Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Kate Winn: Hello to all you travelers out there on the road to evidence-based literacy instruction. I'm Kate Winn, classroom teacher and host of IDA Ontario's podcast Reading Road Trip. Welcome to the 9th episode of season three.
Before we get started, we would like to acknowledge that we are recording this podcast from the traditional land of the Mississauga Anishinaabe. We are grateful to live here and thank the generations of First Nations people for their care for and teachings about the earth. We also recognize the contributions of Métis, Inuit, and other Indigenous peoples in shaping our community and country.
[00:00:45] Kate Winn: Along with this acknowledgement, and in the spirit of truth and reconciliation, we'd like to amplify the work of an Indigenous artist. And this week we are sharing Amik Loves School: A Story of Wisdom by Katherena Vermette, illustrated by Irene Kuziw. Amik loves going to school, but when he shares this with his grandfather, he finds out Moshoom attended residential school. At Moshoom’s school, students were forbidden from speaking their language. It sounds very different from Amik's school, so Amik has an idea. In this heartwarming story, an Anishinaabe child shows his grandfather how his school celebrates the culture that residential schools tried to erase. Add this one to your home or classroom library today.
In each episode this season, we're also going to share a review for Reading Road Trip from the Apple podcasts app. And this week we want to thank Laura, who kindly posted the following the Reading Road Trip podcast has been so valuable on my journey to evidence based literacy practices. Kate is honest about her journey, showing Ontario educators how to be kind to oneself while still pushing forward to improve our practice. I look forward to each episode to clarify and push my thinking forward. The guests are thoughtfully selected with international experts that bring valuable insight to our Ontario context. Thank you IDA Ontario and reading Roadtrip. And thank you Laura and everyone who leaves us a rating and or a review. Every single one is so appreciated. And now on with the show.
[00:02:19] Kate Winn: It is my pleasure to introduce this week's guest here on reading Roadtrip. Doctor Amanda Nickerson serves as the Ohio CLSD technical assistance specialist on behalf of the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce and state support team nine. She is responsible for creating aligned supports for the development of model literacy sites and providing technical assistance for schools and districts. As part of her role, she also collaborates with state literacy specialists to design and facilitate statewide literacy professional learning opportunities. Amanda has previous experience working as a literacy consultant, teacher title one reading specialist, gifted intervention specialist, peer coach, and as an adjunct instructor. A recent graduate of Mount St. Joseph University, and I will add, receiving her doctorate in the same cohort as my esteemed co-producer, Dr Una Malcolm. Amanda's research interests lie at the intersection of MTSS, the science of reading, and gifted education. Dr Amanda Nickerson, welcome to Reading Road Trip.
[00:03:21] Dr. Amanda Nickerson: Thank you so much for having me today. I'm so excited to talk about a topic that I'm so very, very passionate.
[00:03:27] Kate Winn: About, and we are so thrilled to have you here. So we are going to be talking about the work you did for your dissertation, and the title of that was “Utilizing Decoding and Spelling Lessons to Accelerate Highly Skilled First Grade Readers.” And I have read this all, I think, 147 pages of it. So, so interesting. But before we start digging in, I do want to let our eager listeners know that this dissertation isn't available publicly yet. I know when it kind of came up on Twitter, people were saying, I want to read it, I want to read it. So you will have to wait and see what is to come with Amanda's research. But you're going to get lots of tidbits today, listeners, so never fear. But my first question for you, Amanda, is before you conducted your own study for this, you looked into existing research on highly skilled readers and explicit phonics and spelling instruction. What was the messaging that you saw out there about this at that time?
[00:04:20] Dr. Amanda Nickerson: Well, that's a really interesting question, and to be frank, there's really a scarcity of research in this particular area, which resulted in a literature review that was a tapestry of different connected topics.
Anecdotally, precocious readers appear to learn to read with ease, seemingly naturally, right? That's the perception in the literature we see that highly skilled readers are often characterized by exceptional phonemic awareness skills, by their ability to decode unfamiliar words in and out of context, and also by their strong oral language skills. They also tend to have fairly robust statistical learning skills and high working memory capacity. And what's happened is this has led some scholars to presume that young, highly skilled readers do not require or enjoy explicit phonics instruction, and that these students can basically rely on their decoding skills to implicitly learn new words and concepts through extensive reading and self-teaching. But in practice, this has caused educators to basically shy away from explicitly teaching phonics to these highly skilled readers. And as I'm sure you've probably seen as well, it sometimes caused anxiety about potentially holding them back by delivering that kind of instruction. Some of these claims lack research support. There are no citations that accompany these claims. Other cite papers from Smith and Goodman, from their seminal works about whole language back in the eighties. Or sometimes we see citations about the individualization studies conducted by Dr Carol Connor's team.
