Jesse Steif: All right, all right. Well, thank you. Everyone. We appreciate everyone joining us here again. We appreciate our live audience being here with us today, and we appreciate everyone who’s watching after the fact. Welcome to our first in a series of technical assistance webinars.

Here is our aim to provide some additional technical assistance. Some answers to some questions that we know are out there in school districts, as we are all working towards the goal of increasing student literacy proficiency. And so in talking with a lot of our district partners and friends, consistent questions often will come up around issues of literacy, and we wanted to provide a couple of webinars here to to sort of answer some of those questions in addition to the good work that we continue to do that’s personalized to our partners.​

So we thought that our first webinar here should address sort of the biggest issues here that we face as educators, because to effectively meet the needs of diverse classrooms, we have to have knowledge of quality, instruction, and intervention. So we’re going to begin this webinar series by discussing some ways that educators can design and deliver instruction that helps the greatest number of kids acquire the greatest amount of literacy skill over the shortest amount of time, and to make sure that those skills are transferable and support ongoing learning. So we’re going to talk a lot about explicit instruction.

And so let’s see here.

So a couple of outcomes at the end of our hour and a half here today. We hope that you’ll be able to leave here, being able to explain the core characteristics of explicit instruction. We want you to be able to recognize the strengths and limitations of your current literacy instruction. If you’re a teacher, or to recognize strengths and weaknesses of those educators that you work with, if you are a district person or a coach, or any of the variety of educators that I know are on the call here today.

Then, of course, to be able to apply the principles of explicit instruction to your own practice. So I want to start with a question just for everyone’s consideration. 

When we think about factors and influences on student literacy achievement, there are a ton of them. Literacy is an outcome that’s affected by many, many different factors. But we can kind of break them up into 2 broad categories, one being student-specific factors, things like intelligence, socioeconomic status, parents, education, level, home language, access to books at home, all sorts of things, and the other being kind of instructional or curriculum factors. So the amount and the intensity of the instruction that we provide, the number of opportunities that students have over the course of the day to respond and receive corrective feedback on the skills that they’re learning, the knowledge level of the teacher, the rate or the pace at which we’re providing instruction. And the quality of the instructional materials, the rigor, the relevance of the content.

​I want to invite everyone to, if you’re listening to this after the fact, to pause and sort of discuss amongst yourselves about the more relevant factors here.

​I would like to encourage everyone to consider that the power of instructional and curriculum factors in many cases are actually the more powerful factor, the bigger the influence on student achievement.

​For example, we think about something like intelligence. I didn’t introduce myself. My name is Jesse Steiff. I’m the literacy content manager here at the Lastinger Center. My background is in school psychology and elementary education. As someone who has administered many, many IQ tests, I now know that actually your IQ is actually a really poor predictor of a student’s response to intervention and instruction.

​So there’s nothing about a student’s IQ that would say, “Oh, well, you have an IQ of 90 versus. You have an IQ of 110,” and therefore the student with higher intelligence is going to learn to read more effectively. We absolutely can and should not say that. And there is a framework in multi-tiered systems of support called ICEL, and it stands for instruction, curriculum, environment, and learner. And these are the factors that we consider when students are maybe not responding to intervention, or we’re looking at increasing or improving the quality of the instruction that we’re providing. 

And they’re in that order for a reason, instruction and curriculum come first, because not only are those the more powerful set of factors on student achievement, those are really what are in our control, right? And there’s something liberating about that. We have tons of agency over student literacy outcomes. So we just wanted to set the stage by including that sort of discussion.

​I want to talk a little bit about the science of instruction. We talk a lot, I mean, I’m sure everyone here has heard about the term, the Science of Reading.

​We want to introduce, or sort of remind ourselves that there is part of a broader sort of instructional print set of instructional principles that we can label the science of instruction and it refers to existing research from tons of different disciplines. And what that research has to say about instructional strategies that best facilitate student learning. The science of instruction forms practical applications in the classroom, and a set of practices, explicit instruction, has emerged as some of the most effective sets of principles for pre-k to 12 students, both with and without disabilities, from a variety of backgrounds. And so that’s what we’re going to kind of address here today.

​There are a lot of myths and misconceptions around explicit instruction that we hope to sort of address. This session is not necessarily about debunking sort of myths, but we hope that if if we’re carrying some of these myths and misconceptions about explicit instruction like “it’s just the teacher talking at a whole class of students,” for example, we hope to to sort of clarify some misconceptions here by the end.

​I want to start off getting into the meat of the content here with a wonderful quote from Dr. Anita Archer, who is one of my intellectual heroes. Just a giant in the field of instruction and has tons of these archerisms, they’re called, that we’ll revisit over the course of today, and you know the line. How well they learn equals. How well we teach is just super important. Learning is a function primarily of teaching. We know that the vast majority of students are capable of learning to read proficiently.

