S4 Ep18 - Summer Series - Research to the Classroom: Dyad Reading Part 3 (Teacher Talk)

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Hi there, it's Jocelyn here. This episode of the podcast is a really special one, it is the very first of the Teacher Talk episodes in our new kind of podcast series called Research to the Classroom. In this series, we've heard about fluency practices, including dyad reading or assisted reading. If you haven't listened to the first two episodes of this series, I suggest that you do so. It will give you great context for listening to what our guest has to say.

Kirby MacDonald is an experienced teacher currently teaching Year Five in New South Wales. She has some really fantastic insights and routines to share with you about her classroom, and I think that there's so many takeaways here for you, everything from how to set up expectations, how to support strugglers, what a routine might look like and what it takes to shift practice away from things that are a bit less effective, like independent silent reading. So I hope that you love this episode as much as I loved speaking with Kirby. I look forward to having her back on the podcast again into the future. Let's take it away.

Jocelyn: Hey, Kirby, how are you going?

Kirby: Good, thank you. How are you?

Jocelyn: I'm excellent now that you're here, it's so fantastic to have you here for our very first Teacher Talk episode of the podcast. Kirby, why don't you share with our listeners who you are, where you teach, what you do, how long you've been teaching for and all the things?

Kirby: Sure, so my name's Kirby. This will be my 12th year of teaching, I worked out earlier, which sounds like a really long time, but it certainly doesn't feel like that long. I'm a teacher at Trinity Anglican College in Albury, which sits on the border of New South Wales and Victoria. So I currently teach a Year Five class, which I love, I love teaching the Upper Primary. I've been in literacy leadership in the past. I've done a little bit of work for the Department of Education in Victoria and now I'm focusing on some numeracy leadership. So a little bit of work for the Department of Education in Victoria and now I'm focusing on some numeracy leadership. So a little bit of a mixed bag, but that's what I like. I like being able to, I suppose, dabble in a little bit of everything.

Jocelyn: Wonderful, and one of the things that I've always admired about your practice, Kirby, is that you run a tight ship there. You're quite specific and clear on what is important for your students' outcomes and you see what needs to happen and you just do it. And, having spent a couple of days with you and your kids in your classroom, I can absolutely see that that has paid dividends, because they were a fantastic group of kids and, as we know, good kids come from great teachers. So well done to you. But, Kirby, we're here today to talk about fluency and assisted reading that happens in the classroom.

So listeners, if you have listened to the previous two episodes, you will have heard me share a research paper about dyad reading, or assisted reading, and the benefits of that particular practice. Then, in the second episode of this series, I shared a Fluency Development Lesson structure that you might like to have a go with, and that comes from Tim Rasinski and Chase Year. But, Kirby, I would love for you to share with our podcast listeners today what practice in fluency in your classroom looks like. And, before we get to that, tell us a bit about what reading practice looked like when you first started teaching or before you came to this understanding of structured literacy that you have now.

Kirby: Sure, so reading practice in, I suppose, the years gone by was really based on independent reading. So kids were selecting their own texts and then they would read for 15 to 20 minutes per day. And this is kind of going from when I taught Kindergarten or Foundation all the way through to Year Six. So kids were self-selecting their texts, independently reading their texts. I would listen to them read because I do believe that's good practice, and we were holding reading conferences with the kids. But I've certainly seen much more of a shift now that I've switched across to structured literacy and the reading fluency practices that sit within that.

Jocelyn: Yeah, so what prompted you to make the change from that independent reading to the assisted reading that you do now? What weren't you seeing in the kids or what wasn't working for you?

Kirby: I think it was just hard to know when, unless you were specifically sitting down side by side listening to a particular child read, it was hard to know if they were engaged in real reading or if it was fake reading. You know, it's not hard for kids to work out how to look like they're reading and then to think that they'll be left alone if that's what they look like they're doing. But I think obviously over the last couple of years there's been so much talk and interest in structured literacy and what that looks like and that certainly piqued my interest and then, as information became more readily available, I really started to engage in the research and the learning blogs, podcasts, YouTube clips, around what reading practice could look like in a structured literacy classroom.

