E33 | Structured Literacy & Reading Profiles with Dr. Louise Spear-Swerling

Structured literacy, what it is, what it isn't, and how to support your students using reading profiles. It's coming up on the Teaching Literacy Podcast. Welcome to another episode of the Teaching Literacy Podcast. I am your host, Jake Downs. I am a literacy coordinator for a local school district, an adjunct instructor at Utah State University, and I have a PhD in literacy and leadership from that institution.

This podcast is all about bridging literacy research into practice. I hope things are well for you in whatever your sphere of literacy is. And before we get to the episode, I want to say a big thanks to whoever has been able to leave a review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get this podcast that does help the show get into the ears of teachers who can use the content.

that we talk about on the show to support their readers. And I'm also grateful for some of the donations that I have been trickling in via Venmo or PayPal. That does help support the software and hardware costs that it takes to run a podcast. So thank you for doing that. If you're interested in donating, you can go to teachingliteracy podcast dot com, click on about your host, and there is a secure link.

to donate via PayPal. You can also go to Venmo and tap on the business side and you can donate to at Teach Lit Pod there. Let's get to today's episode. When I saw that this book was being published I pre-ordered it and waited for probably six weeks for it to be released and when I received it, I started reading it immediately and really enjoyed what was written in this book.

The title of the book is called Structured Literacy Interventions Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties Grades K through six.

And it is edited by Doctor Louise Spears Swirling, who I have as guest today on the podcast. Doctor Louise Spears Swirling is a professor emeritus in the Department of Special Education at Southern Connecticut State. university. Her research interests have focused on reading development and literacy difficulties, but also on how teacher knowledge connects to reading instruction.

In this episode, we're going to talk about her newly released book, Structured Literacy Interventions Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties Grades K through 6. But you might also want to check out a book that she wrote several years ago called The Power of RTI in Reading Profiles, a blueprint for solving reading problems.

The reason I was so eager to order this book and read it once I got it is that I really admire Dr. Spears Swirling's work because she reads the academic literature very closely. but then translates it to practitioners in a way that is actionable, in a way that is pragmatic, in a way that is practical within the classroom. And I think you'll find today's episode very practical and help you think about how you can profile or categorize your students.

and support them using structured literacy approaches. After the interview, make sure to stick around for my two cents on the topic. doctor Louis Spears Swerling, thank you for joining us on the Teaching Literacy Podcast. You're welcome. It's my pleasure to be here.

I'm very excited to have you on the show today. We're talking about a new book that you edited and published through Guildford Press and it's entitled Structured Literacy Interventions Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties Grades K through six.

And you've had a long research career. You've done a lot of great work. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and your background, can you share a little bit about the work that you've done, your research interests and what you're currently up to? Sure. So I started my career many years ago as a special educator, uh working elementary special education and type of placement.

And the bulk of my career was really spent in teacher preparation. So for many years I prepared both general education and special education teachers. to teach reading using what we would now call structured literacy methods, although the term was not really used then. That's a term that's been coined more recently. And um I'm now retired from my full-time faculty position. I do some part-time teaching, but most of what I'm doing now is either writing or consultation work for schools.

And a lot of the work I do is either teacher professional development, which has long been a research interest of Marine Teachers Knowledge Base. For teaching, reading, and what teachers need to know, and also consultation on individual children and that. Usually children who have severe or persistent reading problems and how to adjust their programs to help them.

We we mentioned this before when we were chatting beforehand that one of the challenges of of academia is taking that and being able to thread it and and get it into the practitioner realm and And you're someone that I think has done a a very good job of that, of taking different strands and weaving it together in a way that

practical and and pragmatic for practitioners, which leads us to this book. This is a book that Written by the who's who of researchers in each of the different areas, but it's written for a teacher, practitioner, you know, school district level, state level type audience, folks who are are not academic. Can you give us some background of why did you choose to write this book and the process behind curating the different chapter authors and and what the vision of the book was?

Yours. So I knew that from both the research that I had done and the work I was doing in schools and work with teachers that structured literacy approaches could be really valuable. for a wide range of students who struggle in being. But I also knew that many teachers were not being prepared. to use these kinds of methods and nor were many children learning to read in school using these methods.

So I I also had some concerns about, in a way, the popularity of the term, which has really taken awe in the last couple of years. being understood maybe too narrowly in some cases as as referring only to a particular program or type of program.

And I thought that you know it's important. My thinking about structured literacy is similar to what I think what IBA uh International Dyslexia Association has discussed, which is it's better understood as an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of programs and approaches that all share certain instructional features and a focused on certain types of content.

And so I was fortunate to find uh a group of chapter authors that all were extremely knowledgeable in their fields, but were also highly skilled at being able to write for practitioners because the book is meant for practitioners. So you want people that are that are not only not sometimes people can be knowledgeable in your fields, but not be particularly skilled at okay, how does that translate into what you do with children?

