The Extraordinary Educators Podcast

Strategies for Older Striving Readers with Lisa Mucci

• Hayley Browning • Season 7 • Episode 10

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Literacy is a lifeline for academic success and lifelong opportunities. For older students still struggling with reading, targeted intervention powerful and transformative. In this conversation with Lisa Mucci, Curriculum Associates' Impact Specialist in Curriculum and Instruction, we explore practical, evidence-based strategies that can make an immediate difference for these learners.

In this episode, Lisa shares her passion for supporting older striving readers.  We dive into specific techniques like chunking and looping for multisyllabic words, which helps students decode 60-80% of English vocabulary by recognizing prefixes, suffixes, and roots. This approach builds not just reading skills but transferable strategies they can apply in science, social studies, and beyond.

What makes this episode particularly valuable is the balance between instructional precision and human connection. Lisa reminds us that older struggling readers need teachers who believe in their potential while providing structured, explicit instruction. She offers immediately applicable strategies for building background knowledge, implementing fluency routines with purpose, and pre-teaching vocabulary to strengthen comprehension. Throughout our discussion, we emphasize that while compassion is essential, it must be paired with high expectations and collaborative effort between teacher and student.

Whether you're working directly with striving readers or supporting colleagues who do, you'll walk away with concrete techniques to implement tomorrow. Listen now to discover how literacy intervention truly can change lives, and how you can be part of that transformation for your students.

Read the 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!

SPEAKER_00:

Curriculum Associates, an education technology company and the makers of iReady, presents the Extraordinary Educators Podcast. Join host Haley Browning to hear tips, best practices, and successes to improve your teaching and leadership and drive student growth and learning. We believe all educators are extraordinary and we are here to support you. Hi everyone, welcome to today's episode of the Extraordinary Educators Podcast. Today I am joined by the incredible Lisa Mucci. Lisa is a team member here at Curriculum Associates. She is an impact specialist focusing in curriculum and instruction, and she joins me today to talk through all of the strategies that you can use to support your older striving readers. It's a really great topic that I think is really important for our listeners to take a look at, or listen, I guess, as you are considering how best to support your students. So Lisa talks through some wonderful strategies, just some basic understandings of how you can be able to dive into the data with your students and build some overall knowledge as they are building up their own skills. And a lot of these skills can then be transferable into their other classes, things like science and social studies, making sure that the strategies that they're learning in their language arts classroom can then support them as they're building their own reading comprehension and reading skills in their other classes. So with that, we hope you enjoyed today's episode with Lisa. Hi Lisa, welcome to today's episode of the Extraordinary Educators Podcast.

SPEAKER_01:

Hi, Haley. It's nice to be with you today.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. We're so happy to have you. And Lisa, you wrote this incredible blog that we'll make sure to link in the show notes talking about reading intervention strategies to really help older students. And I want to kind of dive into that today, jumping off of some of the points that you made. I think that it's really great for our listeners to get some good information and have some good pieces that they could use in their day-to-day. So with that, Lisa, let's kick things off. Um there was one sentence in your blog when I was reading it that just immediately stood out to me and I really wanted to start there. You said literacy intervention isn't just about teaching reading, it's about changing lives. And that in and of itself, you know, I I could I could drop a tear at this moment because it's so, so true. I was wondering if you could talk more about this. Why is it so important that we really hone in on literacy and its impact on the future of our students and children?

SPEAKER_01:

Though anyone that has worked with um older striving readers really understands kind of the heartbreak that that you as a teacher have when you're working with those students because these are children who have experienced struggle with reading and writing and all literacy skills for so long and they're kind of running out of time. We need to make sure that we do our very best to get them as close to grade level as possible before they head into high school because it does change lives. It matters if you are a reader or not. It's kind of a human right to be a reader, as Dr. Anita Archer says. Literacy changes lives and it can change the lives of our older students who have struggled for so long.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and Lisa, you bring up a good point of these teachers that are experiencing and working with this group of students, they have empathy and and they're really all teachers care about their students. We know this, and it's really important to them with this older group of students to really hone in and recognize that there are certain strategies that maybe they want to incorporate with these students and give them the support that they need specifically. I think it makes a lot of sense that you are incorporating this important piece of literacy with all of these older students and and making sure that the teachers are really honing in on some important strategies. And so, Lisa, I want to start there and kind of give our listeners some important takeaways of how they can incorporate some of these strategies in their regular old day-to-day. So, Lisa, this can be somewhat of a daunting topic, thinking about how we have these older students that we need to dive in and support with their reading strategies. And I'm curious, how do teachers get started with this? Do you have any recommendations for just step number one?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think the the first thing we have to talk about is the need for data. So we have to understand specifically what our older striving readers need. Are they still having struggles with foundational skills? Um, or is that pretty solid and it's the comprehension vocabulary, that language comprehension piece that's really holding them back? So kind of that's the first starting point. And then once you have that data and you have that information, then you can begin to really focus on effective strategies for students. I would say if we're we're talking about specific literacy intervention in those upper grades, it's really, you know, teach first of all, teachers have got to make that connection with students. Because these are students who who their engagement, their motivation has suffered along with their, you know, their lack of reading ability. And so we have to make those connections. Something else that we need to make sure we're doing is, you know, even though these are older students, we still need to use decodable text with them if they are students who are struggling with foundational skills. So focusing on those foundational skills that we see that are holes in their learning. So I frequently tell uh teachers of older students that, you know, phonics knowledge for some of our striving readers, it's like a piece of swish cheese. So they have some skills, but then there are holes in certain places. And so it's really important to be able to identify those particular skills and then use those decodable text and repeated readings to help build fluency. A couple of other things to keep in mind too is we've got to start teaching multisyllabic word decoding with our older students right up front because they are encountering those multisyllabic words in their other subject areas. And so we've got to provide them some strategies to be able to work through those words that they're seeing in text when they leave our classrooms. And then really being able to leverage their prior knowledge and then if necessary to build that background knowledge because we know the huge connection between knowledge and comprehension. So those are just kind of some big things to think about whenever we're providing that literacy intervention.