​And so we have to look at our instruction as the primary lever that we have to pull. Otherwise we’re sort of stuck lamenting factors that are out of our control in schools. And this is not to say again that those factors that we talked about before, like socioeconomic status and other things don’t influence learning. Of course they do to a certain to varying extents. But instruction is what we really have the most control over.

​So what is explicit instruction? It’s a group of effective teaching elements that when implemented appropriately, can provide the appropriate amounts of clarity and guidance and support to students who wouldn’t be able to learn that content in their absence. They’re clear. It’s a clear and unambiguous and direct approach to teaching that includes not only the design of or the delivery of individual lessons. What we do moment by moment in front of our classes. But it’s also the design of the lessons over time: single lessons, and how lessons build on one another over the course of weeks and months and years.

​Explicit instruction is characterized by scaffolds, and scaffolds are just a wide range of strategies that teachers employ to lead students to learn something that they aren’t yet capable of learning independently.

So scaffolds are like scaffolds on a building. They are intended to be temporary, and to help students eventually stand on their own as a building would stand on their own or function independently. Scaffolds range super widely. They could be anything from, say, providing a graphic organizer to help a student in a specific writing task to previewing difficult vocabulary words before reading a complex text, and everywhere in between, just kind of what we do temporarily to help a student.

​Students are guided through the learning process. We are expressing clear statements of purpose and rationale for learning a new skill. Students need that context for why? They’re learning what they’re learning.

​There are clear explanations and modeling and demonstration of the instructional target. So with the I do of the I do. We do, you do.

​And then we provide supported practice with feedback that is purposeful and pre-planned, and that practice is provided until mastery is achieved and mastery is not achieved. In one session mastery is achieved, depending on the skill over a longer amount of time, and we’ll get into some more specifics as we go on.

​Contrary to some misunderstandings about explicit instruction, it involves a ton of interaction and frequent opportunities to practice and receive corrective feedback. So a gradual release framework involves first modeling, a skill and highly interactive teacher involvement until students reach a certain high level of mastery and are ready for gradually more and more independent practice over time.

​Typically, this is something like 80 to 90% mastery of a task after we’ve provided an initial lesson that would tell me as a teacher that they’re ready for some more independent practice. But we’ll talk more about that a little later in the session, when we talk about the different kinds of practice, and when it occurs.

​Looking to the right hand side of your screen, the essential elements of explicit instruction best practices in the delivery of a lesson include again, step-by-step demonstrations and unambiguous language, not only providing examples of the skill, but also non-examples and non examples are important across both literacy and math and math skills. Guided practice as students are increasing their level of mastery after they get immediate corrective feedback. We don’t want students to be practicing mistakes and consolidating misunderstandings and errors to their memory.

​We’ll talk more about corrective feedback over the course of today. Appropriate pacing is important, not going too quickly or too slowly and providing strategies that help students organize their knowledge, which can range from pre-teaching necessary background knowledge, so that new learning kind of sticks, to graphic organizers and semantic maps to help sort of organize new information when we’re talking about vocabulary instruction or text structure instruction.

​So there’s tons of different ways that help students organize their new learning as they’re learning new content.

​So let’s talk about the why of improving tier one instruction and also about this, this concept of the upside down triangle, right? So this three-tiered visual on the left is probably familiar to most of the folks here on the webinar. It’s our MTSS Triangle, as a lot of people refer to it.

​I want to clarify that the triangle refers to instructional resources and not to students. So there really shouldn’t be such. There’s no such thing as a Tier 2 or Tier 3 student, but only. But there are levels of resources that students need temporarily Tier 2 or Tier 3 resources to improve their literacy trajectory. 

​The goal is not to have 80% of students meeting a benchmark, 15% of students deficient in reading. And 5% of students substantially deficient. The goal is to have a hundred percent of students meeting standards or as close to that as possible.

​And so when we say our triangle is upside down, as the figure on the right sort of illustrates a lot of people talk about that more students are at risk and not meeting standards than those who are meeting standards.

It actually doesn’t follow that Tier 2 or Tier 3 instruction, and that level of intensive resources is what’s going to get us out of the situation. It’s just not possible. Our systems can’t handle it. It’s too many resources for too many students.

​So if less than 80% of students are scoring at benchmark, this is the opportunity to improve tier one instruction to ensure that it’s meeting the needs of a greater proportion of students. So grade level teams should be analyzing the fit between the needs of the student and the instruction that’s provided in tier one. 

And then, if and when we find that it, that it’s not meeting the needs, and it’s not a and it’s not a good fit, or it’s not a perfect fit. Then we change what we’re doing in tier one and respond to those needs.

