Literacy Talks

Part Two: Exploring Frustrations with Constructive Discussions

• Reading Horizons • Season 6 • Episode 15

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This episode of Literacy Talks focuses on the hosts' shared pet peeves related to literacy education. Donell expresses frustration with the persistent challenges around dyslexia awareness and support in schools. Stacy sometimes gets frustrated with the "checklist mentality" in teaching, where some pre-service teachers struggle to move beyond rigid requirements. Lindsay discusses her concerns about overcorrection in teaching high-frequency words and creating simplistic "black and white" lists categorizing educational practices. 

The hosts emphasize the importance of nuance, context, and supporting teachers with adequate time and resources to implement evidence-based literacy instruction effectively.

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Narrator:

Welcome to Literacy Talks, the podcast for literacy leaders and champions everywhere, brought to you by Reading Horizons. Literacy Talks is the place to discover new ideas, trends, insights and practical strategies for helping all learners reach reading proficiency. Our hosts are Stacy Hurst, a professor at Southern Utah University and Chief Academic Advisor for Reading Horizons. Donell Pons, a recognized expert and advocate in literacy, dyslexia and special education, and Lindsay Kemeny, an elementary classroom teacher, author and speaker. Now let's talk literacy.

Stacy Hurst:

Welcome to this episode of Literacy Talks. My name is Stacy Hurst. I am the host, and I am joined by Donell and Lindsay, as I am every episode. And those of you been listening for a while know we take turns choosing a topic related to literacy, and we talk about it, and today it was Lindsay's turn to choose the topic. And Lindsay, I'm not sure if I need to be worried about you and how you are, but I will let you introduce the topic, because this is a part two. Yeah, that's supposed to mean, okay, well, are you annoyed a lot, is my question. I

Lindsay Kemeny:

know, so she knows. Um, okay, last time, it was my idea. I did you know things that annoy you. And today, this was part two. I do enjoy these conversations. I think it's just kind of fun. And it's like we hear these random things. So we go from topic to topic rather quickly, and so I think it's just fun to chat about some things that annoy us or that we see. Maybe I'm a little too negative, maybe I don't know. It's

Stacy Hurst:

a good way to get it out right, and I don't think we're alone. Yeah.

Lindsay Kemeny:

So anyway, we are going to take it to Donnell first to share. This is part two, and I still had things in part one. I still had a few things on my list that I thought, Oh, we could talk about. But honestly, I think it would be fun to do this kind of topic every several months, because new things come up. So Donnell, let's, let's have you take it away. What's something that annoys you?

Donell Pons:

Okay, well, it is dyslexia. For me, it's been a dyslexia month. I've been doing a lot of things centered around dyslexia and dyslexia awareness, so that's been top of mind for me. But I think this was timing. Was everything for me. Lindsay on this, because you'd sent out what we were going to talk about, and then I just happened to have a conversation with someone I care greatly about, and that's my son, who has dyslexia, and he happened to catch me off guard by asking me a question. I thought that is my top one. I don't know what I was thinking I was going to talk about, but everything just got bumped for this one because he asked me a really pointed question, and unfortunately, I couldn't give him a good answer. And I thought, after all this time, this is still the problem. And what he asked me was, so after all this effort that you've put into literacy and joined, I mean, many different groups, I've been a part of legislation going up every legislative session, keeping an eye on all kinds of things to push reading forward, supporting teachers in the state, just etc, etc. He said, after all this time and effort, what's the accomplishment? And he caught me off guard, because I wanted to say, well, no one's going to have the same experience you had, you had as a young man. But I couldn't say that, because I get phone calls every day still from parents who are having the very same experience where their child isn't learning to read. They go over desperate to the school, oh, goodness, what can we do? How can you help what's going on? And they get told, Oh, he'll outgrow it, or he's just really active in the classroom, so he's not paying attention all kinds of things other than what we should be looking for. And the child isn't being screened either. So they should have been caught before the parent came over, going, how can you help me? So Ed caught me off guard, and that is my number one pet peeve. I think everything just dropped on my list, thinking after all this time, I'm still not seeing in schools, the information that's now readily available being made available and being utilized in schools. And to me, that's that's a big pet peeve.