And all of these people were very skilled at both in both areas and I think shared a similar vision for the book in terms of the vision of structured literacy as m as being an umbrella term that uh had more to do with research based features of instruction and research-based content and not being tethered to a particular approach.

I I appreciate that background on getting a a group of like minded folks together to help broaden this perception of structured literacy. And I've learned that when I'm reading something, there's two places to look, the authors and references. And then that's sort of my first screening and I you know when I saw this book online and I looked at the the contents I A lot of great, really well respected individuals. Louisa Motz wrote a chapter, Michael Cohn, Elizabeth Stevens.

Devin M. Kearns, uh, really some some strong names and introduced me to some names I wasn't as familiar with. And so I appreciate the magnitude of the work here of trying to pull in different folks from across the field to talk about structured literacy and we've we've already teased a little bit about that, but, you know, getting into the book, Sharon Vaughn in the opening, she's uh the editor of the book series and

She talks about how even through her, you know, someone as knowledgeable as Sharon Vaughn reading the book came away with a clearer understanding of what structured literacy is and what its targets are. And so there's a lot of terms that we just throw around in the literacy world and structured literacy is one of them. And ha the term has taken off in the last few years.

Can you give us a clear definition of what structured literacy is and what are those essential components that make uh structured literacy effective? Sure. So that's a really important question. And again, I like the way this has been laid out in some of the IDA documents. So I have to credit them it in giving me the definition that I have and that is embodied in the book. And that's really to think about structured literacy in terms of content and then instructional features.

So the content of structured literacy are specific reading related language abilities that we know are are very important in learning to read.

and that tend to play a role in reading problems. They've often been found to play a role in reading problems. So they would be abilities like candic awareness, phonics, skills, orthography, knowledge about broader letter strings that tend to recur in English, morphology, which is the smallest unit of meaning, like uh not just individual words but prefixes, suffixes, root.

a syntax which is sentence structure and semantics which refers to meaning at the level not only of the individual word which in education we would usually call vocabulary, but comprehension of sentences and of longer discourse. passages, stories, informational text, and so on. So that's the content of striping literacy. So you'll know the content is not saying things like Um multiple cueing systems and how how children use multiple cueing systems to read words or that kind of

Um, so the content part is important, but also the instructional features are very important. So uh Structured literacy approaches all share an emphasis on explicit teaching of important skills, which means that the teacher models and clearly explains important skills. Children aren't expected to just infer those skills from experience.

Teaching is systematic, so it's organized in in a logical way from simpler to more complex and also in line with what research it tells us about the logical order in which children learn, prompt, corrective, and affirmative feedback. when children make errors so that the teacher is providing clear feedback so children know if they've made a mistake, you know, how to correct the mistake. Some other features are uh use of database decision making.

So assessment that would help you not only design good instruction initially, but also monitor progress and Let you change an intervention for a child if an intervention's not working well. And uh another good example of a common instructional feature for structured literacy would be purposeful selections of examples. uh instructional tasks and test So here's an example of what that means. If you're teaching decoding in a systematic way, you initially choose your examples of words.

So as not to confuse children. So let's say in the program children are being taught syllable types like closed syllables, which would be not necessarily a universal feature of structured literacy approaches, but a really common feature. So usually early on children learn a closed syllable has one vowel, ends in a consonant, and the vowel's M will be short. And it's a way for them to unlock the vowel found in the syllable, which is highly variable nature.

So when the teacher is teaching this pattern to children, you have to screen out words like a mild or words like walk. or short, which is a vowel R pad. because children are ultimately going to learn those words, but early on it's going to be confusing because children haven't learned those words yet and they're going to want to call them short vowel words or close to the So the Teaching structures the input so that children are not confused to minimize.

confusion or Jack Fletcher and his colleagues in their book on learning disabilities, uh Fletcher, Lion, Fiex, and Barnes. say that a type of instruction, they don't I don't believe they use the term structured literacy, but they say that type of instruction that would benefit students with learning disabilities.

is instructional design that minimizes the learning challenge. And I think a lot of teachers will find that kind of an odd phrase because teachers are often being exhorted to challenge their students. But I think of it as avoiding sort of needless challenge or needless difficulty, difficulty that will be kind of counterproductive and end up confusing children instead of enabling them to learn in an efficient way.