After thoroughly scouring the databases and crawling through them just looking for everything that I could, I was able to find one empirical study that specifically examined the value of explicit code-based instruction for this population, and it was conducted at the beginning of kindergarten. This study, by Fielding Barnsley suggested that explicit instruction in decoding and spelling benefits children that have high phonemic awareness and Alphabet knowledge. And notably in that study, they compared a decoding-encoding group with a whole word group, and that decoding-encoding group outperformed the whole word group in reading and writing both novel new words and pseudowords, those nonsense words. Of course, you know, there were a lot of different statements in the literature. Joe Torgeson has said explicit instruction can help all children during those early stages of learning to read, but acknowledges that there are some individual differences in those early stages that might cause some a need for different amounts of instruction. And of course, we've all heard that axiom from Snow and Juel that say that the explicit teaching of alphabetic decoding skills is helpful for all children, harmful for none, and crucial for some.
Basically, what that all led to was a series of questions about how that instruction should be delivered to gifted and highly skilled students, recognizing that they're not a monolith and they might need different levels of intensity of support. So, as you saw in my literature review, I kind of moved from this idea of serving them in MTSS and really taking a look at what highly skilled readers possess in terms of skills and what they need, and how we can use assessments to really drive targeted instruction and specifically what that might look like for students who are young and may still benefit from code-based instruction to prevent gaps, essentially. And I do want to add one thing, if I may. I do want to say there are a lot of questions that remain about dosing and pacing and complexity, especially for this group. And I want to acknowledge that there's likely an instructional fulcrum that exists, right, that warrant shifting increasingly more instructional time toward vocabulary and comprehension. And we certainly need to learn more about that skill progression for these students as well.
But there's definitely a really big need for future research in this area, and this was a tremendous gap in the literature.
[00:08:53] Kate Winn: All right, well, thank you for all that background and we will get to your specific study and what you learned from that. But I just want to go slowly here first. So just as we talk a lot about how to identify students with dyslexia and reading disabilities. The process of identifying gifted and highly skilled readers is also important, especially, you know, if you're looking at students like this for a study like yours. So first, can you just share with us the definition you used in your study for highly skilled readers?
[00:09:19] Dr. Amanda Nickerson: Sure, I'll be happy to share the definition. And I also, if you don't mind, would love to share a bit of a rationale for why I took this approach.
[00:09:27] Kate Winn: Please.
[00:09:28] Dr. Amanda Nickerson: Okay, so in my study, I define highly skilled readers as students who possess high word recognition skills and high language comprehension skills, which is kind of a call out to the simple view of reading, right? If you think about that need for word recognition skills and language comprehension skills. But these are students who have high levels of skills in both domains that yield high levels of reading comprehension relative to their age and their grade level expectations. Now, I selected this definition intentionally, and that's because at the time of the study, none of my students were identified as gifted. They're first graders, and typically gifted identification takes place in second grade at this site, which is pretty typical.
So that was one reason that I used the term highly skilled reader. It's possible that some of those students, maybe even all of them, will go on to get a label of gifted at some time. But at that time of the study, they did not have that. Now, I believe that labels can be really, really helpful for advocacy and for services. But as we know, sometimes labels can be slippery, and at their worst, they can also be really restrictive.
And definitions of giftedness are no different. They can vary. The processes used for identification can also somewhat vary.
Often students are identified as having superior cognitive abilities, still based on high IQ scores, but they might also be identified in a specific academic area based on critical thinking ability, or visual or performing arts ability. Or they might be twice exceptional. And so any conversation we have about gifted and highly skilled students essentially has to address the proverbial elephant in the room, which is that not all gifted learners are highly skilled readers, and not all highly skilled readers are identified as gifted. So some gifted and high achieving students are really plagued by chronic underperformance due to disengagement, due to the formation of poor work habits, because they haven't had to put forth a lot of effort. Things have been easy. They've relearned things they already have known. Other students are twice exceptional. They may be gifted and have a disability like dyslexia or autism spectrum disorder or ADHD or whatever it may be. And each of these constellations of strengths and needs necessitate different instructional, behavioral, or social emotional interventions. But regardless, my belief is that all of these students have a need for targeted instruction and that should be driven by data. So that also kind of goes along with this belief that MTSS should be flexible enough to accommodate both early intervention and early enrichment. And that's really why I chose a more inclusive term. Gifted learners are a subset of highly skilled readers, but all highly skilled readers deserve to be challenged, and they deserve to have opportunities to grow, whether they have a formal label, whether they scored a one percentile below the cut score for services, whether they demonstrate advanced to reading abilities or are twice exceptional. And I think that MTSS offers the most effective approach for delivering that data driven, targeted, intensified enrichment.
When we think about MTSS this way, as including gifted and highly skilled learners, we're really looking at two sides of the same coin or two sides of the same model. Both sides are enabling the provision of early support, and that support looks similar in some ways and different in some ways.
Considering the ways in which disproportionality has plagued both special and gifted education, this is really essential for young gifted learners or highly skilled learners who are from culturally or linguistically diverse backgrounds or economically disadvantaged families like the one I grew up in, which increases access to services for these students. And it ultimately permits students who demonstrate strengths early on to receive more advanced instruction at the outset, expanding their knowledge and skills beyond what's typically delivered in core instruction. And I always say it allows them to flourish. We know we've fallen into that wait to fail model in the past with special education students and struggling students, and essentially with this population of students, they have been waiting to flourish.