Jocelyn: How did you get started in shifting from the independent reading to what you do now? What were your first steps?

Kirby: I'm a big believer in just giving things a go, like what's the worst that can happen? If it doesn't work, we're the ones, the teacher is the one that knows that it didn't work, it's not necessarily the kids. And I was just really open with the kids after I'd done a lot of reading, and lots of that reading came from your blog posts, in looking at what reading fluency could look like. I just found them really relatable and I felt like they spoke to me as a teacher and just gave me a real sense of what it could look like in a classroom.

I think, for me, I'm willing to jump in and give things a go, but I do want to be fairly confident around what the practice should look like, and I felt that your blog posts and your YouTube clips really resonated in that regard. I could visualise what it was going to look like in my classroom. And then I just said to the kids you know we're going to, things are changing a little bit and we're going to give this a go and I gave them some of the reasons why, like why we wanted to focus on this particular practice of reading fluency and what I was hoping for from them, how I was hoping that it would improve their vocabulary, their comprehension, their reading rate, etc. And then we just jumped in and started to give just tweak little things.

Jocelyn: So what does, if we were all to come and stand in the back of your classroom in an average week, what would we see in your classroom in terms of fluency practice? 

Kirby: Yeah, so currently, and this was probably one of the first things that I did, I developed for my own classroom initially, and then we've rolled things out at a greater school level. But for my own classroom, the first thing that I did was I wanted to know what the routine looked like across five days. I felt like I could commit to five days of reading fluency and, you know, interruptions happen, so if we lose a day here and there, that's ok. But knowing that we've got a pretty rigorous approach and for most part, for most weeks, it does happen five days a week I felt confident in implementing that.

But what I wanted to do was focus on drawing up, and then I wrote it out, typed it up, made it look like a pretty poster for myself and for the kids, in terms of what each day of our reading fluency routine was going to look like. And then we went through really specifically and broke it down and modelled ok, this is what our Monday fluency practice looks like, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, etc. so that the kids could visually see what the routine was going to look like for that day. I could see what the routine was going to look like for that day, and then we just started to chip away at it from there.

Jocelyn: Yeah, and what does Monday look like?

Kirby: Yeah, so on a Monday we look at a poem. So I think kids don't really get exposed to poetry all that much unless you study it. Well, they're exposed to it, but they don't realise they're exposed to it. So it might be song lyrics, although I'm not singing in front of the class EVER, it could be song lyrics, it could just be a poem that I've found online. We've got so many incredible poetry books in our library, so taking a photo and displaying it on the screen or finding something online, so it looks like a poem for the Monday.

Our Monday fluency routine is a little bit shorter. I'd say it's probably five to ten minutes, because our Monday spelling routine is a little bit longer, I wanted to make the Monday fluency routine a little bit shorter so that I wasn't feeling pressured by time. I didn't want, I wasn't willing to drop anything, but I knew I could be flexible in my approach to make sure that all of the components were still valuable and rigorous, but they did all fit in.

So the Monday looks like a poem and that's echo reading. So I'll read the poem start to finish, modelling, and we set it up at the beginning of the year so that the kids know what's involved in reading fluency. So we're looking at our accuracy, we're looking at rate, we're looking at prosody and we unpack what those things mean.

So we unpack them with both strong examples and non-examples, which is usually me modelling that.

So what does accurate reading look like? Sound like?

What does a good rate look like? Sound like?

What does prosody sound like? Look like?

So I model the poem, start to finish and then we go through kind of line by line or stanza by stanza, depending on the structure of the poem, and I'll read it. The kids will read it back and obviously I'll say to them "I'm trying to model appropriate accuracy, rate and prosody for this particular text" and they're trying to echo that back to me. So I find that works really well because they've got that strong example and it's not threatening or intimidating for the kids because they've heard me read it. Then they're just repeating it back. So that works really well for a Monday.

