proficiency .

So in my foundation or prep classroom , or you'd call it kindergarten we had students on a range of different decodable texts , so phonically controlled texts , and some students towards the middle and the end of the year , if they've actually graduated off those decodables they were then using picture books or short passages that I would provide them that were just

slightly harder and not so phonically controlled .

But the reason why most of them , as beginning readers , were on phonically controlled text was so that the reading fluency was developed on words that they had already had success with and that the kinds of grapheme phoneme correspondences they were familiar with and the kinds of word patterns that they could actually read well .

So the idea behind doing the fluency session was so that the kinds of phonics patterns and the irregular words that they've encountered basically are put together into different texts that they would also read at home with their home readers and they would have an opportunity to not just be reading it for the sake of getting every word right , but actually reading it

so that they could get that sense of fluency and expression as they're reading . And for some students this process can be really slow and they can have a lot of difficulty making that transition from being like sort of pre-blending into then sort of blending at a really basic CVC level and then eventually to more complicated syllable structures .

And then you might have students who are doing those things but then are stuck at certain irregular words and they haven't got that . You know this concept we can talk about today , set for variability , where they've got that ability to say you know , look at W-A-S and read it .

Maybe they might attempt it first time as W-A-S but then realise that they want to change it to was , because they've maybe encountered that before . They know that in this sentence and this word must be was because we've got that approach to flexibly applying our knowledge of sound letter patterns .

So through the process of reading passage text like that , they can really hone that ability to use all of the phonics skills and phonemic awareness skills that they've got , but also starting to experiment with . How do you get the whole sentence to sort of flow together ?

And that's really it's the core work of getting the decoding to then flow into fluency and fluency to flow into comprehension . So it's really , really important .

It doesn't have to be like a leveled text in terms of the number of sentences are shorter , deliberately , as soon as they've got the phonics patterns and the ability to read a range of different kinds of words . The kinds of complexity that you want to introduce is actually about the content and the vocabulary .

So , thinking more about comprehension , sure , there might be some words in there that they might have trouble decoding , because you're not thinking about the length of the syllables and things like that anymore .

But the idea is that if they move on to some texts that are about topics that they're interested in and that maybe relate back to units of work that you're doing , that's the real money spot in terms of fluency is an opportunity . That fluency session is an opportunity to develop their prosody , their expression , their rate and their speed sorry , their accuracy .

But also they might actually be learning extra information or retrieving information from what they've learned about previously , so that might be a storybook that they've read before in your English language arts .

It might be passages that you've created or that you've taken as excerpts from texts that are about the topics from science and social sciences and civics , or it might be other texts that are interesting to them , so you might actually have interest area texts that you generate for them or that you get from things like ReadWorks or other great resources that have

passages that you could use . And that's where fluency can be about .

You know , getting really fluent and good at your expression and maybe working in those pairs still , but also potentially learning from what you're reading as well , and sort of knowing that if you're trying so hard to be fluent but you're not understanding the text , then you're not quite fluent enough , if that makes sense .

So when we think about what you just said about the building knowledge , um , or , you know , students would read texts that they might have some familiar knowledge and vocabulary on in three plus um , say , I'm a classroom teacher and I'm looking at a book and the book has the word , let's just say it's like bioluminescence , yeah , so say , the other words around it

were , you know , not terribly difficult to decode , but that has that's a word . Would I , as a teacher , use that sentence ? Or could I use that to build fluency and use it as an opportunity to like unpack that vocabulary word ? Or is that like too much for my students ?

I'm just wondering what you would say to teachers who are listening who are like okay , so how many words are like too many to be unfamiliar ? Or this is a really big word and it feels really tricky for my students . What advice would you give to teachers looking at a passage thinking I just I don't know .

But if you've got the word like bioluminescence , and you have in your English language arts , you've got opportunities to learn about prefixes and suffixes and morphology , then there is actually an opportunity for students to practise . How do you attack a new word based on its prefixes , suffixes and root words .

So bio meaning life , loom meaning light , and essence can't exactly remember what , but probably essence , and you know the fact that it all comes together .

So it's , you know , light that is created by biological creatures , and so , um , it it's uh , there's an opportunity there , I guess , to challenge your students if you've got that particular word or words like it .

