Struggling Adolescent Readers: Planning for Successful Implementation of MTSS

Narrator:

Welcome to EDVIEW360.

Michelle Elia:

I think you will always need well-trained reading experts in middle schools and high schools to help with those students who are struggling. You will always have students with dyslexia, students with other reading difficulties, students with DLD, who are going to need support. The problem is right now our middle schools and high schools are flooded, where two-thirds of our students need literacy support, and I'm really hopeful that in the future that'll be a much smaller number to make it more manageable for the schools, and I think that as more schools are implementing these systemic changes, that's going to happen. But the other thing we have to remember is the research is constantly evolving as well, and the great thing about science is that it's not stagnant. And as we learn more to what you said earlier, as we learn more, we're going to implement those new things, and so we're going to continue to learn more about how to teach adolescents well and develop their skills, and so I think there's going to be more of a movement toward making sure that we're doing better with that as more research happens.

Narrator:

You just heard from noted literacy expert Michelle Elia, our guest this month on the EDVIEW360 podcast.

Pam Austin:

Hello, this is Pam Austin. Welcome back to the EDVIEW360 podcast series. We are so excited to have you with us today for our June literacy conversation. I'm conducting today's podcast from my native New Orleans, LA. Today, we are excited to welcome educator and science of reading expert and advocate Michelle Elia. Michelle is a seasoned educator who's currently teaching at Marietta College, where she prepares pre-service teachers to teach reading using evidence-based language and literacy practices. Oh, I'm so excited to hear that you do that.

Michelle previously served as Ohio literacy lead through the Ohio Department of Education and has taught students in preschool through high school. She is a nationally recognized literacy professional development provider, training educators in language and literacy instruction and assessment within an MTSS framework. She serves as president of The Reading League Ohio. Michelle is passionate about teaching and applying the science of reading to the classroom, especially for struggling adolescent readers. Welcome, Michelle. Let's talk about adolescent students, those who struggle with literacy, and what we can do to help them. Many assume that reading difficulties should be resolved, that students should be where they are by the time they're in elementary. Why do students continue to struggle? Why does this persist in middle school and high school?

ME:

I think there are a couple reasons that this happens. Number one we know that elementary is our primary risk prevention, right? That's where we are teaching our students how to read. Unfortunately, in the past 30-plus years at the elementary level, we really haven't been teaching all students how to read because we have been using practices associated with balanced literacy, and so for this reason, now all of a sudden, we move these kids into the secondary level and now, luckily, nationally, we are seeing this move toward the science of reading, which is absolutely wonderful.

But we have a lot of kids who are in middle school and high school who are instructional casualties. These are students who were taught to read using balanced literacy practices. They weren't those lucky ones who learned to read no matter what practices. And now, they're in middle school and high school and they're compensators. They have been compensating and trying to hide their reading difficulties for a great number of years, and the balanced literacy interventions that they were given before those weren't helpful for them and we just kept moving those kids along. So, I work with a lot of districts that are in year two of their implementation of evidence-based language and literacy practices, and I applaud them. I mean, it's amazing. It's a huge transition to move from balanced literacy, whole language, to more evidence-based approaches that are grounded in the science of reading.

But as they're starting to implement these practices, they're implementing them at the elementary level and we've got a lot of kids in grades four and up who didn't have the advantage of being taught to read appropriately, and so now we've got to recognize: “OK, how are we going to meet their needs while still adjusting our core instruction at the elementary level to prevent any further instructional casualties?” All right, so that's reason number one. Reason number two is you're always going to have students with persistent reading difficulties. The problem is right now we have too many of them because of dysteachia and the lack of appropriate instruction. But no matter what, even when we start doing things the way we need to do things at the elementary level, we're always going to have some students who have persistent reading difficulties that we are going to need to support as they move through the upper grades, whether it be in fluency, advanced word study and then, obviously, vocabulary and comprehension. We just want that number to be smaller so that we have the resources to better provide services to them.

PA:

Right. So, what you're doing is you're implementing an ounce of prevention, right? It's worth a pound of cure, right?

ME:

It sure is. And that begins at the elementary level. The adolescent literacy crisis that we have starts at the elementary level and at the systems level, with administration implementing appropriate systems to teach kids how to read.

PA:

All right, those appropriate systems. I love the way you use the term risk prevention to help move changing the way that we teach so that we can make sure that we prevent as many students as possible the challenges that would occur. Well, thank you so much for sharing that with us. That gives us a good base to jump forward with asking some more questions when we think about the type of instructional practices that were in place before, and it will lead to teachers, maybe educators, having some misconceptions about adolescent literacy. How can we address those?

