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 our eighth episode of Season four.
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.
Along with this acknowledgement and in the spirit of truth and reconciliation, we'd like to amplify some Indigenous content, and today we're sharing the nonfiction book Indigenous Peoples in the World Wars, part of the four-volume Indigenous Peoples Contributions to Canada series from Beech Street Book.
Simon Rose authors this 24-page information book for elementary students that provides information about the role of First Nation, Inuit and Métis individuals and communities during the first and Second World Wars. The book has four chapters that present information about the First World War, the Second World War, Indigenous Women in the World Wars and the Homefront. The book pays tribute to the men and women who served during the wars.
The Role of Women during the wars acknowledges the work of community organizations such as Six Nations Women's Patriotic League. First Nations Veterans and those who paid the ultimate sacrifice are acknowledged in this resource, which features colour photographs, black and white photographs, table of contents, glossary to learn more, maps, about the author, inquiry questions, and websites. Add this title to your home or classroom library today.
And now on with the show.
I am really excited to introduce our guests here this week on Reading Road Trip. We have three amazing educators joining us to talk about a successful reading intervention for older students who often get neglected when it comes to these conversations and when it comes to the instruction. Lisa Rogers is proud to be both a school-based literacy facilitator with the Near North District School Board and a member of ONlit. Lisa works alongside educators in K-10 classrooms across the NNDSB, supporting school communities to continually improve equitable access to learning for all students through structured literacy. Lisa and a wonderful team of ONlit educators developed the popular Fluency in Perspective: Grade 8 Changemakers and Fluency in Perspective: Grade 7 Across the Curriculum resources. Hi Lisa.
[00:02:45] Lisa Rogers: Hello.
[00:02:46] Kate Winn: Next, we have Courtney Berger. She is a secondary school teacher deeply committed to enhancing student literacy at Almaguin Highlands Secondary School in South River, Ontario. As the English Program Team Leader at AHSS, she plays a pivotal role in the co-implementation of structured literacy initiatives based on current needs evident in data collection. She implemented two very successful sections of a reading intervention course for grade nine and 10 students this past year. Hello, Courtney.
[00:03:16] Courtney Berger: Good morning.
[00:03:18] Kate Winn: And we have Kristen Roy, an educator with a strong background in special education at the Near North District School Board. Kristen is assisting with the implementation of structured literacy support at the high school level, including the implementation of the REWARDS program. She has focused on providing targeted data-driven support in small group settings this past year, enabling students to develop essential reading skills and boost their confidence. Hi, Kristen.
[00:03:44] Lisa Rogers: Hello.
[00:03:45] Kate Winn: So excited about this conversation. Let's jump right into the questions. We are going to delve into an intervention that was done in your board with intermediate students, and just for listeners, we have listeners all over the world, when we say intermediate in Ontario, we're talking grades seven to ten as a division. And we'll get into the specifics in the intervention in a minute. But first I wanted to ask you, why was it important to do this intervention? You know, we talked about data in your bios. What data did you have to support the necessity of this? Lisa, could we start with you?
[00:04:16] Lisa Rogers: Sure. So as a board, we have completed universal screening and reading three times a year for most students in K-8 using Acadience for the past three years. Actually, just as an example, we screened 87% of all students in K-8 for middle of the year in 24-25.
Our numbers last spring were similar too. And while our data shows some really good growth in a lot of areas, for example, we saw a lot of growth in accuracy the first year. We put some effort into some fluency work across our system and saw some results there. This year we had a little bit of a focus on the retell, supporting some explicit instruction for our students on how to do a really good retell. And we've seen some growth there as well. But our data also showed that a significant number of students across the board were really struggling with reading going into grade nine. So, and I think you'd find something similar in many boards across Ontario, especially in terms of fluency, because fluency isn't something, you know, we've really been working on for the past many years. It's something newer, especially at the high school level. And we know now that fluency is a really important piece when it comes to comprehending text, especially complex text. So, you know, we noticed some gaps there. And at the same time, the team at Almaguin Highland Secondary School had been looking at their data coming out of transition meetings where the grade eight students and their teachers and their families were coming in and spending time with the team at ahss, and they'd also been talking about struggles with reading. So with those two pieces, you know, we really were looking at what's happening and what can we do? Principal Hickey, our principal at Almaguin Highland Secondary School, Heather Hickey, asked me, what can we do to bring up their reading skills? And because I'm part of the central literacy team at NNDSB and we've been exploring resources for older students for quite some time, one of them being the REWARDS program by Anita Archer, Mary Gleason and Vicki Vachon. I thought of that particular program immediately also, because at this time, we had just returned from that incredible IDA conference that year with Anita Archer, where we'd seen her, you know, present and teach about explicit instruction. We had seen Anita Archer and you record that episode of Reading Road Trip Live that was just incredible. And I was very inspired by the power of her incredible use of explicit instruction.