But , um , if you're finding that it's a barrier to them actually enjoying and using that fluency session to develop fluency and to feel successful at their reading , then you can obviously strip it back .

I think there's probably a tendency , as a hangover from the balanced literacy movements , in that we're afraid to give students challenging texts and we're afraid to give them things that are in the frustration zone , but it's actually important to give them opportunities to encounter unfamiliar words and to tackle difficult texts .

They don't always have to do that independently . They might do that in pairs or you might actually do that as a whole class .

I know Tim Shanahan talks a lot about whole class sort of analysis of complex text and there's that close reading sort of concept which is really helpful , where you actually look particularly and look at challenging text and try and pull it apart . So it depends on what you're trying to get out of that session .

But I think if it's for fluency and that's the time that you're trying to develop it and it's set up in a way that you can actually wander around and there's a bit of autonomy .

For instance , at our school and a few others that have done similar things , we've got a bell that sort of rings on the PowerPoint slide every minute and that bell tells the students to swap partners . So when the teacher sort of presses go on that PowerPoint slide , that's automatic .

Then they know that to swap and as a teacher you can then float around the room , actually hear students that you want to hear and you don't have to sort of keep an eye on the time or to click your fingers or whatever it might be , to tell students to swap partners , so that 10 minutes could free you up basically to go in and do other things .

So I think it's a balancing act , because if you want that 10 minutes or that 15 minutes to work really well and you want students to feel successful , you are going to have to do a little bit of paring back of complexity . Luckily , we don't have to do a lot of writing or editing ourselves these days . If you can use things like ChatGPT to your advantage .

You can take any text and simplify it or make it more complex in the . You know the click of a button and then you know , have those ready . So I think it's a bit of a trial and error , but my message would be don't shy away from complexity .

If , especially if you know you've got students in your class that you know are ready for a challenge and seem like they're tracking along well , you don't want them to stay stagnant on comfortable texts for too long , because if you're not fluent on unfamiliar text , then you're not . You're basically not fluent yet .

So I'm going to take us right back to those , those three that you mentioned . Um , so the first one , choral reading . Um , I was a middle school teacher and so when I'm thinking of older students , I'm wondering , like , is choral reading something that is good for students of all ages , or is this something that maybe is just a K-2 thing ?

And I think that's a question I've heard before . You know , is that , is it something that older students could be doing , should be doing ? Will they do it ? And then wondering too you know , as you get in the older grades , you're reading much longer texts .

So what's realistic for how long of a text or part of a text you would actually choral read together as a whole class ? Because if we're reading a novel , we're clearly not going to read the whole novel together . But you might still want to put it in there , so I'm wondering your thoughts on that .

I think in the regular sort of lessons , choral reading works really well when you're like reading a shared definition or if you're , you know , wanting to look at a particular segment of the text that has a really good quote or has a really nice use of language .

the letters and they'll always have difficulty saying that word but also reading and spelling that word . So I think with the older students particularly , but also with younger students , it's going to be smaller chunks and if you've got older students , like in middle school for instance , your amount of reading is going to be a lot bigger .

So I sort of use co-word reading as a thing that mixes up the way that we approach some shared reading together or some explanations of the explicit part of the lesson . Say , we're doing some writing about a particular text , we might read elements of the instructions or the definitions that help to drive the content of the lesson .

I think it's really helpful to just know that it's there in your back pocket and you can use it and it's a really easy way to sort of ensure that everyone's on the same page but also gets a chance to do some fluent reading as a group . You can definitely overuse it , so I'll just be aware of that .

But in terms of older kids , with my university students , sometimes I do use co-reading just as a way to make sure that everyone's with me and we're all sort of reading together and it's just a nice way to know that everyone's got a chance to turn their voice on and to ensure that they're with you . Um , because it's so easy .

You know , in high schools and things like that , they might have devices and laptops and stuff around or ipads and things , and so there's a lot of distractions that are there .

So it's nice to have something you can to bring everyone back on the same page but also , as we were talking about before , to give them a chance to hear what it sounds like when you read fluently and what those particular vocabulary words sound like or the particular parts of grammar .

So yeah , that's my sort of caveats around choral reading , but it's a really useful tool to have in your back pocket that you can just introduce a little bit of fluency in every lesson .

