The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Best practices, tips, and stories to help you be extraordinary in your classroom and beyond, featuring Curriculum Associates' Director of the Educator Community Sari Laberis.
The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Empowering Striving Readers: Expert Strategies with Dr. Anita Archer
Unlock the secrets to supporting striving readers across upper elementary, middle, and high school grades with insights from the esteemed Dr. Anita Archer. In this episode, Dr. Archer shares powerful strategies for scaffolding in subjects like reading, science, and social studies. From essential pre-reading activities such as pronunciation and vocabulary to innovative techniques like choral and partner reading, we cover a wealth of practical tips to elevate your teaching game. We also discuss the critical importance of using meaningful intervention passages that not only build student confidence but also keep them motivated and engaged. Whether you're a seasoned educator or new to the classroom, you'll find invaluable advice here. We also dive into the characteristics that make reading intervention programs truly effective. Learn the importance of direct, explicit, and systematic instruction, and discover key elements like teaching letter sound associations and improving reading fluency.
Read Curriculum Associates' blog: CurriculumAssociates.com/blog
Follow us on Twitter: @CurriculumAssoc
Follow us on Instagram: @MyiReady
Have feedback, questions, or want to be a guest? Email ExtraordinaryEducators@cainc.com to connect with us!
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Extraordinary Educators Podcast. I am so excited for you to hear this episode. I got to speak to the incredible Dr Anita Archer all about instruction for striving readers. So Dr Anita Archer serves as an educational consultant to state departments and school districts on explicit instruction and literacy. She has presented in all 50 states and many countries, including Australia, and is the recipient of 10 awards honoring her contributions to education. Dr Archer has served on faculties of three universities and she has co-authored numerous curriculum materials, including phonics for reading, a three-level intervention program and a best-selling book titled Explicit Extraction Effective and Efficient Teaching.
Sari Laberis:Anita and I had a very fascinating conversation about supporting upper elementary, middle and high school students in terms of reading. How do we re-engage these students who have been frustrated by their past educational experiences with reading? How do we build confidence and motivation for them? And she also talked about what skills and tactics teachers can do and how teachers can plan to support these striving readers. And then, at the end, she talks about our new edition of Phonics for Reading and what she's most excited about and some feedback that we've heard from teachers and students already. So, without further ado, here is my conversation with Dr Anita Archer. Welcome, anita. It is such an honor to have you on the podcast. I am so excited to talk to you today. Thank you.
Dr. Anita Archer:Sari. You know this topic is one that we share our interest in striving readers in the upper grades, so it's a delight to be with you.
Sari Laberis:Well, thank you so much, so we'll just dive right in. Can you just explain to our audience why do striving readers in those upper elementary, middle school, high school grades need a unique type of?
Dr. Anita Archer:support and we have a high level of reading after third grade longer words, longer passages, concepts that you don't know, and the students are reading maybe at the second grade level or the third grade level. So they're going to need support in order to fill in that gap. And there's sort of two parts of it. One would be in general ed. So in a reading class, in science, in social studies, what might the teacher do to scaffold the students that are lower readers? So, for example, we could simply look at what we might do before we read a passage at any grade level, what do they need to know and teach it directly how to pronounce unfamiliar words? What is vocabulary that's essential to the understanding? What background knowledge do they need to know in order to be able to read the passage? And then now we're reading the passage.
Dr. Anita Archer:Some of the students in your core program, your tier one program, probably can read the material with ease. But there has to be scaffolding for the students that are lower readers. So we might read some of it chorally Everybody reads, thus having a foundation for those struggling readers. I might read and stop and have you say the next word again scaffolding for the lower readers. I might have them read to a partner. But then we might need to make it safe for the students to read to their partners. So I always give them the me or we option, meaning that you can say me if you believe that you can read it accurately and fluently, or we and ask your partner to join.
Dr. Anita Archer:So there'd be scaffolding done within the classroom and I'm telling you, it might not just be striving readers. You might have some students in there that are English language learners that would be supported by that support, that scaffolding. And we also might have technology that would help. For example, the students could listen to a passage. Now, they're not going to gain in reading skills necessarily, but they will gain in vocabulary and background knowledge. And so people say, okay, that's what I'll do, I'll just give them tapes of all of the passages we're going to read. But you know they're sorry, the problem with that is what I often say don't just accommodate, liberate.
Dr. Anita Archer:Don't just accommodate. That's what you're doing when you have to listen to tapes, accommodate. That's what you're doing when you have Melissa tapes. Simultaneously, you have to liberate, and that means that those striving readers need to have intervention.
