Sold A Story - The Podcast

 If you haven't heard of Emily Hanford then you haven't been around the reading instruction/dyslexia world long enough. Emily Hanford is one of the reasons that the Science of Reading is such a big conversation right now. And...she's a fabulous journalist and weaver of stories. Not fictional stories, but the real horrifying truths about reading in the US. 

You may have seen on my Educate Yourself page, the link to APM Reports. Originally, that was a link to the series Hard To Read and now it is also a link to Sold a Story. In fact, you can listen to a whole series of stories by Emily Hanford that will be enlightening, disturbing, and anger-inducing - whatever your emotion is, it will be provoked by these stories.

A connection

You know, I started work at the University of Oregon in February 2004. My then-fiancé was still overseas and I was deep into planning my wedding. My first day on the job? An Institute on Beginning Reading (IBR) that was being held at a Jantzen Beach hotel in Portland. It was the first of several IBRs that I would attend over the next few years because I was the event planner for the Oregon Reading First Center (ORFC) and the Western Regional Reading First Technical Assistance Center (WRRFTAC). 

If you've been following Sold a Story, you may know where this is going. 

I was 28 years old. I had a bachelor's degree in creative writing. I was about to get married. I was planning to start a family (as soon as my soon-to-be husband was out of the National Guard). And I knew absolutely NOTHING about teaching reading, how kids learned to read, or that there were different camps of belief in how to go about that teaching. It would be much later that I would connect my own slow, laborious reading with dyslexia. 

It turned out that I didn't need to know any of those things to do my job. But as it happened, my job was really pretty much done once people were settled in their seats and listening to presenters. That meant I could sit down and listen if I wanted to as well. And I absorbed information as the years passed - listening to people like Anita Archer and Jan Hasbrouk talk about good instruction and assessment.

Sidebar: if you haven't ever heard Anita Archer speak, I encourage you to find some of her presentations online. She's wonderful. Here's a quick video that you can watch.

A shift, but still in the reading world

As Reading First (RF) started to implode nationally, I was on to thinking about having another baby, our first being born in 2006. The funding for RF was going to end and I was going to have to find another position. But, because I knew I was planning to get pregnant again, I didn't think I wanted to change departments. The director of ORFC was also changing positions. She was starting a little free reading clinic right there in our department and she needed an assistant. She told me that the job was mine. That it would not be challenging and I might even find it boring, but I could keep my .8 FTE Schedule. Since the first task was to build a website for the new clinic, I decided I was in. 

So there I was, in 2008, helping to start a reading clinic that provided reading instruction one-on-one to students in Kindergarten through 5th grade. We did a soft launch with flyers in schools. We had more than 100 kids on our waitlist before we even got started. I think we started by serving 16 kids...I can't remember, but once we got going, we served 30 kids every term. 

Originally the idea for this clinic was to bring kids up to grade level and send them on their way. We discovered in that first year that proving good instruction for 45 minutes a day, twice a week wasn't going to do it and we continued to have a growing waitlist even though we didn't advertise. So, we put a cap on it and served kids for up to 5 terms.

Maybe this should have been a glaring red flag to me that reading instruction was broken in our area, but remember, my only experiences with reading instruction was LITERALLY with the people who wrote the Direct Instruction programs that are talked about in Sold a Story.

I said nothing

By the time my oldest son was in kindergarten, I had a pretty good grasp on what good reading instruction looked like. He participated in the summer kindergarten readiness camp that our Reading Clinic put on and he was in one of the highest groups for the pre-k kiddos. Now I know that he was just really good at sounds in isolation, but that word level reading is very difficult for him. 

So, when I went to curriculum night at his elementary school and the kinder teacher said, "I have a reading curriculum, but I don't use it. We learn letters organically." I was VERY suspect, but I remember looking around the room and watching all these moms just nod their heads and I was like...oooookaaaaayyyy? So, I said nothing. I continued to say nothing as my son spent kindergarten making belts and stitching bags. I think his sole reading experience in K was story time. At home, we read CONSTANTLY. He loved dinosaurs and lizards, alligators, snakes, and crocodiles. We would read him literal textbooks about lizards in the Northwest. But as kindergarten was coming to a close, we decided that we probably needed to do some reading instruction at home.