and efficiency really matters when, you know, when children are behind and you have to accelerate. progress for them. So there's other features that I could talk about, but I think those are some of the key ones that you would find in an structured literacy approach. I appreciate the division between content of of what's going to be taught and the features of how we're going to teach it'cause as I've delved into your book, it's all made a lot of sense to me that I felt the content was very

clear specific things. It's not just let's spray our kids with text and hope something sticks. It's

it's it's it's a structure for literacy. Do we know what the students need and do we have a plan of how we're going to meet that need is perhaps a very broad way of of overgeneralizing it. But then with the features of how do we teach it efficiently and I think every educator and researcher believes in challenge, like you mentioned, but it's the needless challenge, the the red herrings, the confounding variables

that I think is we wanna try and minimize so we can help students learn literacy efficiently. We could have a whole episode just on talking research that supports structured literacy practices, but

Do you have any brief studies or an overview of of how research has supported this collection of practices? So with regard to the content, really the support goes back decades. Early work this was work I learned about in my teacher preparation program, believe it or not, in the late seventies was the work of um Liberman and Scheckwheeler. the Haskins Laboratories group of researchers who were known for their studies of phonological processes in

reading and there have been many, many more. The work of Pete Stanovich, Isabel Beck. Hollis Scarborough, the Florida Center for Reading Research, RIPA for researchers, again, many more that tell us that learning to read is faced in these language types of processes. And when children falter

it's typically because of the difficulty in one or more of the kinds of areas that I mentioned. Again, I'm not giving an exhaustive list, but we're looking in the domain of language and not in things like word configuration cubes, word shapes, or which are not useful. For learning to read in English, word shape is mostly not relevant unless you're just learning first, you know, six words in your reading vocabulary. All of all of the research that I just mentioned is highly relevant to content.

the consensus reports like the national reading panel report would be another one. for instructional features, I think of, for example, the work of Archer and Hughes, the book they wrote on explicit instruction, which is wonderful. and summarizes a lot of research supporting effective and teaching and explicit teaching, but also some of the IES practice guides.

which are also excellent and I recommend highly to your uh listeners if they're not familiar with them define just by Googling IBS practice guides. And they're written specifically for practitioners and they boil down. key research. findings in different areas. So for example, Foreman et al. which is the IES practice guide for beginning reading and Gersten et al. has one for I believe it's for reading intervention, RTI.

type intervention in the early grades would be another one. The Meadows Center at the at UT Austin. has a lot of research also on the value of explicit teaching and what kinds of features make teaching effective. So those would be just a few of the sources that kind of um pop to mind. Yeah, if folks are interested in listening, I interviewed Dan Reynolds a couple episodes back uh about the adolescent. IES literacy guidance and kind of updates in the research since that was released.

fifteen years ago or so. I hope listeners can understand why there was a need for this book. Structured literacy isn't an inch wide. It's a wide breadth of things, from phonology to syntax and semantics and everything in between. Perhaps to make it a little bit more concrete, can you provide our listeners with a quick compare and contrast of what a a non structured literacy practice versus

a structured literacy practice to help make it a little bit more applicable. Sure. Earlier I mentioned um multiple queuing systems models, which are with a good example of kind of non-SL kind of instruction.

And those have been very influential in tier one instruction. So one of the basic theory behind multiple queuing systems models, which we now we have known for a long time, are not an accurate understanding of how children learn to read, but they proposed that Children don't really look carefully at all the letters and words, that they use partial letter cues and context. in order to rework. So the instructional practices would often use things like predictable text.

The one my children learned to read with early on or that they they dot in their reading class as kindergartners and first graders was a book called Mrs. Wishy Washi. And it was a uh book about a farm woman washing on the farm. So there would be a picture of Mrs. Swishy Washy with a big wash tub. and uh washing a cow in the top and the text would say, In went the cow, wishy washy, wishy washy. Then you turn to the page and it's a picture of her washing uh a a pig.

in went the pig, wishy wash, wishy wash, and sort repeated for multiple animal. So what happens with that type of text is that children memorize the text from hearing it over and over and then they look at the picture to guess the word. And often the words that are used are sometimes more complex where the example I just gave you didn't give you good sense of that but

Often the words might have words like caterpillar or difficult words that a beginner could never decode. But if you have a picture of a caterpillar, the student can get based on the picture. So that's not what you would do in structured literacy. In structured literacy, you would be using text early on. that heavily sample the word patterns children have been taught. And there could be nice pictures, but the pictures don't enable yet.

