Three Shifts Schools Can Make to Support Reading & Writing, ep. 188

Three Shifts Schools Can Make to Support Reading & Writing, ep. 188, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:00

Hey coach, if you’ve been waiting for the competent literacy coach course to open up, your wait is almost over. The course is opening soon and I want you to be the first to know, make sure you’ve signed up at competent literacy coach.com to be included on the waitlist, you’ll be notified as soon as it opens for enrollment this year is going to be even better than before. I’ve updated the reading and writing modules to provide you with the knowledge you need to support your school and implementing practices that are proven to build guilds, readers and writers get the PD you need to provide the PD and learning they need join the waitlist so you can join the course.

Chrissy Beltran  00:36

Have you felt like you’ve provided all the PD, you’ve facilitated all the PLCs and you’ve had all the conversation, but your teachers are still stuck. If your teachers are resistant to instructional change or having trouble implementing new thing, it might look something like this. They’re still using outdated practices that we know don’t work. They fight every PLC to claim to their favorite lessons or strategies. You see evidence of for instructional methods everywhere despite having provided tons of PD and better practices. And kids aren’t learning and the same kids are at the bottom of the data chart every single time. Does this sound familiar? To literacy coaches who are committed to helping students grow as readers and writers This is especially frustrating. That’s why I created a free webinar for literacy coaches. But really any coach can value from it. It’s all about helping teachers embrace new practices and try out something new even when they’re not excited about it will learn why teachers for this change how to help teachers feel secure and ready to try something new. And my favorite strategies and methods to encourage choice while expecting and holding them accountable for trying new things. I’m so excited to share this information with you that I created a free download that you’ll get when you grab the free pre recorded webinar at buzzing with Miss b.com/shift Grab it today. It’s totally free and it will make such a difference in your coaching.

Chrissy Beltran  02:03

Welcome to instructional coaching with Miss B where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach and every coach does too. I’m Chrissy Beltran, an elementary teacher who became a coach, and I had to create my own coaching program that worked. Now I teach coaches how to design their coaching programs, build a school wide action plan and use differentiated strategies to support teachers. Plus, I’ve got a special spot in my heart for literacy coaches. Now let’s dig into the episode.

Chrissy Beltran  02:27

Hey, coach, and welcome to instructional coaching with Miss B, we are several weeks into our series about better instruction and you’re listening to Episode 188. Three shifts all school can make to better support reading and writing instruction. I am really excited about the series because I feel like better instruction is our goal, right? Well, it’s part of our goal, because we want better learning. And the way to get there is through better instruction. So we’ve had some fantastic guests on so far that I’ve been really, you know, proud to share with you. We have spoken to some people who are really leaders in the field. And today, I’m going to share with you a little bit about three things that I recommend you take a hard look at your school and make these shifts with your teachers to better support reading and writing instruction. No matter what grades you work with. Something I want to remind you about my confident literacy coach course is open right now. And it is at a reduced rate. So you can actually get it for 15% off with the code podcast. If you had to buzzing excuse me, if you had to confident literacy coach.com. And you use the code podcast when you check out now that will end may 27. So make sure that you are using that code to get your percentage off because it is going to have so much great information. And a lot of the things I’m going to talk about in this episode are covered in a greater depth in the course. And so if you are looking to learn about becoming a coach, supporting your teachers in the areas of literacy, this is a course for you. You can also grab a free little email course at buzzing with Ms. b.com slash literacy coach, and it’s going to support you in the things that I’m talking about in this episode and a couple more priorities that you’re gonna want to focus on at your school. So check that out at buzzing with Miss b.com slash literacy coach.