By this time, the reading clinic had shifted. We were hemoraging money because we were a free clinic, so as our funding dried up, so did our options. We moved the clinic out to the Bethel School District. Bethel supported this by providing food for the kids who stayed after school and bussing them home when tutoring was over. But what this meant for me, was that my son didn't have access to our wonderful Reading Clinic. 

So, we did Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons which was recommended to me by my boss. And, because we understood the score at this point, we also did this with our 4 year old who was interested in anything that his brother got to do. 

I had visions of a miraculous change in understanding how to read. Like some lightbulb would go off in his head, which is what they say in school you know, but obviously that didn't happen. This really brings us up to the rest of this story, which you can find in the Our Story section of this website.

In the trenches since the beginning

What I'm getting at, in my very longwinded way, is that I've LITERALLY been in the Reading Wars almost since they STARTED! And I didn't even start out with a kid who had dyslexia! 

A funny little anicdote - several years ago as part of the National Center on Improving Litearcy, we went to Washington DC and had a Dyslexia Techncial Work Group gathering with some very big names in dyselxia and reading instruction (Jack Fletcher, Nadine Gaab, John Gabrieli to name-drop a few) and on the first day, I can't remember what the group was talking about but I expressed my opinion using my own experience with my son. Later, Dr. Gabrieli and I were chatting and he asked if I sought out the National Center or if it was just serendipitous that I happened to end up working to help give students better access to appropriate reading instruction. I told him it was a complete accident. #acidentalliteracyadvocate. 

Does the Literacy Curriculum Matter?

 Absolutely, but with a caveat. 

So, it turns out that it's REALLY hard to find a good Language Arts curriculum. The textbook publishing industry is a juggernaut and is bloated with cash and the want of more. In turn, they bloat their products with gimmicky things: lots of colors, pictures, manipulatives, puppets, and hopefully some decodable books somewhere in the mix. 

Also, all programs are not created equal. It's important to check the evidence behind a program - but that is also difficult. There are a couple of websites out there that will give you decent information about curriculum, but many of them are difficult to navigate or the information is given without much context. Personally, I think that EdReports is the easiest to follow and understand - here is the Wit & Wisdom Entry - but to be fair, I don't actually know what the EdReports criteria is for reviewing things. Many programs don't even show up on the other websites (What Works Clearinghouse, NCII, Evidence for ESSA) because the criteria for review wasn't met. That means that the research wasn't done in such a way that it qualified for review. Also, I feel like EdReports provides opinions based on the research which is not what you'll find on those other websites. If you want to do your OWN research into curriculum, you can check out The Reading League's Curriculum Evaluation Tool.

All that, which sort of took me into the weeds a bit, is to say that you can have the BEST curriculum out there. Maybe it follows an amazing scope and sequence and the evidence is that kids learn to read at a greater rate than kids who are not getting what we will call Magical Program. 

And here's your caveat...

But if you still have teachers who are telling kids to guess a word by looking at a picture, or to figure out the word from context, or to see if it "sounds right," then all the evidence in the world is not going to make that program work. 

Evidence is only as good as the fidelity with which the program is implemented. 

I cannot stress enough how important it is for teachers to STOP TELLING KIDS TO GUESS WORDS BASED ON PICTURES! It is harmful to EVERYONE, even the kids who do learn to read without proper instruction! Those kids who learn to read without proper instruction? Many of them will develop problems later - when they no longer have pictures and the words are more complex. 

I'm cautiously optimistic about the implementation of Wit & Wisdom in our school district. It's a pretty good  program and it does have a scope and sequence. It also builds upon prior knowledge which is very important. 

What am I worried about with the implementation of the new Wit & Wisdom? 

Off the top of my head:

• Will there be continued coaching for teachers who are using the program? 
• Is the professional development deep enough and are teachers engaging in that professional development? 
• Will the district actually implement an MTSS-R system so that there is a process for what to do when a student IS NOT making progress? 
• Even Magical Program will not work for all students at the same rate. Students with dyslexia and other reading struggles will still require more intensive instruction.
• Will schools continue to implement the program with fidelity through the upper grades? Ideally, putting a good Tier 1 program in place should stem the flow of kids into Tier 2 and Tier 3, but if you stop teaching reading after 2nd or 3rd grade because you've arbitrarily decided that that's when kids switch from learning to read to reading to learn, you're going to be right back where you started.
• What about the kids we've already failed? What about my son who is still struggling with reading in high school and who NEVER learned to write well (dyselxia also impacts writing and organizing thoughts around writing). Are we going to implement anything for them?