Then on a Tuesday, we move into a whole class choral read and that will be the text or the passage that we're using for the remainder of the week. So, in that period of time, in that ten minutes, again I'll read the text or the passage, start to finish to begin with. And then we're going through and we're chorally reading that passage together, making sure that there's whole class engagement. You know everyone's joining in, everyone's voice is heard. And we'll go through and we'll unpack any vocabulary. Not, we don't deviate and so make that the necessarily, lesson focus, but I'll just quickly go through. And Oh, this is the word, this means such and such. Keep reading. I'm not trying to go off on a tangent and start heading down that train track.

And then on a Wednesday, Thurday, Friday, they're moving to assisted pairs reading. So, using the same passage from the Tuesday, which is usually around 200 words, I'd say they will modelling by working in mixed ability pairs. So I will set the pairs, and I usually set them at the start of the year, and only make changes if I need to. So I consider the kids and who they work well with. But I've also considered who's the stronger reader, who's the weaker reader. But also how can I pair them? So it's not necessarily, it works for the social dynamics, it works for the friendship dynamics, but it also works for their confidence as well.

So if I've got a student who I know is a weaker reader, I might not necessarily pair them with the strongest reader in the class, but I will pair them with a stronger reader but also someone who I know that they're going to get some really positive role modelling from. So I want them to feel supported in that pairing because they work with that pair so closely for, however long it takes, sometimes I don't change the pair.

Jocelyn: Yes, and that's a really good point in that the teacher knowledge about the students as a whole is so important in this. It's not just about looking at a score.

So how precise did you feel you needed to be in that pairing in terms of stronger and weaker reader?

How did you determine who was what?

And you know, because we know, that these ok can be a little bit fluid or imprecise at times, so what did that look like for you?

Kirby: Yeah. So, well, my school is just starting to go down the DIBELS journey at the moment. So in future I will probably look a little bit more closely at the DIBELS data. But initially, and prior to using DIBELS, it was more observational. So I'd listened to everyone read and I was just making rough notes as I was going and thinking, Ok, this person with that one and whatnot. So we just call them Reader A, Reader B. The kids, it's upper primary, so they know they've got, without explicitly saying it, they've got a little bit of an understanding of who the stronger readers are and who the weaker readers are. But I've never had anyone say, Oh, why am I Reader B? Or, How come I don't get to read first? They kind of just, yeah, they just have a little bit of an understanding.

I suppose that depends on the classroom culture and the environment that we've set up as well, in that everyone is learning, everyone makes mistakes and, yeah, going from there.

Jocelyn: And I guess, too, you've set the students up for success so well that, because this is a successful confidence-building undertaking, that they don't have the negative feelings that might come with with feeling like, you know, I'm the dumb one. That's actually not how your classroom works at all, and I think you've hit the nail on the head talking about classroom culture.

The other thing that's interesting, as I reflect on the research paper that is shared in this series, is the fact that the students did know who was the lead reader and who was the supported reader, and the students who were the lead readers were really given this responsibility of being the one to provide the model, and so they felt quite invested in being a great model reader for their partner, and in turn, the researchers suggested that that led to them improving their own fluency, because they were explicitly focusing on the expression, the prosody, the accuracy and the rate, as you've described. That all matches with what was in the research. So well done you, and I love that you were just gave yourself permission to use your teacher judgement and that, had you, and I'm guessing, had you discovered that there was a pair that was not perfectly matched or well matched, you would have just changed it.

Kirby: Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah. Don't need to wait for anything. I don't need to wait for an assessment. We can just make a change.

Jocelyn: Yes, that's it, based on what the needs of the students are.

So, in those three days of assisted reading, tell me more about that and about the mechanisms of feedback that you've built in.

