We’ll Level With You: Unpacking the Reading Level Research

In this episode of Literacy Talks, our trio of literacy experts unpacks all the information first introduced in Episode 3 of this season, featuring special guest Dr. Matt Burns. Why? Because the conversations surrounding reading levels, assessments, and the unwavering pursuit of reading proficiency are pivotal. From underscoring the importance of informal observations, pre-teaching, and scaffolding text, hear how frontline classroom teachers, reading coaches, and administrators can change how they think about reading levels and help students access all of the instructional information and resources they need to grow as readers and learners.

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Transcript

Narrator: 0:03

Hello literacy leaders and champions. Welcome to literacy talks, a podcast series from Reading Horizons dedicated to exploring the ideas, trends, insights and practical issues that will help us all improve our professional practice knowledge and confidence in teaching reading. Our host is Stacy Hurst, professor at Southern Utah University and Chief Academic Advisor at Reading Horizons where reading momentum begins. Joining Stacy are Donell Pons, a recognized expert in literacy and special education. And Lindsay Kemeny, an author and a Utah based elementary classroom teacher. In today's episode, our trio of literacy experts reflects about and responds to the episode featuring special guest, Dr. Matt Burns, and closing the research to practice gap. Let's get started.

Stacy Hurst: 1:01

Welcome to this episode of literacy talks, my name is Stacy Hurst. I'm the host and I'm joined by Donell Pons and Lindsay Kemeny, as I am every week, it's just the three of us showing up and talking about literacy. This time, Lindsay got to choose our topic. And I just barely said it's the three of us showing up and talking about literacy. But our last episode, we actually had somebody joining us for that conversation. Lindsay, I know your topic is related. So we'll just turn the time right over to you.

Lindsay Kemeny: 1:35

Yes, last time we met we had Dr. Matt Burns on and wow, what a pleasure and honor it was to have him on our podcasts. He's just so knowledgeable. And I just really love him. He's so down to earth. And I feel like he's really trying to close that research to practice gap. He's always talking to teachers. He's sharing his expertise on social media. You know, he's really active on Twitter and in the science of reading what I wish I would have known in college Facebook group. And I just appreciate those efforts he takes because as he says, you know, researchers are really blunt. And sometimes it can be hard to understand them. And I think he's just doing a great job trying to close the gap. So did you guys catch that? He said, he listens and subscribes to our podcast. That was really cool. So I thought today that we would just kind of follow up and discuss a little bit more about what we talked with with Matt, last time. And I thought we would start our conversation talking about reading levels. And as you may remember, he was explaining that, you know, those levels are really remarkably inaccurate. And he specifically talked about one assessment, the Fountas and Pinnell, what is it called benchmark assessment that he did a study on. And they found that it the accuracy of that was 54%, only 54%. So I just thought that was really interesting. And one of the stories he told that kind of stood out was, you know, he had a teacher who they have a lot of data at their school. And so he just chose some, a few different students who were all on a level G. And then he showed that on the map test, one of those students was the 73rd percentile, and the other was in the first percentile. And on a dibbles test, one was reading 80 words per minute, and the other only 20. And yet, they were all that same level G just kind of showing how, you know, we can't really depend on those levels. Do you guys have any comments or anything that kind of hit you? That was interesting that he said about leveling?

Stacy Hurst: 3:45

You know, as you were just talking, and I know, I probably referenced this far too often. But I just really remember was remembering my time in the first grade classroom, the which was the grade that I taught and loved the most. You know, what, because that those levels were text centric, not student centric, right. And so no wonder we had a discrepancy. But we know from research and those of us who are lucky enough to know from practice, that when you're meeting individual needs of students, that's when you get the best results. But again, those assessments didn't really even help us unless you were really skilled at looking at that data, really knowing where the student was and what they needed. So I'm thinking about how that looked in application and it was far too much of a focus on the level of the text and not exactly what the student needed the skills they needed to progress.