ME:

There are a lot of misconceptions when it comes to adolescent literacy and I think, with anything, the best way to address it is through what we're doing right now engaging in conversations, acknowledging where people are and what they know and what they've been taught. I always, when I do professional learning with secondary teachers, I tell them my story. I was a secondary special education teacher. I had no idea how to teach children how to read. I wasn't prepared to do that, and so I did the best I could with the tools I had, and now we want to make sure that all secondary teachers know how to teach children, how to teach children how to read. So, one of the biggest misconceptions is that learning to read is somehow different for older students, that they learn to read in a different way and, as Stanislas Dehaene reminds us, when it comes to learning to read, we all have the same brain with the same learning constraints. The developmental sequence for word recognition is the same no matter what age you are. It does take a little bit more time as our kids get older, but it's never too late to teach a child how to read. So, we want to make sure that educators are aware of that progression of skills from letter recognition and phonemic awareness all the way up through fluency and automaticity, so that they know where to intervene. And then the other misconception I see is: “OK, I have to get them through this content. I have to get them through their biology and their world civilizations and their geometry classes.”

So, a lot of interventionists, especially special education teachers, see their role as accommodating. And it's not just about accommodating our kids. To get them through, we really do need to teach them how to read. That's the lifelong skill that they are going to need, beyond the time that they spend with us in middle school and high school. So, it's never too late to teach them how to read. We can teach them how to read and our intervention shouldn't be homework help or test prep or accommodating. We really want to make sure that we teach these kids how to read, no matter the age.

PA:

All right, definitely. I'm just listening to you and thinking about it's not the age, it's the skill. So, you ended with that. That's exactly what was going on through our brain, and it's not those grade-level expectations as well, because you talked about becoming a lifelong reader. So, it's more than just putting a Band-Aid on it. We’ve got to go in and give the proper prescription. Wouldn't you say that, Michelle?

ME:

Absolutely. We've got to diagnose and prescribe based on the data that we have for these kids.

PA:

Right and tell me what are some of those unique challenges that our adolescent students have for older students, middle and high school?

ME:

I think we know from the research that it takes longer to intervene and teach an older student how to read, versus a child in kindergarten and first grade.

It's a lot easier to intervene when they're younger. It doesn't require as much time, and one of the reasons is we're developing in the younger grades these brand new neural pathways and by the time they get to middle and high school they've developed compensatory neural pathways and now we have to stop using those and develop the pathways in the brain to connect the letters to the sounds, to the meaning that aren't there, and so that is a little bit harder.

But it's still never too late and we can teach these kids to read with automaticity and fluency. And the reason we want to do that is so that we can free up that working memory, that cognitive desk space, so they can focus on the ultimate goal, which is comprehension. But at the secondary level we tend to hone in on comprehension because it's the goal and we don't realize that in order to meet that goal we have to intervene with those components to get them there. So, we might need to intervene in advanced decoding or, for some students, in basic decoding, we need to intervene in vocabulary, and we tend to not think of those components. We really hone in on the outcome, which is comprehension.

PA:

All right. So, we have to rewire. We have to override and we have to make sure that we guide students to not use those faulty, ineffective strategies but truly gain that skill of learning how to read. I think that's what I'm hearing from you, Michelle.

ME:

That is absolutely it. And changing, rewiring the brain is not easy.

PA:

Not at all. Most definitely not. Most elementary educators, they're used to the idea of working within an MTSS framework, but secondary is a little bit different. What are the differences? What are the most critical components that a secondary school needs to consider when working within that framework?

ME:

Well, I think that there's a lot of similarities. MTSS, whether you are in the secondary level or the elementary level, is still a collaborative, problem-solving model. You need to have leadership, you need to have instructional teams, you need to have really good, solid core instruction, because you can't intervene your way out of a Tier 1 problem. You need to have great assessments. The difference in secondary is in our core instruction. We're not teaching kids how to read like we do in elementary. Instead, in core instruction, we're teaching content area, but we're reinforcing literacy skills while we're teaching our content areas. So, the Tier 1 does look different in the secondary level versus the elementary level, because I'm not teaching children how to read in Tier 1. I'm teaching them my content, whether it be history or math or science or English language arts. But I can embed instructional pedagogy in there and instructional strategies to reinforce strong literacy skills in any content area. And so Tier 1 is definitely different. The other thing that's different is providing interventions to those students. So, at the elementary level, when it comes to interventions, usually schools have something like no new learning time or win time or some cute name where all of our students have this time in the day where they go to get either intervention or enrichment, but at the secondary level it doesn't quite work that way. Our students' schedules are tight, they've got certain requirements for graduation and ultimately we really want to hone in on those kids who are behind, especially my students who are well below benchmark, and we want to provide them with really intensive interventions and the skills they need. And so, that requires giving them a class that they get a credit for, and so that takes away some of the stigma as well. This is a class, it's just a class that you're going to take, just like any other class. Somebody's going to this elective, you're going to go to this elective, and we could call that elective whatever we want developmental language and literacy, developmental linguistics but basically in that class where they earn a credit for graduation, we are going to teach them how to read and we're going to hone in on those skills. So, that's a big difference as well.