Kirby: So, again, to start us off for that lesson, I'll quickly just read the passage, start to finish. Again, modelling, accuracy, rate, prosody, and it's not long, that's 30 seconds to a minute and I'll just say, Ok, reading fluency partners, off you go. And they'll all go and choose somewhere to sit. They know that they need to be sitting side by side so that they can each, each student has a copy of the passage, but I also want them sitting side by side so that they can kind of track where the other person is up to. The lead reader, so Reader A, and that's probably something I'll explore for next year and making sure the kids know who is the lead reader and who's doing that modelling.

But the lead reader will read the passage first, so start to finish and then the second reader, the weaker reader, will read the passage and they'll just go back and forth reading the passage for a specified amount of time. It's usually not too long, I'd say four to five minutes, and within that time they've usually each read the passage two to three times each. And then at the end, and during that time time I'm going around and just sitting alongside pairs listening, and obviously I generally try to listen to the weaker readers first, but in doing so like I'm still getting to the stronger readers, of course. At the end of that specified time, and this is probably a strategy, it maintains engagement, but I also think it means that no one can opt out, I will just choose at random. Well, I tell the kids it's at random, but I generally have, when we say things are at random in the classroom, we usually have a little bit of an agenda to it, but I will choose kids to provide feedback. So say, if there's Johnny and Sally that are partnered up and reading together, I'll say, Oh Johnny, can you tell me how Sally went with her reading fluency today? And so that means that that particular student is responsible for staying engaged, making sure they are listening to their partner and then providing feedback. And the feedback component, we will have set up at the beginning of the year in terms of what that could look like.

So I'll say to the students at the start of the year, and I'll model this, like I'll have a student up with me and we'll model the feedback process. I'll say we're going to give feedback based on the student's accuracy, rate and prosody and then I'm really rigorous in holding the kids to that. So, for example, if Johnny says, Oh well, Sally read well because she read with expression, I'll reframe it and say, Oh, can we, is it because Sally read with great prosody today, because she used different voices to model different characters' tones?

So I want them to be specific in their feedback. They know and it doesn't take them long to realise that if they say, Oh, Sally had good rate, they know pretty quickly that I won't accept that as a form of feedback. I'll say, Oh, Sally had good rate because... and I'll expect them to finish the sentence and to provide some more detail. So if they're not sure, I'll help them out and I'll give them some prompts, but it doesn't take too long for them to be able to work out what good feedback actually sounds like, what specific feedback sounds like, and then in providing that feedback to their partner, they're also having to think about what they've done, with their reading fluency.

Jocelyn: Yeah, and it occurs to me that this can then connect to some sort of goal-setting focus for each child. Is that something you've explored and I'm putting you on the spot, sorry.

Kirby: No that's alright.

Jocelyn: But what are your thoughts on setting reading goals and what they might look like and how this process can help?

Kirby: Yeah, absolutely. We probably haven't used the reading fluency to set goals in, I suppose, an explicit way. In an informal way, yes, but that's something that I could definitely work on for next year, because that's what they're doing every single day in giving feedback and thinking about their own reading fluency and thinking about their partner's reading fluency, they're still thinking about what's something that they could focus on and improve on. So, yeah, I think that could definitely work for goal setting.

Jocelyn: Yeah, so what are you seeing as the impact on student learning? You mentioned that you've just started using DIBELS in your school, and so I'm assuming that, moving forward, you'll be looking at the DIBELS data and hoping to see that improvement in the data. But up until this point, how were you measuring impact of this practice?