SPEAKER_00:

And with that, Lisa, do you have any quick hits for a strategy that can be done starting today?

SPEAKER_01:

Sure, there are lots of things that teachers can do to support their students who are are still really building their capacity for literacy and reading and writing. So one strategy that is a favorite of mine from Dr. Anita Archer is chunking and looping. And so this is a strategy for those multisyllabic words where we show students how to break words into parts and we help them to build the decoding skills to be able to read the parts, to be able to put the words together. And it's really important for older students because some of our older striving readers are still trying to process long words letter by letter, and that's really impossible to do. So the chunking and looping helps with that morphology instruction, so students recognize prefixes and suffixes and roots, that actually helps them unlock about 60 to 80 percent of words in English, and it also supports their vocabulary development as well. And then using some fluency routines like repeated readings for different purposes, because sometimes it's hard to get older students to want to read things more than one time. So if we give them different purposes for that repeated reading, we can generally kind of hook them, engage them into doing that. That fluent reading, again, the tie it has to comprehension, it just allows readers to shift their focus from sounding out words to just making sense of the content. And so that helps accelerate growth and comprehension. So building that vocabulary, pre-teaching words that have simple definitions that can help students deepen their understanding as they're reading. And then again, building that world knowledge by front loading really some complicated concepts that we know are coming up in text that they're reading and really helping them leverage their prior learning and then build on that knowledge to help build and strengthen that comprehension of whatever they're reading.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow, that was all very powerful, Lisa. I'm over here taking notes of things that I I would love to continue to jump into. And I think one thing that really stood out to me was this idea of incorporating multisyllabic words right away. I hadn't even thought about that. You know, you're making this impact and connecting these students with these skills that will then carry over into other classes. And here I am, I I was kind of tunnel vision, just thinking about this as only English language arts, and you know, they're going into their science classes, their social studies classes, and coming across these words that they need the strategies to address them. I really like that piece, so thank you for bringing that up. You also had talked about this idea of leveraging their prior knowledge and building background knowledge, and those are also incredibly crucial as we're considering how best to support these driving readers. And and I'm curious, I kind of want to circle back to something that you had talked about in the beginning as well. This idea of making connections. And I want to kind of bring it to this humanization piece. So you talk in the blog about combining human connection with instructional precision. Those few words, again, you there were some quick hits in this blog that I was like, oh, the there are so many important things I want to talk through. And you talk about combining human connection with instructional precision. How can our teachers do this? Like, are do you have any recommendations for for making sure that we're building that relationship, building those connections, and making sure that we're supporting these older striving readers?

SPEAKER_01:

One of the connections we have to make with these older striving readers is we have to help them understand that it's never too late for them to learn to be a better reader. And that as their teacher, I'm going to do everything within my power to make sure that they are a better reader when they walk out of my classroom at the end of the school year, but that I need their help and I need their support. So there's some work that they're going to have to do. But we're going to do it together. We're going to work on it together. There's a great quote, and it says it's something like a struggling older readers, they don't need something completely different. They need what all readers need. They need structured, explicit cumulative instruction delivered with urgency, intensity, and compassion. So I think it's really having compassion for kids, but not living in that compassion and that empathy, but knowing that I've got to use some really high-intensive strategies to help build those skills with kids.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's so, so powerful. And and I think that that that brings up a good point of yes, we're going to recognize that we have this compassion and we're we need to bring this piece to it, but we're not gonna just solely live there. We need to have these high expectations for these students and and make sure that we're pushing them and supporting them along the way. And I really like how you mentioned there's some work that needs to happen and we're both going to do it. It's not just a be all end all, not all of the work is put onto the student, it's a collaborative effort. Um, and that I'm sure a lot of teachers are listening and recognizing, like, yes, that is my day to day, you know. I'm I'm trying to pull in these students and making sure that they're engaged and just a quick recognition to all of the listeners out there. We we know how much work you do and we appreciate all of the work that you do. Um, yeah. And so so with that, Lisa, I think we're gonna we're gonna wrap up for today. Give our listeners just a reminder that the blog is linked in the show notes, should they like to take another look at it and learn a little bit more about this wonderful topic that Lisa talks about there. Um and with that, thank you so much for your time today, Lisa. You're welcome. Thanks, Haley. Get inspired by following us on social and please tag us in your posts on X at Curriculum Association and on Instagram at my iReady. If you have feedback about the podcast, a topic of interest, or want to be a guest, email extraordinaryeducators at caink.com. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you'd like to help more educators like you join the conversation, please leave us a review. Remember, be you, be true, be extraordinary. The Extraordinary Educators Podcast is produced by Curriculum Associates. Curriculum Associates believes that with the right supports, all children can reach grade level. We provide evidence-based high-quality instructional materials and world class implementation services to classrooms across the United States. Editing completed by Shane Lowe, social media by At City Hannon, guestbooking and production by Hayley Browning. This podcast is Copyrighted Materials and Intellectual Property of Curriculum Associates.