Chrissy Beltran  04:04

If your school is looking to embrace better reading and writing instruction, then you’re making some changes, right? And those changes will vary depending on what practices are already common at your school and which ones you find most lacking. And I think it’s very easy to go into a school and be like, Nope, we’re doing science of reading, throw this away, throw that away. And before we can do that we have to look at our practices and say wait, what is already in alignment and what not. So for example, I was an upper elementary teacher. And whenever I started learning more about science of reading, I was like, Okay, I’m actually doing a lot of these things, even though I was trained in a balanced literacy model. And my understanding of balanced literacy model had actually become over time inclusive of many of those practices, because that’s what worked in my classroom. So just because the teacher says they’re doing something or not doing something, but doesn’t mean it’s not already happening in a way in their classroom that maybe you just haven’t realized. So We need to make sure we get into those rooms and see what’s really going on. Before we start talking about throwing things away and starting over. However, there are some things that we all need to think about that we need to figure out how to bridge our, to our grade level bands in order to support students as readers and writers, regardless of what they’re doing with those reading and writing skills, right. So whether they are reading very low level introductory level books, or whether they are writing lengthy papers on high school, we need to be thinking about these kinds of things, because these are the things that are going to support them regardless of age. Okay, I’m going to share about three things we need to be doing as at schools, and then I want you to grab the rest of them at that free email course that I mentioned at buzzing with Miss b.com slash literary literacy coach, it will help you dig into the other priorities that I think you should be focusing on. So the first of the three priorities I’m going to talk about in the episode today is reviewing data together to build lesson plans and intervention and assessment. And I know that doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with the science of reading. But it really does if we can’t establish a data cycle with our teachers. And if we are not planning collaboratively, I’m telling you right now, these new practices you’re sharing with your teachers are not going anywhere. That’s why the priority isn’t phonological awareness, or phonemic. Awareness, the pull up the priority is help teachers implement the learning into their plans, help them look at data, see where kids are, identify the areas that they’re lacking, and the ID, the areas that they’re strong, and then make a plan to intervene when is needed and make a plan to teach new things that are needed. Okay. That’s the priority. Now, as you’re planning together, you’re integrating these practices that we talked about in episode 187, you’re going to identify the appropriate appropriate spots to assess for those things, and you’re going to identify the plans to support those areas. But the goal for you is to create this process with your teachers. And that is not an easy thing to do. Creating a data process where you’re looking at data, you’re making plans, you’re looking at assessments, you’re building your assessments in advance, you’re working backwards, creating that kind of plan, it takes a while that cycle does not come naturally, to a lot of teachers who have maybe been left to do things on their own for a long time. I know even as a teacher in the classroom, whenever I was starting to move into this direction, where we were asked to do things more in a group setting and working with our PLC teams, it was a big adjustment for me, because I’d been given carte blanche prior to that it was like, hey, just make sure you do this, this and this other than that, knock yourself out.

Chrissy Beltran  07:27

So having to do things in a group setting and talk about data, that was a big shift for me. And then later as a coach having to support teachers in those areas, getting them together to talk about the data that they were maybe not that excited about and didn’t always understand, looking at how kids did in an area that teachers hadn’t even really been directly instructing, like phonemic awareness, for example. And teachers were like, we just do a lot of sight words. And I was like, Oh, well, that could be why we’re having some issues here. Right? having those conversations is a challenge. And so if you want to learn more about that there are other episodes on this endless podcast about PLCs that I will link in the show notes for you. Because looking at PLC looking at data with your PLC teams looking at lesson planning in the PLC teams, it can be overwhelming. But if you do it and you establish that data cycle, it’s going to change everything, it has the potential to change things across your school. So your basic data cycle is you’re going to start by reviewing data, you have to decide what data to look at. Right. And that will vary depending on the thing the kids that you’re working with, and what grade level they’re in or what their focus is. Overall, though, we’re going to be looking for things like you know, obviously, we want to assess different decoding skills. We want to assess vocabulary, we want to assess fluency, we want to assess comprehension, those basics that we know, right? In writing, we want to look at spelling we want to look at can they write a paragraph that makes sense? Is there some sort of structure we want to look at? Do they have ideas for writing, so then we can review that data together. And then from there, we want to make a plan. We look at the data, we identify the strengths and the weaknesses, and we say, okay, these are the areas that we need to intervene with this group of kids. This is what we’re going to teach a new thing or kind of a whole review thing to the whole group, we’re going to teach you in a different way. And then this is when our assessment is going to be and how we will reassess that is all part of your plan, then you’re going to teach your plan, you’re going to reassess. And then you’re going to reflect on that data and identify new focus standards, a new plan for intervention for teaching or reviewing, and for your next assessment. And then you’re going to repeat the cycle. It just goes on forever. And so once you can establish that with your teachers, everything changes, I promise you it takes time. It took me a couple of years from our teachers to feel really good about it and to start looking at their data and being excited to get their data so that they could plan ways to respond to that information. But once you get there it it is life changing. So some of the coaching strategies that you actually can use as a coach to do these things are to look at PLC meetings about to plan your PLC meetings to be about assessments. So you need to build assessments or really get familiar with the assessments you have, identify what strengths and weaknesses they have. So for example, my daughter is in kindergarten, and her district recently moved to a completely computer based assessment. And the printout that they gave me as a parent literally just showed her score, no information. And the teachers received very little information from that assessment as well. And what are they doing with that information? You know, the teacher said, I wanted an assessment where I could watch the child and see what their problem solving strategies were in, see what they were doing as they tried to decode these words and see why they were struggling with fluency. But I don’t get to do that it’s a test, they go take it, and then I just get this printout, that is a real problem. Okay.