Additionally, although the assessment process is the same, you have universal screening, you have diagnostic assessments, and you have progress monitoring. There's slight variation in the assessment administration when it comes to secondary students. For example, especially at the high school level. We don't have to administer universal screeners to every single student. We can look at early warning indicators by the time our students get to late middle school and high school. We know who is struggling. We have the data. We have years of data. So, universal screening is a tool to recognize students at risk and to hone in on those students so we can provide intervention.

But I don't need to administer a schoolwide test to know who those kids are. I've got a lot of data that tells me that. So, early warning indicators are a big difference when it comes to universal screening. And then, after we look at those early warning indicators, determine our students at risk, we can then maybe do a secondary, like a second gate of screening, and administer a typical CBM universal screener like an ORF, in order to drill down and figure out what's causing the problem. But I don't need to give that universal screener to every seventh-, eighth-, ninth-, 10th-, 11th-, 12th-grader. I already know from looking at things like state test data, their grades, their attendance data, their discipline data, we know who's at risk and then we can drill down with just those select students. So, that's definitely something that's a little bit different as well.

PA:

Oh, yes, I can see that, and you honed in on the use of data, right? Being very specific with the use of data. You also earlier spoke about the alignment of intervention with the students and you gave me some answers in regards to that. I just kind of want to reiterate that and you can give any more input if you like to, Michelle. You know I was thinking of the fact that the difference in the secondary classroom and you talked about the integration of skills in any content area, so that students are actually learning those skills and applying as they're learning the content. Is that something that we should emphasize with our secondary teachers? Are our secondary teachers aware of that integration?

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ME:

I think that's definitely something that we should emphasize and there is some awareness in terms of content-area literacy is something we've been talking about for a long time. Unfortunately, I think content-area literacy got a bad rap and everyone assumed they had to teach kids how to read in their content, and that's really hard to do when you're trying to teach physics, right? So, what I'm talking about is what are things that they can do to teach physics or biology or world civilizations or ninth grade English language arts, where we're really focusing a lot on writing and looking at these complex texts? What are things that I can do in my instruction that are going to strengthen the literacy skills of my struggling readers but also really help all of my readers? My daughter is not a struggling reader, but she could benefit from a lot of these things. She's a horrible speller. She's also the outcome of balanced literacy and these I call them levers for literacy.

Change at the secondary level can be helpful for all students. Students who are gifted. Students who are struggling. They include things like teaching morphology and that can be embedded in our vocabulary instruction. So, when we explicitly teach the vocabulary words of our discipline, teach the morphemes. I was really lucky. When I was a high school special education teacher I had to spend a little bit of time with our math department and I don't like teaching math. No offense to those lovely folks, but I remember co-teaching with some wonderful math teachers who when they taught vocabulary they pointed out the morphemes, right? So, if we teach a polynomial, we teach. “Poly” means many. That explicit instruction, bringing students' attention to that, is so helpful when it comes to encountering words that include those morphemes in other content areas. It's helpful for decoding. It's helpful for vocabulary. So, when we teach secondary teachers about morphology, when we teach them about how to teach vocabulary explicitly, not just look up the words in the dictionary and write their definition down and use the word in a sentence, but instead let's be purposeful and intentional in breaking up that word. Let's show the students the morphemes in that word. If we have struggling readers, let's scoop the syllables to help them to decode it. Let's give them a student-friendly definition, not a dictionary definition, and give them a lot of syntactic representation rather than just saying, “Hey, use that word in a sentence.” No, let's do that for them first. So, morphology and vocabulary, they go together. I think it was Susan Ebbers who said that you can't teach one without the other. They really do go together beautifully and that's a lever for change that could be used across any content-area classroom.