[00:14:24] Kate Winn: Mm hmm. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And interesting, you know, to compare sort of the idea of the early intervention, the early enrichment. I know in our, in our school board, gifted identification doesn't happen until grade four. And so what's happening in all those prior years? Right then, even the process and the criteria, that's a whole other story. But my next question for you is, what do you think is the best way to identify these students? So, for example, looking at young readers, as you did for your study, so they hadn't gotten into gifted testing or anything like that yet anyway, how did you identify the students that were going to be incorporated in this?
[00:14:59] Dr. Amanda Nickerson: Okay, so to my knowledge, based on my review of the literature, there was no precedent for this kind of study. Nobody had ever ask this question or use the kind of assessments that I came at this with. There were some papers from gifted education scholars that called for an expanded conceptualization of RTI and MTSS, kind of like I was just talking about. And there were some scholars within that group who talked about the utility of curriculum based measurement to learn more about these high achievers and the use of above level testing so that that informed how I developed a multiple gating procedure to identify some potential participants. Specifically, I used a universal screener to identify first graders who were above the beginning of year benchmark on phoneme segmentation fluency and nonsense word fluency, and I looked at both the correct letter sounds measure and the whole words read measure, so they had to be above benchmark in all three areas.
At that point, I used a phonics diagnostic as a form of above level testing, so I tested up to identify specific instructional needs, and then students who demonstrated mastery of multisyllabic patterns ultimately were excluded from the study. I was looking for students who had skills that preceded that. Then I used survey-level assessments to identify an appropriate level for monitoring oral reading fluency, and students were also tested up using that survey level assessment rather than back.
Participants were then grouped according to instructional needs and progress monitoring levels to the extent that I could, and then a random selection method was used to assign two participants to each pair.
As many listeners probably already know, oral reading fluency is typically not monitored at this point in first grade at the beginning of the year, but since students had already exceeded benchmark on nonsense word fluency in both dimensions of it, it seemed reasonable to monitor them using a more advanced measure that would be sensitive enough to measure growth so that as they were learning more advanced decoding and spelling skills, we could hopefully see that translate into an increase in their oral reading fluency score.
So what I want to point out is I used assessments that the school was already using, which made it really doable and financially feasible, but we use them for above level testing. This is typically done as a way to use off grade level testing to figure out the skills of gifted and highly skilled students who are younger or at a lower grade level than the intended target group.
The existing literature supports this view that the test ceiling is raised through above level testing and that this results in a more accurate assessment of students’ abilities and also in more sensitive progress monitoring.
It also allows educators to identify precise instructional targets and progress monitoring levels, which is really important because we need complete and accurate data to be able to optimally serve all of our students, including gifted and high achieving students.
As educators on a practical level, we need to know what our students know so that we can identify appropriately challenging learning targets. And the same thing is true for enrichment. Above-level assessments can really guide us and help us identify those next steps for instruction. And that can help us purposefully accelerate students through a scope and sequence or a learning progression that helps us quickly learn the content and go deeper to provide that depth and complexity that students benefit from.
And I think this can easily be done in small group instruction by eliminating previously learned material and then reallocating that valuable, very finite instructional time toward teaching new knowledge and skills that will help them gro.
[00:19:11] Kate Winn: Really important how you pointed out you can use assessments that are probably already in schools, and as a lot of us are learning about screening. And the big question I find when I do Acadience training is always okay, but what about that kid that I know is not going to be able to do it at this level? And so we talk about how you start with their grade, but then the backtesting piece. Right. But how testing ahead, that is also, for some students, going to be the way to go. And so it's just, you know, the other direction. Right. So I think that will be. That will be helpful. So you had your definition. You decided how you're going to identify these students, and so can you next, just tell us quickly, well, not quickly, but however long you want, how highly skilled readers can have different strengths and needs. So before we actually get into what you did with this intervention, we, you know, we've kind of got a definition how to identify these students, but they do sometimes have different strengths and needs. Can you tell us about that?
[00:20:03] Dr. Amanda Nickerson: Sure. These students are just like every other group, right? They are not a monolith. So students come to us with different experiences and with different levels of skills. In gifted education literature, they often talk about asynchronous development, which is a term that scholars use to describe uneven development that occurs in students. But especially, we see it in gifted students, where they may have high levels of cognitive, emotional, physical, intellectual, and creative abilities that are kind of fluctuating. So they might have strengths in one area and relative weaknesses in others, or big gaps in a particular domain.
Gifted and high achieving students often have significant variations within themselves, and they develop unevenly across skill levels, not unlike other children.
And this is, again, especially true for students who are gifted and have a learning disability.
A few studies have confirmed what I think a lot of teachers recognize when they work with students like this, that skilled readers are not always uniformly proficient readers and spellers. Right? So some highly skilled readers perform with high spelling accuracy and reading fluency levels, while others routinely make spelling errors and read less fluently. And this is something that makes sense because spelling requires production, not just recognition. I've seen Keith Rayner write that success in reading doesn't automatically lead to success in spelling, and this is true for gifted learners as well.