​We need to align tier one instruction with the needs of most students and make sure that our instruction is using evidence-based principles of explicit instruction to ensure that really nothing is left to chance. Our intervention systems become overwhelmed and ineffective when they’re used to attempt to support 40, 50, 60% of students in a grade level.

​So, how do we purposefully plan for explicit instruction?

​Students should know exactly what they’ll be learning and why. What we build into previous instruction are built into previous instruction, should be the prerequisite skills that they need so that students are on a firm foundation for new learning.

We use preplanned examples that we create beforehand optimally. These things are provided to you by the curriculum and along with solid guidance on how you’re going to demonstrate the new skills.​

Planning should also heavily involve what kinds of practice students are going to get with a new skill, and how we provide corrective feedback when kids make errors and over time, planning for explicit instruction involves how we systematically build in practice over the following weeks and months, so that a firm level of mastery is achieved.

​So how do we deliver explicit instruction segments, complex skills into those smaller, discrete steps? So before more complex ones, for example, say in a phonics, scope and sequence, we teach, say, blending with CVC words and short vowels before CCVC words or CVCE words on the language comprehension side.

​I would teach students about, for example, text structures and how to recognize them in expository text before teaching intermediate students how to write a summary of a science text. Kids need to understand what things like cause and effect and description and sequencing are, and how texts sort of and how texts are structured. In order to actually write a strong summary of a text.​

We want to use modeling and think aloud, to show students exactly how to work through problems, exactly how to read words, or exactly how to use a particular strategy.

The kinds of modeling that you do depends on what you’re teaching, whether it’s something procedural, like step-by-step, like decoding a multi-syllable word, that has specific steps that go to it. I might teach them to peel off prefixes and suffixes, and separate the base word into syllables and then blend everything together.

I would model that differently from something that’s declarative or factual, like a vocabulary. Words, definition, for something procedural like a math problem solving or again decoding a multi-syllable word, I’d break it down into digestible, bite-sized pieces, walk students through the procedure, while perhaps creating and referencing an anchor chart​

Coming back to scaffolds: Scaffolding involves initially providing, like the maximal supports and prompts that students need then sort of fading those supports as students master the content.

​For as much as we talk about scaffolding in education, the interesting thing is that there’s not a whole lot of research about the rate at which or how fast we should be removing scaffolds to facilitate independence. It should take one week or two weeks or one day for this skill and this student and this grade level. That’s a lot of very detailed information through research that doesn’t exist. And this is where instruction is art and science. But a really key indicator or consideration is that we need to take a lot of care about keeping scaffolds on for too long or or too short.

​Keeping on scaffolds for too short and too short of an amount of time might push a student into independence before they’re actually ready. And we get frustrated and students, and they’re not going to learn the skills that we want.

​Keeping scaffolds on for too long tends to foster a sense of dependence on those scaffolds, and also won’t allow independent learning for the student.

​I want to give an example of this. A lot of the time, we may use less complex text as a scaffold for a particular skill. So if I’m teaching cause and effect, a common text structure early on in elementary school, I might use a less complex text that really clearly illustrates cause and effect for a student before getting them into more complex text and using their ability to recognize that and signal words and things like that, to understand the main idea and author’s purpose, and those sort of broader, more complex standards. 

But what we often see is that we keep kids in that less complex text for too long. It should be a scaffold to be removed while we’re teaching while we’re teaching a student a skill.

​But if we never move students to more complex text, they’re never going to be able to meet grade level standards. We need to think more about the teacher as the scaffold and less about lowering the complexity of the text as the scaffold.

​Teachers are highly skilled folks and need to be able to teach students to do things they can’t yet do, rather than providing them with text that they can already read pretty well.​

And finally, we have actively involving all students in responding throughout lessons. So opportunities to respond as we’ll see later is a real key lever for us to pull, to improve student outcomes, to up engagement and help us with our ability to understand how our class is understanding what we’re trying to teach. Purposefully planning opportunities to respond with corrective feedback over time and reviewing previously taught skills are key pieces of explicit instruction.

​I want to be clear here and say that Tier 1, your curriculum can either significantly help or significantly hinder your efforts at improving literacy skills.

​And we’re definitely in a sort of Renaissance period of high quality instructional materials. Strong curricula can be a game changer if implemented well, and if teachers receive regular professional learning and embedded coaching.

​But if weaker materials are present, or even if we have a good curriculum in place but we have minimal support for teachers, then student outcomes are definitely going to suffer.

​But we’ve known. We’ve known about the role of curricula for many years, and in student outcomes. In a great text on explicit or direct instruction from 2006, (and I’ll have this citation here at the bottom), Doug Carne wrote about how tier one curricula can either help or or can hinder efforts to improve instruction.