Donell Pons: 4:44

You know, I think working with older readers, like I do, that this is a thing that's always present in the conversation always present in your instruction is because your students given you know, depending if they're middle school, high school, adult They're always being expected to lean into text that is, you know, well beyond where their reading skills may be. And so as an instructor in these spaces, you are always working with various kinds of texts, right? The student may bring homework text that looks quite different. And but they're always being asked to approach texts that may be challenging. And so we got around to this really important aspect that Matt brought up that I think the, the tutor or the instructor of an older student maybe gets to sooner and that is, you got to listen to each student, essentially, you got to know where that student is by listening to that student approach the text, right? What does it sound like? What are all those things that that student is doing when they're reading that text? And that was one thing that really stood out to me when we had the conversation with Matt is leaning into that space of really listening to each student is that as Stacy was even alluding to to? Is not that one size fits all? And you've said it to Lindsay as well?

Lindsay Kemeny: 5:55

Yeah, I think that's so important. And I think sometimes when some teachers might think, Wait, but running records, like I gain valuable information with that, you know, and we're saying, yes, just listening to a student read that is going to give you valuable information. But, you know, what decisions are we making based on that assessment, a lot of times Matt was explaining that those running records were just looking at the score and making a decision on the score. And since those are so subjective, and they're they're not as accurate, right? Of course, we want to listen to students read. And so Donell, I love that you bring that up, I feel like as a teacher, I get really familiar with how all my students read. That's why I really love small group instruction in my classroom, because then I get to know them. Even better as readers, which I can't always do in whole group, I can start to like, see their habits and the things they need to work on. And all of that. I like that he mentioned some good alternatives. Instead of doing, you know, kind of a leveling system, or running records or the benchmark assessment, the FMP benchmark assessment, some better options out there, he mentioned acadiens. That's what I use and love. He mentioned dibbles, easyCBM, AIMSweb, fast bridge, some of those I'm not as familiar with. But a lot of these are free and inexpensive. We don't need to spend a lot of money on an assessment.

Stacy Hurst: 7:16

I think if you have the framework to look at that, listen to your student and get what you need to know to help them. I'm thinking specifically, even something as simple as listening to your student read a piece of decodable text? Are they missing the high frequency words? Are they missing the words that follow the skill that you just taught them in phonics? Are they consistently missing a word that follows the same pattern that you taught two weeks ago? You really can get information from just listening to your student read, if you know what you're listening for? Are they fluent? Are they sounding out words? Still, there's just so much that those other kinds of assessments really don't capture unless you're a knowledgeable teacher?

Lindsay Kemeny: 8:01

Yeah, I feel like a lot of those informal observations are some of my, like, most helpful, most important, a lot of times, I mean, I do like just the structure of progress monitoring with Acadiance, as well. But I remember just a few months ago, I had one student who has listening in to read, sometimes as you do this, you're gonna pick up on patterns. And I just noticed, oh, he keeps me missing the suffixes. He's just completely skipping the suffixes. And so that told me, Oh, I'm going to explicitly go over this with my student and have him practice that,

Donell Pons: 8:34

you know, a piece that we don't talk a lot about also is being able to follow punctuation. And it's kind of dropped in there. But we never explicitly talk about it, really. But it's extremely important. It's those traffic signals, right? And oftentimes, they'll you'll, again, listening to a student read, is the real tip off. Are they really sensitive to what a comma is doing in this particular sentence? Are they sensitive when the quotation marks appear? Or paragraph change, all of those things are so important. And again, you wouldn't really be able to see that picture. Unless you watch the student doing the thing, right.

