Greetings!
In this edition, we want to fill you in on events and news from November and also let you know what is on the horizon in January. Highlights:
- We are excited for our next meeting on Sunday, January 8, 2023, at 7 pm. Our guest speaker will be Dr. Nancy J. Nelson, an expert on multi-tiered systems of support to effectively address the literacy needs of all students. Please scroll down for more information and see attached document for details about Dr. Nelson’s research and areas of expertise. Register for the event here.
- Scroll down for several follow up links to our November discussion about the Sold A Story Podcast
- The School Committee met on November 21 and you can watch the recording here. Public comment is from 00.24 to 00.44 in the recording. The district administrators’ presentation on literacy and the new K-2 early literacy assessment with questions from SC members and discussion starts at 1:24. Some takeaways and reflections are below.
Next Brookline Literacy Coalition Event on Sunday, January 8 at 7 pm
“Features of Effective instruction in Multi-Tiered Systems of Support to Benefit All Learners”
Our guest will be Nancy J. Nelson, Ph.D., NCSP, an Assistant Professor of Special Education at Boston University, Deputy Director of the National Center on Improving Literacy and the Lead for Literacy Center, and Interim Associate Director of the BU TEACH Research Center. Prior to joining BU’s faculty, Dr. Nelson was a research professor at the Center on Teaching and Learning at the University of Oregon
Dr. Nelson is a former special education teacher and school psychologist, and a principal investigator on more than a dozen federally funded projects to develop or test the efficacy of reading and math interventions for students with or at risk for learning disabilities. Dr. Nelson regularly works with state, regional, and local education agencies to provide technical assistance related to the effective implementation of assessment and instruction in multi-tiered systems of support.
Please find more details about Dr. Nelson and her research in the attached document. Register here. We hope you can join us!
Sold A Story Podcast
Thank you to everyone who attended our discussion about the Sold a Story podcast. Over 30 people were in attendance and we are grateful to all the community members-teachers, parents, school committee members, and others who shared thoughts, questions, and their own experiences, as well as to those who came to listen and reflect. It seems that there was much in the podcast that resonated with people and opened their eyes.
This is only the start of what we know will be an ongoing process of learning and discussion about how children in the Public Schools of Brookline are being taught to read. If you haven’t listened yet, please listen and use it to spark conversations with others. There is now a useful discussion guide that would be helpful for groups of parents, educators, school committee members to use as they process the information in the series.
Thank you to Brookline Select Board member, John VanSoyoc for sharing what he learned from the podcast and our discussion in his blog.
You can also listen to the recent WBUR On Point show, “How Children Are Taught to Read Faces a Reckoning”, to hear more from education reporter Emily Hanford and Missy Purcell, one of the teachers and parents featured in the podcast, and to a conversation on MPR News With Angela Davis.
And if the podcast and ensuing discussion have piqued your interest and you want to learn more about the science of reading, check out the reading list that the producer has curated.
School Committee Meeting
The Brookline School Committee met on November 21. You can watch the recording here. Public comment about literacy is from the 00:24 to 00:44 in the recording.
We would like to encourage others who would like to share their thoughts and their children’s experiences to write to School Committee members directly at any time. Find the email addresses of SC members here.
Beginning around 1:24, we heard a presentation by administrators from the Office of Teaching and Learning. One of the presenters was Lesley Ryan Miller, Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning. Note: In January, she will be leaving Brookline for a position in the Boston Public Schools. We have not heard any news about who will replace her.
Michelle Herman, Senior Director of Curriculum and Instruction, and Kristin Gray, Interim K-8 English Language Arts Coordinator, also presented. We heard about the results of the first round of the DIBELS/mClass early literacy assessment to all kindergarten, first, and second graders.. They also shared information and thoughts about the district’s approach to teaching reading. There were extensive comments and questions from SC members during and after the presentation. You can view and download presentation materials here.
Here are a few points from the presentation/discussion along with our reflections:
- The administration is setting the expectation that this year is a transitional learning year and it appears we will need to wait until next year to hear clearly articulated and widely communicated next steps for at-risk students and parent communication. However, this assessment is administered 3 times a year, and they plan to present and discuss assessment data in January, and again at the end of the year at Curriculum Subcommittee meetings.