Dr. Anita Archer:When you are teaching striving readers, the most probable skills that they don't have would be ones often taught in kindergarten first, second and third grade, which is the ability to read the words, so that they don't necessarily have letter-sound associations. They don't know how to sound out single-syllable, multi-syllabic words. They don't have the pronunciation of prefixes and suffixes. They are low in fluency guaranteed suffixes. They are low in fluency guaranteed. So they're going to need intervention that teaches all of those skills plus has meaningful, respectful passages for them, and so when you say something that's unique to them, it's really important that the passages that they're going to read are respectful, are long enough, that have long words embedded and that have informational text so that they can learn information. So there's many things we can do, but it is a combination of intervention that teaches what they don't know and intervention that uses very explicit, direct instruction.
Sari Laberis:Well, thank you for all that. I think you answered a lot of what I'm about to ask next. But thinking about these students who have been historically frustrated or disheartened by their reading assignments, maybe partly because the passages weren't appropriate for them. They might have felt like it was, too you know, the passages weren't appropriate for them. They might've felt like it was too babyish or the topics you know didn't resonate with them, or they weren't reading to learn, but rather felt that they were only learning to read. How do we build the confidence and motivation back up for these students Confidence, and motivation.
Dr. Anita Archer:They are products of success. So both confidence and motivation comes from success. Sometimes I've been at schools where the teacher says, well, these kids are just not motivated. You know, motivation is a product of success at whatever area we're looking at, where you want to give it more energy, you want to give it more thought, you want to be more present, and so that's why it's critical that we look at what builds that success, so that students are more motivated and are much more likely to be confident. And it's basically an intervention that addresses what we would want them to learn and teaches it in a very direct way so that they do learn it. So it is a combination of critical content and extraordinarily good instructional procedures. Now, we did find in our work in writing many intervention programs for students third grade and above that there were some things that you use the term baby stuff, okay that students would think about and reject the intervention because of it. So let me just tell you what those factors were, when the font was very large.
Sari Laberis:Could they associate that with the lower grade level?
Dr. Anita Archer:Yeah, when the words were all short, not multi-syllabic words. Same thing. When the illustrations had younger children, again the same thing. I reject that. Baby stuff, primary grades and when those things really made a difference in terms of the students being willing to learn it. And the passages also needed to be longer. I'm going to have regular font pictures of older people and children. I'm going to have longer words in all the passages and I am going to have longer passages.
Sari Laberis:Thank you for sharing those, and I think it's obviously so important and it's fascinating to me that we're just getting the research and figuring this out now, right, because I think especially even when I was in the classroom so focused on data and what this student needs, and then it's almost like you don't even consider how the student is perceiving the instructional materials and resources they're getting on a day-to-day basis. How would it feel if, as an adult you know what I mean I got something in size 72, font and pictures of teenagers on it, right, and so just going back to that and it's very powerful, but it also changes not only the children's attitude but the teachers.
Dr. Anita Archer:This is serious stuff. There's lots of words here we're going to practice. There's long words we're going to practice. There's long passages we're going to learn something. When we're doing those passages. It changes the attitudes of everyone. Now let me just give you a perfect example. So I was in looking at the use of an intervention program. I had written okay, and it's a fifth grade and there's a table here and the teacher in the classroom is teaching it and the students are working with independent paraeducators or independent projects and rest of the room. And one boy gets up and he walks over to the intervention group and says how do I get into this group? Not realizing it was an intervention group. I mean, he said you know, they were on task, they were with the teacher, they were reading interesting things. I want to be in this group. It was a moment.
Sari Laberis:That is a great moment. Thank you for sharing that. Going back to, I guess I think sometimes there might be a perception that, okay, I'm a teacher, what can I do to help make the biggest difference for my students in the shortest amount of time? And so what do you say to that question kind of what are the tactics that teachers can use that would give them the biggest bang for their buck in terms of making gains in a shortest amount of time?
Dr. Anita Archer:So that's what we would want. We would like a lot of gains in a short time, right, right, and that's not quite reality. Because let's say I have a sixth grader who reads at the second grade level there's four years difference in terms of their performance and their peers. It's going to take effort, it is going to take time, but what we have to do is basically two things. We have to what I often say teach the stuff and cut the fluff. So anything that is not necessary to fill in the gap we're not going to address.