Lindsay Kemeny: 9:07

That's another reason why I think it's valuable for the teachers to give these assessments themselves versus, you know, having a paraprofessional or someone do the assessment, because you learn those things as you're I mean, hopefully the teachers are listening to read anyway. But

Stacy Hurst: 9:22

Even listening for something like phrasing compared to word by word reading. And I also that this came out in our conversation with Dr. Burns, too, but we can't assume that every teacher is listening to their students. I think when I'm putting those positions to give advice, or I counseled, listen to your student read or when somebody asked me a question about a reader, what do I do about this? I really can't say until I hear them read. You can give me all the data you want. But until I hear them read, I don't know that I have an informed opinion.

Lindsay Kemeny: 9:55

So he also was talking about some of the studies he has done and Stacy, you kind of took a deep dive and looked up some of those I think it might be, is it the one about pre teaching the text that he was talking about? Okay. Great. Do you want to share what you found? And

Stacy Hurst: 10:13

first I want to clarify, I don't know that I go right to deep dive, I tell you like, I wish I had taken longer. However, I was having a just a flashback because I remembered this study, I didn't know it was him. I didn't know the researcher at the time, but I remember the content. And he did two studies that are related to this one was with a group of third graders, and one was with some middle schoolers. So the one I think I was referring to would have probably been, I actually, I don't know which one, because I remember mentioning it to this special ed person at my school and saying, Look, I just read this really cool study, let's try it with a group of students. So kind of cool how life comes full circle in, in some ways, right? And I bet that little reading specialist, literacy, coach me didn't realize someday I'd be talking with the researcher, kind of geeking out about that. But really cool stuff, because in the first study, which was done in 2007, and let me get the name, right. So in case people want to look it up, um reading at the instructional level with children identified as learning disabled, potential implications for response to intervention, or that was 2007. So it was talking about reading with students who aren't reading on grade level, essentially. But pre teaching them vocabulary is what they did in this study key words from the text that they would be reading. And they took 29 3rd graders, and they did this with them three times a week for 12 weeks. And the intervention was only 10 to 15 minutes long. And they had a very specific procedure that they followed. And I'll let you look that up if you're interested in it. But it had really strong effects. They were compared the control group were students that were receiving more of a guided reading kind of intervention. But the students who were pre taught those keywords from the text vocabulary, did a whole lot better, significantly better. And then we're gonna fast forward to 2011. And this study is called comparison of the effectiveness and efficiency of text previewing, and pre teaching keywords as small group reading comprehension strategies with middle school students. And I think we know research articles, titles are really long, but all the words in this title are intentional. One of them this small group reading in middle school, I don't know how often we do that with students, right, we probably are working one on one or in a larger group, but they did something similar. Now, Donell, you can probably really speak to this. But these students, their baseline was a lot lower than the students in previous studies, right. But even so they taught them a little bit of the structure of the passages that they would be testing them on. And they use passages, if I'm remembering correctly, don't quote me on this directly. But look at the study from Q ri. And some of the texts that they would be reading in there, like typical grade level instruction. So they did a combination of teaching a little bit of key people from the text, there were nonfiction texts about historical figures. And then keywords that were related to that they did that in a small group setting. And, again, statistically significant, was the group that got that previewing of the text and the vocabulary, the key vocabulary. Interestingly, though, not statistically significant. When you compare the two, the key word APPROACH did a little bit better than the previewing the text, or like, you know, prominent figures in the passage and so forth. But not statistically significantly different, just a little bit better than keyword. So vocabulary. And we know that right, this is the cool thing about research, background knowledge, which this kind of approach would build. And then also vocabulary are the two things that have the greatest impact on comprehension. And sure enough, the statistics bore out with that, that the students receiving this intervention did much better. Some of them passed, I think half of them passed the tests that they were given at the end. They didn't do really well because they started out so low, so it wasn't like they got on to the grade level or above it, but they made significant progress. So I thought those two things are really encouraging. Cool. When you think about what to do with those older students specifically,

Lindsay Kemeny: 14:57

yeah, and something he had said I believe he said in the podcasts was like the control group, they were giving them texts that were kind of like, quote unquote, on their instructional level, right versus the they were pre teaching and getting them ready for just the regular grade level text, right, so more complex texts. So maybe also showing us the importance of complex text. And that just by setting these students up with some pre teaching, we can help them be successful with those complex texts.