But teaching syntax is another one. Teaching students the syntax of our language can be done in multiple content areas, not just English language arts, and so we can strengthen that through speaking and listening. We can strengthen that through writing. So, teaching syntax goes hand in hand with writing, but it also goes hand in hand with oral language development. In content-area classrooms, we can use complex text and teach kids how to break those down. That's a huge lever for change. Teaching students how to navigate complex text is the difference between the students who do well on the ACT and the students who don't do well on the ACT. But they have to have exposure to complex text and they have to have teachers who can help them to break it down in order to be prepared to do that when it comes to the high-stakes assessments. And we can also build our students’ background knowledge by teaching in units, which a lot of content-area teachers already do. But we want to build background knowledge, not just activate it, right? And so, those are all levers that can be applied in any content area.

PA:

So many different examples and instructional practices. When you began with vocabulary, I thought, “Oh, wow, yeah, vocabulary is universal. You can find vocabulary in every content area, and we want our students to be able to read the words, use the words, apply the words in that idea of syntax.” Thank you so much for sharing so many different types of examples of instructional practices that are very practical for our secondary students here. Besides this integration, you also talked about identifying those students for intervention, and so we may still need to have that separate class for those kids who are still struggling. Just want to reiterate how important that is, right, Michelle?

ME:

Absolutely so. We don't want to try to intervene through that core instruction. We want to support through core instruction while teaching their content-area classes at the secondary level, right? And, we're going to support literacy development through content areas, but we're going to teach the content, we're not going to teach kids how to read in those content-area classes. That's what's going to happen in those interventions, which is an additional period in the day.

It's like an elective that our kids go to and that's where they're going to be taught those skills that they need to be successful readers.Those skills that they weren't taught prior, that maybe they were taught, unfortunately, the wrong things through balanced literacy and now we've got to reteach them how to look at a word, look at all the parts of the word, sound it out, teach them the morphemes, teach them the syllables, teach them how to decode, build their fluency skills.

That's a separate period in the day with a really highly trained professional who is teaching them how to read, a professional who has knowledge of that development of literacy skills, specifically in word recognition, and really good, high-quality instructional materials, because by the time they get to the secondary level, most of our students are going to need a multicomponent intervention that includes work on decoding, but also includes some language comprehension skills instruction as well. So, you're going to need really good, high-quality instructional materials for that, including pulling in some of the materials from Tier 1 and helping those students to break it down and to teach the vocabulary from their core in those intervention periods, while also teaching students how to decode.

PA:

It sounds like just a very practical method that will relieve content teachers as well, because they're not becoming reading teachers, right? They're supporting reading in the content, but students will have another place where they can go to rewire their brains to override those faulty strategies they have and to build their confidence so that they can be more productive in their classrooms. I'm just loving hearing the suggestions that you have.

ME:

Well, I know my colleagues who were physics teachers and geometry teachers. I don't want to be an expert in physics and geometry. They didn't want to be an expert in literacy, right? But they did know things that they could do to teach and strengthen literacy skills while teaching physics, while teaching geometry, while teaching Algebra 2, while teaching English 9, to really strengthen literacy but still achieve their content standard goals. They've got things that they have to teach and, you're right, it is about taking pressure off. But then let's have an expert who, in that intervention period, is teaching those kids how to read using high-quality instructional materials like REWARDS, right? Where they've got the time, they've got the materials and they're teaching those students how to read.

PA:

Excellent. So, OK, we're talking about having some expectations for our content teachers. What type of professional development will we need to provide for these teachers to help them support that ability to dive into the text and the content that they're expected to have students understand and grow in confidence with?

ME:

Right. And I think that secondary teachers do need professional learning in how to embed learning, strong literacy practices in any content area. And so, training in things like explicit vocabulary instruction, explicit instruction. In general, Anita Archer's work with explicit instruction is beneficial for every content-area teacher. How do you teach vocabulary explicitly? How do you teach syntax explicitly? How do you help our students to summarize?

Summarizing is such a powerful strategy for comprehension and we can teach any content area how to help students get the gist, right? How to summarize the text in their content areas, and so all of that is really important for content-area teachers, as well as writing, and I know writing across the curriculum got a bad rap for a long time and I think it's because we weren't preparing teachers how to do it well. Having students not only talk about their content but write about their content. So, if they're going to be engaging in a conversation about back to polynomials, we're going to write about those polynomials. We're going to write sentences about that as well, and it's more applicable in science and social studies and the arts, but we can do this in any content area.

PA:

All right. I agree with you 100 percent. So, with this in mind and I think you've already given us lots of advice, but I want you to layer on if you could. What advice would you give schools when they are looking to strengthen and like the ideas that you're saying? “Oh, wow, I love what Michelle is saying. How can I strengthen this aspect of literacy instruction and literacy intervention in my school?”