Chrissy Beltran  10:51

So as your teachers are using those kinds of assessments at any level, no matter what level they’re at, if your assessments are not telling your teachers what they need to know, fix it, create a create something, created an addendum, add something to it, you know, adjust, because we need our teachers to have the information they need to support their kids and what they need to know. So whenever my teachers would come to me as a coach, whenever I was a campus coach, and I was working with them regularly on assessments and data, then they would come and say, Look, I feel like I’m missing information, I don’t know where they’re struggling, something’s wrong. And we would have to create assessments that were a better fit for what we were looking for. And that it’s okay. I don’t like following any program to the letter I have a real issue with because if it’s not going to give you the information that you need, you need to get that information somehow. So make a plan to do it with your teachers. The other things that you can do during your PLC meetings are dig into your curriculum, and look at alignment and say, okay, are the assessments aligned to the actual things we’re having kids do? Are they aligned to those practices that I mentioned in the last podcast, Episode 187, where I introduce you to the basic principles of the science of reading, you know, are they a lot like when we’re looking at our data, what is it telling us. And so then in that, that free download that buzzing with Ms. b.com, slash literacy coach, you can grab a data PLC agenda, and I think you’re gonna love it, because it will help you kind of structure your PLC a little bit. So you’re not just kind of starting from scratch. So definitely grab that. Because those PLC meetings are going to be a prime place for you to focus your support in this priority of building your data cycle. My second priority for you today is work on how you’re teaching words. Okay? How you’re teaching words and reading, how you’re teaching words to write for writing, and how you’re teaching them at all levels and to all kids. And I know that’s a big, that’s a big ask, right. But let me let me explain a little bit about what I mean. If you’re in primary grades, you need a phonics program. And it needs to be a really good one. If you are in middle grades like upper elementary, even middle school, you need a morphology program for all of your students. And you probably need a phonics program that would include phonemic, awareness and everything. For your kids who are struggling, we are often missing, that we have to keep growing kids ability to read words beyond second grade. Okay. So even if you’re in high school, and you have a bunch of kids, because I know in your high school, do you have kids in that reading class that are there because they’re struggling? And what they’re struggling with? They’re probably not getting support in. Okay? How many of your kids in your reading class struggle with basic phonics has are reading at a fourth or fifth grade level, but your teachers are not equipped to teach them phonics? That’s a problem, right? And as a literacy coach, we have got to give those teachers what they need to reach the kids where they are. And if that means that I am teaching a 12th grade teacher how to teach phonics at a second grade level, guess who’s going to second grade training? Okay? The teachers need the knowledge and if the program is not there to support them, how are they going to do it, it’s too much for you just there’s a reason that phonics programs are so expensive, it’s so much work to create it from scratch. Okay, so I truly believe at all levels, you need some kind of way to intervene with phonics. And that would include your funnel, logical awareness, your phonemic awareness, all of these components that we know are important that I got into in Episode 187. And we also need morphology, maybe we look at Greek and Latin roots, maybe we’re looking at prefixes, we’re talking about multisyllabic words, we’re breaking them down into syllables. We’re identifying how to decode different unique patterns from different languages. Depending on what grades you work with, you need to align it to the groups of kids that you have. But you need something. And again, you’re going to need an intervention program to or something to support those kids who don’t have those tools. Honestly, if it’s in high school, and you’re putting them on a computer program, that’s better than nothing. But if nothing is the solution, and we’re just working on reading comprehension, or reading a lot of texts, but they don’t have the phonics skills. They’re not just going to figure those phonics skills out. It’s missing from their repertoire. We they don’t have the skill set you we have to go back and teach it. We have to find a way to do it. it. So some coaching strategies to help you do this one, my big one, build teacher knowledge, you got to build the knowledge in this area. Okay, I have a phonological awareness guide for you in that free download at buzzing with Ms. b.com slash literacy coach that you can grab, if you feel like this is an area your teachers are kind of lacking and you would like to give them more information.

