The Reading League Review: Key Takeaways and Insights

You’re listening to episode number 224 of the Stellar Teacher Podcast.

So a few weeks ago, I got to attend the Reading League Conference with a few other members of the Stellar Teacher Team. Now for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the Reading League is a really incredible organization that is committed to helping teachers find and develop and implement effective literacy practices.

I love their mission statement. It is we believe all children deserve to learn to read and all teachers can learn to teach them. I think that’s such a beautiful statement of what they believe to be true.

Now, every year they hold an annual conference that has really incredible sessions that really focus on empowering educators to provide even more effective instruction that is aligned to the science of reading. So I went last year with Kori, our lead curriculum writer. This year, I was able to take a few more members of our team, and we just got back a few days ago. And let me tell you, we’re feeling very fired up, very excited, very inspired and very energized by the work that we do. We have so many new ideas for podcast episodes and podcast guests and resources we want to create for you and different trainings we want to offer you inside the Stellar Literacy Collective or this coming summer. And we just have some really incredible things coming up that I think are really going to help you guys on your literacy teacher journey. But of course, I can’t wait to share all of my takeaways with you. I have ideas for additional learning and research and things that I need to do in order to put together some of these things that we want to share with you. But there were some really good takeaways that I’m like, I cannot wait to share this with our audience right away. So I’m going to share with you my three biggest takeaways from three of my favorite sessions from this year’s conference. So that way, even if you weren’t able to attend, you can get a little snippet of some of the things that my team and I learned and were talking about this past week.

Side note, before we get into any of these takeaways, a personal takeaway that I had is that my handwriting is getting worse as I get older, and it is quite atrocious. I don’t know if you are like this, I have never had great handwriting. And as I was going back and looking at my notes for this episode and sort of just synthesizing everything that I learned, there are several instances where I’m like, Wait, what does that say? What did I mean to write? And I’m like, Oh my gosh. Why? Why why do I have such horrible handwriting? The good news is, is that we were able to access all of the slides to the presentations, and my team took some really incredible notes. But I’m thinking, You know what? I might have to be that person who uses their computer to take notes, because I just write way too fast and my handwriting is sloppy. So anyways, if you are a fellow person with bad handwriting, know that you’re in good company

Before we jump into my takeaways from this year, I want to revisit some of my notes from last year’s conference. Now, before the conference began this year, Kori, our lead curriculum writer, and I were reviewing and talking about last year’s sessions, sessions that we really enjoyed, and making our plan for this year. While doing this, I came across my notes from Steven Dykstra’s session, and I did such a bad job of taking notes last year, I didn’t even write the title of his session, so I couldn’t even tell you what the focus was. But I do remember he was one of my favorite speakers, and it was one of my favorite sessions, and it was so incredibly encouraging and empowering. And since I didn’t do a conference highlight episode with you guys last year, I have to share it with you this year.

Now, Steven is a psychologist with over 25 years of experience, and I think the fact that he is a psychologist and not necessarily a literacy expert or researcher, I find that to be really fascinating, because what he has to share about literacy instruction specifically is so spot on. But at one point he said, I am particularly interested in the failure of most universities and schools of education to properly teach the known science of reading, and how that impacts school systems, particularly those in urban areas. I am not a researcher, but I am an informed consumer of research, and I like to help others digest and understand the science of reading so that they can make better decisions. And I very much relate to that. I feel like that’s a lot of why we do this podcast, is because we want to be able to help you guys make better, informed decisions with your literacy instruction. So that’s a little bit about sort of Steven.

A few things he shared last year (that I’m like, I need to put this on a sticky note and remind myself of!), but one of the things he talked about in his session was that the science of reading doesn’t have every answer, and ultimately, we can’t wait to have all the answers to get started. And I think so often it can be tempting to say, Okay, well, I don’t know what this looks like yet, so let me keep on doing some research. Let me keep reading about this. Let me wait to make changes in my classroom. And ultimately, we can’t wait to have all of the answers, because all of the answers don’t exist. They are still continuing to do research, and there are areas that don’t have as much research as other areas. So we can’t necessarily wait until we, as educators, feel like we have all of the answers to get started. Which I think should be really encouraging, meaning, as soon as you know something, we can get started in implementing the few things that we do know.