Donell Pons: 15:30

You know, it's so Lindsay did just to add on to that discussion is so many interesting points come up. And I know, we're making a lot of connections here with things probably we already are familiar with things that might be slightly new to us. So kind of giving the listeners also a minute to kind of think about what exactly it is they've just heard, and connecting it to maybe things that they've done in the past things they'd like to try. But since I think that's interesting, leaning into the vocabulary, because we also know from other studies that when they were looking at readers who are not quite at grade level as they're older, that even their oral vocabulary also seems to be lower as well. So that vocabulary piece period. And that makes sense to, right, because it's enriching to be able to read enriches one's vocab, you cannot teach all of the words, but being able to get into text and have words in context that then expand your ability to Oh, I know that word, I heard it here, or I can associate it there, and how that's just that feedback loop of being able to read and as students are older and not touching text, and many of them not touching it at all, how that's not happening for them, right. So unless they're having very rich conversations, which many students aren't, then that isn't happening for them. So this piece is really important. As you can see, even moving forward as students become less and less maybe socializing in groups more and more isolated on their own engaging with just maybe computer, that sort of thing, that these things are things we really need to think about as educators and in the reading space. But what I was thinking about with you talking about that complex text, and helping the students be able to reach it, is that oftentimes, we can take a step. And oftentimes those steps might be I could take the same words, but in a text where maybe some of the, the bits and pieces have been reduced down. So oftentimes, I've used a text where they've shrunk a paragraph down. But I'm still using that same vocabulary. So the student gets familiar. So this is just ideas for for educators who maybe have older students. And then I step into that text, once we've talked about vocabulary, and they've got that under them. And we've gone through a paragraph, and we've been able to make some connections. And then we approach texts at regular level, I find even that step, sometimes it's fantastic for a student to say, Oh, that's not that big a reach for me, now that I have this under my belt, right? Taking the whole thing at once seemed a lot. But once I broke it down to it wasn't nearly as much. So all these pieces from members helping us along the way. And giving us these research pieces are so helpful in so many settings, which is a

Stacy Hurst: 17:49

great scaffold to and I think the thing that impressed me about both of these studies, is that had a significant impact on comprehension. Yeah, and I know that sometimes we work on that word level, the phonics, and it might have an impact on accuracy. But it's not always easy to measure the impact instruction like this instruction like that has on comprehension. But this, actually they did a procedure called incremental rehearsal, I think is what it was called. And those students, their fluency was even better. So they could recognize those words more automatically in the context of the passage that they were reading as well. So just a really robust approach, I think,

Donell Pons: 18:33

and I was going to add comprehensions to everything, right. I mean, that's, I mean, like it said it, Stacy, that's where we want to be right.

Lindsay Kemeny: 18:39

That's the whole point. So Stacy just to in that study, the ways that they were scaffolding that text, the way they were previewing the text, they were pre teaching the vocabulary words, they were going over text structure, you said going over a key people maybe or things in the text, was there something else

Stacy Hurst: 19:00

there was discussion about those topics, and I think the the research assistants were, I think graduate students, and they actually did model reading the passage as well. Okay, that was at the very beginning. Again, just take this with a grain of salt because I really used my skimming skills. Read these studies, but I'm gonna go back and read them word for word again. But um, they did that the very beginning of the intervention. So you know, these were weeks long, so it's not like they were hearing that every day. But

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Lindsay Kemeny: 20:30

Something else we talked about with Matt burns, we started talking about the secondary space a little bit, and how to help secondary teachers, you know what to teach them, how to help them to know how to help secondary students who are striving readers. And Donell, I would just love to hear a little bit about your thoughts about this, since this is, you know, you are an expert in this space. What should secondary teachers know about reading? What kinds of things can they do to help these, you know, struggling readers?

