Gene Tavernetti: Welcome to Better Teaching, Only Stuff That Works, a podcast for teachers, instructional coaches, administrators, and anyone else who supports teachers in the classroom.
This show is a proud member of the BE Podcast Network shows that help you go beyond education.
Find all our shows@bepodcastnetwork.com.
I Am Gene Tavernetti the host for this podcast.
And my goal for this episode, like all episodes, is that you laugh at least once and that you leave with an actionable idea for better teaching.
A quick reminder, no cliches, no buzzwords.
Only stuff that works.
My guest today is Dr. Brian Ponce.
Brian is a professor of school psychology at Oklahoma State University.
His research focuses on academic interventions and behavioral principles of learning, specifically in the area of mathematics.
Dr. Ponce created the Measures and Interventions for Numeracy Development, M-I-N-D, MIND, and Facts on Fire, a set of free materials to support teachers in the assessment and implementation of empirically validated interventions to increase early numeracy and computation skills.
He is co-author of Effective Math Interventions: A Guide to Improving Whole Number Knowledge.
I think you're gonna find this one interesting.
I think you're gonna like it.
Brian, thank you so much for being on Better Teaching: Only Stuff That Works.
Brian Poncy: All right.
Well, thank you so much for having me.
I'm excited to be here.
I love listening to your podcast, and so let's get cracking.
Gene Tavernetti: All right.
Well, I have heard you on several podcasts and talking about fluency, fact fluency, and I know you have a couple programs.
Could you describe the programs that you've developed and and kinda how they are available to folks?
Brian Poncy: Yeah.
So, yeah, I'm a school psychologist by training.
And because of that, I you know, when I worked in schools, and now that I'm a professor, we have practicum students that are out in schools.
And so invariably we get children referred to us, you know, that struggle with their basic f- basic facts in math.
But I mean, is, whether it's reading or math or writing you know, kids generally are just not fluent or accurate or fluent in their kind of basic skills.
And so I saw this a decade ago, and so I created what was called the Measures and Interventions for Numeracy Development, MIND with, it has periods in between because somebody else has Mind Math, and mine's- They, they, they contacted me, and- Right,
Gene Tavernetti: right.
Sure
... Brian Poncy: people were getting confused, so anyway.
But what I did was really that was a resource for tiered supports, and it was basically like, you know, here's, we're gonna kind of task analyze these computation skills, and we're gonna have kinda sub-skill mastery measures where you can assess students, look at patterns in responding.
And then there was basically four interventions that you could use, flashcard drill cover, copy, compare tape problems, and explicit timing.
And so, and basically we had intervention materials, supports, treatment integrity forms, and so that, you know, people could you know, drive those types of practices in their schools.
And so that- You don't- So that-
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah
... Brian Poncy: that was the initial one.
Yeah, sorry.
Gene Tavernetti: No.
I was just gonna say, you know, you listed the four.
Could you list them again quickly so I don't have to remember?
The Yeah.
Brian Poncy: A flashcard drill.
Okay.
And of course, after you know, I mean, flashcards are the vehicle, the drill and practice is the instruction.
And so- Right ... in that light you know, and so, you know, we kinda get into ratios to start with, and then how to adapt that based off a student responding.
Cover, copy, compare is where, you know, you have a problem, the problem's on the page with a space next to it.
The kids look at it, they cover it, they write it, and then they uncover it to make sure they're correct.
So it's basically a self-mediated flashcard intervention where, you know, the kid kinda does it.
Tape problems is a time delay procedure, and that is when a child will look at a problem, like three plus eight, and then the tape will read, "Three plus eight is," and it gives a two-second delay, and they have to try to beat that.
And if they don't, they get immediate feedback on that.
So again, with those three, whether it's flashcard drill, cover, copy, compare, tape problem, there's all an an- there's an antecedent component to all of those.
And then obviously the student responds, but in all of those, the child gets immediate feedback on whether they're right or wrong.
So those interventions are really good to build accurate responding.
And obviously, if you're working one-on-one with flashcards versus tape problems, which you could do in a group, you see that saliency of the antecedent and the consequent procedures kind of lessen.
And what that does is it allows for increased rates of responding, and you're kind of fading that support for students until then you would go to explicit timing, which is timed retrieval practice.
But again-
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah
... Brian Poncy: but again, that tape prac- pr- problems is that bridge there, right?
Because it has the immediate feedback, but what you're really doing is you're trying to get the child to kinda independently retrieve that before they need the the consequent procedure or the feedback on it.
Gene Tavernetti: You basically answered my follow-up question, which is everybody's heard of flashcards, everybody's heard of the things that you've talked about, but it's not necessarily it's the flashcard, it is how you implement what you're doing w- with the kids.
So let's just take flashcards for a second.
You have some str- I'm gonna say strict guidelines.
You have some protocols for the teachers to use.
Where do teachers... Where have you found that the flashcards have not been used properly that you don't get the impact that it could have had?
Brian Poncy: Yeah.