If you are doing a shared reading experience together , the teacher might do it and the students track , or one of the students might read and then you track um and students , often depending on how the culture of your classroom is going and how confident the readers are .

Um , we've found a lot of success with students being like I want to read in front of everyone or you know , there's a it's a bit of a culture that builds of like students feeling like they do want to show um some of their skills because they've worked so hard on their reading .

And it's nice for other students to hear examples of how other students read and knowing that if you've got a culture of error built into the way that you do things , when students stumble or if they make mistakes , it's all part of the learning process and you have a supportive way that helps students through it .

I think you know round robin reading has been really sort of killed off .

So people really hate it because and the problem with round robin reading in some ways is that because it's a set order and students know when it's their turn , often there's an anxiety sort of thing that happens , where their working memory is dedicated to which part of the text is going to come up when I'm going to have to read and therefore what part should I

pre-rehearse so that I don't make a mistake and like that's all the wrong things that you don't want students to think about when they're doing shared reading or , you know , individual reading like that .

So with round robin , the problem is that it's a set order and the problem is that there's not some discretion for the teacher to use around who they call upon .

When I think something that's driven around , students who do want to do it , or when we've done non-volunteer , say , we'll pick someone from the cup of sticks and say , okay , josie , it's your time to read .

We've actually set up the culture already so that we know that Josie can give it a go and it's okay to make mistakes , but also if she's not ready , like we'll just come back to her . So having a no opt out is important , I think .

And if you don't have a culture where it's like you know , you don't want to have it so that only certain students read and the others listen , because that sets up a power dynamic that you don't really want .

But you can do it really nicely where , say , even if your reluctant readers say Josie isn't ready to read that excerpt , you say that's okay , I'll come back to you and you put that down and you come back to it the next sort of after two more readers .

Or you might read and then she might read , and then you've also got an opportunity , if you really want to scaffold it , to say you might read a sentence , or the whole class might call read a sentence and Josie gets to read that sentence again . So a repeated reading of just that little bit so that she still feels successful .

But also you've scaffolded it as well .

Basically tell them we're all like instruments and we're going to create beautiful sound together and so if we all sort of speak and read with one voice , then it's actually going to sound really good and it's going to sound really fluent and everything . So it's a bit of training to sort of get your class to do that .

And it depends on how much depending on their age and sort of how cool they think they are , like whether they'll go along with you with it . But I can get university students to do it . So I reckon you know , if we try really hard , we can set up the culture in any classroom .

But as you're doing that , you're then listening , for you know deviations , or you're listening for changes in words and I just pause that straight where it is . It's like someone's stuck on bioluminescence or I've got like bio and it doesn't really come out . It's like , okay , let's pause .

Everyone pronounce with me bioluminescence , your turn , everyone says bioluminescence , and you might even chop it into everyone , say bio bioluminescence , essence , put it together , et cetera . And so you just be looking out for things like that and once you've got it all set up and you've got those strategies ready to go .

It's easy for me because I've got this sort of drama , musical theatre background . So I'm used to like getting a group of kids , whether it's for a dance or a singing class , like to do stuff like this which is sort of in the realm of dramatics , but as a teacher you might not be as familiar , so it's a bit of trial and error to sort of see your flow .

But once you get it working well , you can actually get your whole class sort of reading in symphony if you like , and also listening to each other and hearing fluent reading all throughout the day . It doesn't have to be something you just have in that 10 minutes a day .

So I think my first question is is popcorn reading a good strategy to help with fluency in terms of like track to reading , or is it a stress inducing strategy ? I don't know .

Some students really would love that strategy because it's like oh , it's fun , I could start reading at any moment and there's an opportunity for me to make sure I'm listening and tracking so that I know when to pick up .

And if you've got a class of semi-fluent readers , then this is actually a really good level of challenge for them , because the teacher's reading some , you may be correlating some and then you're popcorning , as you said , or just swapping the reader , basically to someone else .

And I think if you need to have it so that there is a pass option , I would always just come back to them , because the reason you come back is to say , well , if you do say pass or you need to opt out for that moment , it's not an opt out all the time , it's an opt out for that moment .

It's not an opt out all the time , it's an opt out for that moment , and then I'm going to come back to you because the idea is you want to keep that Anita Archer sort of phrase in your head , being that learning and teaching isn't a spectator sport .