And then another thing that he shared during his session that, again, I think is so helpful for educators to keep in mind, is that even the best methods and programs don’t work for everyone. I talk about this a lot on the podcast. There is always more than one way to be an effective teacher, and there’s always more than one really great curriculum program out there or strategy. There’s so many ways that we can go about it, and so recognizing too, that even some of the best, they might not work for you, for your school, for your students, but just because one method or program does not work does not mean that there isn’t something out there that does work. I think especially as schools continue to align their instruction with the science of reading, it is important that we make sure that what we’re doing is grounded in the research, and that just because a program does not work doesn’t mean that we give up on this idea of best practices.

He also shared this idea of thinking of our target as a bullseye. So think of the science of reading as the bullseyes that is our most effective instruction, and we can shoot for the bullseye, and we can aim for the bullseye, but the reality of it is, we’re not gonna hit it every single time, and we are going to step outside of that bullseye at some point in time, and that is okay. We don’t have to be perfect. We just have to constantly be aiming for the center of that bullseye, knowing that if we miss, we’ll try again, and that’s okay.

And then maybe my favorite thing that he shared is this idea that we don’t want to love our ideas so much that we wouldn’t be willing to abandon them. I remember that really resonated with me a lot last year. I have talked about this before, but I was a balanced literacy teacher for so many years, and I loved balanced literacy. I just loved this idea of creating a cozy classroom, and students who are all independently reading, and, just cultivating this love of reading. And I remember when I first started learning about the science of reading, I was worried and wondered if I been teaching literacy wrong? Do I need to abandon everything that I’ve been doing and learn a new approach? But the more I learned about it, the more I recognize that here’s the thing, it doesn’t matter if I love balanced literacy. It doesn’t matter if I’ve been doing something in my classroom for so long, whether it is a certain read aloud or a certain activity or a certain strategy, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter how much I love it, because my love for a specific instructional strategy or activity is not going to be the thing that makes students learn how to read. Providing effective research based instruction is going to be the thing that makes my students learn how to read. And we need to be willing to be mindful of our own bias and be aware of sort of our really strong beliefs that we have, and recognize that sometimes we have to abandon ideas if they’re not what’s best for students. And so just this idea that we can love the things that we’re doing, but we don’t want to love something so much that we wouldn’t abandon it if we recognize that it’s no longer helpful for students. And so that right there is something that I’m like, Okay, I need to put that on a post it note. And even as we work on creating resources or put trainings together for you guys, there’s things that we want to make sure that we’re doing because they’re what they’re what’s best for you, not necessarily because they’re things that we enjoy doing. So hopefully that resonates with you as well.

Okay, so let’s talk about some of the takeaways from this year’s session. So our first keynote was by Zaretta Hammond, and she’s actually someone that I would love to get on the podcast sometime this next year. So be on the lookout for an episode from her. But she talked a lot about how important it is that we not only understand the science of reading and all of the research that goes into effective literacy practices, but we also understand the science of learning and how students best learn to read. She said, our real challenge is not understanding the science of reading, but it’s really understanding the implementation of it. We can have all of this knowledge about effective practices and Scarborough’s Reading Rope and how students need to have word recognition and language comprehension skills. But if we don’t really understand how to implement it in a way that our students are actually going to acquire and hold on to that knowledge and those skills, then it doesn’t matter how much knowledge we have, so we really need to understand the science of learning. And she recommended a book, The Learning Challenge, by James Nottingham, which, of course, I promptly added to my Amazon cart, and I had it delivered to my doorstep. So when I got home, I had this book, and I’ve already started flipping through it. Again, I see a lot of possible podcast episodes inspired by this book, because it’s all about this idea of, how do we create an environment that is most conducive to learning? A lot of what she talked about in her keynote is how students learn when they are challenged. And I think that is really hard to hear as an educator, because having an environment that is challenging students is hard and it’s uncomfortable. Because unless our students are used to it, they don’t want to be challenged. They don’t want to be uncomfortable. It’s sort of like, I don’t know how to do something. I need to practice it. I need to figure it out. The productive struggle can be uncomfortable, but ultimately that is where growth happens. And so we don’t want our students to only be given assignments that they know how to do confidently and can easily breeze through things. And so we really need to think through, how are we creating an environment that is challenging our students?

