S4 E10 - Instructional Spring Cleaning - Timers During Classroom Fluency Work

So far , we've looked at the idea of classroom news for oral language development and one student coming up to the front of the room during phonics lessons . Today , I'm sharing my thoughts on something that impacts all grades in the primary school , that is , using timers during classroom fluency practice .

This practice is becoming more widespread and is a feature of some phonics programs . Essentially , a timer is used while students are reading with a partner . epending on the program or advice . The timer is used in a variety of ways .

It could be to track the length of the session , it could be to indicate a swap over point in the reading , or it could be as a prompt to encourage students to read faster . I first encountered this practice a couple of months ago in two separate schools , and when I saw it I was a bit taken aback . Actually , that's not quite true .

I first encountered this several years ago in a school I was working in and I pretty quickly knocked it on the head . I felt that it was putting a lot of pressure on the students and it was unnecessary , but I didn't have a good research understanding of it back then . Timing during assessment is a must . It's a way to measure accuracy and automaticity .

Without timing during reading assessment , the data just isn't reliable . But as a classroom practice , I've actively avoided it and discouraged others from using it and , as I said , I just felt that it put a lot of pressure on students . When I saw this in the classroom recently , I thought , "whoa , hang on , no , no , no , we don't do that .

And then I paused because if I'm going to be making a recommendation or suggestion of something , I'd like to be able to do so with some evidence to go along with that advice . So I got reading .

I wanted to know if this was one of those times when I had a belief or if I was accurate in my thinking , and I think we can all recognise times where we've had either one of those things happen . This resulted in many hours of reading and exploring to figure out what was what in this timed reading situation .

The difficult news here is that there isn't one easy answer for every circumstance for every student . Well , if we're honest , there never is . So we need to be clear in our own minds about what is and isn't evidence-based and under what circumstances a practice is most appropriate to meet a particular need .

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of my reading and some recommendations , let's quickly review the concepts around fluency . Firstly , fluency isn't an activity that we do . It's not something that we teach in a standalone task . It's largely the byproduct of other things done well and has three components: accuracy , automaticity and prosody .

Accuracy is pretty self-explanatory and is an aspect of reading we've always measured , even though schools still using benchmark assessments are measuring accuracy . The next element is automaticity . This is about how quickly and effortlessly students can lift the words from the page .

It's where the idea of reading rate comes into play and why reading assessments and screeners are timed . Without knowing how many words a student read in a set time , we can't assess automaticity . Using a combination of accuracy and rate , we arrive at a score of words read correctly per minute .

It's important to know that this notion didn't arrive in education with Dibles . It's been a feature of quality , normed tools for a very long time . Text level fluency isn't the start of the journey . While text-level reading supports automatic word-level reading , accurate word-level reading through sounding out is necessary for effective text-level reading .

Further , accurate word-level reading is highly dependent on student knowledge of the alphabetic code and morphemic structures , as well as spelling rules and well developed phonemic awareness . All of this is interlinked . The third element of fluency is prosody .

While words correct per minute is an unambiguous measure of reading fluency , prosody is not so easy to pinpoint and score . Prosody includes phrasing and expression , with elements of this relating to punctuation use , adjustment of pace for different purposes , changing your voice during dialogue and placing emphasis on particular words in a text to achieve an effect .

Reading aloud is a multifaceted undertaking . If you're a Resource Room member you have access to the course "Milestones of Early Reading Development , where we have explored all of this and examined research around the link between things like punctuation and comprehension , as well as other skills and understanding students develop on the road to becoming a proficient reader .

So we can already see from this explanation of fluency that addressing fluency is not as simple as just whacking a timer on during some partner work in our classrooms and sitting back while the results appear . The nuanced conversation here is about what kind of experiences do students need to develop fluency at different points in reading development .

That might involve a timer , it might not . Let's turn our attention now to some research to help inform our decision making . Remember , evidence-informed practice involves three components: the research, decisions about our practice based on our experience as teachers and the experience of the end user , the students .

Often we're looking at formal data , but we're also looking at our observations about how the students react to different tasks . It's important to know that our preferences or feelings never override the finding of robust research when we have it , but they are an important consideration when we are implementing practices .

So when I went down the rabbit hole of reading about using timers during whole class fluency practice in the primary school , guess how many papers I found ? Not one . I read from sources such as Tim Rasinski , Jan Hasbrouck and Louisa Moats . I searched databases for articles and papers in peer-reviewed journals .

Now , if you have a paper that meets these conditions , as in students learning to read , particularly in the early years in the primary school classroom , please get in touch and send through what you have and I'll make an update to this episode . There are plenty of papers and articles about repeated reading at class level, absolutely .

But I just couldn't find anything about timing during whole class lessons in the primary school . There was a paper called "the Effect of a Timed Reading Activity on EFL Learners: Speed , comprehension and Perceptions", and EFL there stands for English as a Foreign Language .

This was from 2010 , but the participants in the study were university students who were learning English as an additional language . They had high levels of spoken vocabulary and presumably high levels of accuracy in word level reading , so that one didn't hit the mark for me .