I fear the answer to that last question is no. There is no time for my son to get all his credits in high school and take a remedial course in reading or writing. So I will continue to pay a tutor to help him with reading. I may have to find someone to help with his writing - but since I was a creative writing major and it's kind of my jam, I think I can help for the time being. But this assumes that he will actually let me help him.

I hate to end on a low note, but facts are facts. I am going to drop a few resources here to help with some understanding:

Not sure what I'm talking about when I discussed Tiers of Support? Check out this graphic (designed by the lovely people at the Lead for Literacy Center (L4L) and then polished into a graphic by yours truly (I am part of the Lead for Literacy dissemination team). You can read the brief that goes with the graphic too. L4L has a ton of really great resources for school, district, and state level leadership - because everyone from top to bottom should understand what good reading instruction looks like.

Lastly, the new NCIL Supporting Students with Dyslexia Toolkit. This houses Understanding Dyslexia as well as 4 brand new Toolkits and Tutorials. And here's a tip

Whispering: reading instruction for students with or at risk for dyslexia is good for ALL students. So, even though these things say "Dyslexia" everywhere, this information is really good information for all teachers and parents.

Understanding Dyslexia

School-based Screening

Identifying School Based Supports

👉Reading Instruction

Intensifying Instruction

Don't dive into all of this at once 😀

Is It Dyslexia? Does It Matter What I Call It?

 NO! It doesn't matter what you call it! But also, it totally does.

First, it's #DyselxiaAwarenessMonth so I'm not sure if this post is well-timed or ill-timed, but here it goes!

It turns out that nearly ALL kids can learn to read if you provide them with appropriate, evidence-based, systematic, cumulative instruction. It should include instruction in all the big ideas of beginning reading - phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. 

For some kids, this process will take little time. They will get it after just a little practice. But MOST kids - not just kids with dyslexia or a reading disability - need systematic instruction in the 5 big ideas. 

Sidebar: I love this video from my friend Jess Surles. She can tell you better than I can, what effective instruction looks like: 

 All kids are going to learn to read at a different rate. Like I said above, some will pick it up like it's nothing and that's great, but not everyone can do that (in fact, MOST people can't). But what we DO know is that systematic, cumulative, instruction (that hopefully has an evidence base) is the best way (that we know of right now) to teach MOST kids to read (like, virtually anyone). Sorry for all the parenthetical phrases there, but I wanted to make sure that I was qualifying things - because it turns out that science is ever evolving and we should change practice as new evidence comes to light.

So, call it what you want - dyslexia, a specific learning disability in reading, struggling reader - if we were providing the appropriate instruction to all kids, the labels wouldn't matter so much. 

I also think that some people find the word dyslexia to be a little scary. It's scary to think that your child has a disability and maybe it's easier to just use the term struggling reader.

So, all that being said, why do I believe that it's also totally important to use the word dyslexia?

Because when I told my son that the reason he couldn't read was that he had something called dyslexia which just meant that his brain was wired differently and it made connecting sounds to letters and words in print difficult, he was so relieved. He was relieved because he had spent years feeling like he was stupid; like he was incapable of doing this thing that all these other kids could do. Adults made him feel like he was supposed to be able to do this thing and instead of helping, they paired him with other students who couldn't read and told them to "read together" which of course, they couldn't do. 

So suddenly he had confidence in himself. He felt like he could say, I have dyslexia. It's a brain difference that makes it hard for me to read. And you know, for the most part, people just accept that. 

So, do we need to call it dyslexia? We shouldn't have to. We shouldn't have to pay a neuropsychologist to give us a diagnosis of dyslexia to get help for our kids. It's cost prohibitive for most people. And we shouldn't have to be in a situation where our kids have to have a word to apply to themselves because they haven't been taught to read. But...here we are. So, the answer is YES. It is so important that we #saydyslexia that we screen for dyslexia and that we provide intensive evidence-based instruction for kids who have dyslexia (but also any other reading struggle). 

Dyslexia Awareness Month

 Did you know that October is Dyslexia Awareness Month? For those of us who see the struggles of our children, dyslexia awareness is every day, but it's always good to try and bring attention to this disability that affects around 15% of the population. 

The National Center on Improving Literacy will be sharing resources all month long. 

Start with this video to learn about the resources that are currently available. 

Or you can find a list on the Dyslexia Awareness Month Resource Page.