So it's all about set size- opportunities to respond and repetitions, right?
So for example the flashcard is, it's just literally a medium for the information.
And so if I was at home and I was teaching 50 sight words and I went through them all one time, it's not gonna work, right?
And so, again so what I see is that, you know, people need to control those ratios.
So there's a really interesting study.
It's it's old.
It's 2008, but it's Nestin Joseph, and they compared all unknowns, a folding in technique, which was, like, three to s- three unknowns to six knowns, and then an incremental rehearsal, which was one known to nine unknowns.
And anyway, they compared all of those three, and they looked at the amount of words learned, and then they also looked at the kind of efficiency and the rate of learning.
And so what they found was the most effective was incremental rehearsal, but it also took the most time.
And so, you know, so most kids responded best to all unknown, right?
And when I said that, that would be words learned per instructional minute.
But the amount of words learned per session the most was with incremental rehearsal.
And if we think about that, it's really all about OTRs or repetitions.
And so when I'm working with kids from typically developing to maybe intellectually disabled, it's all about understanding the set size and the OTR.
So I could do 10 flashcards with five repetitions, see how the kid does.
Let's say they don't, so then I could do five cards with 10 repetitions.
In both cases, the kid would get, you know, 50 repetitions in their sight words.
And then, like, if a kid, if you could do 10 words with five repetitions, obviously you would wanna do that.
But if that didn't work for the student, you could do five cards with 10 repetitions.
And so you kind of search for those ratios to see, you know, how a child learns most efficiently.
And that should be kind of the purpose of response to intervention models you know, when we look at special education eligibility.
Gene Tavernetti: Okay, I wanna talk w- a lot more about that later, but just k- kind of, kind of a clarification here or on the, On the expectations of this program, because you mentioned, you know, th- this has been going on for years.
It's been going on as lo- you know, I've only been in education since 1977, and it's been going on since then.
And it's almost has been, ... And then when I started consulting in lots of schools, it would be the same thing.
It's like, "Well, we have ... Our kids don't know math facts." And the question should be, "Well, what are you doing about it?"
Okay.
So if you're doing something like, like your program let's say in a general ed setting is it, are these is this program appropriate for a general ed setting?
Brian Poncy: Well, the initial one, we kind of combined interventions, and we did cover, copy, compare, and explicit timing.
And so I called it the skill remediation package.
And so, basically what a teacher would do is they would assess every kid in the class.
They would place them in their instructional level, and then, I mean, that might be in a fourth-grade classroom, you had sums to 10, sums to 18 multiplication.
I mean, all over the place, right?
But you could have 30 kids on different things all working in unison because the intervention procedures were the same, right?
It was four 2-minute blocks, and kids were either using cover, copy, compare if they were kind of low with fluency and needed to focus on some accuracy-building components, or it would be all explicit timing, right?
But what was interesting is where we differentiated it was with the curriculum.
So the intervention procedures were the same.
The curricular materials were differentiated across students.
And so in that case, I was like, "I came up with a great intervention." But guess what?
I started, like, teachers were like, I would get these superstar teachers that would find it, 'cause you know, I never really talked about it, and I wasn't on a podcast till like 2024.
And they would get it, and they would be like, "This is so great and it's free and it works. I'm gonna get my colleagues to do it." And the colleagues were like, "Oh gosh, no. This is way too much work." 'Cause you had to assess the kids, place the kids, do intervention all week, score it.
You know, see if the kids moved from skill or intervention.
You'd have to, you know, reprint stuff for the next week.
And so there's constantly this kind of assessment and intervention feedback loop, which I thought was fantastic, but I mean, teachers don't have time to go to the restroom sometimes during the day.
So obviously asking them to do these things you know, it's just it was too large of a lift.
And so then as teachers you know, kind of communicated these things with me, I was like I need to come up with something for Tier 1 to support teachers," and that's where Facts on Fire 2.0 came in.
And my goal with that is I need to lessen the amount of effort on the teacher.
I need to ensure you know, that it works really well with kids.
I need to kind of, you know, keep kids uniform since it is tier, Tier 1.5, as Dr. Vanderheyden calls it.
But I mean, honestly, I just... A- and the other thing is as a school psychology profes- person, going in and assessing it was never an isolated 20% of kids that were struggling with math facts.
It's widespread And so, like, I mean, I know when I go into any school I don't even tell them, "Well, why don't you assess your kids and see if they don't know their facts?" 'Cause I've yet to have anybody come back and be like, "Yep, our kids are pretty fluent with their math." Not one time.
Gene Tavernetti: Oh.
Brian Poncy: Not one time.
Okay.
Like, I was talking to a school today, and they assessed their kids up to fourth grade, and you know, they use illustrative math as their core curriculum, and all of their kids started at sums to 10, whether they were in first grade or 10th grade.
And they supplemented with Jennifer Bay-Williams and, you know, their math specialist and people were doing probably a wonderful job teaching the things they were taught in their colleges of ed, which was, "We don't want kids to memorize their facts because, you know, that's gonna prevent them from multiple strategies and coming up thing, you know, with things on their own."