Not finding research about timing during whole class primary lessons, I looked for intervention studies and recommendations from experts and guess what ? I found some . So what did they say ? The first paper I'd like to share is from Grunke , Karnes and Hisgen , called "Effects of Explicit Timing on the Reading Fluency of Third-Graders with Learning Challenges .

This paper described a study conducted in 2019 in Germany and involved four students . Yep , that's not a typo, four students .

We have to understand that these smaller scale intervention studies often involve very small sample sizes , meaning that we have to be very careful not to read too much into them , and we certainly aren't going to rush out and change practice based on the findings of one of them , but we can build our own knowledge to inform decision making in what we learn .

The students in this study were all accurate decoders who spoke German as a second language . The study lasted for four weeks and results were measured using correct words per minute .

The intervention in the study was delivered one student at a time , with repeated reading within a text when there was an error , but the texts themselves were not read in their entirety multiple times . A timer was used and results were graphed at the end of each reading session .

These researchers found that while results improved during the timed reads , they didn't stick once the timer was turned off . There wasn't a suggestion in the paper of why this occurred , but for me I think it has some interesting things to indicate about attention .

Maybe, and I'm completely guessing here, but maybe part of that was that while the timer was on , the student's attention was focused and that made their reading more accurate . But I don't know . You make up your own mind about what you think might have been happening .

But I just want to say that us having a bit of a guess about what might be happening is not evidence that we should change our practice . There were other examinations of fluency development practices in intervention studies that involved timing , but these all involved the student reading one-on-one with an adult .

There were many more studies about repeated reading showing positive impacts on student outcomes . What I did find curious was the number of articles about timed reading that cited a program or publication where it was included .

When I read this I thought there are plenty of examples of people doing this , but I'm not convinced of the research basis for it in the classroom with 25 six-year-olds . My question is, is this one of those practices that has become familiar without a super strong evidence base ?

And because it's common in programs that are largely evidence informed , have we just assumed that the practice is also evidence-based ? An example of this is from Hudson, Lane and Pullen . They published an article on the Reading Teacher in 2005 . In this article , the authors described a timed reading protocol ,

and I'll read briefly from that article now . "Timed readings are conducted using books or passages the student has read before . They are at an independent reading level (i . e . , books the student can read with 95% accuracy or above) . " Hmm , so they aren't recommending timed reading with texts that the students can't decode . That's interesting .

It's also worth noting that the protocol they shared involved an adult and a child in a one-on-one situation . This article did cite timed reading as being part of a program . It also said that program has been examined and been shown to be effective .

But again , I'm still not convinced of the blanket application of timed reading in the classroom , based on what I'm seeing . Similarly , an article on Reading Rockets about timed reading features some of these same recommendations . Their notes on differentiation are as follows: Encourage students to become familiar with the strategy before introducing a stopwatch .

Begin with materials that are familiar to the student . Use repeated reading as practice for the timed repeated reading . Have students read passages aloud several times , while receiving feedback and guidance from an adult . Have the adult or a more proficient student read the passage, then have the student read the passage .

Teach students to be proud of their own progress and not compare it to others, keep scores private . Familiar text that the student can decode, the timing is used to monitor progress as part of a larger structure involving repeated reading , receiving feedback and guidance from an adult . None of this is about whole class fluency practice .

I've linked to the articles and studies in the show notes of our website for this episode . Don't just take my word for it, have a look and see what you think . Now let's move on to the classroom level implications for this practice .

The first thing to remember is that the type of fluency practice and the type of reading material students need will depend on their stage of reading development . If students are perfectly fluent , prosodic readers , repeated reading does nothing for them . If they don't have a high level of accuracy , they need to work on phonics and morphology to build that accuracy .

So we have to remember that the needs of the students in our class will be different and the fluency measures we undertake also need to be a little different . Fluency , like everything else , is not a one-size-fits-all undertaking in every circumstance . The second thing relates back to what I saw in one of the classrooms I was in in particular .

When you add a timer and say go , students are going to rush . They just are , and I'm sorry , but simply telling them not to rush and to slow down and read nicely isn't going to do a thing . We are hardwired to go quickly when stopwatches , timers and the word go are in the mix . Try having a sports carnival without them .

And when the rushing starts , accuracy drops , as does the level of attention that's given to comprehension . The next thing is that they're going to compare themselves to others . For students who struggle in this area , that is a nightmare .

Sitting students with reading difficulties and/ or anxiety down every day and pressuring them to read faster could very well lead to some well-being issues for those students . The whole issue of reading faster is problematic .

Jan Hasbrouck , whose research has given us robust norms for correct words per minute , says that the aim is for students to reach the 50th percentile .

There is no virtue at all in asking a student who is confidently reading the 80th percentile to read faster , and the answer here is likely to increase the complexity of the text to pose more challenge, but remember , if the student doesn't have a fluency problem , fluency work is a waste of time .