Lindsay Kemeny:

How can we move the needle? Right? And you have certainly done a lot for moving this work forward, Donnell and but it's like all three of us, we can you can only do so much, and it's how far is your reach and how much of an impact can it be? But I don't know. I'm encouraged more than in the past, because I think there's a lot more people coming to this knowledge. And there's organizations that are, you know, pushing, I think, for more, but there's still a lot of work to be done, right? Donnell, and I think that's what you're seeing, yeah,

Donell Pons:

I'm just surprised by the lift, right? I'm surprised by, boy, the lift. And as you say, there are a lot more resources, because I look back to where when I was struggling and I really had nowhere to go, and I end up desperately, frantically. I mean, the library, of all places, I end up going down there just scanning aisles. No, I now have places I can send parents, and there are really good resources, as you say. So that's all very positive. I'm just surprised by how much effort it's taking. Okay,

Lindsay Kemeny:

Stacy, any comments on that? Or do you want to jump into your annoyance?

Stacy Hurst:

Well, I just appreciate the opportunity to make a list of things that annoy me, because I think I just get annoyed, but I think to comment therapeutic,

Lindsay Kemeny:

so maybe,

Stacy Hurst:

yeah, I think it's working. So maybe we could recommend that to our listeners, make a list

Lindsay Kemeny:

and then, like, burn it or something, right?

Stacy Hurst:

I'm a little more analytical, so I started like categorizing mine. But I to your point, Donell, my annoyances. And it's hard, because annoying, the word annoying, makes it kind of minimizes some things, but my annoyances are with the system. Usually they're systemic, you know? So, yeah, we can think of a lot of examples for that, and I think that is to your point, Donell, progress takes a long time to get to where it should. So I try to regulate myself and stay well, this is systemic too, let's be honest. But my annoyance and done all yours, is very close to your main focus in literacy, and mine is too to where I am in my life right now, and it is this checklist mentality over teaching our students to think critically. And as you know, I'm teaching in higher ed, and I love it when my students can infer and think for themselves and figure things out, but I feel like there's so much anxiety around any opportunity for that, because they just want a checklist. What do I need to do? And I'll do it, but I just need to know exactly what to do. And when you're talking about literacy and teaching children, you've got to learn to be a little flexible, because every child is different. There's not a checklist that works with every kid. And I think speaking systemically, this might come high school teachers listening to this might hate my guts after this, but it might come from high school where that's and this concept, too, of social promotion, which is kind of built in there, of like, this is what you need to do. Do it. I don't know maybe I'm wrong, but I think that's annoying to me right now. Okay,

Lindsay Kemeny:

Stacy, I like checklists.

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, they're not terrible.

Lindsay Kemeny:

I love to check it off. I make my list every day of things I have to do, and I check it off. Okay, but give me more of an example. So you're saying with your pre service teachers, you feel like they're getting glued to like the checklist, where that's all they do, and they don't do anything extra, or put extra work into what they're supposed to be doing, or explain that little more, I

Stacy Hurst:

wouldn't even say extra, and I'm a fan of checklists as well. But Lindsay, I know you, and you get a curriculum and you don't just follow it blindly, you also use your teacher knowledge, and I want them to start flexing that muscle. So one assignment we've had recently is that they gave a series of tests, really for the student that they're tutoring, and then they need to analyze that data. What does that mean for this student? How will it form my instruction and the questions that I got after fully explaining, giving examples. I mean, it's not like they don't have a background on this. And, of course, it's not every student. But the question was, well, how many comments do we need to make, and how many? And like, No, it's not about and how long of a summary. Should it be one page, two page? Don't like some of those things are important, but not it doesn't page doesn't matter. You need to know what the student needs. And it's not going to be as easy as, oh, they scored in the strategic range. Do this, and this some of that, yes, but some students might need something else. So that's what I'm talking about. And just this overall hesitancy and almost fear to to kind of wade into that territory.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yeah, I can see that. So they're, they're a little too caught up in what do I need to do? To get a high score, kind of thing, or what do I have to do to fulfill the requirements? Versus Hey, you're supposed to be analyzing the students data and making recommendations and writing a summary on that think more about the purpose of the task than just like, Yeah, okay,