One of the things that she shared is the five basic science of learning Brain Rules. Again, I found all of this so interesting because so much of it had to do with understanding how our brain works and providing instruction that is conducive to how we’re genetically wired. Again, this is probably something that’ll expand upon in a future podcast episode, but I want to share them with you, because they definitely gave me things to think about. I reflected on my classroom. Was I doing these things when I was in the classroom? Were these things that I was thinking of? So hopefully these five things are things that you can just sort of think about and maybe be aware of and really consider, am I doing this in my classroom? What does that specifically look like?

So this first one, I feel like you guys gonna be like, yes, I’ve got that going on, because we actually do talk about this on the podcast. But the first brain rule that she shared was that all new learning must be coupled with existing schema. And she shared a really great quote, and I just love how she worded it. But this idea that knowledge will not be created unless you can connect the new to the known. And we’ve talked a lot about the importance of background knowledge. We know that in order for students to comprehend a text, they need to be able to connect what they’re reading to existing knowledge. So they need to have some background knowledge around the topic. And so this is something that you probably are already doing in your classroom, if not just a little reminder, we want to build background knowledge and activate prior knowledge before we begin reading.

The second rule that she talked about is this idea that practice makes permanence. And I’m sure that’s not a surprise to you. I feel like that’s something that we hear about, but she went on to expand that it is this idea that perfect practice makes permanence. So it’s not just giving students practice, but really thinking about, Okay, what type of practice do they need to be doing in order for this to be a permanent thing for them to know or for them to do? And are our students able to do things automatically? Are they able to do things without scaffolds?

Something that came up that I thought was such a good thing to think about, is this idea that we often want to give students a scaffold, whether that is a question stem, or a prompt, or something that will help them be successful with the assignment. But a scaffold, she said, that is never taken away, becomes a crutch. And it really made me think about, are we over scaffolding our students? And so just this idea that we want to give our students enough practice so that whatever we’re teaching them becomes permanent, but we need to remember that as students are practicing, that we have to take the scaffolds away so that way they can develop the skills on their own.

And then the third rule of the Science of Learning Brain Rules that she shared was that emotions matter to cognition, and that we really need to leverage this progress principle. And I thought again, that was such a good reminder. Emotions run high, I think in all classrooms, from day to day, and so often, it can be easy because of things like standardized testing and really high district expectations. It can be really difficult to remember that we are working with people. Our students are people, and they have emotions, and their emotions matter to their ability to be successful and to learn. And she talked a lot about how self talk matters and really thinking through, how can we help students develop the self talk skills so that way, they are not afraid of challenges, they’re not afraid of failure, they’re not afraid to make mistakes, that they can power through these challenges and really come out on the other side, recognizing that they’re making progress. So again, self talk matters, but also this idea of the progress principle; how are we showing our students that they are making progress on whatever it is that they’re working towards? Do they recognize the small steps that they’re making towards their goals? Again, I thought that was just such a good point to make that I think we often forget, especially when we’re looking at so much data and standardized testing. It’s like, wait a minute, but emotions matter too. If we want our students to learn what we’re teaching them, we need to really tap into the emotion side of things.