What we should be doing is engaging students in robust, wide reading opportunities , including during text-based work , and folding in prosody to that work where we have time and space to bring meaning to the picture . When it comes to partner work for the little people , we need to align reading material with the student's skill development .

If I can't blend words on my own , I shouldn't get a text . If I can't blend words on my own, I shouldn't be learning high-frequency words , and that's related to the work of Anne Castles and colleagues .

So popping a text of even one or two sentences in front of me when I don't have strong code knowledge and I don't have strong phonemic skills is unfair and it is not going to lead to great outcomes . Remember , it's not a one size fits all approach that's needed .

The other suggestion that I've seen is to set a timer for a minute and then , when the timer goes off , the students swap over and their partner reads . Hmm, I'm not sure about this one for a few reasons . Firstly , it feels like chaos .

Trying to get everyone's attention four or five times during a reading experience and then having them all reading again at the same time feels like we're constantly breaking their focus . And if we aren't doing that , what are we doing ? Are we just yelling at them to swap over and hoping for the best ?

Now I will acknowledge that different schools from different backgrounds are going to have different experiences here . This is where the application of the research becomes context-specific . Remember , the findings of robust research are not context-specific, we can apply them to everyone , but how we make things happen may differ from one school to another .

We just have to know why we're doing what we're doing and what we want kids to get out of it , and if something isn't working , if we've done our darndest, if it's still not happening , feel free to make a change . The other thing with this is that if we're strict with it , it's likely that we'll be cutting kids off mid-sentence .

This has a couple of implications . Firstly , it's just not enjoyable . Secondly , kids may feel that they've been cheated because they couldn't finish . Thirdly , it's quite difficult to attend to any kind of meaning when you can't finish the sentence that you're on and get a sense of the ideas being communicated in the text .

Comprehension monitoring is a really important early comprehension strategy we need to teach , and if kids are often not able to get to the end of the sentence , how do they monitor whether what they've read actually makes sense ? A signal to swap partners isn't a bad idea , though , and there are a few different ways to do it .

The simplest way if students are reading a book is that you just swap over at each page , and early decodables don't have much text , so the child's not waiting for very long . I would recommend one between two, and one points for the other . Another way that works when texts get longer is for students to swap over at the end punctuation of sentences .

So should we use a timer during whole class fluency practice or not ? Well , for me the answer is no . However , I'm not saying to throw the timers in the bin . We've heard today that research indicates positive benefits when timing is used in a certain way , but a big part of this in the research studies seems to be about feedback from an adult .

Using a timer as an indicator of how much time there is left in that part of the lesson , as in when the timer goes off , reading fluency time is finished , is a great idea . It keeps you to time and makes sure that you can fit everything in .

The other time that a timer could be useful is in those one-on-one reading fluency intervention sessions after students have developed a high level of accuracy . No amount of repeated reading is going to help a student of any age be more accurate and fluent if they don't know the code .

This practice is specifically for students who are accurate but slow in their reading, that's what the research papers are showing . Also , remember that , according to Hudson and colleagues , it's not every single read that is timed . It's the third or fourth read when students are now familiar with the text .

The timing is then really being used as monitoring and feedback to the student . In all likelihood , this will be for students who are in year three and beyond , and , of course , a timer is used during reading assessment to measure the number of correct words read per minute .

So , when it comes down to it , this spring cleaning episode , like the others , is about embracing the messiness of no one size fits all . We know that there is some research to support timing during reading fluency development . That research seems to indicate that the conditions for this practice could be: Students have a high level of accuracy in their reading .

There is an adult there to directly support them and give them feedback . Students read the text to become familiar with it , and then they are timed . This all boils down to this could be a practice for tier two support when you have an adult working one-on-one .

Please don't go grouping your students in small groups so that you can time them and meet these conditions . That is not what we're talking about . In your regular classroom work , you can have a timer overall , but maybe just don't have it to tell kids to swap over and please do not ask them to beat their last time . First comes accuracy , then comes speed .

And for the vast majority of students , focusing on accuracy and automaticity with repeated reading is going to get them where you want them to be . For the others who need help in this area , there are protocols , as found by research , to help them in an intervention situation .

Listeners , I have no doubt that this episode is going to prompt some staff room discussions . Please know that I'm not intending to criticise any program or practice or suggest that I know best for your school . I'm also not criticising any person who promotes this .

There is room for robust discussion within our profession and we have to be able to have those talks . It would be brilliant if there was just one way to tackle all of these questions and one answer that would lead us

where we want to go , but there simply isn't . Adopting an evidence-informed approach to instruction means that we have to sometimes rumble with the difficult ideas .

We have to make the best decision we can , with the available evidence , consider the needs of the students in front of us , including through that lens of cognitive load theory and information processing theory, and monitor data to evaluate whether our choices have been sound for our students . There aren't any quick paths or quick fixes .

There is only open , curious conversation and a willingness to grow in our practice . And , as I've said , if you have papers sitting in a folder on your computer about timed reading being used at a whole class level in the primary school , please send them through . I'm always growing in my knowledge too . Until next time , happy teaching everyone . Bye .