- In addition to the DIBELS/mClass, teachers are also continuing to use formative assessments such as the Wilson Fundations (phonics) unit tests. Some teachers are still administering the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System (BAS), even though it is no longer required in K-2. There are no immediate plans to eliminate the BAS in later grades.
We find it disappointing that there is no plan to eliminate the BAS because, as we shared in our public comment at SC, and in our previous newsletter, it is not a valid or reliable assessment in any grade, and the evidence shows it is a poor guide to instructional decision-making. We hope our district leaders and educators will understand the problems and eliminate it. There are freely available, well-validated replacements.
- In order to address student needs, classroom teachers are being encouraged to differentiate their teaching, and to work with literacy coaches and specialists to respond to students. They are expanding practices to include the use of ‘decodable texts’ (books that match the scope and sequence of the phonics patterns being taught) and the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Program, a series of scripted, oral (no letters) game-like exercises that are intended to develop the ability to attend to and work with sounds in words.
- While oral sound games can play an important role in prekindergarten and can be a useful, fun supplement during transition times in kindergarten, we are concerned that this program is being regarded as a form of reading intervention or used merely as a token of a critical element of learning to read (‘phonemic awareness’). This approach does not align with the scientific evidence of how best to develop these skills in the context of mapping sounds to letters and learning to read and write, particularly for students who are not learning this easily. This podcast episode provides some background information to help you understand our concerns. For more information about what the evidence tells us about phonological and phonemic awareness, you can also watch this recent presentation by Dr.Susan Brady at the symposium hosted by Oregon Response to Instruction and Intervention
- The introduction of decodable texts is an encouraging step as these books can play a key role in helping beginning readers practice what they are learning and develop confidence in their ability to sound out words. There is a wide variety of these books on the market (with varying quality), and we look forward to hearing more about the specific books that the district has purchased, how they align to their phonics teaching, and how teachers are using them in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms.
- Are you a classroom teacher using these books with your students? Are you a parent whose children are practicing their reading with these books? Please share your experiences and questions. We’d love to hear from you!
- It appears the focus for intervention is or will be on students considered ‘highest risk’ based on their composite scores on DIBELS/mClass (those at the 10th percentile) along with two other optional subtests that place them at ‘additional risk”. It is unclear what the approach will be for the remaining students at the 20th-40th percentile who, according to to the technical manual, should also be considered at risk and should also receive additional support. Please see the presentation slides to see how many children in each grade scored in the ‘below benchmark’ (yellow) and ‘well below benchmark’ (red).
- It’s important to note that, while low performance on this assessment at the beginning of the year may be due to a number of factors and may warrant only additional attention in “tier 1”, classroom instruction, if a student continues to score low a second time, this does indicate the need for more intensive support. Michelle Herman noted that “We will make decisions about intervention based on the Middle of Year results”. When this is discussed again in January, we look forward to hearing details of what the additional instruction and support will look like for these children. Please remember that the purpose of these assessments is to prevent or mitigate reading difficulties by ensuring a timely and evidence-based response.
Some further thoughts:
In the discussion, Lesley Ryan Miller and Kristin Gray minimized the error analysis part of the BAS, a part that is based on the incorrect “3 cueing” idea explained so lucidly in Emily Hanford’s work. Kristin Gray said, “They don’t have to analyze it if they don’t want to. It’s flexible”. While we are glad to hear it is not mandatory, we certainly hope teachers will be explicitly advised to not analyze it, as this analysis is based on an incorrect assumption about how reading works!
Gray also defended the value of establishing an “independent”, “instructional” and “hard” “level”, another component of this type of assessment. Unfortunately, this practice is likewise not evidence-based. Attempts to pinpoint these ‘levels’ are inaccurate, and the levels are not a good guide to teaching. Forming guided reading groups based on these levels actually serves to perpetuate the inequities we are very concerned about. You can read this brief, but detailed blog post, written by a teacher and literacy coach, to learn more about the inherent problems and contradictions in the BAS. And this is an excellent free webinar along with slides to help you understand the problems with using these levels.
In response to SC member Steven Ehrenberg’s question about what it is “that teachers are gaining from the BAS that they can’t gain from informal assessments of their own choosing”, Lesley Ryan Miller responded that in her own experience, it may be just to “see how children handle books”, “hear them read”, and “the comprehension piece”.