​If there is no clear guidance on which tasks are most essential, or what are prerequisite skills for more complex ones provided by the curriculum that can hinder and impede explicit instruction.

​If there are vague directions for the teachers, teachers have to be prepared to structure the teaching of the task, so that demonstrations are clear and instruction is interactive . What you’re provided by your curricula can either really really facilitate that or can double the amount of planning time that you have to use.

A lot of curricula will introduce skills too quickly for at-risk readers.

Not that at risk readers are not able to learn, but we run into issues when there’s too little initial practice and too little subsequent practice built in over time, and that’s not in the context of meaningful experiences with text.​

We often need a systemic approach to modification of the curriculum to incorporate additional practice opportunities, and that’s an issue with the way that curricula are written, and that good curricula, we don’t have to do that.​

And we often see the language of the instruction that’s provided to the teachers is that it doesn’t match student needs. So teachers often have to modify the wording in teacher presentation of the materials to ensure that students understand all the terms that are used.​

Now you can make your curriculum better, though, by incorporating elements of explicit instruction to make it more interesting and engaging to all readers, and more effective for both the lowest and highest achieving readers.

​The next question that we often get is, “well, what about Fidelity? Right? Fidelity of implementation?”

​Most large curricula haven’t been rigorously studied through randomized, controlled trial studies, or found to be effective when implemented in a certain way. So it’s hard to say how to implement a large basal curriculum with 800 resources in the course of a year in the absence of that research.

​So this is not to say that fidelity of implementation isn’t important. Of course it is, but it’s important for programs and curriculum and resources that have been studied and implemented in a specific way and found to be effective, and most Tier 1 curricula just haven’t been studied to give us direction about how they’re to be implemented.

​So when planning for explicit instruction, we liked this visual sort of, it’s not a checklist, but it’s an inventory of the components of effective explicit instruction over time. So it’s not a list for teachers to check off or for administrators to check off in a walkthrough, or anything like that.

​Some of these elements won’t appear every single day in every, in every lesson, because a lot of them will refer to practices across lessons over time. But we thought that including sort of an inventory of the big, powerful instructional levers would be important for folks to know.

​This is from the wonderful text, explicit instruction by Anita Archer and Charles Hughes that is certainly in my professional library. I would encourage you all to, if you haven’t read it, or you don’t know about it to certainly to certainly check it out.

​So just to reiterate how well students learn is a function mostly of how well we teach and how well we incorporate these elements of explicit instruction. Teachers, methods and approaches play a really significant role in how students learn. We have a lot of agency over the schools and students that we have, which is a great responsibility. And one that I know no one takes lightly here.

​So let’s move into logically sequencing skills. Sounds kind of dry. But I promise there’s some more exciting content here. Sequencing of skills falls under the lesson design, part of explicit instruction. “How do we purposely plan our lessons over time to make sure that we are gradually bringing students into more and more complex levels of understanding?”, and not, as Anita Archer would say, committing a suicide and assuming that kids have the prerequisite, foundational skills or knowledge that they need before we start layering more complex instruction in

​So how do we ensure that we’re teaching skills in a logical sequence? I’m going to move a little bit more quickly through this slide.

​First and foremost, we’re following a scope and sequence. Again, this is how curricula can hamper or facilitate explicit instruction.

​We need to be better than our curricula, as teachers, as professionals, as educators, our curriculum, our tools for us to use, and we need to understand their strengths and weaknesses. We need to be better than them, though better than our resources, and understand, Where are the key levers to pull?

​We need to understand where some prerequisite skills may be being left out, and where we need to supplement or or reteach, or go a little bit more slowly, and sometimes this may require adjusting our pacing guide, but I would say that it’s more important to ensure a high level of mastery, of prerequisite skills across the classroom than to have simply covered the material in a way that doesn’t lead to mastery for all students. I’d rather go a little bit more slowly, ensure that a hundred percent of the kids are where they need to be, then move quickly and say, maybe 50 or 60% of the class is kind of where they need to be.

​So let’s talk about some classroom applications.

​We’re talking about a system––and following a scope and sequence that teaches phonics skills in order from simple to more complex. There are.

​I, almost all, really all major core curricula in use in Florida will have a scope and sequence for their phonics. Instruction. Not all of them are the same. There’s no research to indicate that one scope and sequence is more effective than any other one. The powerful ingredient is the fact that we are using a scope and sequence in teaching Tier 1 K-2 phonics, so that we’re not leaving any gaps in our foundational skills.

​This scope and sequence is a really broad scope and sequence that doesn’t have individual letter sounds or anything like that. It’s just kind of a continuum of phonic skills that would range over the course of a couple of years, from K to 2, from letter sound instruction to decoding multi-syllable words and everywhere in between. The other important thing about phonics scope and sequence is that it incorporates previously taught skills, and that we’re not teaching a particular pattern, a letter, a letter sequence, a grapheme and then moving on without systematically incorporating previously taught skills into future lessons. We’ll talk about that more when we talk about this concept of interleaved practice here a little later in the presentation.