Interestingly, I saw this firsthand in my study and it really showed up in my highest decoder. She read third-grade oral reading fluency passages for progress monitoring with near perfect accuracy. Time after time, 98% accuracy, 100% accuracy. And yet she was the one student who needed review for spelling the most. And I think that was so interesting to see, but not overall surprising. It illustrates the importance of teaching for mastery, right, teaching encoding alongside decoding and not just looking at decoding and thinking they're fine if they're doing a great job with that, and also the importance of using data-based decision-making to drive our teaching and our instruction. I think it would be easy for a teacher to look at the student and see her third-grade decoding skills and assign an independent reading project. That's what we often see. Or to just plug along and teach what they're teaching to the rest of the class with the assumption that they're going to be fine because they're doing well. She's already a good decoder, it's not going to hurt her, right? And that's what we typically see. We see highly skilled readers who are receiving the same phonics instruction as their less skilled peers.
What I want to say is this can be problematic because these students may be ready to learn more advanced content like vowel teams or multisyllabic words, and they may be unlikely to profit from lessons about previously mastered patterns like CVC words.
There is a researcher, Dr Stainthorpe, Rhona Stainthorpe from England, who advised that a flexible approach is needed if we are going to prevent students like this from becoming bored and marking their time in class. What we've seen in the research, and probably many of us in our classrooms, is that when this is prolonged, students end up with decreased effort and engagement and motivation, and this can cause those highly skilled and gifted learners to underperform, to languish, to exhibit discipline and social emotional issues.
What I believe, and what it seems to be pointing to with my study is that advanced code-based instruction may potentially mitigate some of these issues by providing students with opportunities to be challenged and engaged while they strengthen their decoding and spelling skills. And just again, another call out to the simple view of reading because strengths in decoding and language comprehension magnify one another, developing more advanced decoding skills will likely improve oral reading fluency and reading comprehension, too. So that's a value added.
[00:24:38] Kate Winn: Okay, now we're going to get to your research, so could you please give listeners a description of who ended up taking part in your study and tell us what that intervention looked like?
[00:24:47] Dr. Amanda Nickerson: Sure. The participants in this study were six highly skilled first-grade readers who, as I mentioned, demonstrated advanced phoneme segmentation fluency and nonsense word fluency but had not yet mastered multisyllabic word reading in terms of their skills. This study took place at a very small, rural, Title One school in the midwest, and the intervention was delivered by one interventionist who received support from an experienced implementation coach as needed. I ended up using a single case, multiple baseline across-subjects design, which is a mouthful.
Well, basically what that means is that design allowed me to compare baseline and intervention performance for each participant so I could look at changes across the student, across time, but also across participants.
And that helped me across the kind of staggered intervals to be able to assess changes in oral reading fluency that resulted from that intervention in decoding and spelling. Basically, students participated in lessons from UFLI Foundations for 30 minutes a day for eight weeks. That was the intervention. Because each lesson comprises 30 minutes sessions, each lesson was taught across two consecutive days, and the interventionist kind of, we came up with a procedure that was a little different than the standard textbook procedure for UFLI. So I do want to acknowledge that. So rather than teaching two lessons in the first four days of the week and then doing review on Friday, we used a data-based decision-making framework so they would teach, they would engage in the lesson for two consecutive days. On the second day, we used the progress monitoring assessment in UFLI as an embedded formative assessment. So those words were included in dictation in word reading so that we could look at it on that second day and determine whether some additional instruction was needed or whether we could continue to just move on as quickly as we could. Right. So that was interesting.
So that second session of each lesson, they were assessed on newly introduced irregular words, new concept words in isolation, and new concept words within those dictated sentences. And then I also shared some suggested activities when review was warranted. So, basically, if students didn't misspell more than one of those target words on the formative assessment, then the next lesson in the scope and sequence was initiated and taught the next day. If one or both of the students misspelled more than one target word, a review session on spelling was taught. And so that might look like Elkonin boxes to spell words using magnetic letters, manipulating magnetic letters to complete extra word work chains that are in the manual from the previous lesson. They wrote leftover sentences from the previous lesson. They wrote words from the lesson's word list, and they spelled irregular words if they misspelled more than one target word and also misread some words if there was also an accompanying decoding challenge there, then we added the blending drill to the review for the next day. They did all of the same spelling work, just condensed, and then they would read and write those leftover sentences and read and write the lesson’s word list and read and spell those irregular words. So we just added a little bit of a decoding element as they worked through those tasks. And then, as needed, the interventionist consulted with that implementation coach to try to make sure we are really matching the student's pattern of error with appropriate instructional strategies and then interleaving words that contained patterns from previous review sessions if there were lingering challenges.