Donell Pons: 21:05

You know, it was so interesting, because Matt made the point, which I thought was one to pick up on if we didn't already. And that was that not all the teachers in a secondary space know anything about how to teach reading, right? They don't, they haven't had that training. And so to go in and say to somebody, oh, suddenly, this is now on your plate to is going to be difficult. So I really appreciated Matt, talking about that. And saying, that's, that's difficult, but what are some things that we can do, where we don't say, Oh, now this is suddenly on your plate, and you need to now be a reading specialist as well, on top of everything else you're doing. And he gave some ideas and suggestions in the podcast. And a lot of them are things that we've talked about here, you know, and being able to teach that vocabulary doing those pre teaching techniques and that sort of thing. But I also think something interesting in that space that I don't know, enough of us are utilizing or understanding in that space is, if you think about it, and a student has has been trying to get those pieces together to become a reader, the text has always been rather difficult, maybe they've avoided reading. So they have not having those experiences with a text, that when you are approaching a text that is a subject matter that might be in science, that's even more difficult, because it doesn't really have much for me to get into. Because, hey, I haven't been doing much general reading of things I'm even interested in. And now you're handing me a text I may not be all that interested in, depending on who wrote it, I'm not going to slam all scientific tests, some of it could be fantastic. But a lot of those science textbooks are ones kids are cringing at right saying, Oh, it's gonna be difficult. So even just as the instructor taking a look at whatever passage, it is that you're going to have the students responsible for, maybe it's a chapter on something, and maybe it's, you know, on cells, but going through that chapter just to look at it and say, if I were to start this read here, and I wasn't heavily into reading, and the first paragraph, what would I get out of that first paragraph, as a 13 year old, as a 15 year old, whatever your class classroom happens to be. And I think even just that I've had a conversation like this sometimes with teachers in different subject matters, and just said, look at your first chapter of that read you're having the kids do and take a look at the first paragraph. What do you think if a student read that, and you know what, that's fresh eyes. So I think that perspective taking is really important in that space, I don't have to be a reading expert. But perspective taking of if reading is not my thing, I haven't been doing a ton of it. So I'm not really sure of of myself in my skills. If the read I've been asked to then perform is challenging, how can you help me with that read, and boy has that just even that perspective shift for teachers has been different in in So what then what the teacher does is says, Wow, that's a really big leap to jump into that first paragraph, I would do. And then they have a list of they already intuitively as good teachers have a lot of things, they just didn't know where I need them here.

Lindsay Kemeny: 23:52

Also, helping them understand to those secondary teachers, accommodations, you know, other accommodations that they can do for those, those students.

Donell Pons: 24:02

And Lindsay, this is a really good point that it came to my mind when we were having a conversation with Matt, but I didn't get to express it. And that this really important thing that I see happening fairly often for students in the secondary space, is the assumption that, oh, if a student is struggling with reading, than they only have to read, and they'll reduce the number of pages. So now the student is getting a reduction of information. And the teacher feels a sense of oh, I'm really helping, I'm trying to help because this would be a big ask to have the student read this match. But the reduction means they're getting less exposure to that information. And so I wanted to point out that we need to look for other ways for the student to get all of the information. So if that's audio is then available, so the student can have audio accompanying, then that should be the first go to is how does the student get access to all of the information because it's not an intelligence gap? It's a skill gap. Right? And we need to remember that

Lindsay Kemeny: 24:56

yeah, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and if we're by not giving them as much information, they're going to be more behind in other areas that they shouldn't even be behind. So

Stacy Hurst: 25:07

yeah, to combine the things we just talked about view how if you're in a situation in a high school, middle school setting junior high, where you have other professionals working with those same students, you could use them to pre teach that content right in ways the student would be able to access it in a scaffolded manner, with more than one

Donell Pons: 25:29

I love that, Stacy, I'm gonna put in my two cents that yes, yes, yes, that's the ideal model is to see that happening.