So it really is something when you see. When you see the magic of instruction live with Anita Archer, it sticks with you. So I told Principal Hickey that I hadn't used REWARDS yet, but it was potentially a good option. And to her credit, she sought out funding to run sections of the course. She purchased the REWARDS material with school budget, and a plan evolved to include two sections of ELS20S and that that's a course in the Ontario curriculum, a grade 10 course called Literacy Skills, Reading and Writing.
So the plan evolved to have two of those sections running in the upcoming school year, as well as some withdrawal support, so that there was a lot of, you know, full wraparound support for students who needed it.
And one of the hopes of this ELS course was that in running a focus structured literacy course for students in grade nine, that the number of students who need the OLC course, which is a grade 12 course that students take if they struggle a number of times with the literacy test, that we could maybe reduce the number of students taking that class by preparing our students best for not just the OSSLT, but, developing their reading skills in general. So, yeah, that. That was the idea. So in essence, it was a shift in sections instead of having to find new sections, which was, I thought, really a neat way of looking at things.
Something perhaps of interest to your listeners as well is that that summer, both Principal Hickey and I tried REWARDS at home with members of our families. First and foremost, we wanted to learn the program really well, to make sure we knew how to support the teachers who it. But I think to be honest, we also just really wanted to make sure that it worked. And my goodness, it did.
We were both so excited to see the results from delivering that program one-on-one. I can share that my daughter internalized a strategy for decoding multisyllabic words that summer that was so powerful, and it changed her as a reader. She moved at that time from high decodable text, sort of end-of-code decodable text, to full and very complex text with that decoding strategy that she learned.
And despite significant ongoing struggles with spelling, she also began to spell some difficult words correctly.
The day she spelled precautionary was a real moment for her. REWARDS spends a lot of time reviewing the short and long vowel sounds as well as vowel teams and prefixes and suffixes. And my daughter was able to spell the word precautionary because she had learned and practiced and forgot and relearned and, as learning goes, all the parts of that word. She learned the prefix pre and how it was different from per and pro. That was really important. She learned the meanings of each of those prefixes or each of those word parts. And she also learned that the vowel team au and practiced that the vowel team au says ah. And she learned the suffixes shun and ary. So the only letter that was left to chance at that point was the C at the beginning of caution. And she'd previously learned the cat kite rule with me. So she struck spelling gold that day.
And yeah, she was just so proud, Kate. And by the end of August, we knew that the trick was just going to be to make this work in a whole-class environment or in small group settings through withdrawal supports. And of course, Principal Hickey already had an ace up her sleeve with knowing that Courtney Berger and Kristen Roy would be delivering those interventions in those environments. So she knew what she was doing.
[00:10:56] Kate Winn: That's great. And your response there really highlights, I think, for me, the importance of that school leadership. Right. You kept saying Principal Hickey, Principal Hickey, because you need that. That is, that's so important. The next thing I'm wondering, how did you choose the students for this, Kristen, would you be able to answer that?
[00:11:14] Kristen Roy: For sure. So some students were identified through the grade eight IPRC process and others came recommended just by their grade eight teacher. So on top of the grade eight Acadience assessments as historical data, in each of the grade nine English classes during both the semesters, I went in and I ran the CORE Maze and vocabulary diagnostics for from the Assessing Multiple Measures Resource.
So this gave us some current data to compare and contrast with the historical data that we already had.
This helped us to determine which students needed the level of intervention that's offered by the REWARDS program.
So if the diagnostics flagged the students as red, which means intensive intervention is needed, or if it flagged them as yellow, which means that strategic intervention is needed, then I did follow-up testing with them which included the REWARDS program pre- and post-tests that were for multisyllabic words and reading passage assessments.
If students performed at below grade level for these pieces, one or the other or both, then they were considered strongly for the program either in Courtney's ELS class or for the withdrawal intervention, depending on their scores and their individual schedules, and all different factors like that. I was also able to consult with their current and previous teachers to see if the teachers had any concerns or if they noted any specific struggles in the classroom.