[00:29:10] Kate Winn: I love how responsive everything was. It wasn't like you could just plan at the beginning of the month like, okay, day one of the intervention is going to look like this and day two is going to look like this and we got to stick to the program, right? It was so responsive to where the students were, which is really interesting. All right, and now tell us, what were your findings when you looked at all of your data at the end?
[00:29:27] Dr. Amanda Nickerson: So this study supports the findings of Fielding Barnsley, which indicated that students possessing strong phonemic awareness and Alphabet knowledge can derive benefits from explicit phonics and spelling instruction. And my study also refuted those earlier assertions that gifted and highly skilled students do not benefit from or enjoy phonics. What I found was that every student showed improvements in oral reading fluency, which was reflected by increases in the number of words read correctly per minute, and also moderate effect sizes, which was measured by the percentage of data exceeding the median, something called P.E.M. or PEM.
Throughout the intervention, students' accuracy, their comprehension, and their ability to retell stories improved, though some students grew more than others.
Students who had a little bit higher reading skills showed more improvement compared to those who weren't as skilled.
Three students exhibited what we call functional relations, which indicated a positive response to intervention, and the other three students, they also demonstrated growth, but the the intervention's impact was less evident. In their cases, it was harder to draw the conclusion that the intervention 100% caused that change.
It's also important to note that the interventionists perceive the intervention as valuable and feasible, and all of the students perceive the intervention as helpful and enjoyable. So that whole idea that highly skilled or gifted students don't enjoy this kind of instruction did not bear out in the results of this study. That was not what I found.
As a matter of practical importance, it was really neat to see that the observed words correct per minute growth rates dramatically surpassed what's typically reported in the literature, where we typically see increases of one word per week.
This was a pretty short intervention. It was eight weeks long. We had a very short baseline period.
But the range and scores of spanning from the lowest score in baseline to the highest score in intervention revealed tremendous growth. So some students grew 14 words. Then we saw 22 words, 23 words, 29 words, 50 words, and 54 words. I think those last two students that I mentioned that grew 50 and 54 words. It's worth pointing out that those were my highest-skilled students. And so the students who were receiving instruction that was even further along that scope and sequence benefited the most and showed the most growth in oral reading fluency.
I also want to make the point that given that oral reading fluency in particular, looking at words correct per minute is a robust and valid indicator of general reading ability, these improvements may also suggest more than just improved fluency. They may also be indicative of growth in a wider range of reading competencies like vocabulary acquisition, comprehension of texts, and overall literacy proficiency. So, in a nutshell, again, you know, I think the study offers preliminary evidence that providing advanced explicit phonics and spelling instruction, that's a beyond where tier one instruction may typically be at that point in the year, may be enjoyable for highly skilled readers and also has the potential to improve student outcomes. And again, it also demonstrates that even highly skilled decoders may benefit from some additional instruction and spelling to make sure that those two reciprocal skills are intertwined and are both robust and strong.
[00:33:30] Kate Winn: How exciting that you've got these findings. What do you think? Now, obviously, this is one study, but what do you think this means for all of the classroom teachers who are listening? What would you want them to take away from what you have learned, not just with your own study, but even all of the reading and learning that you've done around this whole topic? What do you want classroom teachers to know?
[00:33:50] Dr. Amanda Nickerson: Well, I think the results highlight the importance of acknowledging and accommodating individual differences in our students, especially with respect to phonics and spelling instruction.
We have seen in prior research that rigid adherence to core programming, instructional compromises that we make as teachers, lack of challenge and also misconceptions about differentiation that we possess as teachers can all diminish learning opportunities for advanced learners and that's true even when we are delivering evidence based reading instruction, even when we're using programs that are aligned with the science of reading.
Given the current emphasis on programs that are aligned with reading science, this means that it's crucial for us to consider how we can flexibly apply evidence based strategies to offer sufficient challenges for students with advanced language and literacy skills.
And this becomes a conversation about instructional integrity. Right? How do we meet the needs of the actual children in the room?
Using data to ensure that we are targeting that instruction in small groups and that we're not, I mean, fidelity is important, but what we don't want is to trudge through a curriculum without giving a thought to the fact that we have a wide array of student needs in our classroom. So we have to again use those evidence based strategies, but use them with data so that we can make sure we're meeting kids where they are. Now, I mentioned that further research is warranted to really take a closer look at what a tiered enrichment model might look like for gifted and highly skilled learners, which can help with that differentiation that's needed.
Now, I think it is reasonable to expect that tiered enrichment services would closely resemble the intervention services that we use to support students with learning difficulties. So, within tier one, that means that we are going to provide grade-level instruction rooted in scientific research for all of our students because we want to establish a strong foundation in those essential reading components.
Differentiated core instruction, then, should strategically use small group instruction to both address gaps and also enhance rigor based on that student data that we have at our fingertips. And I honestly think we need to collect a little bit more data on those kids who are performing above benchmark. We need to figure out where exactly they are.
We can use that to inform those other tiers of instruction, too. So tier two should offer supplemental enrichment opportunities to some students, which would provide more challenging and complex instruction than we're able to provide in tier one. Perhaps that might even be in collaboration with a gifted intervention specialist in your building. In tier three, intensive enrichment opportunities should be tailored to the needs of a very few students who might require more personalized or individualized or rigorous instruction because all learners deserve opportunities to grow.