Lindsay Kemeny: 25:34

Something else Matt burns brought up was this idea of hero worship. And he, you know, this was a big caution to everyone. And sometimes we tend to think that, you know, whatever our the hero says is true. And he pointed out that this, you know, Emily Hanford just did this whole podcast series sold a story that kind of brought that up. Well, he warned that we sometimes tend to do that again. And we need to remember to be critical consumers at all at all times. You guys have any thoughts or anything to add on that?

Donell Pons: 26:09

One of my first thoughts because I fall into this category, I have you do you have those favorites, right? If you go to a conference, if you get the opportunity to go to a reading conference, you develop this sort of report? Oh, yes, I'd love to see it. Oh, good. They're speaking. Yeah, there's like kind of thing that happens. And then there's sometimes too in the literature, there's just something that speaks to you, right, or maybe they're addressing a topic that you haven't heard a lot of folks addressing, and so you do tend to find yourself gravitating this way. But it was a very good reminder, he's absolutely right to be good consumers, critical consumers. I would also add to that, though, that when you don't agree with someone in that space, who has, you know, put put their neck on the line, they've written a book, they're, they're suggesting things they're trying to push to get others to say, let's look at this, that we also can be kind about our criticism, too, right. So that's another piece. And I think people find themselves having to feel like they're defending or fiercely staunchly defend somebody when the criticism seems to be quite severe. And so that's another thing too, is Matt brought up this thing about learning how to be in those spaces together, and how we, how we help each other by saying, Oh, I don't quite agree, and maybe look here. And I appreciated that, because that's important on both sides.

Lindsay Kemeny: 27:19

Yeah, he was saying, like, researchers are like that they're just blunt. And they're like, that's not true. This is how it is, you know, and for a lot of us, we might be a little offended or taken aback by that. And that's just how they speak. So it's just trying to take emotion out of it. Right, Stacy, what were you gonna say?

Stacy Hurst: 27:37

I think this could be an entire episode on its own. And maybe we'll be someday. I have so many thoughts, and I'll try to keep them concise. I've said for a long time research keeps us all humble. And by that, I mean, I've done this before, just little tiny action research projects, right? Like, I'm certain that this is going to have this outcome and then it doesn't. And then I think, oh, it turns out, I don't know as much as I thought I did or it looks, it gives you an opportunity to look at it in a different way you think about the scientific method. That's what it is, right? But those of us who are practitioners and not schooled in research, or maybe we don't even like to read research articles, obviously not me, but other a lot of other teachers don't have time for that, then we do find ourselves looking to people. And I think it's more like we should keep our eyes on the concepts and what we know to be true in this moment. Right? Because things evolve. science evolves. That's the nature of it. I'm thinking the inverse as well. And we kind of tend to demonize people, also people, right. I think recently, I'll just say the name. A lot of people have been talking about her, but Lucy Caulkins has been in the news a lot. And I think I was one of those. And I did do a writer's workshop model in my first grade class, by the way, so I think I've gone from one extreme to the other with her. And then I realized she was just trying to sell us a story, right? But then I listened to the new episodes of Sold A Story, and I was listening closely to her tell her story. And who did she turn to? When she had questions about curriculum and content Fountas and Pinnell. She was sold a story too. And her her career took a different path because of that, right? Because she didn't buy into it like many of us did. I think that's interesting, a recent conversation about you know, who's on which side of whatever I think if we just keep our focus on the content that will help. I was reading recently ending the reading wars by Hassel Rasul a nation, which is just fun to say their names anyway. Yeah. But they were talking and very end. They said one of the reasons they wrote that paper was because of the need for by Balanced instruction. But that term has kind of been just kind of put in a negative light, right? But it's still the concept is still there, we need to teach the right things at the right time, we need a balance of that instruction doesn't mean equal time. But it means we need to look at it, the lens of what science tells us. So anyway, I'm sorry, I just kept rambling. But I, again, keeping our focus on the content and the information and not necessarily the people. Although, I don't know I still pretty close to hero worship with Louisa Moats. So I'll admit that,

Lindsay Kemeny: 30:38

of course, it's good for us to have people we look up to and admire, but it is just trying to stay close to the to the research and being willing to look at, you know, all sides of an issue, and maybe all points,

Stacy Hurst: 30:52

what were your thoughts on that topic?