If students know that they don't have to answer questions or that they can opt out of participation , then they will opt out , and some students will do that for years and years on end .

I think that removes that opportunity to hear what their reading is like or to hear what they think about issues or to gauge how they're going in terms of their understanding . So it's a problem if you let it sort of go on that way .

If it's really big and if you've got students with particular anxieties around speaking in front of the group , there's other ways that you can check in with them or there's other ways that you can help them to participate that maybe aren't as stressful .

But you know , Douglas says this , hollingsworth and Ybarra say that when you've set these things up really well and you have and to choose which answer they like the best or to repeat a certain phrase that they've already heard before , it's not going to be out of this realm to expect everyone to participate , and I think that's a really good thing if you can get

that to work well , because the alternative where only some students participate , just like the traditional classroom , where every question students put their hands up and the teacher literally chooses only the people with their hands up , it means that you've got , you know , two tiers or three tiers of your of your students , and people don't always feel connected because

they they don't have to , um participate yeah , I love that idea about setting it up .

So that's great . Can I throw out one more for you , nathaniel ?

Now , like I'm imagining it being done really strategically , right , If I'm a first grade teacher and I've just taught you know long sound spellings for long E , then I would have pre-read that book and or that text and really pulled out those words that would be meaningful for my students to practice fluently .

Or if I am a thinking a fourth grade teacher and we are , I don't know , building knowledge on the heart , and I would make sure that I'm pulling out some academic vocabulary that is related to that content for my students to maybe work through or , or , or , you know , sound out um and and practice that vocabulary .

So I'm curious what you think about that strategy .

I think that's something that I've used as well in my kindergarten classroom .

So , particularly because I had a lot of students who weren't yet reading fluently they're just reading CVC or CCVC words early in the year but when I was reading a text with them say it's a knowledge building sort of text , or a literature text that we're sort of reading together I would do that .

I would pause on words that I know that they could read , or words that I wanted them to read together independently , and they like whether I can't remember exactly if I prompted them or if maybe I did the leave , that pause and there was an opportunity for them to jump in .

Or I might have said read this with me and I got them to sort of sound it out together . So I think with older students you could just do it in that subtle way of like pausing and then they know to jump in . I think that's really nice .

I do a lot of those nonverbal things of like , you know , if I'm wanting them to repeat something I don't have to say well , now it's your turn to say bioluminescence , and I think those subtle nonverbal cues can be really helpful as well if you , if your students , can pick up on those , because then it doesn't interrupt the flow of what you're trying to do and

interrupt the flow of the meaning that you're trying to build as well .

So , yeah , I think that kind of strategy is really handy , and whether you could do it at a single word level , but you might actually do it at a phrase level as well , if you're saying , let's actually make sure that they can put these words together in a nice phrase or even a sentence , yeah , yeah , that's great .

So , it's successful Like do you have any suggestions for teachers of like the kind of the same things you're talking about with the norms and the things like you know , how do they tell each other when they may have said a word incorrectly , or how to improve their , their way that they're saying things like are there ways to to make it really work well by

setting those norms up ?

I think I found it the most difficult to get that to work for my kindergarten class with , you know , year three , four , five , six , where I was able to , you know , basically say the instructions one or two times , maybe provide a model , and then they ran with it . It was kind of easy .

But with kindergartners especially , you have to be really explicit and really intentional about how you show them how it works and also just be ready to go in and jump in .

And we'd have situations where , like you know everyone , you know most students are doing it , but then two are like stuck or they're like looking at each other and they're like who's meant to be reading , and then you'd have , you know , five-year-olds having arguments about whose turn it is , who's meant to go first so you know all the fun things that you've got .

but I think usually I'd have like a really clear model , like when we first do it and you know , over the first few weeks that we trial it , we sort of do it gradually and we might build up to doing it .

Eventually we probably started it twice a week and then we started it three times a week and eventually by the end of the year we were doing it five days a week , so that there was always 10 minutes a day that they were doing that fluency practice . And you do have to make sure that students are able to read at a sentence level .

If they're not yet reading words and sentences together , if they're stuck at the CVC or sort of simple words , you don't want to push them onto reading whole texts . I was about to ask that with kindergartners .