Again, this should not be restricted to only students with a gifted label. This should be any learner who would benefit from enrichment based on the data that we have at our fingertips. But because we're talking about MTSS, those different levels of intensity may warrant different levels of rigor. Right?
I did want to mention one limitation of the study, just because I think it's interesting as it came out, and that is that instrumentation using oral reading fluency may have limited my ability to really see how much students grew. And here's what I mean.
Based on the fact that these students had emerging phonics skills and an error analysis of their results showed that they typically made mistakes with vowel teams and r-controlled words and patterns, it's possible that they weren't able to show enough growth on the oral reading fluency passage. One group, because each pair had targeted instruction that was tailored to exactly where they were in that instructional scope and sequence. I did have one group who received instruction on vowel teams and began to learn a little bit about r-controlled vowels. And not surprisingly, they grew the most on oral reading fluency.
They were able to close some of those gaps that we were seeing early on in the error analysis. So I was thinking that it is conceivable that the oral reading fluency measure may have been a little too distant, a little too distal, perhaps for some students, it didn't adequately capture the growth that actually occurred because they had not learned those patterns that led to frequent errors in their oral reading fluency passages.
A more proximal direct measure, then, might be helpful. One of the, one of the measures that's out there right now that's new and emerging are those highly decodable passages. And so people like Mark Shinn and others have initiated this development and evaluation of those tools, but they're not yet widely known. They're not widely available. There's still research that's going on to test them and refine them. But it is possible that those highly decodable measures could prove useful for measuring the progress of students who kind of are in between nonsense word fluency and oral reading fluency. And that might be able to give us a more immediate and precise assessment of student progress for those students.
[00:39:47] Kate Winn: That's great. And what would you say that as classroom teachers, we should watch out for? I mean, you've got us thinking now about our advanced readers because, of course, we're also thinking about our kids who are below benchmark, and, you know, what to do there. But we also want to think about those kids that are above, because, as you've talked about, every student deserves to be learning and growing, right? So thinking about what we can do for them, thinking about the idea of acceleration, what are some things we should watch out for? Kind of. Any warnings or tips you have there?
[00:40:14] Dr. Amanda Nickerson: Well, my advice is not so different than what I would advise people to do for intervention, and I want to say, you know, in my role in Ohio, a lot of my time as a technical assistant is spent looking at interventions and how we intervene, how we intensify supports, how we fade those supports. Right. Which data we're using to inform interventions. And I think the same is important for acceleration. We, again, really, really need good data.
So that's the first thing we want, data informed acceleration. We don't just want to pick a starting point and charge forward as quickly as we can.
Researchers widely recognize acceleration as a powerful tool for maximizing the growth of these gifted and highly skilled students. There's six decades of research that affirm this approach.
It's done because it enables educators to swiftly move students through an educational program at a faster rate or sometimes at a younger age. Right. So that we're able to provide more rigorous instruction for these students. And there have been many, many benefits reported with the use of acceleration. But educators need to be vigilant about potential gaps that can occur if we're going too quickly and we're making assumptions or we're looking at one dimension of a student's progress. So again, if I'm just looking at decoding, but I'm not also assessing encoding, there could be some unrecognized gaps that, that occur just like other student populations. We want to move through the curriculum as quickly as possible, but as slowly as we must, right? As slowly as necessary, because ensuring mastery is the goal for all of our students.
And if we are trying to solidify skills, that requires careful progress monitoring. And that's something we don't often do with this population of students, we want them to grow, but we don't always check to see that they are.
So if we move too quickly without paying attention to whether they are actually gaining skills and growing in these measures, again, we risk creating gaps in those knowledge and skills. So I think the bottom line is if student performance or assessment suggests that we reteaching or reviewing content might be beneficial, that it might be needed. We need to slow down. We need to stop and reteach whatever it is. And then once students demonstrate competence in that skill or mastery of that skill, then we can resume our instruction at a deeper pace and our faster pace, and we can get to that depth and complexity. We can help them make connections across content areas. We can look at trends, we can look at all of those dimensions of complexity that we want to get to. But if we go too fast and students have gaps, they're going to also lack the ability to apply the foundational skills in service of those higher level skills. So I think my last statement about this is like all targeted instruction, acceleration and enrichment really needs to be guided by data. It should always be rooted in data based decision making.
[00:43:43] Kate Winn: That's absolutely excellent advice. Before I let you kind of have the final word and share some last thoughts, I did have a couple things I just wanted to share with you and with listeners because we haven't actually had this topic on the podcast before. I haven't had a chance to talk about gifted and advanced learners. And so just to give a bit of context text from myself first, I was identified gifted as a child, and I actually talked to Un about this and I said, is it obnoxious if I say on the podcast that I was identified as a child? But I think sometimes knowing someone's background and where they're coming from when they share their perspective can help. I'm thinking of a few weeks ago, we had a guest on talking about multilingual learners who was able to talk about how they themselves were a multilingual learner as a child.