Kirby: Yeah, so with DIBELS, we'll definitely use that going forward as more of that formal assessment tool, but up until now it's been more, I would say, observational data for the specific practice of reading fluency, in terms of listening to them read, then hearing them present that passage to the class on a Friday, seeing, and you can just, I suppose, when you know what you're looking for, then you, when I know that I'm looking for the accuracy, rate, the prosody, then I can hone in on that and I do see it also pay off in other areas of the curriculum as well, not necessarily just during reading or just during English, but across the board, just generally, I've seen a big uptake with the reading fluency and that's something that we've just been so rigorous with all year. But I'm seeing a bigger payoff in their knowledge of vocabulary, their reading comprehension. They're able to get through greater chunks of text now with greater accuracy and with that, I suppose, improved rate. Therefore their comprehension has been improving and I would say, because we have such a heavy focus on morphology as well, with the morphology linked in with the reading fluency, just seeing that reading comprehension come through. So it's hard to pinpoint, I suppose, one particular area, because we know it's a combination of all of the components of structured literacy coming through. But I would say that the reading fluency is not something that I would be willing to drop now because I do see such an improved benefit across the board.

Jocelyn: Yeah, absolutely, and that interconnection, I think, is so important. You know it is a bit, you know I would say that a literacy, a good literacy block is like a permaculture garden: everything is interconnected and has more than one purpose. So, as you say, there are so many positive knock-on effects of this particular practice.

Some of the questions that I'm anticipating that our colleagues might have will be things like:

Where do you get the passages from?

How do you choose them?

How do you make sure they're at a right "level"?

Kirby: Yeah, the level one's an interesting one because, you know, what is a level? I suppose there's so much variation within a particular level. But initially what we were doing is we were having a look for passages, I suppose online, or taking photos of some of the texts that we were reading and using those as passages and bits and pieces. But I was just finding that was taking a really long time and it wasn't necessarily, you could go online, I could Google and you can find heaps of fluency passages online, but they were never quite what I was after.

So I started using ChatGPT and other forms of teacher AI to generate our own passages and that's where I suppose I found a lot of time saving. I could generate a passage in a minute, really, popping in a specific prompt. So at the moment we link our passages to the particular genre that we're studying. So if we're looking at narrative, then we've got narrative passages. So I might enter a prompt into ChatGPT, "You're a Year Five teacher in New South Wales, Australia, create a 200 word reading passage that's a narrative", and something that I haven't done this year but I would like to do for next year would be to link in, now that my school has got a pretty solid understanding of morphology now, teaching routines associated with that using the presentations in The Resource Room, then I could link in, "Can you also include some words that contain the base lept", just so that I can make sure we've got some exposures to the morphology as well. But those passages that you can create through ChatGPT, the more specific you are with the prompt, the better the passage, and it's just so quick and easy you really can't stuff it up.

Jocelyn: Yeah, yes. And I think that that sort of leads into the next question that people will have, which is, How do you make sure the kids don't get bored with the repeated reading?

Kirby: Yeah, that's something that I haven't had an issue with. I would say not once this year, and for the most part we've had our reading fluency every single week, five days a week for the most part, but I suppose because on a Monday it's a poem, so that's a different text, that one kind of stands alone, and that's more so exposing the kids to that form of reading fluency and oral reading. But then on the Tuesday, because we're reading the passage all together, I suppose it's not just on the kids. So really it's three days of the week where they've got the repeated reading of the same passage and I haven't had anyone say bored or whatnot.

I think because we've set the kids up and said to the kids, the more that you read a particular passage, the better that you get at it, and they really would read it, I suppose two, three or four times, depending on the length, maximum four times each day. And I think, too, it's the tone that the teacher sets for that particular practice.

So if I'm saying to the kids "Oh, here's your passage, off you go. You know five minutes timer is on, get started", then the tone that I would be setting would be that I don't value this, there's no interest, there's no engagement, then therefore, that's what I would be expecting to come back from the kids in terms of their attitude towards it. Whereas I'm modelling like an enthusiasm and engagement, we're talking about why, like why this is so important.

The passage, it does change each week and I suppose to the kids because they improve with it, and we make sure that when we generate the passage on ChatGPT, we make sure that it is of interest. I don't want it to write a passage about toast, or if it was about toast or bread or something, then I'd make sure that the passage had some sarcasm or some humour or there was something in it, so that the kids are engaged and they can experiment with that prosody and the expression that they're using. But I think, too, a lot of it just comes down to the teacher setting the tone and setting the energy for the room for that particular practice, and I think therefore, yeah, the kids, they just haven't had an issue with it.