So you might have two different things happening where , if you've got students who are reading decodable text and able to read it a sentence in a text level , you would set them up into these pairs and while they're doing that , for maybe six months of the year in kindergarten , you'd bring the other group down as a focus group and actually just do more single

word work or more opportunities to , you know , revise aspects of the code that you're trying to teach them , so the phonographic correspondences or the blending of . You know you might have magnetic letters that you're sort of getting them to spell or to write to read with .

So that's actually a nice way to differentiate , so that you've got something set up so that your students are doing those 10 minutes of really helpful fluency practice , because that's where they're at , and for your other sort of half of the class , they might actually be doing this focus group with you for another 10 minutes , which is really handy way to sort of

separate yourself and you're not disadvantaging anyone in that regard . I think over the course of the year once everyone's sort of in that sort of mode of doing it , you just have some models .

So I used to actually get two students sitting on a desk and have everyone else sitting on the floor and sort of looking at them and we actually do a model run through of like the first three or four dings . So we would do the slides that we've got set up . We have like you press go and it sort of makes a .

There actually wasn't a ding sound on PowerPoint , so there was like a cha-ching , like when the cash register yeah , my friend Shane Pearson and I like to say like we're cashing in on all that great reading that we're doing so there's a cha-ching every minute , and so the first cha-ching goes off . They know it's the whoever was going first .

They read for one minute and they're reading the text . The other person is tracking and watching , just like with practice as a whole group . One person's reading , the other person is tracking , and then when they get a word wrong , they're meant to jump in and sort of help them with that word .

Or sometimes they overdo that and they sort of give them the word way too early because they're so helpful , and so it's a little bit of partner training in that , you know , let her try , let her have a go . If she really gets stuck , like then jump in and provide the word or you know .

It's actually a really nice peer learning strategy that you can develop there if you get it working well . But as the other group is watching them and how they're doing it , they then hear that when it goes cha-ching , the next person swaps and they pick up where they left off .

Sometimes , when they get confused , they do this thing where I've got my book and you've got your book and we've both got different books going , and then when the bell goes , I start reading my book . When the bell goes , you read your book and I just don't care because I've got my own book and that's not what you want .

But students will start doing that because you know they start realizing that oh , we're on .

Yeah , and you know we're on slightly different levels and I don't want to read her one because they're on a different level to me and it's like well , we're in this pair , you got to make it work , so we're going to read her levels because that's where she's at and you know , you do swap the pairs deliberately so they get a chance to go with someone higher

or lower than them , so it's not always the same dynamic um . But once you've got it working well , you show them it's always the same text . It's always picking up where they left off .

It means that at the end of the 10 minutes they've actually read a text together and they've practiced fluency both and they've also heard fluent reading um back and forth as well . And it's at that individual sort of paired level . Sometimes you've got threes , because you've got an odd number and threes works as well .

You just sort of go one sort of at a time . You just got to have them on a desk , that sort of works . Or get them on the floor so they can all see , because that's always an argument that you get with five girls , of course .

But once it is working well , we would have eight minutes on the clock , with one minute either side for setup and pack up , and you could get it done in 10 minutes , which means that you've got still a lot of time in your block to do all the other things you need to do .

It can be these strategies that you mentioned or something different , but for any of them , if you have students who are maybe better at some aspects of fluency than others , so maybe they can read pretty accurate , but they're , you know , going pretty slowly , or maybe they read pretty quickly , but you know they're just reading without stopping any punctuation , there's

no prosody Is that something that you kind of work into any of those strategies , or do you have extra strategies to share that work on some aspects ?

I think that's the thing to do first , and these strategies that I've talked about so far , they're the ones to sort of to think about first .

When you've got students who are starting to either read too fast or without prosody or they're reading too slow but they're getting every single word right , that's where something like repeated reading works really well , so you might have the same text that the students are reading and they'll actually read it multiple times .

One way to do this , to make it sort of interesting , is that you might and Tim Rosinski talks about this you could create like a reader's theater sort of situation where you know you've got actually a small play or a little script and best thing about ChatGPT I'm saying that a lot today you can actually get it to create a play version of any text .

So I've got it to generate like a script . Oh yeah , anything Like I've got it to do sitcoms , I've got it to do like a movie treatment of , like you know , a random storyline , it can do it . It can really like create anything .

