S4 Ep20 - Summer Series - Why It's So Scary To Let Go Of Guided Reading

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Hello everyone. It's Jocelyn here for this week's episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. Here in Australia and New Zealand we have just begun our new school year. By the time you're listening to this podcast, everybody should be back at school with all of the trials and tribulations that come with a new school year.

Some of us are coming back in, picking up where we left off on our structured literacy journey. Other people are beginning to embrace a structured literacy block, which can create understandable worry, anxiety and a feeling of not being in touch with what's going on in our classroom.

In this week's episode we're going to talk about some of the mindsets and some of the thinking we need to shift, not necessarily overcome, but just think differently about when it comes to making that move from a small group guided reading situation to working with a more structured literacy block.

Moving from that guided reading small group approach to reading instruction means embracing a whole new literacy block structure. We're moving to one that seeks to maximise adult-led instructions, time on task and the number of successful learning trials. And we're not doing this simply because it's the next shiny thing or because that's what someone told us. We're making this move to a more explicit approach because that's what the research tells us is the most effective way for all children, not just some of them.

Now, for the past few years I've shared my suggestions for the setup of a structured literacy block with teachers and teams and it has the whole reading and writing rope represented in low varience lessons, and if you're a Resource Room member, you can find this in the Planning and Assessment section, and there's a different file for each grade of the primary school. There's also some accompanying planning documents that go with it.

When I share my suggestion for a literacy block, a common response initially is, "That looks achievable and simple, thanks!" Because everything's kind of set out in low variance routines and, you know, it looks achievable. Then, after a little bit of time and upon reflection and after people have given things a bit of a go, the feedback that I often receive is, "Look, it's great, but I still can't get my head around it. Maybe I might need some sort of a different outline." And the thing about the I can't get my head around it comes about because writing a literacy block outline into your planner is easy. It's easy to say I'm going to teach a phonics lesson here and work with a text-based unit there, and this is where we'll be doing our partner reading with our texts, whether they're decodable in the early years or something richer in upper primary. Writing it into the block is the easy bit. Achieving enough automaticity and fluency with all of the elements of the block, so that we feel like we're in our comfort zone, is a whole different thing.

Moving away from guided reading, that we may have spent years organising and refining, might make intellectual sense, but it's also going to result in a temporary loss of teaching mojo. And this feeling of being lost, uncomfortable, nervous, overwhelmed or, frankly, downright scared is not a sign that you need a new program or you should retreat from your path. It's a sign that you are learning something new that is taking you out of your comfort zone.

In my head it's like I'm under my doona on a winter's morning and, as much as there are things outside the bed that I might want to do, when I stick my toe out from under the doona and it feels cold, I just want to retreat and stay in the warmth of my bed. But we can't do that. And this is that bit where all of those cliches come in about ships losing sight of the shore and all of those sorts of things.

But I'm not here in your favourite podcast listening app today to tell you just to brave it out and suck it up and everything will be fine.

I hope that in this episode, I can share some practical learnings from my own teaching and the experiences of those people who I support to grow in their practice. And the first thing that I want to say is that your feelings aren't about having a bad attitude or a lack of commitment. Feeling uncertain doesn't mean you're a bad teacher. The feelings are about cognitive load and our brain's wiring that is designed to keep us safe. Just as with learning to jump off a high board at the pool, changing practice will be approached differently by different people. Some people will climb right up to the 10 metre board and just jump off, squealing with delight all the way down, and then say, "Oh, can I do it again?" And others will need to take things much more slowly, gradually increasing the height of the board that they jump off over time, with lots of encouragement and lots of feedback.

Now, neither approach to this is best or right, and I think we have to be really conscious of staying out of judgement. We are the way we are and the way we approach change will come about and be influenced by our personality, by our experience, by what else is going on in our life. You know, if you're in the middle of buying a new house and starting or ending a relationship, or having a baby, or you know, something else, that takes your cognitive load. Having wholesale change in your classroom is going to feel much more challenging than if everything is all stable, and we know that the last couple of years in our schools, and maybe in our lives, have been anything but stable. We're going to see variation in our teams and colleagues when we make that move from guided reading to a structured literacy block. People are just different.

Differing Mindsets

Now, we are all aware that going slowly can help people adjust to new ways of doing things, but it can also be really helpful to know what the mindsets are that might hold us back from fully committing to new approaches. Sometimes these mindsets come from hearing myths and falsehoods repeated over and over, and I recall hearing somewhere that we are more likely to believe that something is true the more we hear it, even when faced with facts that show that that thing is not true. So just by virtue of hearing, "Explicit teaching is boring for children", or "When we make this shift to explicit teaching, we're going to lose a focus on meaning." When we hear that over and over and over again, it's really hard not to have it infiltrate our mindsets. Even if intellectually and on a conscious level we know that it's not true, that doesn't stop the feelings from coming up. Sometimes the mindsets are misconceptions that we've just developed because maybe our professional learning in an area hasn't been as strong as it could be. Sometimes the mindset's from that really unhelpful, anxious state that so many of us grapple with, which is never logical but it doesn't mean that it's not there and very real for us.