The fourth thing that she shared, and I think this one can be really tricky, but she said attention guides information processing, and that intellectual curiosity matters. And one of the things she shared, and I loved her language behind it, she said, only the learner learns. And I think that’s such a good reminder. So often we are like, Yep, I taught that, taught that, taught that, check, check, check. But rather than thinking through, did we teach everything that was on our list? We really need to be asking, Did our students learn everything that was on our list, or all of the standards, or all of the objectives, whatever it is. Because at the end of the day, their learning is the only thing that matters. It doesn’t matter if we teach something, if our students aren’t learning it, then our instruction is not landing.

She talked a lot about, and I think this can be challenging, but it also could be viewed as a really fun opportunity for us to think about, how can we innovate our instruction? She said that if we can’t excite students curiosity, they will not learn. And I know I’ve talked about this on webinars and stuff in the past, that sometimes it can feel exhausting. It can feel like we are in edu-tainment. That we are expected to be entertainers. And I think that’s one way that we could look at this idea of excitement and curiosity. But I think that there’s another way. And I don’t have all of the answers. I’m just flushing through these ideas, and this is definitely something that I want to provide some additional episodes on, but is there a way that we can present our learning that is going to excite student curiosity that is not necessarily connected to the traditional models of engagement? We’re not talking necessarily about fun and entertaining them. But still, can we spark this curiosity? This idea of, is there a way that we can create a dopamine hit for our students that is connected to learning, whether that is about a specific topic or a specific method that we’re teaching, an instructional approach, or even, can they get a dopamine hit from recognizing the growth that they’re making? How can we spark more authentic curiosity with our students? And like I said, I don’t know if I have answers, but it’s definitely an interesting thing to think about. So I would invite you to think about the question how can you create more curiosity for your students?

The last thing she shared, which I think is really important, is this idea that the brain thrives on challenges and learns from mistakes. I think that’s important for both our students to know, and I think it’s also important for us as teachers to know as well. Think about when was the last time that you were challenged? When was the last time that you made a mistake and were okay with it? How can we help our students embrace challenge and really get comfortable with this idea of productive struggle?

So all of that came from, like I said, the first keynote, and I just love this idea of really thinking about the science of learning and how it connects to the science of reading. So like I said, you can expect to hear a few more podcast episodes connected to this type of stuff here in the future. So that was my first takeaway.

Now, the second session that I really, really loved was by Molly Ness, and she had a session that was all about comprehension. And I think the title of her session had to do with, the more you read, the more you know. She talked about and shared her journey as an educator, and as a professor, and as a literacy researcher, and how her knowledge has grown, expanded, and changed over time. And I loved her session for a couple reasons. First of all, she probably shared 20 different research articles and titles with us, and ultimately, this session gave me a lot of questions and thoughts and things that I want to continue to learn more about. So this session really inspired me to continue learning. And if you think about that, the goal of any instruction is to inspire future learning. So she did a really good job, because I walked away with so many different things I want to learn more about. I was like, I need to read that, and I need to look into this, and I need to ask these questions.

One of the things she talked about (she has been both a student and she is a researcher), and she talked about how in science, it is okay to be someone who changes your mind. When you’re doing a research project in science you’re constantly rethinking your process. You’re constantly re-evaluating the data and thinking, can you get these results again? Do we need to change things? You doubt. You get curious. You ask questions, because that’s how we learn and grow. And we want to apply the same thing to our literacy instruction. We want to be open to this idea that it is okay to rethink how we are approaching literacy instruction. And so just this idea that we don’t have to have everything figured out, that it is okay to be constantly on this journey of learning and to doubt and get curious and ask questions, because, like I said, that’s where we learn and grow.

One of the things that I thought was really interesting was when she talked about how when she started teaching back in 1999 she noticed that her kids couldn’t read. I think just recognizing that 1999 that was 25 years ago, and so this has always been a problem, or it has at least been a problem for a long time. It reminded me that it’s like, okay, this has been a problem for a long time, and we really need to be committed to figuring it out. And so it re-energized me to refocus and be really committed to empowering literacy teachers to be effective in the classrooms, because what you guys are doing is so incredibly important.