So if you put like I don't know , a nursery rhyme or a fairy tale in , say , the gingerbread man I've done recently , and you say I want a different version of the gingerbread man , where where it's like a soup bowl full of dumplings and the dumplings are going to escape and run away from being eaten , it'll do that . So in a really interesting way .

It'll create it . But then what you can , so that's a variation on story . You can also get it to do a variation on format . So you can say , take this text which is the gingerbread man , and it actually knows all those texts already , so you don't even need to provide the text .

You'll say , like , create a version of the gingerbread man , which is a script for three students to read three dialogue parts , and it will do that for you . So it'll say you know three students and they all have dialogue . And you can even say put in stage directions or take stage directions out .

And then , if you wanted to , you could have a group of three and you've got your script . It's maybe about a story that they've read before or a slightly different version of a topic .

You could do fiction or non-fiction with this and you could turn it into a play where students have dialogue that they then read , and the benefit of the play is that there's a real reason to actually repeatedly read and to get to fluent reading , because at the end they then perform it and ideally they perform it without the script , so they actually memorize it .

That's a really helpful way to do it and that would take more time , but it's also a really nice oral language activity as well for them to remember . You know parts of texts in their memory forever .

You know we're all good at learning nursery rhymes and aspects of different stories or quotes from famous books and things like that , so those are really important bits of language that they can take with them in their life . So you can do this , obviously , with established plays and with established short stories that as well .

That are more important for literature reasons . But if you just wanted to generate something quickly or that is at a particular level , chatgpt can do that for you really well . So it's actually a really handy tool in that way . The other thing I'd say is that poetry is the other thing that's really useful for repeated reading .

So you might have famous poems or you might have poetry that you find online written for children , or you might even take things like nursery rhymes and sort of give students depending on the age level , give students an opportunity to master that poem or that piece of writing so that they can recite it really beautifully and really clearly , and maybe without actually

looking at it as well , so they might memorise it too , and the benefit of doing that is that they actually . You can actually jump in and say if everyone's memorising a similar text , you can jump in and provide feedback on intonation and feedback on prosody .

You can say well , here you really need to pause so the audience can , you know , listen and hear what the next bit is before you jump in , because at the moment you're rushing through every single period or every single comma .

Um , and I think repeated reading is probably an underutilized strategy , um , but if you make it interesting for the purpose of , you know , performance , um , you know , it's where that drama sort of background of mine comes in handy .

Um , and every , every teacher should see themselves as being dramatic in some way , because we are creating things together and with a live um group of students and like an audience . So , um , it's really , it's an opportunity , I think , to use aspects of drama in a really considered way that also enables students to become better readers and better writers .

So if you want to say , give me a text with examples of a positives or , you know , think back to the writing revolution , you can say , give me texts that have examples of subordinate conjunctions or , you know , generate example sentences that follow the structure of because . But .

So , like you know , there's a lot of writing that you have to do when you create written materials for the purposes of teaching and some teachers are really good at that and some teachers find it really hard to actually make grammatical errors without realizing .

And then if you've written that text for that lesson , then that lesson is going to reinforce a grammatical error potentially or miss a potential nuance there that you could get across , nuance there that you could get across .

So utilizing other you know , shared planning , where you actually share those responsibilities together and you have better writers in the team that help to ensure the quality control , or using other tools like ChatGPT or Grammarly and things like that in a more simple sort of way can actually help you to ensure that what you put in front of students is high quality

and also fit for purpose for whatever you're trying to teach .

So it's much more meaningful exactly .

So you've got to put bioluminescence or photosynthesis in there somewhere , because it's a focus in your science class . It can do it and it can do it in really interesting ways . I've got it to do some pretty fascinating things in terms of , you know , with high school . It's done like a dramatic version of two competing epistemologies throughout history .

So it's looked at the fight between the Enlightenment and the Romanticism , sort of periods , and I've got it to generate a play with key figures from history sort of fighting with each other , the way that those ideas were fought back in the day , and it was actually really clever and really insightful .

I was like I actually learned from this this is awesome , so you know if you wanted to give students information in a different way . You know dramatic sort of creations or you know scripts or poetry or songs . We can generate songs and things for you Like . It's just really useful , I think , if you're like well , how do I get this across to students ?