[00:12:46] Kate Winn: And I think your your answer really highlights the importance of having that assessment data beyond the K-2 screening data that is mandated here in Ontario. Super valuable. I mean I think my not-so-secret hope is that someday, if we're getting K-2 really right, you won't need to be doing this so much with, you know, grade eights and then going into grade nine, et cetera. However, this, these screener measures and then followed by diagnostics as necessary still so valuable in the intermediate years. How did you actually make this intervention happen logistically in terms of scheduling and that sort of thing, Kristen?
[00:13:19] Kristen Roy: So most students were enrolled in the ELS course to a maximum of 15 each semester.
And then I was able to work with another eight students doing withdrawal support during semester one, and in semester two, I worked with 14 students.
A few of the students who took the course with Courtney in semester one, they still needed a little bit more support, so they received some individual or small group support with me again in semester two.
In total, we had like 53 students out of a cohort of approximately 135 that received some form of intervention.
For the one-to-one and small group work, I had to look at the students' individual schedules. I really did my best to withdraw them from non-core subjects. So often I was withdrawing them from art, phys ed, learning strategies, shop, things like that, which was tricky because often those are the desired subjects for those students, right?
Then I looked at other students who other flag students who had similar scores or who needed to focus on similar areas and I did my best to place them into groups accordingly as much as I could given their individual schedules and needs.
I really did my best to be sensitive when I was withdrawing students to work with them and meeting them. When possible the students would leave their class on their own accord. We had it set up previously. I would email their teacher with the schedule and the students would just leave on their own and come meet me in my workspace. But there were some times when I needed to go directly into the student's class in order to withdraw them for the support.
And interestingly enough, after things got rolling, a lot of students were like super outgoing with their work with me because of the number of students I worked with. I would often walk into a class to retrieve one student and there'd be a number of students I worked with in that classroom. So I'd walk in and I'd have kids saying, oh, oh, can you take me? Can you take me? And I'd have to say, oh, like, not right now, but I'll check up with you later.
And I even had two boys in a shop class who were like, I'd walk in and they were like begging to come out at the same time so they could read together. And like grease-stained hands and all, they're like, no, take us both at the same time, please Ms. Roy.
Actually they, when they were reading together, when I gave them that opportunity, the one student was constantly encouraging the other students, yeah, you got this. And then when the student completed the reading, he's like, isn't that the best score that he's gotten so far, Ms. Roy? Like, he does read best with me. No, like he has better scores with me than when he reads with you, so we should keep reading together.
And actually, that student, I have to tell you a little bit about him. He took Courtney's class in semester one, and he had really abysmal attendance in elementary school. And he was our most struggling reader in grade nine this year. His attendance also wasn't great in Courtney's class or school in general. At first, he started to improve a bit in his reading with Courtney, and she worked really hard to let him know that it made them all happy when he came to class and all kinds of methods to support improved attendance, they just hadn't worked over the years. But his attendance began to improve toward the middle of that first semester with Courtney.
He showed probably the least improvement in the class, but it was still more improvement than he'd experienced in the past. So I offered to work with him in semester two, and he and I started with a CORE phonics survey.
As we suspected, he needed to consolidate some grapheme-phoneme correspondences. So he and I set to work on it. And Lisa was so supportive and she gave us some UFLI type lessons. And his attendance in semester two was excellent. He was there all the time. He rarely missed. His growth was incredible. I would work with him and I was screenshotting his word chains and I would be sending these emails of his work to Lisa and Courtney. And sometimes we were literally in tears, just some days because he was moving from being very illiterate to becoming literate just right in front of our eyes every day, just always building on that. So providing intervention for students in the secondary stream has been some of the most rewarding work that I've had in my career.
[00:17:42] Kate Winn: Yeah and it reminds me of, you know, things I've read about. You could have all these initiatives to try to improve attendance, but one thing that you could probably try to improve attendance is to get the skill level up so that a child feels confident and comfortable coming to school, right, so that they don't feel like they're stupid and they're behind their peers and they're embarrassed and. And that sort of thing, that the importance of that instruction piece.
Speaking of instruction, can you share with us what was taught in these courses or these interventions, and how was it taught? Lisa, I'll start with you.
[00:18:15] Lisa Rogers: So the cornerstone of this intervention, really is that REWARDS program.
The school invested in it and it's working really well. I think there's a few pieces that make REWARDS unique. It has that peppy pace that Anita Archer is well known for, coupled with choral reading, repetitions, opportunities for interleaving as they build skill.