Chrissy Beltran  15:20

So you want to make sure that teachers have the phonics knowledge. And that generally comes with getting them training and getting them a program period. They need it regardless of what age they’re teaching, they need to know how to reach the kids that they have in their class. So you got to identify what kind of vocabulary and word study skills are required at that level, and then give them the tools they need to do that. The second thing I want you to think about is, as you’re building teacher knowledge, look at classrooms and think about how has this been implemented? So let’s say that you have an elementary school and you have fundations as your program. And fundations can take a while to get through each lesson, right? So you like like 30 minutes is not uncommon. 40 minutes, sometimes depending on, you know, management and how how well the kids are doing in that area. Whenever you go into a classroom, if teachers are cutting off the lesson at 30 minutes, exactly. Maybe it’s not really serving its purpose. If teachers are having to feed kids the words and they’re not maybe doing their little review their little rote review, as well as it should be like, what does this teaching look like using the program because the program gives you the tools, but you still have to teach it. So we want to make sure that our teachers are have the tools that they need. So they need to see model lessons, they need to see mentor video lessons, we need to be supporting them, like I mentioned in the first priority, looking at that data, digging into it, figuring out where the gaps are and how we can adjust our future lessons to accommodate for that. And you could actually even set up a model classroom, where you’re teaching, you’re working with the teacher to teach these strategies and skills that kids need for decoding and for word recognition, and supporting the teacher and doing those things. So you can have other teachers come in and observe or you could record the video lessons and share them with other teachers, I would highly recommend doing that. Like I mentioned before, if you have high school teachers, and they need to remediate for that group of students, have them visit a colleague and another grade so they can see what these things look like. You can leave your school teachers are allowed to leave the school to go to another school to learn something they can do that, get the teachers the tools that they need, and help them implement them while my third priority for literacy coaching right now. Are it really for any coach who supports teachers in the areas of reading and writing and honestly, this one is for anybody build background knowledge for teachers, and for kids. One of the reasons that I know teachers don’t teach science, sometimes they don’t know about it, and they’re nervous. And they feel like they can’t do a good job because they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Chrissy Beltran  17:46

I know somebody who was, you know, good teacher, but she would have to watch the videos from the science curriculum. Every week before she taught science. She had to build her own background knowledge, but she did it. Are all teachers doing this? No. Do all teachers have the time or will take the time to do that? No. So we need to be really thoughtful about giving our teachers opportunities to build background knowledge, I firmly believe it. I think that we count on teachers having this knowledge from their high school experiences and their college experiences. And while I love to my content area classes, and I got a lot of background knowledge about that. So whenever I started teaching science and social studies in in elementary school, I was like, this stuff is so much fun. I love it. And I still love it. Not everybody does, because they don’t have that knowledge. And that experience of the hands on learning that they’re trying to get them to use with their kids. background knowledge, we know is essential for comprehension. And I talked about that in episode 197. I find that if we do not explicitly teach our give our teachers opportunities to build that background knowledge, they many times will not. And so we have to take that burden and say I’m going to make sure that our teachers are prepared for the content that they are teaching, at least in this grade. Now I have seen some really bad attempts to build background knowledge in students. And you know, this program that my my daughter school is using is from the state. And you know, anybody ever asks, I’m not a fan of the program.

Chrissy Beltran  19:16

If Do I sound a little bit annoyed? I think I do. And I should. This program is attempting to build background knowledge, so good for them for trying to make sure that kids have access to information and can build that base of knowledge so that whenever they go to read, they have information to access, and they can use their schema to understand and to comprehend. That’s great. I’m really glad that they chose to make that a focus for the program. However, the method in which they are doing it is they made a little video for every unit. I’m not sure how they chose the units, it seems to me it seems random. I’m sure there was some sort of thought process maybe I’m giving too much credit. i There must have been a thought process behind it but I cannot determine what it was based on my daughter coming home and telling me the random things she learned about. It doesn’t seem to be aligned to their standards, which is confusing to me because the state wrote the standards and science and social studies. And yet the state also created this program or was pushing the program. And they don’t match confusing. So I feel like that’s one huge mistake not having any purpose for your background knowledge building, you just chose a bunch of random stuff and threw it out there, instead of killing two birds and going well, how can I align this with the content they already have to learn in this grade, so they can have that content echoed across their day and really build their knowledge? That would be a good way to do it. That’s the way I used to do it. And it makes sense to me, that’s one issue. Second issue. It’s a voiceover a slideshow, but it’s a video that they slideshow that they made into a video. So it’s just pictures that they made into a video. And then there’s a voiceover telling the kids what they need to know about this topic. Now, I’m not, I don’t think you’re going to be surprised when I say where are the books? We will background knowledge through books, right? Isn’t that how we learn stuff? No, no, not in this program. If you have a program that sacrifices, books, even a book on a video would be an improvement, right? If you have a program that sacrifices books for just people telling stuff. I don’t I don’t know if that’s the way to go.