That might go like, "I'm going to make this shift, I feel vulnerable. I don't feel like I know what I'm doing and I absolutely know that when the classroom's in uproar because I'm not in control, that's the moment the Principal's going to come in and figure out that I don't know what I'm doing". Now, is that likely? No. Does that mean that it stops those thoughts from coming? No, not at all.

Questions that can get in the way of shifting practice

Let's explore some of the questions that frequently arise and some ways of rethinking things when we make that shift into new ways of teaching.

And the first one that comes up is,

How do I make sure that everybody's actually reading if I'm not working with them in a small group?

The thing to think about in this one is that decodable texts are designed to set everyone up for success. So when we were working with our level texts and we were teaching our three queuing, the reason that the children needed us to be there in such close proximity is because they couldn't actually decode what was on the page. They needed us to guide them, hence guided reading, through using these really inefficient strategies, which actually made reading harder. When we use a decodable text that is aligned with the phonics the children know and what I call phonemic stamina, so how many words on a page, how complex the words are, that sort of thing, when we have those things in alignment, our children are set up for success. They can actually access the text in front of them, and with the support of a partner who's there to help them if they stumble, all will be well.

The next thing that comes up is,

When do I teach comprehension if we aren't in a small group?

Now the mindset shift around this is that we are not actually teaching comprehension strategies using those simple texts. Comprehension comes about through vocabulary, through background knowledge and, yes, through the application of comprehension strategies we put them to work in terms of making connections and summarising and that kind of thing. We put those things to work, but all in the context of a rich text that we teach with whole class during our text-based work.

This focus on comprehension and deeper understanding is not a job that we do when we read decodables. The job of the decodable text is to help students lift words from the page and, for an upper primary perspective, the job of our oral reading fluency practice with our partner is to practice lifting the words from the page automatically, fluently, accurately and smoothly. The deep comprehension comes about through the teacher-led work with a rich text. So that's a big one. We are still going to work on comprehension, it's just going to look a little different and until we've done it, until we've had a go, until we've seen success, it's really difficult to create a mental model of what that's going to look like. So we end up in this messy middle between the hopeful goals that we set and the outcomes that we'll achieve. We have to push through the messy middle.

Then there's the one about,

Decodables are not rich text.

So you know, children will not like them, they will be bored, they will lose a love of reading. Even if, again, logically, we know that this isn't true, there's still that worry in us. So I'm here to reassure you that decodables are not supposed to be rich text, that actually the engagement and enjoyment that children get out of them is being able to read them. It's being successful in the reading. The text selection is important because we need to make sure that we're providing children with a text that is challenging enough that it provides them with a little bit of stretch, but not so challenging that they can't do it with their partner. So when we select texts that are aligned to where the students are up to, then we are going to help create successful opportunities for them.

I often hear that, 

Children will be bored by all that teacher-led explicit learning,

And we're led to believe that explicit teaching has children sitting like automatons parroting things back to the teacher, that there's no opportunity for them to have voice or choice or engagement or get excited about learning, and it's simply not true. High quality explicit teaching is incredibly engaging. In fact, I think it's more engaging because every child is participating through established norms that help everybody feel safe and when the teacher's leading the experience, they are building success every step of the way so that children can feel and be successful and have that beautiful little chemical hit in their brain that rewards them when they achieve. Explicit teaching does not alienate children from the learning process but again, until you see it in action it can be hard to imagine what this thing is going to look like.

A big one is,

I'm not going to be able to meet the needs of all my learners if I don't teach them in small groups.

And there is an element of this that I think we need to acknowledge. When it comes to the bottom of the rope, of Scarborough's Rope, and phonics, that word level decoding through our phonological and phonemic awareness and our phonics and our practices that lead to automatic sight recognition, not 150 sight words by the end of Term Two of Foundation, but that ability to effortlessly lift words from the page. When we think about our phonics, particularly, we do need to be conscious that this really needs to be cumulative, that we need to have the background knowledge of what's come earlier in the code, that children have different numbers of repetitions that they require to consolidate this learning so that they can use it. We really can't expect to take a group of children, particularly beyond the early Foundation, where there are gaps. So if your school's new to structured literacy, it's entirely probable that when you have a look at your data, that the student knowledge is a bit like Swiss cheese, where there's holes everywhere. You may well have quite a large range. Now, when we teach explicitly and we do it well from the start of Foundation, we have far fewer gaps and a much smaller range because we're providing many, many, many, many repetitions and a lot of opportunity for consolidation so that children stay together and they keep up, they don't have to be caught up.