It's also heavily scripted to be delivered with direct, explicit instruction. And we chose purposefully a scripted program because the learning curve for intervention, delivering a reading intervention at the secondary level is just very steep. Secondary teachers, we don't have that background in teaching students how to read. So we wanted something that a secondary teacher who's brand new to structured literacy could access, something that would work if it was just followed with fidelity. And REWARDS certainly is that.
I mean, I only ran a 90-minute training session in the spring of 2024 for Courtney and Kristen and a few other teachers. And I delivered and modelled the first two lessons in September. But after that, they really dove in and were able to use that scripted program to deliver a really solid intervention. And many experts, you know, are encouraging teachers to use scripted programs. I think about education writer Robert Pondiscio. He says teachers are trained to instruct, not to architect. And the skill of instructional delivery is simply not the same as designing an instructional system from the ground up. You know, the instructional systems that have been designed, things like UFLI or REWARDS, they really take into account not only the science of reading, but the science of learning.
There's a lot of research that's built into those programs. So. And Holly Lane of UFLI says, let teachers focus on that expert lesson delivery.
So Courtney and Kristen were able to do just that. They really focused on delivering those lessons with fidelity and on the students in front of them really understanding what they needed and how to get them really as engaged as possible in the instruction and the learning. So it really worked, I think.
As I mentioned earlier, REWARDS really focuses in on short and long vowel sounds, although the short vowel sound in REWARDS is just called the sound, and the long sound is called the name for simplicity's sake. But every single lesson reviews those vowel sounds and conversions. There's 24 lessons in all. And that repetition, it really promotes that learning from initial skill development to mastery. There's even a small section that the students really love where a word is mispronounced, and they need to use their set for variability skills to convert the sound to the correct vowel sound to pronounce the word correctly. It's sort of like a little puzzle, and they enjoy it. For example, the word hotel might be pronounced hotel, and they have to figure that out.
So, yeah, lots of fun. Every single lesson reviews word parts in all kinds of different ways. It reviews vowel combinations, vowel teams, r-controlled vowels, prefixes, suffixes.
Students do different things, like they underline vowel sounds, and they scoop multisyllabic words into their parts. They circle prefixes, encode, and decode, repeatedly interacting with the word parts to create that mastery skill. It also starts off with that overt strategy. There's a poster, actually, that you put up in your room that's called the overt strategy for reading longer words. And this overt strategy becomes a covert or an internalized process over the course of the program.
The lessons of course, include explicit instruction, lots of choral reading, practice, repetition, interleaving, and vocabulary. The vocabulary lessons that use strong tier 2 multisyllabic words are really powerful to, you know, both sides of the simple view of reading are included in this intervention. And we were actually.
I don't know why we were surprised, but we were a little bit surprised and overjoyed to see the exceptional growth in vocabulary that happened over the course of the semester.
We did those pre-tests from CORE Assessing Multiple Measures in vocabulary at the beginning of the semester, and then we did the post at the end, and the growth was significant. So lots of different parts are included in that particular program.
Anyway, these two educators here with me today, Courtney and Kristen, they were fearless, really. And I really admire their willingness to jump into something without being experts yet to jump in as willing, capable learners ready to figure things out as needed.
I remember a few conversations here and there at the beginning that went something like, Lisa, if the short vowel sound for A is ah, what about the word bag? What's that? So we would get into talking about all sorts of things like nosy a or whiny a as some people call it.
But I actually had to call my friend and SLP expert, Kara Macie, about why the a in bag sounds the way it does. And she started talking about the great vowel shift between the 15th and 18th centuries, which was something I had not heard of yet. And so then I went back to Courtney and explained a little bit about the great vowel shift. And anyway, the. The point is that we all learn a lot as we go, don't we? Do you. Do you remember that, Courtney?
[00:24:03] Courtney Berger: I do.
[00:24:05] Lisa Rogers: Anyway, these two educators learned a lot over the course of the semester, as did I. But I think the point is that, you know, most educators could run this intervention if they're just brave enough to jump in and trust the process.
They also have to be able to create safe spaces for students to grow. But maybe Courtney can share a bit about that later.
Back to your question, though, about instruction. Specifically, our students in the semester one course, because they had those significant needs in reading that showed up in all of those diagnostics that Kristen did. We used REWARDS, and it took up a lot of the class time.
Courtney also used a little bit of additional morphology. She used the Morpheme Magic resource and a free resource online called Latin Word Trees, as well as some morpheme matrices, and the students really enjoyed these.