ME:

I think, first of all, they need to make sure that they've got strong, multidisciplinary teams that include reading and literacy specialists. Not every middle and high school has reading specialists in their buildings and they need one or they need multiple. They need someone who understands the development of literacy skills, who can pinpoint where a student is struggling and intervene at that point. Is it basic phonics? Is it advanced phonics and decoding? Is it phonics and decoding? And maybe some vocabulary phonics and decoding and maybe some vocabulary. So, being able to look at the skills, you administer the appropriate informal diagnostic assessments, plan those interventions based on that data, because they understand how literacy develops and that's not something that content-area teachers know, nor do they need to know. But if every building has some specialist or a team that does have that training, they can help to plan those interventions and provide those interventions in an intervention period for those students. And then, on top of that, making sure that we've got strong Tier 1 that supports what's happening in those interventions by utilizing those levers, right? Teaching core instruction, teaching all of our content-area teachers about morphology, about vocabulary, about syntax, about oral language, and building background knowledge and navigating complex text.

All of those things are really important in order to have a great system, and it starts by training your administrators in what MTSS is and teaching them how to adjust, because they have the power. The administrators have the power to change the master schedule. You can’t have an intervention period unless your administrator can fix your master schedule, right? They have the power to hire the appropriate individuals or get those individuals the training they need. So, we need to start with administrators, because they are the ones who steer the ship and they're the ones who create the systems to allow all of this great instruction to happen.

PA:

All right. So, the administrators have the power. I just love that. It's them taking the power in their hands and really helping to guide the what and the how. Is that what we're talking about?

ME: 

Yes, absolutely, absolutely.

PA:

So, literacy education we know it evolves or we learn more, or we discover more when we learn more than we do, better than before, and we need to think about the future and the future trends that are coming up. Do you see additional support? Do you see an increase in supporting those older students in reading proficiency?

ME:

I'm hopeful that with this wonderful movement we've seen with integrating evidence-based language and literacy practices starting at the elementary or starting at the preschool level really that we will have less students who need these intensive interventions at the middle and high school. I'm very hopeful that will happen, but it will take time for that to happen. Systems change in general takes time, not to mention the fact that we've got to get these new kindergartners who are being taught to read the right way. It'll take time before they work their way into our middle schools and high schools. I think you will always need well-trained reading experts in middle schools and high schools to help with those students who are struggling. You will always have students with dyslexia, students with other reading difficulties, students with DLD who are going to need support.

The problem is right now our middle schools and high schools are flooded, where two-thirds of our students need literacy support, and I'm really hopeful that in the future that'll be a much smaller number to make it more manageable for the schools, and I think that as more schools are implementing these systemic changes, that's going to happen. But the other thing we have to remember is the research is constantly evolving as well, and the great thing about science is that it's not stagnant. And as we learn more, to what you said earlier, as we learn more we're going to implement those new things, and so we're going to continue to learn more about how to teach adolescents well and develop their skills. And so, I think there's going to be more of a movement toward making sure that we're doing better with that as more research happens. There's not a lot out there, but it's coming, and I'm really excited to see the focus move to adolescent literacy.

PA:

That is great. You just went back to the challenges that we have. First, in creating at-risk prevention by having our students learn in elementary so there are fewer students there and staying tuned in to what's coming, what's going to continue to help and support this directory toward that system change and making sure that all of our students are in an environment that we're going to be able to support them and that there are a few of them that need that support in secondary school. That's the goal. Thank you so much, Michelle. We thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience with our audience today.

ME:

Thanks for having me.

PA:

How can our audience get in touch with you? 

ME:

I think the best way is to email me and my email address is MichelleElia@gmail.com. So, gmail.com is the best way to reach me, and they can also reach me via Marietta College through our email on our website, and I'm happy to talk about adolescent literacy ad nauseum, sometimes, but I look forward to talking with more folks about how to implement those systems for change in adolescent literacy.

PA:

That's it for another great EDVIEW360 podcast. Please join us again and visit voyagersopris.com/edview360 to learn more about our webinars, blogs, and other podcasts. This has been Pam Austin and we hope to see you all again soon.

Narrator:

This has been an EDVIEW360 podcast. For additional thought-provoking discussions, sign up for our blog, webinar, and podcast series at voyagersopris.com/edview360. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love a five-star review. Wherever you listen to podcasts and to help other people like you find our show. Thank you.

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