Jocelyn: I think, Kirby, the way that you've built that feedback mechanism into the lesson gives everyone an opportunity to feel good. We all want to hear that we've done a good job. So when the, dare I say it, learning is visible and the students can see that they are achieving, they are improving, they are growing and someone told them they did a good job, then they're going to want to engage. Success breeds engagement, so it's not just about the reading itself, it's all of the other things that live sort of in the ecosystem.

Kirby: Yeah, yeah.

Jocelyn: And another question I'm anticipating is that your class, like every class everywhere, has students with a range of reading development, and you do have a couple of students who struggle quite significantly and you've also got some really high flyers. So what does it look like in your classroom for you to balance the needs of the different students?

Kirby: Yeah, you've definitely hit the nail on the head there. Like there is such a diverse spread, not just within my classroom, within all classrooms. I would say making sure that the passages do kind of pique student interest, making sure they're engaging passages, holds them to it. Those stronger readers, they will find ways to kind of extend themselves with the way that they're reading the particular passage and the prosody that they're using and kind of experimenting with their rate a little bit as well, whereas those students that are the weaker readers, whilst the Wednesday might be a little bit more tricky for them because it's their first go at a particular passage, they improve each time they read that passage. So again, that success breeds success. So their confidence is starting to build as the week goes on.

If it were a huge issue, I suppose then I would have a variety of, I would have the standard passage that I've generated, but I'd also probably get ChatGPT to make one passage a little bit easier or one passage a little bit harder, still focused on the same thing, and then maybe the stronger reader reads that harder passage, the weaker readers reading slightly easier passage, but with the goal that they're getting to the same passage. Or it might be that the weaker readers, I suppose I would use my teacher judgement. It might be that the weaker readers perhaps start off their reading fluency practice by reading with me more so than reading with a partner, or they might be reading with me as a group until they've developed their confidence enough to be able to go and just join in with their partner and keep the routine going as the rest of the class does.

Jocelyn: So this is not something that has come about in your class this year to my understanding, but, drawing on your experience, if you had a student or two in your classroom who really were only working at that basic code level, starting to you know build phonics, what would possible solutions be for them in that fluency lesson?

Kirby: Yeah, so I'd have them working at a sentence level if that were the case. I suppose it hasn't, yeah, it hasn't happened for me this year or so far in my reading fluency journey but I'd have them working at a sentence level. Whether that be with me as a well, I probably would have them working with me at a sentence level until I felt that their code knowledge, until I could catch their code knowledge up to a level where they were okay to start engaging in slightly harder passages because I just, I can't leave things to chance, that's not fair on the kids. I would potentially use that time to do a little bit of phonics catch up with them at that sentence level, just knowing that that's another exposure and that's their point of need. I think you just have to meet the kids where their point of need is.

Jocelyn: So they would be essentially reading decodable sentences as their fluency. So the point is, everybody is engaging in fluency routines, but what they read will depend on what they need.

Kirby: Yeah, absolutely.

Jocelyn: But there would be, for most students other than those students significantly struggling and still developing those foundations of phonics. They're all getting the same passage and that's a feature of your classroom I've seen in other areas too, Kirby. So in the morphology work, we have the differentiated word lists, or the parts of the list, and so your students who need more help they start with the simpler words, but then you've been able to work it so that across the week they're actually building up to be reading those longer multi-syllabic, multi-morphemic words as well. And what I really like about that is that you're not putting those kids in a box and saying, well, no, that's your level, you can't read beyond that.

Once they've got foundations of phonics, then we do need to stretch them, because without stretch we're not going to have learning. So that's a feature of your classroom that I see across the board that you're not scared to stretch the kids but provide oodles of support around that, still recognising that there's some phonics catch-up work to happen just to strengthen spelling and reading. But we don't deny the age-appropriate work to the older children, which is fab.