Lindsay Kemeny: 30:53

I loved it. I think that's true that we get too much like, oh, and I felt that frustration myself with certain topics when I'm like, This person I admire so much. And they just said this. And this person who I admire so much, just said this. And those are like I am teaching in one hour, and what am I supposed to do, because those are completely opposing. So it can be frustrating sometimes. But I think it's so good for us to remember, we don't just, we don't have to take what one person says as gospel truth all the time, we can look at like I'm saying all sides of the issue. Donell, were you gonna say something about that?

Donell Pons: 31:30

I was just gonna say the researchers that I find I'm most drawn to are the ones who are not dismissive. When others say something like, Well, I'm not sure about this, have you thought about. And I've also heard researchers say, show me the data, I could be convinced I'd love to hear that, too. So when I hear things like that, and I see them not being dismissive of things that may be in opposition, and they're willing to entertain a conversation, that's, that's, to me, really draws me in,

Lindsay Kemeny: 31:56

that says a lot. And also when they're willing to listen to the teacher to, right, because we know that, you know, the teacher experience might be different, or the experience in the classroom might be a little different than the study that was so isolated, you know, and so it's good to look at all of it. There was another story that shared just kind of on that about the limits of research. And it was really interesting, because it was someone who was doing, I think, a behavior intervention for a student. They tried this intervention, the behavior improved, I believe, then it was like a winter holiday. And they came back and the behavior was not great again. And they had assumed their intervention is what improve the behavior. But when they talked to the parents of the student, they had said, Oh, we had promised him a trip to Disney. So and So once the Disney trip was over, you know, the behavior went back. And so I thought that was interesting. So just another thing, sometimes there's limitations, right? So I mean, it was a great conversation. We're about out of time. Anything else that Matt said, or anything else you guys want to bring up? Well, thank you. You guys was great. I'm so glad we had Matt on. And he was able to give us a little glimpse into his his mind and his knowledge.

Stacy Hurst: 33:12

Yeah, I found the whole conversation really inspiring, and maybe not for reasons that we've talked about even but he has such an efficiency with research and practice. Right. And I think a lot of it is because he was a practitioner for a long time. He's a real he considers themselves a researcher. Now, I thought that the whole conversation highlighted that need to bridge research to practice and practice to research. And so a lot of those themes have come up in our conversations today. And again, we joked at the beginning of that episode, Matt is only the second guest that we've had on the podcast. And so far, we've gone in alphabetical order. So we had an Anita Archer, and then we have Matt burns. Anybody come up with a C name that we can have on next? Okay, we're not gonna go. Donell's faces like Oh, no. Anyway, but thank you so much, Dr. Burns, again for joining us. And thanks to all of you who are listening with us and learning along with this, we really appreciate you and are always open to hearing from you and things that you'd like to discuss. So thanks again for joining us for this episode. And I hope you'll join us for the next episode of literacy talks.

Narrator: 34:35

Thanks for joining us today for literacy talks, the podcast series for literacy leaders and champions everywhere. We hope you'll join the science of reading collective, our free community, so you can stay current with the professions newest thinking free webinars, resources and more. Visit literacy talks online for access to all episodes and more at reading horizons.com/live Literacy talks. It's an exciting time to teach reading and help all students reach grade level proficiency this school year. Literacy talks comes to you from Reading Horizons where reading momentum begins. Join us next time