Donell Pons:

so Stacey, I'm going to remark on yours, just because it's kind of touched on something that came up after my husband did a podcast about having dyslexia, and that's part of our series here. If you've heard the dyslexia talks pieces, it's my husband Curtis, and he was afraid a little bit after he listened to it, because there was a little thing he dropped in there about it looks different when a teacher has this as personal in their background, meaning they had someone who struggles with reading, and so it's personal. They've seen it firsthand. And he says it just feels different when that's the teacher. And then he was he was really upset after because he's like, oh, gosh, I really don't want to offend teachers if they don't have a personal experience. I don't want them to feel bad, because I know their job is hard. And I assured him, oh, teachers won't do that. So none of you did, I know, but his point, though, I think, is an interesting one, and maybe feeds into what you're talking to, a little bit Stacy. This all seems so removed. I think for a lot of educators, first of all, you're teaching them in the pre service space. And so yeah, a lot of their experiences are yet to come. Some may have had some experience, you would hope. And so they decided, Oh yes, I want to be a teacher, but many of them have not. And again, if reading has never been like this for you, meaning, there's challenges, there's difficulties, there's someone you know that really worked hard at this, but it never really came then this really wanting to understand what goes on when a student has challenges with reading. Or likewise, how can I help a student reach even more heights than they could if I didn't really know what I was doing to teach them. It may not really become a passion for you, and unfortunately, I want to see it be a passion for every teacher, right? Because it's going to take that level to be as engaged as we need to be to move the needle for kids. I think anyway,

Lindsay Kemeny:

what it makes me think about so, you know, Stacy's talking about pre service teacher. So let's then, let's think about teachers. Well, we have, like our state kind of mandates this progress monitoring. And it says, you know, you have to do progress monitor, you know, anyone that's below the benchmark, you know, so many times a month, and then the other one, so many times a semester, or whatever. So you could just do the progress monitoring and check the box, yep, I progress monitored these students done, right? Or you can connect it to that your instruction to an intervention, and then monitor. How did they do? Are they making adequate progress? Or they aren't making adequate progress? I need to change something so that they are right. So I think that might be a good example of what you're talking about, where, hey, check the box, or dive deeper and really understand the purpose.

Stacy Hurst:

Yeah, 100% and that is exactly what I'm trying to instill into my pre service teachers. Data means nothing unless you know how to analyze it

Donell Pons:

and do something about it, right? Stacey, yeah, and

Stacy Hurst:

put it into action. Yeah. Thank you for helping clarify my annoyance. No,

Lindsay Kemeny:

it's good. And then with my students. So now let's bring it to the young first grader. So last year, when I was getting giving, you know, like a writing assessment, before I was about to start a unit on informational writing, so I did a little pre assessment for my students, and I just I gave them a topic, we talked about the topic, and then I had them write about about it, and and I was walking around as they're writing, and I just heard one little boy, he was writing, and he's just made this comment, I have one more line, and then I'm done, because there was one more line, like on the page, on That front page. And so it's kind of like that, like he was thinking, just check the box, I need a link. And, you know, I'm guilty of that, where it used to be, oh, you need three sentences, or you need to do a page, or you need, you know, in upper grades, right? This needs to be a two page, whatever. And I just made a note, and I think, Okay, well, I'm excited because I'm going to be teaching him how to construct, construct an informational paragraph using an acronym called tide, which I think I've talked before, you know, and talking about what the paragraph needs to be considered done Right, versus just a length. So anyway, just a thought. Okay, so my annoyance, okay, the first one I want to share is related to what I shared last time. So in part one, I mentioned how it really annoyed me when people started. Teaching high frequency words before students knew all the alphabet sounds, and even before, like they're really starting to decode. And so I said, That's my annoyance, because we just push those high frequency words, I think too many, too early. Okay, but today, my annoyance is kind of the flip side a little bit. I'm also annoyed when we don't teach high frequency words, because I see comments where people say, Oh, well, like now that we don't teach sight words anymore this, you know, and I'm like, Whoa, hang on, this is like the perfect example of over correcting, right? Because those high frequency words are high frequency words. Students are going to see them a lot in text, and they need to be able to read those to access the text like the word the is the most common word, right? So they still need these words. We still need to teach them. So my annoyance before is, hey, let's wait. Let's let's focus on the alphabet at first, but then we still need to teach them. And students usually need more exposure to high frequency words than other words, just because, like a lot of them, are those function words, and we do have research from, I believe it's Katie pace miles, but shows that it's harder, or it might be Colin Brander, I can't remember, that shows that those function words take more time to learn. So the difference is how we're teaching them. I think, right? We're not memorizing them visually as a whole, so we're teaching them differently, but we still need to teach them. That's