And the text is not written in a way to encourage guet based on picture. There's differences even in things like assessment practice. So in a structured literacy approach, if you're doing an informal assessment of a child's world meeting, usually every error a child makes

counts with only a small number of exceptions. So one exception would be if a child has an articulation problem and they read wabbit for rabbit, but you know they mean a little furry animal with the big ears, that doesn't count as an error but so called contextually appropriate error. like a for da and this for that, in a structured literacy approach, those who count. Because we want the child to be reading the actual print on the page, not just sampling words and guessing.

based on context. In non-SL approaches, very common that those kinds of errors would be ignored. And then you can get really a false picture of how children are doing. And it's often problematic as children will dance and have to read more difficult types of books. But you mentioned the three queuing system and I consider myself fortunate that I I never that was I that wasn't something in my teacher education program. That wasn't something that the school district I was hired to work for

None of our curriculum used that. And uh I was about two thirds of the way through my doc program and I started hearing about this. It was, you know, a few years ago when it was right when RRQ was doing their special double issue and There just was a lot of stuff going on in the reading world and I started hearing about this thing called the three queuing system. What on earth? What on earth is that? And I went to go follow up on it and learn more and it just seems so

bizarre to me that we wouldn't teach kids how to process the print directly rather than just guessing for for meaning. So I I appreciate that compare and contrast because there are a lot of places that the three queuing system and other related practices are very heavily used and perhaps there might be a more structured way to to approach reading with it. So I I appreciate that that background and context.

Your first chapter to introduce the book, you provide some background on reading profiles. And and that becomes sort of a a structure that a thread that I see carried throughout the book and Very early on in my doc program I came across some of your work and and I found the the work on reading profiles to be something very pragmatic, something that I could take and make decisions off of in the classroom the very next day.

Can you provide a an overview and some background on reading profiles and perhaps comparing and contrasting them a little bit as well? Sure. So um so about many of your listeners might be familiar with the simple view of reading. And the three profiles really flow out of the simple view of reading. So the simple view of reading says that to have good reading comprehension, a student has to have two broad types of ability. They have to be able to decode the printed word.

And they have to have a language comprehension to understand what they decode. And so if you think about those two broad abilities, then a student who a student who is a good reader will be good in both. This non-negotiable that, you know, you're gonna be a good reader, you have to have good skills in both of those areas. But a poor reader can have poor decoding.

coupled with good language comprehension, average or better, where they could have the opposite profile. They could have at solidly average you're better decoding, but language comprehension weaknesses like say a weak vocabulary that will then impact their ability to comprehend. Or they could have a mixed type of profile, which means that they have weaknesses in both areas. So with the last type of student what you might see is that

the student has reading comprehension difficulties. Even when you give them text they can decode, even when they're reading at their instructional level, because maybe they don't know the meanings of certain words or They don't have background knowledge to understand what they're reading or that kind of thing. Or you might see with a child as a mixed profile, the student has decoding problems, but also in oral discussion, the teacher will notice.

language weaknesses like weaknesses in vocabulary or background knowledge and so on. So it's three common profiles and the profiles really apply one of the reasons I think profiles are so useful is that they apply to a a pretty broad grade range, really. first grade through high school, but they also fit children with and without disabilities. So a lot of disabilities that affect learning to read, such as dyslexia, autism spectrum disorders, language disabilities.

can be understood in relation to the three profiles, but so key in reading problems that are more experiential. Let's say a student has difficulty reading because they just haven't been exposed to certain vocabulary. or they're an English learner, so they don't have certain types of academic language in English, that sort of so it very In my opinion, that's one of the things that makes them so useful is their application to a lot of different types of of students.

I would echo that the application part is what makes it really powerful. Sometimes a hindrance to having something reach the classroom is that it it isn't practical enough but

As a classroom teacher, I I can three is a number I can handle. I can look at my students and think, Okay, what which students uh need more support in decoding but are strong in comprehension, who's strong in decoding but needs to comprehension and then who needs both and then perhaps who's really excelling at both as well and

a way to help just making three simple groups like that. This is a practical mental model of thinking that I think really h helps a teacher design instruction in a way that is being cognitively efficient based on those different

profiles within a classroom. Do you have anything to add about why using profiles might be beneficial or any particular uh stories or anecdotes that you've seen with it? I think it's it it's a really helpful starting point. So it's not that other kinds of data wouldn't be important too. Like you could ha you could do an evaluation on a student and see that the student difficulty say are concentrated in the domain of comprehension.

But m but word reading is good, is solidly, you know, grade appropriate. But then if you have information that say a student has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. We know those students tend to have specific kinds of comprehension problems, like difficulties with perspective taking, for example, difficulties with multiple meanings of work. So so then, you know, that additional information could certainly be very helpful for that student, but the profile is a starting.

It it's a starting point to which you can add as you get to know children and get more information. Also, I've only written about this a little bit and I I haven't seen a lot of attention to it in the literature, but really the profiles also help you understand students' problems in written expression. Because really what the profiles are is that they're a constellation of underlying strengths and weaknesses in language, in different components of language.

And those patterns play out in predictable ways in children's rights. So if a student has a s a specific word rec recognition problem, the first profile where the difficulties are concentrated in decoding, very often those students will have difficulties with the knowledge. And then that will impact spank in the area of written expression. Or conversely, if you have a student that has a specific comprehension difficulty.