Well , there's things that you could do creatively yourself , or there's things that you can do creatively with a tool like ChatGPT , which can just generate text really quickly and allow you to experiment .

Like Melissa said , we don't need to spend an hour Google searching for something if there's a tool that can help us do it more efficiently and actually get what we need a little bit easier . So I love that .

I think that's really practical and especially just I can't say it enough keeping that topic or keeping the text that we're studying at the center at the core of the fluency .

Like you know , I think it gets tricky when we try to pull in our fluency work with something that feels random , or maybe that is random and I think in the past that might have happened because that's what we could find yeah .

instruction so interesting things that we hope to sort of show teachers and seeing how you could get ChatGPT to work the way you want to , because you have to train it in some ways and to give prompts that really get it to the the way you want to , because you have to train it in some ways and to give prompts that really get it to the result that you

want . It's not going to give you magic straight away . You have to be patient , but there's there's hacks that we can share with you that would be helpful , so keep a lookout for that .

I know we've touched on some of it , but just to kind of hit home that these are research-based practices , you're not just whimsically sharing what you feel like sharing tonight , this morning ?

One of the lines is they've looked at struggling readers , and they've looked at readers who are having difficulty and fluency remains a challenge for them , and so they've been able to map that success with reading is tied back to proficiency , with fluency , and they've seen the flip side , where they've tracked students over time , longitudinally , and they can predict

their reading outcomes , with the fluency being one of those factors that they use . Others will be the other aspects of the big fire , so the comprehension , phonics , phonemic awareness and vocabulary , and so the fluency is a really important sort of cornerstone .

But the other research that's really interesting is the intervention studies to show how to improve fluency , and some of the things that have come out of that are the repeated readings , but also the modelled reading as well , so the teacher modelling fluent reading and getting the student to imitate it and to sort of try and get that fluency happening in their own

reading , but then also the work on improving accuracy and improving familiarity with connected text , so that work in the phonics space , but also the fluency practice is really powerful as well .

So giving them a chance to get comfortable with connected text and with both phonically controlled and then uncontrolled text as well , which is what we want to move them to .

So we're just curious if you have any suggestions . Where does this fit ?

I think if you set aside 10 minutes a day and maybe a little bit more in the setup phase when you build one of these routines or these ways of doing fluency , you can get it to work for 10 minutes a day .

And I think we've found that , you know , in grades three or four onwards , if you've got fluent readers , you don't necessarily have to do 10 minutes every single day . You might actually get enough fluency through doing some incidental choral reading or by doing accountable independent reading .

So then if you've got students who you know are not quite fluent and they're in grade four or grade five , you can actually spend some of that accountable independent reading time to go and work with them . So you might then hear them read a little bit more often than you've got the other students .

So we found with , you know , years five and six , and I wouldn't expect secondary or high school teachers to do this very much if they've got their kids at a certain level of fluency that you might do it occasionally , but it doesn't have to be a big thing .

I think fluency is one of those things like phonics and phonemic awareness that once you've gotten students to a certain threshold it's not something you have to continually work on , because the ultimate thing that gets them better at fluency is lots and lots of reading and lots of success at reading , and that's both reading aloud but also reading in their own heads .

So if you've got students who are reading novels , there's not , unless they're doing a particular focus on presentations or , you know , say , putting together a play or doing a reader's theatre or something like that there isn't a huge need to constantly drill fluency . You can check in on them and make sure that they're up to where they need to be .

So , using your ORF methods or oral reading fluency methods that help to see how many words per minute they get correct at a single word and a passage level , that can be really helpful to make sure that they're on track . But in some ways , because of the self-teaching hypothesis this is David Sher's theory of reading and how it sort of works .

At this higher end , students actually start to teach themselves any exceptions that they find in words that they encounter . So they have enough phonics and enough morphology and enough vocabulary and awareness and understanding to basically be reading text independently and then to be sort of making good predictions on what the word would be if there's an unfamiliar word .

And the reason we know that this works is the self-teaching hypothesis is because there's lots of examples of really precocious readers who in conversation will drop an epitome or a hyperbole you know which is meant to be epitome or hyperbole and the reason they do that is because they've only heard that word in their own head as they've read it .