Stacy Hurst:

such a good point. And I'm laughing. My mic is off, but I'm literally laughing out loud because I just barely had that conversation with one of my classes today, just barely today. And I'm laughing, because I get as passionate about it as you just were. And I think most of my students are thinking that I'm just weird, like these kind of things, I just get like, we were specifically also talking about the traditional definition of a sight word just going off on, like, we're not going to refer to it like that anymore. I'm sure they're just looking at me like, okay, yeah, but I think you're right about the over correcting. We all need to be cognizant of that,

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Lindsay Kemeny:

Okay, Donnell, let's do your second one. Oh,

Donell Pons:

I may have already done this one before, because I feel like, well, you know, when you have a thing, it's kind of like you're with the sight word thing. It's like, Okay, how many ways can I talk about this? Well, I'm gonna go in again. I'm gonna wade in again. Accommodation versus modification. Boy, I don't think we can go on and on about this one enough. And I think over time, I've kind of decided, especially of late, that because we don't understand this very well and it gets muddied, is why a lot of professors, I'm thinking of professors at universities who don't really have a lot of this in their vernacular, and also high school teachers, push back on what is a really good, fair, legitimate accommodation, because they've got that mixed up with modification. And I think if we all had a really good understanding of the difference between the two, maybe we'd see this handled better. So an accommodation is how you're going to accomplish something. So maybe I'm a student who's going to need extra time, because it's going to take me a lot of time to get through the material. So that's what I might get, is time and a half. It doesn't mean I do any less than anybody else, or I'm doing anything differently than anybody else, or I'm required to do anything differently. It's just how I'm going to get there. Likewise, maybe writing is really difficult for me, the transcription part, so I can use speech to text, because that's how I'm going to get it done. But I'm still doing as much as everybody else, and still required the same number of pages. A modification is when everybody else is going to do five pages, but you can do one. And you know, when we're in math class, you do every other problem. Now, I'm changing what you're doing. It's not the how, it's the what, right, so what you're actually going to be responsible for. And I think this gets muddied and mixed up, so that sometimes an educator says what time and a half I'm just putting an end to this, you've got to be able to and they're not realizing they are. Doing everything that everybody else is doing. It's just this isn't a legitimate way to get there. It's the how. And so I think if that were explained and people understood it, I wouldn't get near the pushback. Because when I do finally end up sometimes in a conversation with a teacher, because there's just been such a problem with a student, they're like, Could you please talk to my professor? Could you talk and that gets explained very quickly. Boy, they're reasonable because it makes sense. The professor's like, oh, oh, okay, so yeah, modification versus accommodation, we could understand that

Lindsay Kemeny:

it's a really good distinction. They're different. And Donnell, I wonder if one reason why it's confusing is that on an IEP, they're in the same section. They're all listed, I think, under accommodations, right? You go to your student's IEP, you look IEP, there's a list of things. Some of those are accommodations, but some might be modifications,

Donell Pons:

absolutely I think you're absolutely right. The IEP is one place that can get very mixed up. And another one is where on a 504 too, you don't have a whole lot of training or background for the 504 and a lot of things on there too are kind of muddied and mixed up. You don't have a lot of understanding of what you're looking at on that.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Yeah, and I'm gonna piggyback on this, because one of my annoyances is related, and this is not gonna count as one of mine. This is gonna be an extra because I still have another one to talk about. Bonus, okay, bonus annoyance, when my son's IEP is not followed, I'm not gonna say which class, okay, because he's in ninth grade, he's got eight different classes. And, you know, up to this point, we've really, you know, for the most part, it's gone pretty well, but this year, there's been some struggles with the accommodations not being followed, and it's really frustrating as a parent. So I'm talking as a parent, and I know as a teacher. You know, sometimes there's additional work, sometimes not really, but sometimes some of them require a little bit of work from you. So I understand that from the teacher perspective, but as a parent, it's so frustrating like that. Might be difficult for the teacher during this semester, but guess what? The child has to deal with that every single year, so it's a lot harder for the child. So it's really important to do those accommodations. And when my son, you know, in this certain class, he had to retake the test, he, you know, we did all this, all of this studying and practice and prep all this stuff at home to make sure he knew the content and was ready when he had to go retake the test, and he retook it and I came home, or he came home, and I was like, how did it go? And he did awesome. He's like, I only missed one, he said, but it was really stressful because it was timed. And I was like, okay, that it should, you know, that's on his IEP, that he has extra time, so it shouldn't been timed like that, and so, oh, it's just, it's just frustrating because that, you know, for him, that raised the level of stress. And we're just really glad that he still did so well, but maybe he wouldn't have, you know, or in on another test with content he didn't know as well, or anything, you know. So, and

Donell Pons:

you know, so I'm gonna piggyback your bonus, and you don't even have to get hit me again, because maybe I said everything I want to say, and that will be me putting a period on it. But the here's, I'm gonna I'm gonna piggyback that, because this is a power imbalance in schools that I think needed to be addressed so long ago, and we allow it to continue, the individuals in the school who are the youngest with the least amount of power are expected to drive their own accommodations with an adult, which I think is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen, or seen arranged ever in what situation in life with the person with the least amount of power be expected to drive their own what they need? Right? Their necessities? In every case, we hire an attorney, we get whoever we a spokesperson, but you're making the child, the individual who's who's struggling and needs to help. You're making them go toe to toe with an adult in order to get their accommodations. Is the wackiest thing that I've ever seen in school systems that needs to switch. It always has needed to, and no administration drives that. So they tell teachers, this is what we're doing, because we're required by law and we're going to do it. And again, that explanation of the difference between what an accommodation is and a modification should also come from them as well. It's so hard.

Lindsay Kemeny:

And he gets, you know, embarrassed, and he wants me, yeah, he says, Can you email terrifying, you know, because it's hard. And I do, and I always try to come about it really kindly and politely but also directly. And then if there's a problem and they're not still not Do you know, I will treat it like, oh, you might not know. Here's here are these things that really help him. These are the reasons. Why they help him, and then if it's still not followed, then I'm going to become a little more Mama Bear.

Donell Pons:

Yeah. But and, you know, we talk about trauma informed care all the time, and we're getting more aware of this, but we're inflicting trauma on these students all the time, to the point where I recently had a conversation with a fantastic young man who's finally, finally going to get his engineering degree that he's been working towards for years, has has a combination of some challenges, ADHD being one and working with language, and because of what he was put through by many of his professors, saying to him, you're just maybe don't have the right stuff. You know, if you need all of these accommodations, maybe this just really isn't the field for you. These sorts of comments that are made because you're not educated. That's the only way I can put that in perspective for myself, is to say, well, they're just not educated enough to understand. But now, when that young man talks about receiving that degree, it's with tears in his eyes, and the trauma he's had to go through to get to this point, completely unnecessary and should never have occurred. So that's, that's what we're talking about here. It is a big deal. It's

Lindsay Kemeny:

a big deal. It's important. And sometimes, I think, especially in elementary, I think, Gosh, I don't need an IEP. I do all these things already, like, I don't need it for the student, because, of course, when I see them struggling and they need something, I'm going to do it right. But not all teachers are like that, and that's why, even if you have a student in your class and you notice, you know, especially if they're in special education, you notice something in the class that really works well for them. Bring it up because you can add it to their IP because, yes, you're doing it anyway. But you know, future teachers may not, or they may just appreciate that idea that helps them, you know, access that grade level material, or the grade level work, or whatever it is. Okay. Stacy, what's your next one?

Stacy Hurst:

Well, just before I tell my next one, I just want to say I recently took the opportunity to review some notes from a idea conference I went to in 2012 and Sally Shaywitz said that to dyslexic, time is their on ramp. Time is their on ramp to the freeway to go the speed that everyone else is going. And as you go 2012 Stacy, yeah, 2012 so back to your first annoyance.