[00:44:26] Dr. Amanda Nickerson: Right?
[00:44:26] Kate Winn: So you just kind of know where a bit of that perspective is coming from. I also worked as an itinerant teacher of the gifted with my school board for three years. So I had a partner and we had the school board split in half and we each supported our half of the board in terms of those gifted students and students needing enrichment. And even from the parent perspective, my daughters are both teenagers now, but at a young age they were advanced readers. We actually declined gifted testing when that time came up for various reasons. We won't talk about now, but I kind of have the parent perspective too. And there are two things I wanted to mention that are sort of, I guess I would say, areas of strong opinion that I have when it comes to this one is, I just think it's important to note that being bright and understimulated at school is not the cause of wildly inappropriate behavior. So I'm not talking about those twice exceptional kids where we're seeing ADHD symptoms. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about really inappropriate things. So, sure, if you're bored at school, and I mean, I'm sure you and I both have had that in the past. At one time or another, you might be reading under your desk, or you might be chit chatting or taking extra bathroom breaks or daydreaming, but that does not cause you to resort to physical violence or profanity towards the teacher or the throwing of desks or bullying. Right?
[00:45:40] Kate Winn: Like, I mean, this doesn't happen a lot. But I have seen some cases where it might be coming from the parent end or it might be coming from professionals who are not in the classroom sort of explaining that away. And I think that gets to be a little bit of excessive teacher blaming when it's like, oh, they were bored, which is why they committed this criminal act. Right. So, I mean, I think we want to be careful there where obviously we want to be engaging our students and doing all of these things that we've talked about. But that's just something that kind of always bugs me coming from the perspectives that I have. And the other one that I wanted to mention just is the idea, too, that equity doesn't mean the exact same thing for everybody, right? It means getting what they need. And I think, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean the same number of minutes with the teacher every day, but we don't want to be neglecting this population either and what they need from the teacher. So I know when my daughters were young, let's say first grade, there was one adult in the room for their entire first grade year for both of them. And so if I had been told that they weren't getting as much small group or one to one time with the teacher because the teacher was focused on the underperforming students, I would have been totally okay with that. But they can't be put in a corner like, oh, you're ahead, we're just going to leave you over there, let everybody else catch up to you. Right? And that's why I love how you kept talking about data. Data. You're going to use that data. And I think we need to be looking at the creative things that places do where they have grade level teams, school level teams. You've got other adults in the mix where we can be grouping kids and doing things. Because I think it's a lot to say to one lone teacher in the class, you know, that they have to do all of these things. And so I think that's where we can get creative. But it can't just be one teacher trying to do this on their own. So I'm hoping if people are listening, who may be the administrators, the consultants, the higher level people who have some decision making here, too, this can be important not just for those students that we're trying to catch up, but also those students who are ahead when we can do creative things like that. And I know it was interesting, good timing. Not long before we sat down to record this conversation, Tim Shanahan had a piece about above grade readers on his blog and he was sharing some of Carol Connor's work and just the idea that some kids reading at high levels are able to work independently away from a teacher. And so the teacher has to use time outside of the class to plan for some of these things. And he talked about providing them with less direct instructions that they are less likely to need it. Ideas like literature circles, book clubs, project based instruction. So teachers who can't get to it in class time right now, and let's hope we're going to find a way that they can, right. They can look to some of these more independent options. But as you've talked about, when you've got your data, there may be explicit instruction that these kids still need to, right? So we can't assume that they don't need explicit instruction and just give them independent work. But when we're also trying to use our time as best we can, that's an option. And I don't know if you have any thoughts about any of what I've just said.
[00:48:42] Dr. Amanda Nickerson: Yeah, I found Doctor Shanahan's blog post to be very interesting to read it. I think there's a lot we can learn from reading scholars like Doctor Shanahan. And I think there's a lot we can learn from gifted education scholars about how we serve these students. Well, a lot of the guidance in gifted education literature tends to be kind of content agnostic. So you think of like acceleration or curriculum compacting where you're eliminating content they've already learned and you're teaching something else, right. We can take all of this good research that we have in our disposal to really make good decisions about kids. So if I have data that tells me what that next step for instruction is, I can pull them aside for a few minutes perhaps, and maybe they don't need a 30 minutes small group instructional period, right? Maybe I can meet with them less frequently or for a shorter period of time. And that's what I mean by the fact that we have questions to answer still empirically about what that is. So how, what amount of time is optimal, what level of frequency is optimal for these learners.