Here’s the thing: If teachers do not have the opportunity in the course of their instruction to see how children handle books and to hear them read, and feel they need to use an erroneous assessment in order to do that, then we hope that realization creates an urgency around professional learning and redesign of the entire literacy program. Perhaps this was implied in Lesley Ryan Miller’s concern that eliminating it would be ‘haphazard’? She suggested that discussion about eliminating the BAS was next on the agenda and we very much look forward to hearing more about this.
Regarding “the comprehension piece”, it is important to realize that there is no valid assessment of reading comprehension with beginning readers who are just learning to sound out words. If a child can’t read the words, it is hard for them to understand what they are reading. This does not suggest a ‘comprehension problem”. Instead, measures of oral language comprehension can be used, and in fact, would be a very helpful addition to the DIBELS/mClass screening. There are many to choose from.
As for older students who do not read words accurately and automatically, addressing their decoding difficulty, teaching them to read accurately, and providing guided practice to develop fluency, will likely have the biggest impact on their comprehension. The vast majority of older struggling readers have difficulty with both decoding and language comprehension.
Furthermore,”reading comprehension” or understanding what you read is a complex construct that is not easily measured. It is not a ‘skill’ like sounding out words. It is highly dependent on vocabulary and background knowledge and varies considerably based on the text and the task. Making inferences and connections, synthesizing information, speculating on an author’s word choice, evaluating sources–all the things that Kirstin Gray mentioned in the discussion as part of comprehension–are not skills to be assessed or taught in isolation.
All of this can and should be assessed formatively by teachers in the context of instruction that is rooted in particular shared texts: interesting, engaging, language-rich texts. Early on, teachers can read books to children that are far above the children’s ability to decode. Later on, once children have sufficient ability to sound out words, children read grade level texts alongside their teacher and classmates, building their fluency, discussing the content, writing about them, learning vocabulary and growing their knowledge. The evidence supports embedding these texts in a coherent, cumulative knowledge-rich curriculum that includes science, social studies, literature, and the arts.
In the course of the discussion, the administrators suggested that current practices and curricula like the Lucy Calkins Units of Study and Reading and Writing Workshop models have some flaws and gaps that can be addressed with a few ‘shifts’ and tweaks, but that there is a lot of benefit in, for example, they way they approach the teaching of ‘complex text’. Based on our knowledge, we disagree with this. You can find many links to further understand why we disagree in this opinion article “Why Problems With Literacy Instruction Go Beyond Phonics”, by education writer Natalie Wexler, whose book The Knowledge Gap we also highly recommend.
What does it look like in classrooms where teachers are aligning their teaching to all this evidence and understanding about how children become highly literate? Well, we have no doubt that there are classrooms in Brookline where you can see aspects of this in action. Our leaders need to find these classrooms and teachers and learn about what it is that these teachers understand and what they are doing. And find ways to support them and other teachers in their ability to expand it and put it into practice on a larger scale.
There are also teachers across the state and country that are putting these principles into practice. We hope to provide opportunities in the future to hear directly from them and learn more about what is happening in their classrooms and how their students are benefiting.
Towards the end of the SC meeting, Steven Ehrenberg mentioned the CURATE website that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has offered to school districts. We think this can be a good resource going forward. The “Explore Curricula” feature on the Knowledge Matters website is also helpful for understanding the way different curricula approach literacy instruction.
We were encouraged to hear that there is funding for a literacy review and that Michelle Herman will be writing a Request for Proposal to initiate that process this year. While exploring curriculum options should be one important part of this review, it is only one part. The last thing we want is for our school leaders to spend large sums of money on curriculum without also committing time and energy to a robust plan for learning and implementation.
We sincerely hope an equally important part of the literacy program review will be devoted to learning about what is actually happening in classrooms, fostering professional dialogue, and building capacity for effective, efficient and equitable teaching throughout our schools.
Phew, this newsletter has a lot of links!! We hope you click, read, listen, and explore. There is something there that is sure to be thought-provoking to both educators and parents. As always, feel free to reach out with any thoughts or questions.
We hope you all have a peaceful, enjoyable holiday season and we wish you a very happy New Year!