Donell Pons:

Thank you. Sorry. I

Stacy Hurst:

can see why you're annoyed. Yeah, that, yeah, 2012 and that's 12 years ago, right? Yeah. So okay, leading into my next annoyance, oh, gosh, I have two that I don't know which one takes precedence, but maybe I'll just say the one that comes with this statistic. So I'm not going to judge about high school teachers, but I know they have a different schedule, but there is not enough prep time for elementary school teachers. And the statistic is that, on average, this is average people, there are over 400 hours of overtime for every elementary school teacher per that's 10 weeks of full time working of overtime that they're not getting compensated for. And I think part of why we're talking about these things that are so annoying and that maybe the teachers haven't had time to implement all the things they're required to do, time to prepare well. And I that's annoying to me. That's my annoyance. Oh

Lindsay Kemeny:

yeah, for sure. So the district I'm in right now is the best because we have prep time every day. We have like, either 30 to 50 minutes every day for prep time, and that's because our district hires other teachers to teach art, PE, music, computers, so and library. So when students are there, we get that prep time. Additionally, I think this varies by school, but most of the schools in my district, we don't have to go and do outside recess duty. So we get recess, you know, which is just going to be shorter, but hey, that 15 minutes, you can really do a lot of prep during that 15 minutes or in the afternoon. So we have, you know, morning lunch and afternoon recess. My old district, we did not have any prep time. We had to do recess. So we would rotate. But when it was your week or your day to do recess for your team. Man, that was stressful, having to go, you know, teach, teach, teach, go out there, monitor, come back in, teach, teach, teach. And we, we were responsible for teaching all those specials, the PE, the computers, the art we the music. We had to do it all. And so what like my team would do as teaching second grade? Is we would to have one person's class. We would split it between the other, like five teachers. We had a really big school, so you'd get some extra kids, and then we would, we would kind of do our own rotation. So like, one week, I'm teaching computers the whole week, for the whole grade, and another teacher is teaching PE another one is art, another one is music, you know, and then one teacher gets a break for that week, and then it would rotate. So we just tried to do that so that we all could at least have a break sometimes for planning time. Anyway, that's really important. Stacy, we do need to make sure we really overwork teachers, and if we can support them, we well, we need to support them.

Donell Pons:

And Stacey, I think your complaint is part B of my A, right is, you know, so why hasn't why haven't things changed? Why doesn't look different? A lot of teachers just don't have the time to implement, and oftentimes don't even get to go to a lot of these things to learn about the things to implement. It's still a big problem. I ran into an educator just over this weekend in Dallas, delightful. Had such a great conversation with her. Taught first second grade eight years. Loved it. I could just see the energy in her. I thought she would be a great teacher in that first second grade space. She said last year, I got to where, if I didn't get a change, and she's now a literacy specialist. I said to my husband, I will have to quit. I'm burned out. There is no time. I have no time for anything else, and we cannot keep doing that to teachers. It's not okay. Yep, I agree. Yeah,

Lindsay Kemeny:

I have someone at my school who was going to transfer to another school district because it was closer to her house, and she was getting all ready to do that had, you know, someone extend a job to her. And then she found out they don't have any prep. And then she was, oh, never mind, I'm going to stay in this district, because that is a huge perk. It's a necessity, really. It shouldn't be a perk. It should be a necessity. Yeah. Okay, so we'll go to mine. We'll just, here's mine, and we'll just end on this one. Okay, so something that annoys me are these black and white lists, like here, all these things are science of reading, and all these things are not. So here's a list of no nos. The reason why is because a lot of times I think some of the things we put on this list require an explanation, or there's more shades of gray. So I feel like, when there's just this one visual of this list, like these things are yes, these things are no, I feel like there can be a lot of misinterpretations that way. And shout out to this teacher who put up one of these lists in a social media group, because she was doing it to get feedback before she took it whatever to whoever her presentation or whatever she was doing. So I'm like, okay, major kudos, because that took a lot of, you know, courage for her to post it online. But I'm just going to give you an example of something that was on there. She had for the Yes, 44 phonemes on the No, 26 letters of the alphabet. And so I asked her, I'm like, Okay, you need to explain that, you know. And of course, she was saying, Well, you know, we want to focus on the 44 phonemes. And I'm like, Yes, but you also teach the 26 letters of the alphabet. So I was just kind of chiming in, like, I think you need to take that off, because that's really confusing. Because, of course, we still need to know the names and letters of the alphabet. And she did. So, like I said, she put it up for feedback, so that was her rough draft, and she did. But I see other lists or other just these kind of these blanket statements that I'm like, Okay, we can't just say it like that without an explanation attached, because this is when we run into some of these other problems that are annoyances for us, where we overcorrect right, or someone misinterprets something wrong. We don't want this to be seen as a pendulum swing. That's one of the annoyances we talked about in the last episode. And when we're just taking those little, you know, little bite sized, you know, little snippets, it's really easy for those misconceptions to happen. Thoughts on that,