And so that shows that once they are fluent and once they've got good abilities to attack words and to use other sort of morphological as well as phonological and orthographic strategies to figure out the word , then they're going to get to the meaning of the word , even if the pronunciation isn't quite right , because there's an interesting thing going on there with

Greek words and how they're pronounced .

how well you can do it efficiently , effectively and smoothly so that it doesn't actually interfere with your working memory on the comprehension piece , which is what we talked about at the start . So it's really important in that space .

I also think , to be honest , when you've set it up really well as a busy classroom teacher , when you're trying to manage all the things that you've got during the day , that 10 minutes of the bell sort of going off one minute at a time , it's actually your chance to breathe , like if you've got explicit instruction and if you've got lots of sort of

teacher-directed or teacher-facilitated teaching throughout your block because you're using good instructional practices , it's actually very tiring to stay on top of that all the time . So having 10 minutes maybe in the middle of the block , that gives everyone a breather to just read and to do it in a meaningful way .

So they are practising fluency and it is , you know , peer-assisted . You can actually if you haven't got time to go and read and listen to students reading .

In that sort of 10 minutes you can actually just get a drink of water , have a listen to the lovely sound of all your students sort of reading together and know that you know it's all going to be okay if you don't go and listen to a particular student read in that moment .

So I think it's a 10-minute thing that if you set up really well , it's an easy part of your day and it's also a moment that could be really important on that daily sort of practice , because some students will have lots of time to read at home but , depending on your students and the home environment that they're in , they might not be able to do that daily

reading that we want them to do when they take their readers home or when they do reading in other ways .

So this might be their moment of 10 minutes a day where they actually put all of the skills that you've been developing together the phonics , the phonemic awareness , the irregular words that you're trying to teach them , vocabulary comprehension , trying to put it all together to sort of read successfully with a peer , and that might be really important for some of

those students who aren't going to get that 10 minutes of reading or 15 minutes of reading at another point .

And , like you know , depending on your age level and the level of challenge you've got , you might go more fancy and say , let's do it through poetry or let's do some scripts that we've got developed and do a performance and that can be really helpful .

But if you have to strip it back because you're limited for time or you're limited for what you can fit into your day , just doing those 10 minutes of peer reading or combined with some opportunities for choral and tract reading as well in your everyday sort of classroom teaching , that'll be a lot of fluency that you can build in , so it doesn't have to be a

huge extra thing that you add in on top .

There's a lot to think about and , as I say , you know , you have to de-implement at the same time that you implement , because you can't just keep adding things on top of each other .

So when you look at your literacy block and when you think about what definitely needs to be there , you don't have to put in half an hour of fluency Like 10 minutes , maybe 15 if you really need it is sufficient so that you've got enough space for everything else that you're trying to do .

And that's the takeaways that hopefully make teachers feel better about , you know , not beating themselves up . That's the takeaways that hopefully , to make teachers feel better about you know , not beating themselves up .

They haven't made , you know , an hour for for fluency sessions or you know a weekly thing , that they're constantly learning a new script and a new performance , and you know how do I fit in all these performances ? It doesn't have to be as elaborate of that , elaborate as that all the time .

You know I we've talked , we talked about it with Jan Hasbrook , but I just another plug too for that motivation factor of kids , knowing that their goal , seeing the number where they're at , seeing themselves increase , and also the benefit of really teaching the idea of consistency of practice over time and it's just a little bit , goes a really long way and that

to me , is always like the big appeal with fluency . I adore the fluency instructional practices because I think they're so much fun fluency instructional practices because I think they're so much fun and I just think they're so tangible for kids to see the results of and it's very motivating . Especially , my favorite grade to teach was fifth .

So fifth graders are like the most competitive kids age you could get . So it was always a big thing . And , melissa , I know middle school too they want to see themselves increase from their previous number and if you can get that idea of you against you , you know , and help them feel motivated , it's pretty awesome .

You know , there's a point to doing phonics , there's a point to doing phonemic awareness , there's a point to learning about morphology , because it's not just for the sake of it , it's so that you , in those moments of reading interesting texts and coming across unfamiliar words and having a long sentence that you have to try and pull together , you have got sort of

tools in your tool belt that you can use and through daily practice , it becomes more and more automatic and , as we said before , you can stop thinking about it and you can focus on . What is this author actually trying to say to me ?