Dr. Anita Archer:An intervention program has to focus on what's going to make the most difference in the moment and in the future. So that means things like teaching letter sound associations, using those to sound out short words, teaching students how to read multisyllabic words, teaching students how to read prefix and suffixes to facilitate longer words. To work also on high-frequency words for instant recognition. It means that we're going to also focus on fluency, so that there's more words that are in sight, words that we recognize immediately so we read with appropriate rate. And then we're going to work on comprehension being able to read readable text, being able to answer questions on content, being able to utilize strategies to read that text. So combine what we're teaching with how we're teaching On task. The teacher's on task the whole time. The kids are on task. We are covering as much as we can. We have a perky pace. We have lots of responses we're getting. We are teaching very directly and very explicitly. The research on intervention favors direct, explicit, systematic instruction, no matter where you look.
Sari Laberis:So switching gears just a bit before we end this conversation. You just released the new edition of Phonics for Reading, so congrats. And what are you most excited about?
Dr. Anita Archer:Working with the two editors at Curriculum Associates over a four year period. First, I'm very excited that it is done and looks good. But I will tell you if I picked out one thing I was excited about, it is the passages for striving readers, because so often they would be quite insulting to children, the content wouldn't match their developmental level, and so the passages are terrific and half of them are informative and the rest are narratives. They're much longer so they're paragraphs in each section. They're divided into three sections and the artwork that goes with it is compelling. But you can't use it to guess the words, no, and it comes with comprehension questions and sentence stems. So the students have complete sentence answers and Plick's Reading has three books book A, b and C and the third one. After C comes 10 transfer lessons where the content readability is getting closer to what they might need in, let's say, fifth, sixth, seventh grade.
Sari Laberis:And have you heard any feedback from students or teachers about this new edition, and have you?
Dr. Anita Archer:heard any feedback from students or teachers about this new edition. So recently we asked students you know, what did you like the best? And then we asked their teachers what did your students like the best? And you're going to be surprised. Okay, number one that they voted for was the students. Okay, either through the lens of the teachers watching or the students telling us. I love the spelling. Okay, because in addition to reading words and multisyllabic words, there was dictation. Number two they loved is that we wanted to build up automaticity at the word level, utilizing word families, a timed exercise that they did 10 seconds of practice, then 10 seconds of practice, then 10 seconds where their partner counted the number of words that they read. And the third one was reading multisyllabic words. Now, when I stopped to look at those three, what about them would make a student really like these? Well, it was because all of them, if you did well, shows you that you were learning something.
Sari Laberis:It's a success. Motivation loop yeah.
Dr. Anita Archer:So you're looking at the spelling words. I mean, I saw kids giving high fives to each other when they spelled the word right, that's awesome.
Dr. Anita Archer:When they were able to read multi-Slavic words that were two syllables initially, then three, then four, then five. Whoa, I am a reader and in fact I have to tell you so. One day I was visiting a school and I did ask students afterwards what they found useful and what they thought about the program, and one fifth grade boy just blew my thoughts away. He said well, you know, dr Archer, I was able to walk and I was able to talk, and now I can read. Do you realize the wisdom of that? That being able to read in terms of how well you do in the moment and in the future is as related to being able to talk or walk?
Sari Laberis:That's incredible.
Dr. Anita Archer:In terms of the teachers. This may surprise you too. We asked them what advice would you give another teacher teaching this? And they said use the scripts, use the scripts, use the scripts, use the scripts, use the scripts, use the scripts. Use the scripts because we did script out all of the lessons so we could hold the wording that was utilized consistent over time. We scripted it out so that we can use the best pedagogy teaching practices that we knew and then also be able to reduce that uh, those teaching practices and make the kids more independent over time. And they simply said, when I use the scripts, uh the uh lessons went better, we covered more, there was more responses and I had fewer disruptive behaviors. So that's the dream.
Sari Laberis:Yeah, that is amazing. Well, thank you so much for giving us that overview and letting us hear about the feedback so far. I so wish I had this program when I was a teacher, but unfortunately that is all the time we have for today. So thank you again for joining us and I am sure that the folks listening are going to absolutely love this episode, so really appreciate it. Get inspired by following us on social media and please tag us in your posts on X at Curriculum Asoche and on Instagram, at my Eye Ready, if you have feedback about the podcast, a topic of interest or if you want to be a guest email extraordinaryeducators at cainccom. Please subscribe where you listen to podcasts and if you'd like to help more educators just like you, join the conversation and please leave a review. Remember, be you be true, be extraordinary. The extraordinary educators podcast is produced by curriculum associates. Editing by shane low, social media by at city hannon, guest booking by sari labaris and production by hayley browning. This podcast is copyrighted materials and intellectual property of curriculum associates.