But in the interim we can be strategic. There are going to be things in the data that tell me everyone in my classroom needs instruction on whatever it might be, especially those language comprehension skills. If I'm doing a read aloud and I'm using a knowledge building curriculum, there's a lot that I can do with the whole class to teach them. But there are going to be elements of that instruction that I can intensify for kids who struggle and that I can intensify for students who need more rigor. And I can use things like tiering. I know there's a limited time in this podcast, but I would suggest that people look into what tiering looks like, where I'm looking at a grade level standard and I'm looking at something that's above grade level, that's aligned along that learning progression or the scope and sequence. And I might also be looking at some prerequisite skills that I need to tighten up to get them to that grade level standard for another group. So I have some leveling that is flexible and that is trying to move everybody toward grade level expectations expeditiously and then beyond those standards as needed. I can use different instructional routines in my classroom where I teach an introduction to a lesson to everybody with maybe just a little scaffolding or differentiation at the front end, and then I can send students to work with me. If they are my struggling students, maybe I'll meet with them first and I'll put my other students in groups, student-led groups, or partnerships or independent work that again, is driven by data that's aligned with what they need.
And if I'm asking those gifted learners or high achieving students to work on their own, I'm going to make sure that whatever they are working on, they have the background knowledge and skill to apply on their own. I think what happens sometimes is we make a lot of assumptions and those students are relegated over to a corner, and sometimes they may lack the maturity or the emotional strength to persevere on their own. The academics may be there, but they may have a hard time working independently in that way with no teacher support or student interaction, peer interaction.
In terms of what you were talking about with behaviors that we see in the classroom, I think a typical behavior we see when students are bored is that they shut down and they start to say they don't like the class anymore. I too was identified as a child and spent a lot of time reading under my desk waiting for people to finish work because nothing else was provided for us back then. I would say that probably the same is true now in certain settings, right? That students sit and they read or they. They wait patiently or whatever. They might be given a packet of work to do when they finish the other work.
[00:52:41] Kate Winn: Thank you so much. Is there anything else that you want to share? You know, did any other misconceptions or pet peeves of your own or anything else that's come up that you, that you want to share? With listeners before we say goodbye.
[00:52:53] Dr. Amanda Nickerson: I think it's just important to think about enrichment in the early grades as preventative.
I don't think many people think of it that way.
I think it's easy to see the need for intervention as a preventative measure. We're trying to prevent reading failure, what we're trying to prevent with students who are high achievers who are not being adequately challenged and sometimes unintentionally right. We have really great teachers who want all the kids to succeed, but they are rightfully so, more concerned about the students who are not meeting grade level standards. So I 100% understand that, but I don't think it is conscionable to just sit students in a corner or to continue to give them curriculum and material that they've already learned, where they are just kind of passing time, right, until they finally get to interesting, challenging material. Hopefully at some point those are the students we have to worry about, because the stakes are high. Students can end up with depression, anxiety. We have a high number of gifted students who go on to high school and drop out of.
We have students who commit suicide. And that's something we don't want for any of our students. But we often don't think about it with high achievers that things get to that point, but they do. So we tend to have some pretty decent services in place by middle school and high school. In many settings, we have advanced tracks. We have advanced courses. You might have advanced placement or international baccalaureate courses or some kind of equivalent course. But in elementary, we often we have no services happening until sometimes third grade, fourth grade, 6th grade. So what are we doing before that? Right? To identify some areas of strength and propel them forward, develop those work habits and prevent those really dire challenges from happening. So I just want to implore everybody to press into that idea a little bit more and ask yourselves what we can all be doing for these students when they enter our classroom in kindergarten on day one. What information do we need about them that maybe the current assessments aren't giving us, or that if used differently, they might be able to give us if we're using them to test up, for example, instead of always testing back for students who struggle? And then I just want to encourage everybody. I know that we all care deeply about the kids, our classroom. We want all of them to succeed. I think there are ways for us to work smarter and use the tools that we already have at our disposal, use the teams in our building to carry the load right, to work together and work collaboratively. And that's going to make a big difference for our kids in the end.
[00:55:53] Kate Winn: Dr Amanda Nickerson, thank you so much for bringing this voice for our gifted and advanced readers to the discussion today on Reading Road Trip. It's been a pleasure.
[00:56:03] Dr. Amanda Nickerson: Thank you for having me. It's been a delight.
[00:56:09] Kate Winn: Show notes for this episode with all the links and information you need can be found at podcast.idaontario.com and you have been listening to season three, episode nine with Doctor Amanda Nickerson.
[00:56:22] Kate Winn: And now it's time for that typical end of the podcast call to action. If you enjoyed this episode of Reading Road Trip, we'd love it if you could rate and or review it in your podcast app, as this is extremely helpful for a podcast and your review might make it onto an episode. Of course we welcome any social media love you feel inspired to spread as well. Feel free to tag IDA Ontario and me. My handle is thismomloves on Twitter and Facebook and katethismomloves on Instagram. Make sure you're following the read Reading Road Trip podcast in your app and watch for new episodes continuing every Monday throughout the summer. We couldn't bring Reading Road Trip to you without behind the scenes support from Katelyn, Brittany Haynes, and Melinda Jones at IDA Ontario. I'm Kate Winn and along with my co producer, Dr Una Malcolm. We hope this episode of Reading Road Trip has made your path to evidence based literacy instruction just a little bit clearer and a lot more fun. Join us next time when we bring another fabulous guest along for the ride on Reading Road Trip.