​The concept of teaching prerequisite skills also applies to teaching comprehension strategies.

​This is a topic that requires a little bit of nuance when we’re talking about it because teaching comprehension strategies is clearly an evidence-based practice. We should absolutely be doing it.

​But we, as in the collective we across the country, have likely overdone it in terms of teaching comprehension strategies.

​Students probably do not need 30 different tools or strategies, when they’re reading. Evidence suggests that it’s more effective for curricula to use a small set of strategies and organizers and for those strategies to be used consistently across the years and that we not teach strategies for teaching strategies sake. Strategies are tools that students need or can use to access complex, rich text and good content.

​We don’t necessarily want to teach strategies just so that they have the strategy. And I think that we’ve overdone that across the country. Some of the most powerful comprehension strategies, according to researchers, are the ability to summarize or paraphrase in writing, it requires a good amount of knowledge and understanding and teaching students to recognize text structures. 

This session is not necessarily about either one of those. But research has found that teaching. Those types of comprehension skills are really effective powerful levers to teach that we do want to focus instructional time on.

​A through line here is that again, strategies are a means to an end of understanding high quality content and building background knowledge in science and social studies and English Language Arts. They’re tools to be used, and we don’t want to necessarily select the text based on the strategy that it allows us to teach. We want to select the text based on the value of the ideas and the information that the text contains.

​We teach a couple of high-yield comprehension strategies for students to use to access that text. I’d say we kind of are letting the tail wag the dog to a certain extent, or have been with an over teaching of comprehension strategies and crowding out the reading of high-quality, whole pieces of text and literature.

​So how does this apply? Again, let’s take a look at a lesson objective here of determining the author’s purpose when reading a certain myth or a folk tale. The prerequisite skills that are needed for something like that rather than jumping directly into asking students about what the author’s purpose was and engaging in discussion around that, we need to consider the prerequisite skills, including understanding narrative text structures. So do students understand, have they gotten explicit instruction on the components of narrative fiction, including, setting character, conflict, rising and falling action and resolution.

​Other pieces, other pieces of background knowledge or prerequisite skills is understanding of genre.

​Can they distinguish between forms of narrative fiction? So myths versus other narrative fiction myths allow authors to explain natural phenomena through personification. Why does rainfall happen? How does lightning strike and things like that?

​And drawing inferences? So can students use evidence from the text to infer meaning.

​So myths convey messages and lessons often implicitly throughout the story. So we need to be able to read into the meaning of the narrative. You’re not really able to infer without strong levels of background knowledge about what you’re reading about.

​So we need to make sure that these things are in place. Kids have a strong literary understanding before we can really tackle the author’s purpose in the context of myth.

So moving into opportunities to respond.

​Another nice archerism. Learning is not a spectator sport. Kids function best as active participants in their learning. There is a really lively volleying of information from teacher to class, from teacher to student, groups to groups, in a classroom that emphasizes explicit instruction is not the case, that the teacher is the person just doing all of the talking. In fact, if the teacher’s doing all the talking, it’s probably going to lead to a lot of disengagement.

​But that’s not to say that, well, there is a balance there. Teachers should be doing a good amount of modeling and direct instruction in explicit classrooms. Let’s talk about it.

​A little bit of research about opportunities to respond OTRs, a really important concept in instruction. There was a recent sort of review of research a couple of years ago that we cite for these and a couple of the next slides that I’ve looked at many studies over many years about effective teaching that leads to strong student outcomes, and how those classrooms facilitate active engagement and student responses.

​So effective teachers in the context of direct whole-class instruction elicit three to five simple responses per minute during that active whole class. And we do periods of direct instruction.

​That’s a lot of serve and return. That’s a lot of eliciting responses and active engagement of students.

​These sorts of simple responses can be things like unison, choral responses, or gestures or response cards, writing something on a mini whiteboard can also include reading a word or saying a sound in the context of, say, a phonics lesson for more complex responses, like sharing with a partner writing a longer answer, solving a math problem… It’s still about one opportunity to respond, provided to the class about per minute again, super highly interactive. 

And this is on average throughout the course of a particular study. So we’re not saying every minute that has to be one  complex response. But it’s averaging over time. And there’s the citation for that.

​So in terms of more detail from the same study. About 70% of responses during a whole group lesson should be in unison or the whole class.

​Everyone says it, everyone writes it or everyone and or everyone does it. Another, another Anita Archer-ism.