On top of the additional morphology, they also engaged in daily fluency routines using some of the Lexia fluency passages and some of those Lexia paper and pencil materials, too, because our school does use that Lexia program too. Anyway, in semester two, though, the needs of the class were a bit more diverse, so the instruction had to change. About half the class still had significant needs in reading, but some of them had more needs in writing than reading. So, you know, we sort of got it all figured out. Semester one, and then we had to shift a bit to respond to the needs of the students in semester two. So I ended up modeling a bit of SRSD writing for the class, and Courtney was able to use some of those strategies like reading for the gist and creating a gist statement.
Also, they used the Do What strategy to pull apart question prompts quite a few times after I was in, and they used the TIDE-L structure a few times to write assessments or sorry to write assignments. But this really is an area we need to work more on as we move forward, and I know we will. Courtney also had some really creative syntax work in semester two to meet those demonstrated needs that came up in that class. Courtney, do you want to share a little bit about that?
[00:26:18] Courtney Berger: Yeah, sure. So a colleague of mine shared Brian Tolentino's website with me. The Tolentino teaching website offers many free resources for English teachers. So they includes things like editing worksheets. And it was those in particular that I found really useful as bell ringers to start each class and get kids to sort of open up. And it was great. So some of these included these edit and restore celebrity quotes or tweets.
So after some explicit instruction on some of the syntax errors that they were going to probably encounter in the tweets, students would work individually initially to identify errors in those quotes. And then we would come back together and collaboratively we would take up the spelling, punctuation, grammar, syntax errors, or what have you. And then I would walk the students through the quotes again, explicitly explaining the changes that were made.
So this is great, especially for generating some participation marks. Just to give you an idea of the flow of our class, so following this activity, we would proceed to our daily REWARDS lesson for the better part of the class period.
The last 20 minutes of each class was reserved for either choral reading or then some paired partner reading or morphology.
So for fluency, students were intentionally paired with another individual in the class to read either a Lexia passage or an ONlit passage that was both challenging and accessible. After we read together, they would take turns reading and recording their fluency and accuracy scores and then graphing their results every day.
So students found the visual of this progress monitoring really encouraging because they could see day to day that their word count and their accuracy was improving.
[00:28:14] Kate Winn: This all sounds so great. I'm so interested in all of this. Going back to something Lisa said when you were talking about the scriptedness of the REWARDS program, and you mentioned Holly Lane. I recently heard her speak at SSSR and she was speaking to researchers, and there were probably just a couple of normal practitioners like me in the room, but she was talking about the implementation of their program, and she said, oh, and we call this suggested teacher language. We don't call it scripted because people don't like the word scripted. And it just seems like, why is that such a bad word? Because all of the points that you made, right, like just to let teachers teach, to give them that, so that they can go ahead and do what's best.
And I'm also really excited because at my school there's going to be a teacher implementing REWARDS next year. And so she and the special education resource teacher had a day of release and it was like video training that they were watching. But I happened to have a double prep that day and no lunch duty. And so I just kept going into the room every time I could to kind of sit in. So I got one third trained on how to do it. But it just sounds like such a, such a great program when we talk about interventions. I mean, I like to think that I do early intervention, but we're talking about kids who pretty much still have all their baby teeth. When you're talking about this older demographic. I'm curious to know, how did you respect the age and stage of these students when working on this content?
[00:29:38] Courtney Berger: Yeah, so definitely that's a great question.
Initially, this is probably what I was most concerned about when I took on the task. So it was really important, I knew right off the bat, to create some safe, brave spaces. I knew that building strong relationships would be clutch. Respecting the student's age and stage, all of these things are critical elements to the program's success.
We spent a bit of time with Julie Brown's website, No Time to Waste: Structured Literacy with Young Adults, prior to the semester's beginning. And then with established routines, accessible content and practice in the safe, brave environment, kids eventually felt safe enough to take risks.
They were, you know, they bought into the participation piece and then gains were made.
I think. Lisa, you and our literacy team actually met virtually with Julie Brown, wasn't that right?
[00:30:30] Lisa Rogers: Yeah. Speaking with her was really inspirational. She shared so many great ideas. And I encourage anyone interested in supporting struggling and striving readers in intermediate to check out her work.
Courtney, you also brought in some really strong relationship and community building to the class too.
[00:30:46] Courtney Berger: Thanks. Yeah. I tried to be honest about how despite having taught English at the secondary level for many years, that I did feel incredibly, and still do feel vulnerable modeling some of the material required to deliver the programming. I think it just took for granted that usually I, students end up, you know, bum and seat in front of me knowing how to read. And so this was a huge shift in my thinking.