Usually in writing, their their foundational writing skills might be strong, but whatever the underlying source of the comprehension weakness is tends to impact writing too. So if a student has weaknesses in vocabulary, then that's going to impact their word choice in writing. if they have um syntactic weaknesses, trouble understanding complex sentence structures, well you're going to see that in their writing also. So I I think it's uh very useful in that way as well.

That's got my brain thinking. I appreciate that connection to writing'cause they are so closely intertwined and I would chip in with the simple view of reading. It's important to remember that it that is a very broad level and it filters down from there but at a broad level, that that does account for our students' strengths and and patterns of weaknesses that that we can support. You also talk about the mixed reading difficulties profile.

specifically. For students who um struggle in both the decoding side and the language comprehension side, it it's a bit extra challenging. Um, I mean it's, you know, always challenging, but if a student has a strength in one side and a weakness in the other. It's a little bit easier nut to crack, it's more straightforward, but

for students who struggle in both the decoding side and the language comprehension side, it's extra challenging. And so you advocate for multi component interventions for these students. Can you elaborate on what uh multi-component intervention is and why it might be beneficial for these students? Sure. So if if a student has a mix profile and let me use a specific example. Let's say we have a student who had weird decoding problem.

But testing also reveals weaknesses in vocabulary knowledge. Then you know that once you successfully build decoding to a certain point. the vocabulary weaknesses, if they're not addressed in intervention, they will affect comprehension too. So if those difficulties are addressed early as part of intervention, then you have a better chance of long term success. And you might put a different emphasis, like if a student has severe decoding weaknesses they can barely read.

and of, you know, vocabulary reduces like high and mild. Well, it makes sense in the intervention to put somewhat more emphasis certainly on decode to build that. But I would argue you should still think about developing vocabulary maybe through things like Read Aloud in order to ultimately enable the student to have more long-term success in reading.

So in that case, you're trying to do two things, right? You're trying to support both sides of the simple view of reading. So planning becomes really critical at that stage because Time is time is always of the essence. And for some of our kids, we need to make sure, or well, for the kids we're providing interventions for, we want to make sure we're being

very intentional with how we spend that time in order to make sure we're providing them the the type of support that they really need to progress. So as a teacher or as a a uh literacy coach or someone is

planning a multi-component intervention, what sort of things should that person consider that would help maximize its success? So I would say you wanna start with good asset in each of these areas, in the you know, area of reading the words, which would include multiple a like And uh decoding regular words and white word knowledge and that kind of thing. And also uh a similar good assessment.

area of comprehension. And this could inc include not only formal evaluation data, but data that might already exist. as part of progress monitoring, uh classroom observation and things like that. Especially in the area of comprehension. Some of these things are often going to be evaluated more informally, I think, at least initially, unless we have a student who really ends up going for comprehensive evaluation for special education or something like that.

So that would be an important way to begin. And then in designing the intervention, I would think about what are the students' needs, because most students will have a need in everything. And what do they need the most next at this particular point in their development? So for instance, in decoding, we might have a student whose accuracy is poor and who's also not very automatic, but usually you want to initially focus on building accuracy.

And then the automaticity, you shift to more to bat a little bit later as the student has built some accuracy of decoding. So you think about what are the students' needs and what what are the most pressing needs to address first. and then use progress monitoring to you'd want you'd have an expectation that if the intervention is successful, the students needs are gonna shift somewhat over time.

Another thing I would think about doing, and I alluded to this earlier, is prioritize or allocate time. based on the severity of me. in decoding versus comprehension. So

And the example I gave before was, you know, if decoding is really low and a student can barely read, it obviously makes sense to put more emphasis on that to start with. So it would allocate more time to that area, but that's can't still do a 10 minute read aloud at the end of a session and te explicitly teach important vocabulary and things like that, but it's not going to be the main emphasis in time allocation.

And then I would say finally, um, one thing that's important is to try to find ways instructionally to um to integrate. uh instruction and this is helpful probably for a lot of children, but I think particularly when, as you suggested, it's a lot of needs, right, that have to be addressed. So as a practical matter, it helps to find activities that will integrate instruction. So some examples of ways that you can integrate instruction would be to use rhyming activities to help develop read.

So writing activities help focus children's attention on the print. So a child who's a very beg functioning at a very beginning level can be learning about letter sound relationships and phonemic awareness and spelling and decoding. in the context of that type of activity for a child who's more advanced in reading but still need intervention. writing summaries about something that they've read could help to develop both.

comprehension and writing skills, an activity that I used to use with my own stud my old teacher candidates when I used to when I was working full time I would I taught a couple of courses where first half of the semester I would spend teaching content and then the second half of the semester the students would go into a local public school to tutor children.