​30% of responses can be individual students. But I would like to prompt you, or I encourage you to consider the effects of relying on volunteers or raising a hand. How does that affect students? The students who both volunteer, and the students who don’t volunteer? Just a couple of beats to think about what the effect could be on relying mostly on calling on volunteers.

It can contribute to this sort of this concept of the this effect that we see in literacy of the rich getting richer, or students who are students who are already skilled, who already know the answer and and are more advanced are the ones who are going to be raising their hands really readily and are the ones who are getting called on and and are enjoying that sort of interaction with the teacher and move up in their in their trajectory versus students who don’t raise their hand and are and are not called on do not get the benefit of responding and receiving corrective feedback. The ability to receive corrective feedback is another really powerful instructional element that leads to students’ improvement in literacy.

​So if instruction is truly interactive and students are constantly responding, then your attention, then your on task behavior and your learning increase and your behavioral challenges decrease. There is a very direct line between student engagement and behavioral issues. 

We find study after study, that the more engaged that students are, the more that they are focused on their work and the fewer behavioral problems there are. Engagement is a complex sort of construct that there are a lot of different factors in classrooms that affect student engagement, the degree of interactivity is a huge one. How many opportunities we’re giving students to respond.

​The difficulty of a task is another key one. It’s not too difficult, it’s not, and it’s not too easy. Being in that zone of proximal development is a big indicator of engagement as well.

There’s a wide menu of ways to elicit frequent responses when you’re doing whole-class instruction, starting with oral responses. Oral responses that are for the whole class. They’re appropriate for all ages,  pre-K to 12, and all abilities, students with disabilities, students without disabilities. 

And they’re most effective when there’s a visual or auditory signal that the teacher uses to elicit the responses. It could be like a hand signal, a ‘one, two, three,’ something highly customizable. But research indicates that there should be some kind of signal that’s taught and practiced. Choral responses where all students answer together when the answer is short, and there’s only one correct answer. 

Partner responses, where students can share their thoughts and ideas with a with a partner when the answer is either short or long, but particularly when you need, when you need more than one word, or when you need to cut more than you need multiple words, or that, or when the answers vary and not everyone can shout out a whole sentence that might vary. So that’s a good opportunity for partner responses. Same thing with team responses.

​Also, written responses are proven to be beneficial for students across a variety of age groups, variety of subject areas. You know, a content area teachers in secondary in secondary grades definitely applicable to you as well.

​Response cards. So if students have a choice between A, B, C or D, an excellent choice for responding when the number of potential answers is a sort of limited response. Slates or mini whiteboards are better for answers that are a little longer. They’re more divergent.

And a really helpful way to take the temperature of a whole classroom’s understanding rather than cold calling on a small handful of students. If everyone holds up a whiteboard with a particular response, that is a really good way to get a real quick visual temperature gauge about whether you can move on or you need to deepen your instruction.

​There can be action responses, touching or pointing good for primary students and struggling students can ask them to put their finger on the letter or the word. It brings the students attention to the stimulus and allows it and allows teachers to monitor students.

Acting out or responding with gestures or facial expressions, can be done through elementary and secondary classrooms to make concepts easier to remember, to make learning more memorable and interesting, whether that’s acting out a vocabulary term, or modeling the behavior of solids, liquids and gases.

​So you know a variety of ways to elicit frequent responses here.

Another through line here that I’d like for everyone to kind of come away with is that, as I mentioned before, we have to be better than our curricula. Curricula are tools that help us with content and skills, but can sometimes be inefficient, or, at the very least, not written to optimize for active participation by all students.​

So we wanted to show a sample activity that comes from a large commercial Tier 1 curriculum. We’ve wiped out any detail for you to be able to identify what it is. That’s not the purpose of this presentation.

But something that appeared there in the curricula is, after reading a story, we have two students retell the story to the teacher or the class in a whole group setting, and then compare and contrast the retells while the other students listen.

​Compared with something like this.

​So after students’ partner read a story rather than maybe independently reading or popcorn reading or round Robin reading, which are definitely not evidence-based practices, partner reading, though, for sure is that again, that would increase everyone’s opportunities to respond and actually read the story.

Each student retells their story to their partner again, giving everyone an opportunity to work through a retell and share with their partner. Then, after we do that, we invite several students to share one part of the story. We break it down into smaller chunks while the teacher writes the ideas in order on a chart paper.

I don’t know about you, I would much prefer the second way to implement that lesson.

​If my concern is increasing engagement, decreasing behavioral difficulties, improving opportunities for students to respond, improving my ability as a teacher to assess and provide corrective feedback to students, you have so many opportunities to circulate and engage with students and provide that sort of feedback.

​So let’s talk a little bit more about this concept of practice and corrective feedback.

​Our next Archer-ism here is perfected. Practice over time makes perfect and permanent.