I get real about the content. It can be a little bland, but REWARDS does not present as babyish, which is important. So the vocab is age-appropriate. There are no baby pictures or gimmicks that are designed to appeal to younger learners.
It's designed for grades 4 to 12.
I think the kids appreciate that. I also pledge to make it as engaging as possible, but there's no two ways about it, the content can be a little boring, but it's medicine and it's 100% the antidote they need.
I also try to offer some great participation incentives. So whatever sweet or salty treat that is popular that week and gift certificates for the school cafeteria and school store, try to use those as motivation to participate on the days when speaking out feels hard.
[00:31:56] Kate Winn: That all sounds really great. You have mentioned earlier a little bit about progress monitoring. So we started with that beginning data, but I'm curious to know what tools and systems did you use to monitor progress and to assess the outcomes. And I know that you considered both the academic growth, of course, but also that more affective piece too.
I'll get Lisa to start with that.
[00:32:17] Lisa Rogers: That's such an important question because we did. We used those pre- and post diagnostics from CORE Assessing Multiple Measures, but to really ensure that students were learning and to respond to their needs ongoing throughout the courses. We also used the Acadience out-of-grade-level progress monitoring. So so I would come in about every three weeks and we would run that progress monitoring together as a team.
And we use the Acadience recommendation to move a student up to the next grade level in progress monitoring when they could demonstrate approximately 60 words per minute at at least 90% accuracy.
It's a little trickier than it sounds though, because some students would read with speed and many errors, and other students would read perhaps more slowly but with accuracy. So we used it as a general guideline, but we really made sure to think about each individual student and their needs. A student with lower self-esteem might need to move a little bit more slowly and experience some really great success.
And some of those students who were reading with a lot of speed and not enough accuracy, we needed to slow them down a little bit, give them guidance and time to work through the accuracy piece.
We used Acadience Learning Online, the ALO system. So that was really, really great because we were able to see the lofty and attainable goals that ALO sets with their aim lines in that program.
So we knew that our students were besting those aim lines for accuracy or fluency or both consistently which, you know, helped us say, okay, we're on the right track. This is, we are growing at a pace that is about equivalent to one year's growth in half a year's time, and in fact, a little bit faster than that, because, as I said, the students were besting those trajectories.
It was just so exciting to see that significant steady growth, really.
Overall, I can tell you that the semester one class demonstrated a 3% steady growth in their accuracy overall. So that's while also moving up to levels in progress monitoring. So they started at grade four, most of them had ended up in a grade seven, six, most of them with also growing 3% in accuracy, even when those texts were getting much more complex each level. So pretty significant growth, really. And if you think about it, they started with an average accuracy rate as a class of 94%, and they ended with an average accuracy rate of 97%. And 97% accuracy is that minimum, really, that we hope for with accuracy for our readers, because anything below that can quite seriously impact comprehension. You know, sounds great, 94 or 95%, but that's, you know, five or six words out of a hundred that are being read incorrectly. And those words that are read incorrectly are generally those multisyllabic words that carry a lot of the meaning of the passage and really do create those issues. So we were really happy to see that average 97% threshold hit by the end of the semester, while also moving up two levels in the progress monitoring. So really tremendous growth, really, and that's just accuracy, right? Fluency rates also grew tremendously.
Like, I think about one student who grew from 83 correct words per minute at progress monitoring for grade 4 to 135 correct words per minute at progress monitoring for grade 6.
This student experienced such a dramatic shift in all of her academics, and she spoke passionately about her ability to now understand text and how it made a difference in all of her classes. She even spoke about her shop class because the parts of engines and the tools are sometimes really difficult words to decode, and she was able to read those with ease at the end of the semester, she actually began to see herself as an academic student, which was so, so powerful. It was just impactful to listen to her speak about it, because literacy is power, and she was empowered.
So many of the students had significant shifts like this in their sense of identity. They began to see themselves more as students. I think that was something we didn't expect. Would you agree with that, Courtney?
[00:36:39] Courtney Berger: 100%.
In many ways, I think that Kristen and I found the students self-development was as fascinating, I think, as the strides made in their reading proficiency.
I remember calling Lisa the first snow day of the semester to tell her of the most magical thing that had happened. One of my students had come by my office and told me that he was available to read today after he played a few rounds of badminton, of course.
He would sit on the edge of his seat like a jockey on a horse and he would read and ask for his word count and then he would ask to do it again and again and again until he bested his top score.