So what were some of the challenges that you encountered introducing this in your own classroom, but then also as a school, because this is a practice you've mentioned is now sitting across your whole junior school. What's it been like for you as a teacher and for your team to implement this practice?

Kirby: Yeah, I suppose some of the challenges would just be well, again, it was tricky, I suppose, when I started introducing it, whilst I could do a lot of reading and listening around what it could look like, I couldn't necessarily see it in action. I'm someone I really like to see what something could look like. It just helps me to be able to, I suppose, visualise and then implement what I'm going to do in my classroom. So some of the challenges were sitting around time. That's obviously a big one and that's one that most people would say well, how do you fit it in? So it was just looking at how can I set up and structure routines so that all of the components of structured literacy can still fit within the literacy block and I can just make sure that things are pretty tight time-wise. But my routines are solid enough in that.

I think when you set things across a week or you look at your routines, you're thinking about well,

How am I going to be able to teach what I need to teach within the specified time frame?

How are the kids going to be able to learn what they need to be able to learn within that timeframe?

And looking at, well, is there anything fluffy that sits within there that's really not having any impact on student learning?

It doesn't mean we don't have fun, we still have heaps of fun. You can have a laugh, lots of sarcasm, lots of humour, especially in upper primary. But some of the things that were a little bit fluffy we just thought, well, they can just go, we can fit those in in other areas. We haven't had much fluff this year, had to be pretty structured and cut it all back.

What's some fluff from the past? Kids are very good, again, especially upper primary, at procrastinating. So if kids are going on and on about something from their weekend, absolutely it's important to them. But also you get to the point where you can tell that they're just talking about their weekend now or they're talking about something that's happened this morning as a way of procrastinating and avoiding getting into what they need to start.

So I'll just say to the kids "You know, that sounds really good, I'd love to hear about it. Maybe you could tell me about it at the start of lunch," and if it is really important to them, they'll stay and they'll tell me at the start of lunch. If it's not important, they're running out the door.

So just little things like that that, I suppose, could easily chew up, you know, five to ten minutes getting started in the morning. Whilst, absolutely, we have conversations and we engage in things that aren't necessarily about the learning, it's when's my moment or when's the time for that to happen. Um, yeah, not undervaluing the importance of connection at all, but I think it's when. And I can remember sitting in classrooms and thinking, oh you know, if I tell the teacher about this from the weekend, then we don't have to start that.

Jocelyn: But you are laser focused on maximising time on task, so, that's a difference there.

If you were chatting with a teacher in a lift who was thinking of implementing this particular practice, what advice would you have for them?

Kirby: Persistence. I'd say if you feel like something's not working, either persist with it until you get to a point where you do feel like it's working, or just change your approach slightly, make some adjustments, make some tweaks, go back, do some further reading, research, reach out, ask people. And I suppose that's the power of social media these days as well, like if you can find and connect with particular people whose approach you feel really confident in and who you resonate with, and asking or you know, I've got this issue how did you navigate that, what not? I think that's really helpful.

But I'd say that it just comes down to persistence, you know, if something doesn't work, I'm not going to throw the whole routine out. I'm going to reflect and think well, why didn't that work? You know, was it just an off day with the kids? Was I a little bit off? What can I do different next time? But just, and always going back and unpacking why with the kids.

So I'm not throwing a new routine or a particular lesson structure at the kids and saying this is what we're doing, go and do it. I'm trying to give them the why so that they can understand, so that if things do fall off track a little bit we can go back to. Well, what's the why? Why are we doing this? What does it need to look like?