And I would accompany them and uh su and supervise them while they were doing the tutoring. So and these were mostly all children in first and second grade, so function at early levels. So for reading and spelling phonetically irregular words, we would do a multi-sensory tracing type of activity where the child learns to repeatedly trace the word. say the letter names and then say the whole word and then turn the paper over and write the word from memory. And um I actually didn't gather data.

And I it did promote children's retention of follow the word in reading, but also being able to spell. So finding, you know, instructionally efficient ways to work on more than one thing at once. Another good example of that I think is when you teach children morphology. Morphology is really useful for decoding. but also for spelling and also for vocabulary. So if children are learning that, you know T-E-L-E-E is pronounced tele, like in television, telegram, teleport, telemarketing.

Um, and it's always spelled T P-L-E. It's never gonna be T E L I and it means from a distance. then especially in the context of word families that share this similar prefix or root, they can uh improve their vocabulary, their spelling, their decoding. So I think Those kinds of activities become especially important with these children because they do have so many different needs.

Thank you for that explanation. I want to expand a little bit on what something you briefly mentioned of and that's the matter of dosage.

I I'cause I think that's something that's that's really critically important, that if there's a half hour or forty five minutes allocated during a day for that for a teacher be giving a student an intervention or or a small group of students What might guide the teacher of, okay, within that forty five minutes Or within that half hour, how much of that am I spending on the decoding side?

Of the simple view and how much am I spending on the language side? Maybe you can kind of walk us through how those decisions can be made. You know, that that's a really good question and it's a question I've gotten pretty often from schools, because it's exactly the kind of thing you worry about when you're implementing stuff, right? I don't know of a good empirical basis for saying, you know, X number of minutes is better than Y number of minutes.

In fact, I know of a couple studies that have addressed different reading skills and had to come up with the same outcomes even though more time was spent Say on words in isolation versus reading words in past or vice versa. So I don't have an empirical answer. I think it's more of a of a judgment call or common sense that if a student has really serious needs in one area.

that you would tend to allocate more time to that. But I don't have a good empirical basis for making that judgment, at least not that I know of, not in terms of the research that I So that's always gonna depend on the context and and the data that you're seeing and perhaps the s the scope and sequence of instruction that they're in and a lot of local contextual factors will factor into that as well. And using progress monitoring.

So if you're doing ongoing progress monitoring and you're seeing that there's an air an important area where the student is not progressing, that's telling me I think that one variable to consider is putting more time into that area.

Excellent. Could you provide us an example vignette of what a structured literacy multi-component intervention could look like? Sure. So in the book there's a student uh there the last chapter of the book, which was one that I wrote Uh it's profile three different children and multi component uh interventions for each child and each child has the what things. And Jamal is um the first child who's profiled

I think that some of your listeners, if you work in elementary or middle schools, you see a lot of children, a lot of struggling readers like Jamal. So he's a sixth grader and he's not a really low level decoder, but he still has some decoding need, mainly in relation to multisyllabic words, building fluency. Spelling and then also vocabulary comprehension. So he's got these

broad needs. He's not extremely low in any one area, but it's a broad set of needs. So he's a perfect example of a student that could really benefit um Teaching of morphology to read multisyllabic words. and then tying in the meanings of roots, prefixes, suffixes to help him with vocabulary, teaching him that the root typically has a stable spelling. So it's gonna be with the same spelling across the semantically related types of words.

And that you can do that you can do that to help even when words even when the vowel sound is not apparent. And you really have to do that in English spelling. So for example, if a s if a student is trying to spell the word colonist. The second vowel. it you cannot hear with your ear that that's an up, right? Because it's a schwa. So colonist. It could be an I, it could be a U, could be an A. Um, but the students make an analogy to colony or colonial.

a semantically related word, the same roo, and if the student understands, oh, I should use the roo to help spell the word, then then you can get that spell. So um so some teaching about that, just making explicit. Hey, this is useful information. If you pay attention to, you can't maybe hear what the vowel is, but you can think of words that are related word that will help you in in spell.

So those that was one set of basically Jamal's word reading. And in the in the book, he's working in a small group. He's able, he's got a matched group of children, so it's like one to three or something like that. And then for text comprehension. The teacher is doing teaching and instructional activities like question generation, where the student generates questions while they read. and they write answers to their questions in a log and that's to help get better depth of processing.

of what they're reading and better inferencing and and that sort of thing, it also picked into being able to summarize a text. And then there's repeated reading for fluency. And I guess one thing I would say, and I'm still this isn't really specifically a structured literacy thing, but I'm just thinking of children like Jamal that I've worked with and

that again in my experience are really common a really common profile of reading difficulty in the upper elementary and middle grades. A student like Jabal reads well enough So if you've got a sixth grader who's reading at a first grade level, it's a really tough duck to crack to find something they can read for enjoyment. But a student who's in sixth grade and stay in reach or our fourth grade level, that opens up a lot of series that are really written specifically for

older students who struggle in reading. So I do worry sometimes that in special education we overlook the importance of trying to stimulate independent reading, especially once students get to that point where it would be a good option for them. And I'm not talking about that as sort of a substitute for instruction in school. But more as an adjunct.