I thought maybe this phenomenon was like maybe a one-off. But sure enough, the same student showed up 23 of 25 of our snow days and would read with me each and every time.
I guess, so, Kate, by the way, our school is 100% bussed with some students on a bus 90 minutes each way. So we only ever have a handful of students on any given snow day.
And so you know best of all, this particular student, whose skepticism about the course I was worried would negatively impact or sway the class morale at the beginning of the semester.
And before long, he was the shining example for literacy intervention in our Near North Board.
And he didn't care who knew about it. He had transformed from a guy who would make jokes and disrupt class as sort of like a deflection technique to an active reader who really led our class. He would even demo some of the lessons in REWARDS for us in class. He made practicing reading cool, which had a huge ripple effect in my class.
[00:38:27] Kristen Roy: I have a little success story, too.
A colleague of ours, Marissa Hughes, she shared with me that in her geography class, in their reading, they came across a larger multisyllabic word that the entire class was struggling to pronounce.
A student who was one of my one-to-one REWARDS program students, he broke down the word using the strategy that's taught in REWARDS, like locating the prefix and the suffix and the vowel sounds, and he just pronounced it successfully, just like that. And when Marissa asked the student how he knew how to do that, he goes, I saw that lady this morning.
So he may not have remembered my name, but he totally remembered the strategy for decoding multisyllabic words. So I'm going to take that as a win.
[00:39:15] Kate Winn: I love that. And honestly I'm getting tears in my eyes listening to these stories because I'm just thinking of these kids and where they came from and then and hearing, you know, these anecdotes. It's pretty incredible. I'm sure there were some challenges throughout this whole process too. So wondering if you might want to share some of those just so listeners have a bit of a heads up. Lisa, could you go first?
[00:39:36] Lisa Rogers: Sure. Well, I think I alluded or spoke to it a little bit earlier, we were a little bit surprised when we realized that the semester two students had a wider variety of needs and that we needed to pivot quickly. So, you know, we collected all that data and it had an impact on what we needed to do.
And I think I bring it up just because it's an important piece to remember that we really need to. We really need to count on our assessment for learning so that we can respond to the students who are in front of us.
It was a challenge, but we managed.
[00:40:14] Kristen Roy: And with. With my data collection that I did, I also found that some students had strong decoding skills but poor language comprehension. So with this data, it helped me to focus on vocabulary for some students, building their understanding. And with my REWARDS students, I then also increased the focus on the decoding of words like the prefixes and suffixes, and teaching them how this can help them with also the understanding of the word itself and not just the pronunciation. So the programming that we did is very data-driven. It's data responsive. So I also had a small group who, according to the diagnostics I did, they purely struggled with reading fluency. So I used the Fluency in Perspective resource from ONlit and I did paired reading with them, and they charted it, like Courtney had mentioned on the graph, each time we got together. And their progress over the semester was, it was amazing. And they could see their scores increasing week by week. And they were just so invested and motivated by their own progress.
[00:41:18] Courtney Berger: 100% and I think, like from my point of view, with the course initially, it was really hard to make inroads with the students.
They showed up with defense systems activated. They were seemingly resentful that they had been enrolled in the course. Some were in denial. They were skeptical about the program and its efficacy.
I spent some time, a lot of time in the beginning, really establishing some classroom norms because the importance of creating a brave space for these kids to take risks was just, it was imperative I would educate the kids, just scratch the surface, really, on the science of reading, the little bit that Lisa was able to teach me in time for rolling out the course program. And I explained to them why it was crucial that they participate orally and that they do it daily.
After probably the first progress monitoring session, Lisa was able to share the progress with the students, like the strides that they had made, only like one month after the start of the REWARDS program. And the kids were blown away. They couldn't argue with the data. And Lisa had recorded the progress in real time. And it would generate a graph right in front of their eyes, you know, the aim line and then where they were coming in and where they had started.
And they were, they were cautiously optimistic, but you could see them walking away from Lisa's desk a little taller.
Even those that struggled with attendance benefited from REWARDS. I think Kristen mentioned the repetition and the interleaving that's built into the program enabled those infrequent attenders the opportunity to move forward even incrementally. So everyone benefited. Semester two, during semester two, those from first semester's class would swing by during their lunch hours or on breaks.
And I like to think that they came back because they really liked who they were becoming when they were in that brave space. And I think that their positive feedback made semester two peers more at ease and more inclined to come in with a better open mindset.