And lots of, if someone was implementing lots of strong versus non-examples. So I would always model the non-examples. But when and where I can, I'll use the kids to model the strong examples, because the kids, you know, they probably like their peers more than they like me at times and that's where they, they're so influenced by their peers and particularly, if I can link in, if there's someone who was a little bit trickier or more challenging or disengaged where they're doing a really good job, well then I'll try to use them as the strong example and try and pump their tyres and lift them up a little bit. Everyone likes a good tyre pump every now and then. So, trying to get use strong versus non-examples to show what it should be looking like.

But I am pretty strong in always saying that the non-examples need to come from the teacher. I'm not ever going to say you know, Sally and Johnny over there, that's what it shouldn't look like. The non-examples, whilst I might model that of what I'm seeing from the kids, I want the kids to know that the non-example comes from what I'm doing and, yeah, the strong example comes from either myself or from another student in the classroom for that positive peer influence.

Jocelyn: Yeah, I love that and I've always done the same in terms of doing the non-example, but the way you just phrased that, I think, is really beautiful. Thank you for sharing that with us. The three things that I'm getting out of your practice in this area, in all that you do, but in this discussion today, was that you're insistent. You know, there's nowhere to hide. You are going to do it. It's not negotiable, it's not if you feel like it or how does it go today. No, this is your insistent. It's going to happen that you're persistent, as you said, but also you're being consistent. So it's not something that you did four times in Term One and then said, oh, we didn't see any gains from that.

It's, none of these things happen as a one-off or when they're ad hoc, and this is any part of our practice, it has to be consistent and rigorous and we have to do it over time, because it's the time that helps children build the automaticity. And, as you've described to me before, about the confidence that the kids now have in reading and that you don't require children to come to the front of the class to share the passage. You ask for volunteers and over the course of the year, every single student chose to do that.

So I love how you're working with their emotional beings. They're, you know, Year Five/Six. They can be pretty fragile leading up into the adolescent years, but you've built that classroom culture where success is really valued and built, and so the kids were confident to get up and do that, that's really fantastic.

Lastly, before we finish off, Kirby, what's next in this particular practice or in this area of fluency, what are you planning to try out in 2024 to extend on the success you've already had in 2023?

Kirby: Oh good question I would like to, I suppose, explore, and I know you spoke about in the previous episode some other forms of reading, fluency or assisted paired reading. So there's some other forms that I'd like to give a go and try out. I suppose I would start off the year being set and solid in my routines, first and foremost, and the routine that I've got going at the moment. It worked really well for last year's cohort of kids, so if that's working, I'll try and re-establish that for this year. But then I'd like to perhaps look at a little bit of Reader's Theatre. I don't think I've done much of that in 2023.

So I'd like to look at a little bit of Reader's Theatre, but I'm also just very conscious of keeping the main thing, the main thing. So if the Reader's Theatre was starting to kind of go off on a tangent or a different direction, then I'd need to pull it back and keep it pretty tight. But I would like to have a go at some other forms of fluency and I suppose, as it becomes more common practice, there's more and more research and more ways of doing that are out there, but always making sure that it comes back to the main purpose. It doesn't turn into something that becomes fluffy. It's still quite rigorous and tight and make sure that we achieve what we're intending to achieve.

Jocelyn: Absolutely, and I love that. Thanks so much for that reminder, and I think it's really easy to get excited about the fluffy and go oh, that'll be really fun. But, as you say, if it's distracting the class from the main purpose of the lesson, then we probably need to pull it back. We can inadvertently create extraneous cognitive load because we make things fun and overcomplicated and we do the distracting from the main thing.

I like that: Keep the main thing, the main thing.

Kirby, I think there's so many takeaways from this episode for teachers and leaders who are listening, and I want to thank you for your generosity in sharing all of this with us. So exciting, I can't wait to get you back onto the podcast because there's about five things there that I would have loved to delve a little bit more deeply into, but we've got lots of time into the future for that.

So, Kirby, thank you so much for your time, wishing you and your class, your new class and all of your colleagues all the best for 2024. We'll see you next time. Thanks, Kirby.

Kirby: Thank you.