reading for homework or reading during free time or something like that. There's so many benefits that children can get out of independent reading for enjoyment that I think we should overlook that. as something that we wanna do we wanna try to stimulate product for kids who struggle, even if early on they were like, I'd rather sprout the toilet than read. I'd rather eat Brussels sprouts than read. I think it's worth trying to change that.

as kids get more more skill in reading and they have more books that might interest them if they were Absolutely. I love that perspective. My mind just kept going back to as you're providing this vignette of the importance of good, accurate data collection and having various types of data

to try and get this three-dimensional profile of what the student really needs. And that's a tricky part of it as well, but it's an essential. It's it's to make decisions on how to support the kid, you've got to have good data from the beginning. So we have really scratch the surface with the book. We've provided a little bit of an overview of the reading profiles and how to structure multiple interventions at a time, but

we haven't gotten really into the the individual chapters that are covering different things like spelling and like fluency and like phonology. So would you mind providing a brief

walkthrough of the book of other highlights that that folks who are interested in the book can find if they dig deeper into it. Sure. Well there's individual chapters on these important components of reading. There's also a a chapter on written expression. There's a chapter on oral language comprehension, including syntax and narrative language. and all understood within the framework of structured literacy and how would you teach.

children with weaknesses in these areas using a structured literacy approach. I guess one thing I'd like to highlight about the book. And this I really owe to uh Sharon Vaughan, who as you mentioned is the series editor and suggested using a template for the individual chapter.

So at first suggestion I devised a template I thought would be useful. And the thing about edited books, they they often the chapters often have a lot of variability. So if you really good chapter and then a not so good chapter. Um, but I thought all of these authors probably would have produced great chapters anyway. But when you have a template, it kind of ensures that people are consistent in how they organize.

what they're doing. So authors were asked to start with an opening anecdote or case of a child or something like that, to have a section that would summarize research findings. in in whatever domain it was for awareness or vocabulary or whatever, to have the meat of the chapter be focused on instructional activities and uh lesson plans. And then at the end

to have application exercise. So the application exercises give the reader Say, uh for my opening chapter go get one of them is a description of a student. and then the uh reader has to decide which pattern of reading difficulty. what profile or it might be a description of a student's difficulty and the reader has to decide what would be an example of a good vocabulary instructional activity.

or a good meaning comprehension activity or that sort of thing. So I think that was very useful. I think at structure that initial template. um helped to aut the chapter authors just really did a great job with it. They really did exactly what I was hoping they would do. And I think that also helps to make the book very useful for practitioners.

Absolutely. I'm I'm a kinch person, so macro structures matter. So I I I think it's it does communicate very well to practitioners and I think that consistent structure throughout is part of it. And I will add that there's additional resources sprinkled throughout the book. You know, here's a table that has different programs that fall in this category or here's a website that has more. And that's been something I've really appreciated about this is

not only is it giving me the practical nuts and bolts, this is what it looks like, but okay, here's resources that you can use to help it make it happen in your your sphere. So it's a good It's a it's a really good, very practical text for for practitioners. Once again, the name of the book is Structured Literacy Interventions Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties Grades K through six and

It's available, you know, through Guildford Press wherever wherever books are sold. Are there other books or resources or m materials from you that folks who are interested in learning more might be able to be connected with?

From me, probably the most relevant, the most relevant source other than published articles would be a previous book that I did that was published by Brooks called The Power of RTI and Reading FOFI. um a blueprint for solving reading problems. So that um introduces the profiles idea and has a lot of case examples of children. Excellent. So I'm sure that'd be a good companion text to this one a as well, thinking about RTI. So

Wonderful. Well, Dr. Louise Spearswirling, thank you for joining us on the Teaching Literacy Podcast.

Final question for you. What do you think makes a good teacher? Oh, okay. So I thought about this because you let me know a little bit about what the questions were gonna be up front. And I think that's a really good question. So I think to being a a a good teacher, certainly being effective, means you do have to have a a a knowledge base.

about that's you know grounded in current research about how children learn to read and the most common reasons why children have difficulty and evidence-based practice. So that's one set of things that hopefully, but which does unfortunately it doesn't always happen, but it's what you would want teachers to get as part of their pre-service education. Another really important piece is to be able to teach explicitly. And to teach, you know, been it consistent with the effective teachers.

that are part of structured literacy and that are supported by research. And one of the things I've found in many years of training teacher candidates is that Some people like anything else, I guess, some people have more of a head for this than others. Some people are more natural. at being able to explain things in a way that's clear, not too wordy, to the point. But I but also, of course, like a lot of other things, I think that that's a skill set that can be trained. Um that can be improved.