Stacy Hurst:

yep, I think the phrase that I frequently associate with this happening is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So we learned a lot in our balanced literacy training about how important read alouds are, and even how we call them, what shared reading or interactive reading. And to be honest, I never could remember the difference between the two, but there were a lot of great strategies for engaging students in comprehension in that case, and for people to say, Oh, we don't do that anymore. Well, we do ask. Six of it 100% like, let's just not, you know, discard everything we've learned. We just need to understand the context with which we're implementing the science.

Lindsay Kemeny:

Another one I saw come up on the list of no noses. They said, pictures. I'm like, No, you need pictures. And what are you talking about? Explain pictures for what for a book? Well, you still want pictures. The problem with pictures is, when we use them to decode a word, you still use pictures to help you enjoy the story and understand what's happening for your comprehension, you use pictures to illustrate vocabulary words. I saw someone say, Well, don't use pictures in phonemic awareness. I'm sorry. Why is that? If you have an English learner, they need pictures to support you know, the vocabulary that they're learning, which you can connect with your phonemic awareness. So again, I was just like, one of those things that annoys me.

Stacy Hurst:

You know that also made recently on a social media post, somebody was asking about running records, and honestly, the act of listening to a student read and coding what they're saying is very beneficial. The problem with running records was in the miscue analysis the way it was analyzed. So really, just clarifying, thinking about those things before we discard something that's useful for our students. Yes, I

Lindsay Kemeny:

remember we talked about that in our episode with Dr burns. I don't remember which season that is, but we talked about the running records with him. It's great to listen to a child read. We don't need to determine, oh, was that air, a semantic air? Was it, you know, syntax, or was it visual? Uh, exactly, Stacy.

Stacy Hurst:

But we can tell what, which of Aries phases they're in by the way they read a word, right? And when we know that, we can move them to the next one through our instruction. So, so much about the science just makes sense. Okay, well, I we are at time. And Lindsay, I'll be 100% honest. When you said this was the focus again, I was like, oh man. And like I said, I made a list, but just in the course of our conversation, I've added two or three more things to my list. So I'm gonna pin it up somewhere I can keep it next time. Do you promise we can get another episode like this. No, next

Lindsay Kemeny:

season, we'll do another one. Okay, good. So it's like, you know how you have a column, like in a newspaper, you always have this certain column, or whatever, It'll kind of be like that this. Yeah,

Stacy Hurst:

it'll be great. And so listeners, if you have some annoyances you'd like us to talk about, or you'd like to share with us, please send them in. I bet we would agree. Most of them. Well, thank you so much for choosing this conversation. Lindsay, it's been very therapeutic, maybe not for Donnell, because things still haven't changed tomorrow, but we are making progress, right? We definitely are. And I think I see that even though I'm annoyed sometimes with some of my students, I do see that overall, I tell them all the time, they're already more prepared to teach reading than I was when I graduated with a reading endorsement. So the fact that we have achieved some amount of alignment with the science is encouraging, even though there will still always be things that annoy us. Thank you again, Lindsay, and thank you for those of us who have joined us for this episode of Literacy Talks, please join us for the next one.

Narrator:

Thanks for joining us today. Literacy Talks comes to you from Reading Horizons, where reading momentum begins. Visit readinghorizons.com/literacytalks to access episodes and resources to support your journey in the science of reading.