​A little different than the sort of typical thing of practice makes perfect; practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent for sure. The things that we practice over time do become permanent. But if we practice mistakes or inefficiencies, we can have a way of consolidating those mistakes or inefficiencies into our long term memory. So practice makes permanent, whether that’s for good or for bad.

But it’s a better way to think. But a better way to think about it is perfected practice or practice after strong modeling and feedback, with examples and non-examples, and practice with corrective feedback over time, meaning we don’t just teach it and then move on is what makes perfect and permanent.​

So practice over time with corrective feedback is what makes perfect and permanent.

​So let’s talk a little bit about the types of practice. And there’s a lot of things, when you start to learn about these principles of explicit instruction, of course we can’t paint with a broad brush about our teacher training and our university experience.

​I did my bachelor’s in elementary education many years ago, and this information would have been very helpful for me to have learned. I would have appreciated learning about practice and the different types, and how to use them to improve student memories for skills. But this was not included in my teacher training.

​Not to my benefit, and not to my students’ benefit when I was teaching, I wish I could go back into the classroom and reteach students that I taught when I taught second grade and fifth grade with the knowledge that I have here.

​So types of practice, we have masked practice, which are your immediate sort of repeated practice of a skill after you’ve provided that initial instruction, right? So we’ll talk about what that is, or we’ll go into a little bit more depth about their uses and what it is in the next couple of slides.

​There’s also what’s called distributed practice, which has to do with providing students purposefully, and in a pre-planned way, multiple opportunities to practice the skill over time in certain intervals. A week after two weeks after three weeks after. Distributed practice is hugely important. I wish someone had taught me about distributed practice when I was in college, because I wouldn’t have crammed for tests every week or every semester.

​Then we have interleaved practice, which is a type of distributed practice, and it has to do with providing opportunities to practice varying types of related skills. And we’ll talk about what each one of these things are.

So mass practice again, student practice, in isolation, of a newly learned or newly instructed skill or strategy immediately after instruction.

​This is the common sort of practice that we do after a lesson, and it’s the most frequently provided form of practice in published curriculum.​

So your 15 practice problems after we teach a math concept, or after we’ve taught a new phonics skill. We provide word lists featuring words that have that letter pattern.

Mass practice is super important and something we absolutely want to be doing. It is necessary, but not sufficient for true student mastery. It does initially result in short-term retention of the skill, which is again necessary, we have to get students over that initial hump of learning the thing, but if we don’t put it into practice over time, if we don’t build in purposeful opportunities to practice those skills later in the ensuing weeks and months, then those results quickly fade and we do not want for mass practice to be the only practice strategy used.

I did my Friday vocabulary test dutifully and consistently. When I was teaching, I taught my 10 vocabulary words every week, decades ago at this point, and then we moved on to the next set of 10 words, and then the next set of 10 words. 

I had kids who would consistently ace that vocabulary test on Friday, but then come Monday they did not remember, or at least in the following weeks or months. They just all those, all the vocab, all that rich, good vocabulary, just kind of went right out the window. It’s because we stopped at mass practice. We didn’t include distributed and interleaved practice, afterward also known as blocked practice kind of as a visual of what that looks like.

​So we teach skill A in week one. Then we practice skill A in week one.

Then in week two, we move on to skill B. Practice skill B, week three. We teach skill C, practice skill C and so on, and so forth.

​Contrasted with distributed practice, which is practicing a skill or strategy in sessions that are relatively short practice sessions, but spaced out over time.

​This concept of distributed practice has been studied for probably 60-70 years at this point, and consistently found to be just one in the Mount Rushmore of effective learning strategies. Everything from studying adolescent students in college and high school, and the positive effects of scheduling short study sessions over the course of a semester rather than cramming for a thing when the test comes to teaching young students about phonics, skills and purposely building in opportunities for them to practice previously learned skills. And everywhere in between, distributed practice is just one of these unassailably effective things. And it’s not just literacy. It’s math. It’s really and it’s content areas. It’s all areas of learning.

​The space that you provide in between practice can vary.

So we just have a quick little visual here. You provide an initial skill, instruction, and mass practice. Then, a week later, a little short practice session, and then, a week later, a week later, a week later. That’s kind of a regular one week intervals. You can space it out. You could do a practice session of this, of the skill a week later, and then, two weeks later, and then three weeks later and then four weeks later.

That’s all. That’s also distributed practice of the same skill we have interleaved practice.

An interleave practice is distributed practice that includes multiple skills. And so it has to do with adding related skills to ones that were previously taught and practiced. So all the previously taught skills are practiced together over time. This is unassailably the most effective way to teach tons of different pieces of content.

Consistently over many decades, research has found the best types of outcomes for interleaved practice. If our goal is long-term retention of literacy skills and students’ ability to generalize and transfer that knowledge to other contexts and take a phonics skill that we taught and then transfer it to complex text, or to teach a comprehension strategy and apply it to various different texts.