She shared about some research that she has read and studied, and also research that she has done as a researcher. One of the things that she talked a lot about is this idea of comprehension instruction versus comprehension assessment. And she talked about a study that she replicated as a researcher where observed and analyzed 4000 minutes of reading instruction across various classrooms and various grade levels, and then categorized all of the instructional minutes and where they used for instruction, assessment, practice, whatever thecategory was, and she noticed that there was a huge discrepancy between comprehension instruction and assessment. And ultimately, what she noticed is that there’s really a lack of comprehension instruction. She noticed, out of these 4000 minutes, 3% I think, from her specific study, 3% of the time was categorized as true comprehension instruction. And then, compared to 27% of the time was comprehension assessment. And that brought up this idea that we are really over assessing our students, and we’re not providing enough actual instructional time.

She talked about when we are reading a story or discussing literacy with our students, we often go to asking questions of the text. I know I did this. We ask students, can you summarize it? Can you tell me about the characters? Can you talk about their traits? Can you sequence it? We ask text based questions to our students. She said, a question, even if we’re discussing it is really a form of assessment. And so we often think that when we’re asking questions, we are teaching, but really we’re assessing. And so that just really made me think about, how often are we asking questions, thinking that we’re teaching students comprehension, but we aren’t, that it’s more like an application base.

She talked a lot about how comprehension is complex. There are so many factors that impact it. She said her hope is that we can be a little bit more nuanced when we talk about comprehension, because it’s not so clear cut. She shared a little bit about some different strategies, things like thinking aloud and other things that can really improve comprehension instruction. Things that I’m like, Okay, I want to learn more about this so I can share them with you guys. When she talked about the difference between comprehension instruction versus assessment, and especially asking questions being a form of assessment. I was like, Oh, wow. I have never thought about that before. So again, things for future learning that you guys will eventually get to hear about.

Another thing she talked about during her session was comprehension strategies versus building knowledge. Right now it seems like building knowledge is getting a lot of attention in the spotlight. She said, so often we feel tempted to do either/or. We’re either using strategies or we’re building knowledge. And she’s like, in a literacy classroom, we really need to be open to this idea that it’s both. We definitely need to build knowledge. We definitely need to help our students acquire knowledge through our literacy instruction, but we also need to teach students comprehension strategies, because there’s also research out there that shows strategies like summarizing, and making inferencing, and writing about reading, actually do improve comprehension. So it’s definitely a both. And so that was my second favorite session that I attended.

As she was going through that, I was like, yes, these are things that we talk about all of the time. And I love this quote she shared about word recognition, she said, You don’t age out of phonological awareness, you skill out of it. And I think so often, especially in upper elementary we think, Okay, well, I teach these upper grades. Our students learn phonological awareness, phonics, phonemic awareness, syllable types, all of those things, in the lower grades. I don’t need to teach those. But she really just talked a lot about how unless our students develop the word recognition skills, the decoding skills, the phonological awareness skills, the phonemic awareness skills, unless they develop those skills, they are never going to be able to comprehend a text. And so I just love this idea that it’s like, okay, they don’t age out of those skills. You skill out of it. So until the students have mastered those skills, we need to keep teaching them. And I know we talk about that on the podcast, how we have to fill in those gaps.