People have to work with kids. you know, an eight uh direct interaction with with children. Um, I think also the ability to relate well to students is really important for any teacher and it's probably even more important if you work with kids who struggle. Um so what one student that I had always stuck in my mind. Um in she was this was a teacher candidate at in a university class.

She was a good solid student, maybe like a B student. She didn't have any significant academic problems, but she didn't really stand out. when she went into the field work, she really stood out. Um, because one of the things she would do is um with and again, these were like young children, first and second grade. When her child got something, even if it was kind of like the smallest achievement, her whole

the teacher's whole face would light up. Um she would express such pleasure at the child's, you know, learning. And you could see the child really respond to that.

And um it might be different things, different a little bit different ways you would interact with children depending on whether they're older or they're younger. But I think that ability to kind of and have a rapport with children, um, and be able to, you know, build a relationship with them is really important to be an effective teacher.

Um and then I guess the last thing would be sort of a uh a disposition toward continuous improvement, lifelong learning, because like any other you know, area of expertise. It's built over a period of time. and people don't learn it in pre service or even, you know, your learning's not gonna be done when you get your masters. And that's actually one of the things I love about teaching is that it can always

To learn, grow, improve. And I think that's an important mindset for somebody who's an effective teacher. Wonderful. Dr. Luis Spearswilling, thank you for joining us on the Teaching Literacy Podcast. My pleasure. Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk to you. A big thanks to Dr. Louis Spearswerling for joining me on the Teaching Literacy podcast.

For those of you that have followed the podcast for a long time, you'll be familiar with episode two, which is my first time I interviewed Dr. John Z Strong, and he was talking about how we can support students in complex text. And he references Dr. Spearswerling's work in there where he's talking about supporting students who have uh difficulties in decoding but relative strengths in comprehension.

Students who have relative strengths in decoding, but a relative weakness in comprehension, and students who struggle in both areas.

And that was a really influential article and interview for me. There are so many different threads to literacy research and how we can really robustly support students. It can be overwhelming. Uh and even for me, someone who's done a PhD in in literacy and who's read a lot of reading research, it's still very overwhelming for me at times to think about how do we make all of these different threads

cohesive so that students can really benefit. But that's exactly the reason why I like Dr. Spears Swerling's work around reading profiles.

you know, a bazillion different threads is hard to handle. But I can handle three. I can look at any of my students or as an entire group of my students and think where are their relative strengths and weaknesses and using that profile mind And using that type of mindset to support the instruction that I'm delivering at tier one, tier two, tier three, at all of my different tiers of support to make sure that I'm providing students with the best support that I possibly can.

So I hope that you also appreciated thinking about those three different profiles and special considerations for when uh a student needs a multi-component intervention, which I think is fairly prevalent for students who struggle to read. And especially we start thinking about upper elementary and into middle school and high school, those multi-component interventions really become very critical to make sure that we're using our time efficiently to support reading achievement.

The other reason I really appreciated this book and was so grateful that doctor Louis Spearsor would join us on the show was specifically to talk about structured literacy. As she said, the structured literacy is a term that's really taken off in the last few years. And a lot of times we throw terms around like structured literacy and balanced literacy and guided reading and science of reading. These terms get thrown around quite a bit.

And we forget to define them really clearly for folks who may not be on the inside track of all that of of what each of these, you know, different areas mean. And so what I like about talking about structured literacy is that it really is a broad umbrella term that encompasses lots of different That not only encompasses different content areas of literacy instruction, but also different pedagogical or approaches.

teaching that instruction. It's going to have very clear targets. It's going to have very clear instruction. That instruction's going to have lots of opportunities for students to practice and respond. It's going to have a gradual release format.

And so thinking about it as both sides of that coin I found was really beneficial and added to my knowledge of thinking about it's not just the content of what we're teaching our students and the perspective of why it matters that those are the things we're teaching. But also the how of how do we make sure that we are teaching our students in an efficient way, uh a way that is working with their brains and working with time rather than against it.

That's why I'm a big fan of thinking about structured literacy and gradual release and explicit instruction is simply because time is one of our most valuable resources within the classroom. We can't get more time. There's a hundred and eighty school days in a year. There's only so many grades of elementary school. And so for us to be able to use the time that we have more efficiently matters so much with making sure that our students can become successful readers.

And with that, we will wrap up this episode. I hope that you had some great takeaways from this episode as well. If you appreciated this episode, please share the episode with a colleague. You can of course pick up the book Structured Literacy Venture International. Structured Literacy Interventions from Guildford Press. Thanks so much for joining me, and until next time, let's go and teach reading just a little bit better.