​And what is that? What might that look like here in a little quick visual.

​It would start here with T. The T is teach. The P is practice.

​We’d start out teaching skill one. Then in the next section, we practice skill one and teach skill two. Then after that we practice skill one and two, and teach skill three.

​After that we practice skills 1, 2, and 3, and teach skill and teach skill for and so on until all of the skills within a domain of knowledge are taught.

​If you’re in a district that’s implementing UFLI foundations, what a wonderful example of interleaved practice over the course of a single year and many years. 

It’s kind of like this, that I don’t have enough positive things to say about the way that UFLI foundations is structured, and the way that it builds in interleaved practice of previously taught skills. Just top notch, but interleave practice, it’s something that can apply to many different skills, not just phonics.

​So we wanted to take a little bit of time to illustrate what it might look like in vocabulary instruction, and how that might contrast with typical teaching practices, or something that’s built into your curriculum.

​How I certainly taught vocabulary when I was teaching, so I may have say, dedicated five lessons per week to a particular text, and provided vocabulary instruction on day one or or throughout that week, with one or just or a small handful of vocabulary assignments with no subsequent instruction or practice being provided.

​Take a second to think about massed distributed versus interleaved.

​What type of practice might this be so providing initial vocabulary instruction with practice on a subsequent assignment? And then moving on.

​That would be mass practice. Again, important, necessary, but not sufficient. And so we want to think about ways to incorporate more distributed practice throughout the week, and then in subsequent weeks.

​We want to encourage folks to feel autonomy, to build in purposeful, distributed practice of previously taught vocabulary through a couple of different ways. This is not an exhaustive sort of list.

​Brief, pre-planned review sessions of previously taught vocabulary, so students could have something like vocabulary cards, and we and the teacher says a definition or provides an example or a non-example and students hold up a card.

​We could build in purposeful planned discussions in which our prompts are chosen specifically to have kids use words in the sentence and then share out for corrective feedback. This could also be done in a written format and provide structured writing practice using previously taught vocabulary interleaving in that previously taught vocabulary into subsequent writing opportunities.

​Okay, so we’re kind of getting down to the end here of the session.

​I want to do a couple of recaps. Again explicit instruction. We are focused on directly teaching academic skills, not relying on implicit instruction, not necessarily being such a guide on the side, but purposely designing and delivering effective Tier 1 instruction where we directly model the skill, we have a strong understanding of where we are and where we’re going throughout the course of the year, so that we can appropriately sequence skills in a systematic way to guide students over time to increasing levels of independence of what we’re trying to teach.

​We ensure that students have those prerequisite skills to learn to learn the new skills that are being taught, and that may cause us to have to slow down a bit in our pacing and deviate a bit from what our curriculum is asking us to do.

​And that’s okay when it’s in the context of improving our instruction and making sure that all students are benefiting maximally from our instruction.

​We’re providing practice and explicit corrective feedback by purposefully looking for opportunities to increase student engagement, to increase the number of times students have to respond and answer our questions. The more of our students’ feedback that we can elicit, the more feedback that we can give to them, that gives us, as teachers, opportunities to take the temperature of our class, and to understand who’s understanding, who’s not understanding and to provide sort of specific tailored feedback toward them.

​Explicit instruction is scaffolded as much as necessary, but not too much, and not too little.

​That’s very easy to say, but that’s why I think I agree with the good Dr. Louisa Moats who says that teaching reading is rocket science. It’s very complicated. It is an extremely challenging thing to do to constantly have students in that zone of proximal development.

​You know it’s not an easy task by any means.

​And explicit instruction gradually, as quickly as needed, removes those scaffolds so that students can exhibit independent mastery of the skills that we’re trying to teach.

​So I have some references here. We will be making this recording available to everyone who registered and they will be up on the Lastinger Center’s website. So if you are the type of person who likes to go through references and read through, which I always encourage folks to be, we have our references here.

We want to encourage everyone if you haven’t to go ahead and to register for sessions two and three. So in our next section, we’ll be talking about multi-tiered systems of support, clarifying things like, what is an intervention, what qualifies something as an intervention versus an accommodation, what are some common sort of barriers that schools and districts face when trying to implement MTSS, and all sorts of other helpful sorts of MTSS Implementation gems.

​Then our next section will be talking about cohesive reading interventions, or how we align Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention with Tier 1 instruction, so that we are not confusing students with multiple different practices, curricula and instructional routines. And we’re also making our resources as efficient as they can be, and not wasting resources and instructional time and of course, money.

​So we thank everyone for attending. We hope to see you at the next one. Thank you so much. We appreciate your time, and best of luck to you, and we’ll see you at the next one!