I do have to admit though that as the inaugural semester came to a close, I had some anxiety about the students transitioning into their semester two courses.
I’d become a little bit, I think, protective and, and really just super invested in their progress. So likewise, they seemed a little skeptical about whether these skills that they had learned would translate to success in their other courses. We all seemed a little fragile, I think. So this presented in different ways with different kids.
But because of this, I ended up following the kids super closely through semester two, checking in regularly on their achievement instead of especially in English, their English course, but also in other courses.
And you know, one student who is reading at a grade four level in my course in September was achieving an 81 in the destreamed grade nine English class with supports as needed. But by February of that same academic year, he was holding strong at an 81%.
Another was achieving high 70s in science.
Good things were happening and I was able to let go a little bit and trust the process even more.
I'd follow up again during course selection for grade 10. And two of our students who were previously in the locally developed pathway had opted to shift to the applied level pathway. And two students who were in the applied pathway switched to the academic pathway. So this was game-changing for some of these kids. Some students opted to take the course again just to further the gains made in the course. But there are really good things happening in our building.
[00:45:06] Kate Winn: Sounds like this was such a success. Overall, I'd love to know what's next moving forward, whether it's for these students or the use of this model at your school or in your district. Courtney, can we start with you?
[00:45:18] Lisa Rogers: Sure.
[00:45:20] Courtney Berger: So I guess to be fair, we need to just give a shout out to Lisa Rogers, who is just, you know, been the guru and we've just loved working with her so much. So probably Kristen and I would follow Lisa into any project that she suggests next.
So piggybacking on that, I think that, you know, I've recently received the good news that we're going to have two sections of ELS running this year. And so as of now, I think I'll be teaching those sections. And I just plan on furthering my understanding of SRSD and just working with Lisa to add this piece into our ELS course more fully to complement or to piggyback on the REWARDS teachings.
Just plan on learning as much as we can from Lisa and just carrying it forward, I think, in our courses this year.
Kristen, do you have anything you want to share?
[00:46:08] Kristen Roy: Yeah, I have two GLE learning strategies classes in my schedule for next year. So I plan to run the diagnostics and see where the needs lie and then see what I can do to support the students, whether it's focusing on developing vocabulary or if it's running the REWARDS program for the class or if it's using the Fluency in Perspective.
I even heard that there's a rumour there may be a grade 9 Fluency in Perspective resource coming.
So that's pretty exciting too, with the structured literacy programs. The beauty really is that even if you don't have a couple class specifically dedicated to literacy, there are still ways that you can utilize these programs in your classroom. Courtney has the dedicated literacy class. Even though I do not, I can still easily include structured literacy as part of my curriculum. And our grade nine destreamed classes have been running fluency routines this year, too. So there's just so many possibilities.
[00:47:07] Kate Winn: Yeah. How about you, Lisa?
[00:47:09] Lisa Rogers: Well, personally, I am hoping that there will be a way to continue using REWARDS at the secondary level.
I'd like to see it in all of our other schools if possible. It really is uniquely well suited to secondary students. So that's, that's a big hope for me. But most of all, my hope is to see this model supported with strong literacy resources, whatever they may be in other schools in our board and across the province. I really agree with Stephanie Stollar that we, we need to focus a lot of our energy in K-2 because we make the biggest impact there with the most number of students in that space.
But I would also assert that students who are struggling with reading in secondary need us the most. So we can and we must intervene.
[00:47:56] Kate Winn: Wonderful. Lisa Rogers, Courtney Berger, Kristen Roy from the Near North District School Board, thank you so much for being here on Reading Road to Trip this week to talk about this successful intervention with intermediate students. I think it's going to be really valuable for so many of our listeners.
[00:48:11] Lisa Rogers: Thank you Kate.
[00:48:12] Kristen Roy: Thanks for having us.
[00:48:13] Courtney Berger: Thank you.
[00:48:16] Kate Winn: Show notes for this episode with all the links and information you need can be found podcast.idaontario.com and you have been listening to season four episode eight with the team from the Near North District School Board.
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 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, katethismomloves on Instagram and Kate Winn on Bluesky. Make sure you're following the Reading Road Trip podcast so you don't miss a single episode in this jam-packed season. New episodes will continue to be released on Monday mornings all summer long.
We couldn't bring Reading Road Trip to you without behind-the-scenes support from Brittany Haynes and Melinda Jones at IDA Ontario.
I'm Kate Winn and along with my co-producer, Dr. Una Malcolm, we hope that 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.