But you could very well be looking at your data and saying, "In my Year One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six classroom, wherever we are in the school, I've got children still consolidating the basic code, some who are learning the complex code and some who are beyond phonics and decodable text. How do I manage this?" So I'm never going to say to you that you will never need small group. There are lots of ways to manage the range of student need, but I'm going to affirm for you that your thoughts around some of this may actually be very sensible and in response to student need.

Now I'm not going to say you should never have small groups or that you should always have them. Your data will tell you the story, the goal is to keep as many children together as possible and to teach in a way that makes it so that we are being inclusive.

We don't want to be creating the gaps in the kids. We want to make sure that everybody can keep up and teach in a way that makes that happen. But the reality is that sometimes dealing with a range of children can feel messy because they all have different needs, not different needs in how they learn to read, but just in terms of code knowledge. That top of the rope work that we do with our rich text and our comprehension, that is one rich lesson for everybody, and we adjust the support that students need to be able to demonstrate their learning. So that one is absolutely whole class, but sometimes in the area of phonics, if our data indicates that our range is really really wide and we need to address student need, then there may be a need for small periods of time of small group, but I think that's probably a topic for another podcast episode. We do want to take things one step at a time and use low variance routines to keep things simple.

Fear + Excitement

When we understand that fear and excitement come from the same place in our brains, we have an opportunity to trick our brains into not feeling quite so nervous. And I'm going to read to you now from the psychologytoday.com website, and the article I'm reading from is called Predictable Fear: Why the Brain Likes Haunted Houses, by Alex Korb, PhD. I'm just going to read you this particular paragraph. I will link to this in the show notes as well.

Interestingly, studies have shown that if you learn to anticipate fearful situations then you actually activate [a part of your brain] which is the reward center of the limbic system. Thus, knowing you're about to be scared is actually somewhat enjoyable. But if the fear is unpredictable then it doesn't activate [this part of your brain]. So fear activates the hypothalamus [which is a part of your limbic system] in the same way as excitement, and when it's predictable it activates the brain's reward center as well. And that really gets at the heart of the matter. We don't like fear per se, we like predictable fear. It gets the limbic system fired up, making us feel more alive, but we don't have to worry about actually dying.

This is why we like roller coasters. This is why we like scary movies, because when we feel that feeling that we interpret as fear, it does the same thing as excitement.

So if we can change our language around change, we have a chance to trick our brain into not getting in the way of us taking the steps we need to. So when you're about to start something new, when you're about to use a new routine for the first time, instead of thinking, this makes me feel really scared, if you adjust your language to, well this feels exciting, I wonder what wonderful thing is going to happen today, and you're anticipating something fun and that nobody's going to die, when it actually works, guess what? Your reward centre is triggered in your brain.

But we need to take things slowly.

We can't have this thrust upon us.

We need to be prepared.

We need to know that we are going to be ok, and if you've been with me for any length of time, you will have heard me say you are not going to break the children, you also won't break yourself.

Making the shift to a structured literacy block can leave us feeling out of our comfort zone, but understanding that it's not our knowledge of what goes into the block but our brain's natural reaction to change and new things, that causes this sense of being lost or nervous, can really help put things into perspective. We've all heard that language about the power of yet. Instead of, I don't feel confident with partner reading; I don't feel confident with partner reading yet. And I know that sounds cliche and it might sound like an oversimplification, but it works. All we need to do is take small steps and, like the kids with their reading, practice them so that we have increased automaticity and increased fluency. When we do that, our comfort zone expands. It's only terrifying the first time you do it. The next time you have a little bit more idea of what to do, and the time after that, a little bit more again.

If you are looking for a magic thing to help you step bravely into the newness of structured literacy and overcome those mindset roadblocks to moving away from guided reading and into a more explicit approach, I'm going to ask you to just look at the faces of your students, particularly your strugglers. Think about those children who have kept you up at night, the ones who you worry, the ones who you regret, that you couldn't reach them, that you couldn't help them. Those are the kids you're doing it for. Because all of this shift to structured literacy is about the students, all of our students, not just some of them. It's about them and not about us. As teachers, we teach to make a positive impact on student outcomes.

So when you're feeling nervous and you're tempted to retreat back into black line masterland, back into guided reading, back into old habits, remember that you are going to be brave for your students and for their life outcomes, because it's not just about what they achieve in the NAPLAN or in the end of year school report. It's about their whole lives.

One step at a time, one day at a time, one piece of low-hanging fruit at a time. Do the easy stuff first and get runs on the board. See the results and celebrate them. Everything else will follow.

Thanks everyone, I'll see you next time.

Show Notes:

Korb, A. (2014). Predictable Fear: Why the Brain Likes Haunted Houses. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/prefrontal-nudity/201410/predictable-fear