Chrissy Beltran  21:19

So that’s an issue that I have with the way that I’ve seen some programs, putting out background knowledge into kids brains, is they literally think they can just like, tell them, and now they’ve got it. And I have an issue with that we know that kids learn through story, we know that kids learn through reading. And we know that read alouds are a really important component of our day to build background knowledge. So the fact that any program would kind of remove that as kind of a horror story to me. So anyway, we want to be thoughtful about how we introduce information to kids, and ensure that we are building their knowledge through like really great tried and true ways, such as literature. That’s how we want to build background knowledge with kids with teachers, we can expose them to literature as well. And PD and PLCs create some great opportunities for teachers to refine and grow their own content knowledge. So teachers with more knowledge are more comfortable teaching those content areas, right. So then what are some coaching strategies that you can use to grow teachers content knowledge in these areas? Well, you can model a lesson in which the teacher is actually service students, and you are having them interact with the content and describe and use academic language just like we want our kids to do, you can show videos. So you know, you’re coming up on a unit about tectonic plates, right, and how the plates in the earth create landforms. And maybe teachers could build some little background knowledge on that side of discovery, education, clip, three minutes, boom, now the teacher has more knowledge than they did before they started. And they will be able to share that knowledge in student understanding as students are working through their content. Another great way to do this is a book study. And while I know what I’m talking about his background knowledge in terms of like, stuff, we should just all know, content information. I think you could do really great book studies in specific areas. So like, you could look at science standards and choose a book study that actually complements the science that teachers will be teaching. You can look at social studies standards, and choose a book that will complement that and help teachers kind of understand the context of things. You also can help them think about, about Okay, so then this is what we’re coming up on in the unit that we’re about to learn about, what are the areas that I feel fuzzy about and just have them talk about it, so that they can kind of establish a purpose for their learning as they’re going through that unit with kids. The inquiry model is a great way to do this. And teachers can record their questions on the charts, just like with students, just like we asked the students to do, and then the teachers can discover that information and add to their understanding as well. A couple things to think about in terms of building background knowledge, we can look at science and social studies, standards is a good place to start. And we can think about what do we want our kids to know, by the end of each grade, and really think about mastery and what knowledge we want them to walk away with and carry with them forward, that will be supportive of them in learning as they move forward. We know that comprehension is supported by background knowledge, what what kinds of things do they need to know about to be able to comprehend a whole lot of texts. So we can start with that. You can also think about purchasing books in sets for each main set of knowledge.

Chrissy Beltran  24:25

So maybe we can look at okay, we want renew our kids in this grade are really going to learn about weather. So we want to make a lot of cross curricular connections so that our kids develop background knowledge about weather moving forward. So then I’m going to purchase this this collection of books. This one’s a nonfiction text. This one’s a poet collection of poetry about weather. This one is a play about the water cycle well, and how it affects weather like what the role is and whether and this is a story about how weather impacted these kids days or whatever. So if we can make sure that we actually are giving teachers the resources that they can have to plan these cross curricular units and build background knowledge, then our teachers will be more prepared to impart that to kids. And kids will hear that learning echoed across their day, instead of in isolation in a little video with a picture that nobody is really excited about listening to, except for possibly my daughter who likes to learn everything that’s just she kind of like a kind of nerdy like mom, and she’ll she’s really curious about like information. But I’m gonna say that a lot of kids are probably not responding to that as positively as she is I get to learn everything that she learned in school, she comes home and tells me all about you know how she knows how the Lakota Sioux hunted for Buffalo. But I don’t know that that’s the norm whenever that’s the way that information is being parted. Sorry. So Fox, it really bugs me. Okay, so these three things that I just talked about, I talked a little bit about building your data cycle, making sure that you’re using that to figure out what to teach and how to teach it. I talked about working on how you’re teaching work, teaching words, reading and writing them at all levels, because we need to support our kids in decoding and in morphology, and spelling at all levels. And I talked about looking at building background knowledge for your teachers and for your students huge focus that you can take away and it’ll be it’ll go a long way towards implementing signs of reading. If you’re not sure where to start to me, those are three foundational principles that we can make sure our teachers know exactly what is being expected of them and how they can support kids in reading and writing. If you want more guidance, and you want to know the rest of my priorities for literacy coaches right now, check out the five priorities email series at buzzing with Miss b.com slash literacy coach. And remember to go to confident literacy coach.com to use your code podcast to get 15% off the already reduced course price. This reduced price promotion and the coupon code will end may 27. So be sure to grab it before then you will get so much information it will support you in your coaching work. I know you will love it. Next week, we’re going to talk about why all coaches need literacy knowledge. We’re going to look at reading and writing across the curriculum and how no matter what you coach reading and writing is a part of it. I cannot wait to share that with you. And until then, happy coaching

Chrissy Beltran  27:11

now that you’ve got so much to think about head over to buzzing with buzzfeed.com to grab some free downloads, become a VIP, and check out the podcast show notes. Happy coaching!