But one part of her session that she talked about, and again, this kind of connects back to the keynote, is she talked about cognitive load theory, and this idea of, how do our students learn and what is maybe preventing them from actually acquiring new knowledge. And she talked about how our working memory is the gatekeeper of learning. And so she showed this visual on her slide, and I’m going to try to describe it to you, but think of lworking memory, almost as like a measuring cup. And what we want is we want there to be only learning happening in this measuring cup. But there, unfortunately, are things that can make it more difficult or give students less space for learning. So first of all, things that can take away from students ability to learn is insufficient skills. So pretend that you pour in some liquid into this measuring cup, and it is insufficient skills. And so for some students, this might be a little amount of liquid. For some students, this might be a lot of liquid. But if students have insufficient skills; if we think about in upper elementary if our students have insufficient spelling skills, if they have insufficient phonics skills, if they have insufficient listening skills, those insufficient skills are going to take away from the amount of space that they have for learning. Another thing that can take away from this space for learning is the competing demands for attention. Again. So imagine even more liquid being poured into the cup. And so this is the competing demands for attention. And so this can be things that are happening in the classroom. It can be sounds, it can be noises, it can be visual things that are distracting. But it can also be things that are going on in the student’s life. It can be the fact that maybe they don’t have electricity at home. It could be the fact that their parents had a fight in the morning. There are so many other things that are going on that can take away from students ability to attend and focus on the lesson, and these competing demands for attention can reduce the amount that students have left over for learning. So whatever’s left over, there’s liquid that is poured in for insufficient skills, there’s liquid that’s poured in for the competing demands for attention, and then whatever is left over is the student’s capacity for learning. For some students that might be a lot, and for some students that might just be a little. And so what we want to think about is, how can we reduce those other things? How can we reduce insufficient skills, how can we reduce the competing demands for attention, and how can we create more space for students learning capacity? And I think just having that visual and really thinking about how it’s not always just about having the perfect lesson or creating a lesson that is aligned to best practices, but we also have to consider our students and where they are coming from. And one of the things that she shared is just this idea that you can’t control what overwhelm looks like or displays itself as, for individual students. And so I think recognizing that, if students are feeling overwhelmed, we can’t control what that looks like. We can’t control what that displays itself as, but we want to be sensitive to that and really trying to create an environment that maximizes students learning capacity on an individual level. And again, that is something that I’m like. I want to learn more about this so I can empower you guys to do that in your classroom.

The third session that I attended was by Jamey Peavler. She’s a university instructor that focuses on the science of reading, but her session was all about planning a scientifically based ELA block. She talked a lot about Scarborough’s Reading Rope, and how we need to make sure that we’re teaching both word recognition skills and language comprehension skills, and she really went into depth into both of those.

So those were just some of my takeaways from the Reading Leauge conference. Thank you for allowing me to share them with you. I hope that you got some ideas. Hopefully you found a little nugget or two that you can write down and hold on to, or something that you want to think about or continue learning on. And of course, if you have questions about something, or if one of these things that I shared sounds more interesting to you, let me know, and I can prioritize putting together either a series or some podcast episodes about that.

There is one more thing I want to leave you with, and this comes from Zaretta Hammond’s keynote. I wrote this down, and I was like, All right, this needs to be my new mantra. But she said, “Don’t say you’re about (fill in the blank) if you’re not willing to do the work to get the results”. If we say that we’re about providing effective literacy instruction, then we need to be willing to do the work in order to get the results. And hearing that re-energized my commitment to making sure that I am continuously doing the work on your behalf. So that way, when you listen to these podcasts, when you come to a training, when you use our resources, you can feel really confident that we’ve been doing the work to help you get the results. And I also hope that it motivates and inspires you to continue to do the work on your own. Every time you tune into these podcasts, you are increasing your content knowledge and hopefully becoming a little bit more empowered and competent. So like I said, Thank you for letting me share my takeaways with you. I really am so excited for a lot of the resources that we have planned and podcast episodes we have coming up just from all of the learning that we had at the Reading League conference this last week. So have a wonderful week, and I’ll see you back here next Monday. It will be the first Monday of November, which means it is a Dear Stellar Teacher episode. And so my co-host Emily will be back, and we have some great teacher stories and questions that we’re going to be sharing with you.

Thanks so much for joining me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode and are finding value in this podcast, it would mean the world to me, if you subscribe and leave a five-star positive review, this helps me spread the word to more and more teachers, just like you. Don’t forget to join me over on Instagram @thestellarteachercompany, and you can also find links and resources from this episode in the show notes at stellarteacher.com.