And that, to me, is kind of the crux right now in education.
Like, any fourth grade teacher will tell you, "I can't teach what I'm supposed to teach 'cause kids can't access the curriculum." But if you ask people, "Well, why are you doing what you're doing?" And it's like, "Well, I want, we, you know, well, we want kids to think flexibly."
Like, that's the big definition of NCTM with fluency, is about flexibility.
And that's a really important skill for kids to have.
But if they build accuracy and then they memorize the fact, that is the bridge to the multiple strategies and flexibility.
And so, again, there's kinda research that shows this.
It's correlational.
There's not a ton of it out there.
But, you know, as I see it, and I think the data that's coming in from my grant work and some other things where we're using Facts on Fire broad math scores are going up quite a bit from just six minutes of you know, timed practice, and that's probably due to the fact that it is increasing kids' skill and allowing them access to the curricula, which most core curricula are focused on representations and multiple strategies.
Gene Tavernetti: All right.
So you touched on my next question because y- I think if folks are listening to this podcast we'll just stipulate what you just said.
We agree with the kids needing to know their math facts.
So then the next question is, Well, the first question is, what do we do?
And you answered that.
You've got your program.
Now the question is, like, how much time does it take?
What is actually the investment of time in a day, in a week for a a tier one classroom teacher to be able to administer and oversee this program?
Brian Poncy: I would say 10 minutes, and I'm being con- and I'm being liberal.
Right?
So the the, there's a tape problems and an explicit timing piece- The tape problems takes about three and a half minutes to four minutes, and then the explicit timing is one minute.
And we have a, like a whiteboard type.
Like, you would download it.
You would get it on the whiteboard.
It reads the directions.
It times everything out.
You know, the students have their workbooks that match kind of the instruction.
And so if a teacher's really good with her transitions, she can have it done in six minutes per day.
And so, you know, so six minutes per day obviously is 30 minutes per week.
Gene Tavernetti: Wow.
Okay, and just to be clear, because the first time I heard you talk about the taped the taped component, I was a little bit confused because I know Eureka Math uses a tape model.
So but when you say tape, are you talking about recorded?
There's something recorded.
Brian Poncy: Yeah, back when I was in graduate school, we used tapes , tape record- Okay.
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.
Okay ... until
Brian Poncy: we went to CDs.
But yeah, it's basically an audio cue.
Gene Tavernetti: Okay.
And
Brian Poncy: it, yeah, it paces the kids.
And again the program is very carefully sequenced with its sets.
And so like when I talked a little bit about flashcards and what makes them effective or ineffective you know, I the...
So, so if we take sums to 10 Facts on Fire is literally 30 lessons, and there's 12 problems in the first 15 lessons, and then there's 12 problems in the second.
So when you look at you assess for one minute and get a baseline on all of those 16 problems.
For most kids it's usually around six to 10 problems per minute.
Okay?
And then lesson one, we isolate four problems.
And so that taped problems piece, it does four items, so it restricts it to four items.
It does six repetitions, and then the following one-minute timing times them on only those four problems.
Okay, and then it goes to lesson two.
It folds out one problem, it folds in one problem, and they do the same thing.
And so over the initial first 15 lessons, the first 10 of those is just systematically incorporating you know, new items.
So by the time they're done with the 10 lessons, they've been exposed to all 12 items in very small sets with high repetition.
So in tape problems, four items, six repetitions, and then of course they go into the timed practice so that they can independently com- complete those, right?
And then the last five lessons of that 15 lesson is we- we call warming up, and that is just retrieval practice.
Gene Tavernetti: So you have so this is all laid out for the teachers.
And let's assume that a teacher does this.
Is there a- percentage of kids that are not going to learn their math facts this way?
You know, does this... I guess I'm asking does this work for everybody?
Is there checkpoints to be able to say, "Well, maybe we need to do some of the interventions that you talked about earlier"?
What should be the expectation in a tier one class?
Brian Poncy: That's such a fantastic question, and unfortunately it is not the panacea and cure-all that I hoped it would be.
Gene Tavernetti: But
Brian Poncy: you know, what happens is A, kids need to obviously have, You know, like, if you start the program, it goes all the way back to kindergarten, and kids have to count, and they have to write numbers, and then they subitize, and then they combine kind of sets and learn larger and smaller.
And so, you know, there's things that happen.
So, you know, when we start with sums to six, kids already can count.
They have one-to-one correspondence.
They've practiced these things.
And this works great when a kid starts from kindergarten and goes through the whole program.
You know, so you're never gonna put a kid in unless they have prerequisite skills kind of known and able to do those fluently.
But when teachers start this in, like, fourth grade, there's a whole host of skills that kids might have been taught and might or might have learned, right?
Might not have learned.
And so that complicates things.
And so, what we're finding with our initial results is your typical kid will generally double double their baseline to the end of the program fact.
And so the end of the program is usually either a six or a nine-week you know, kind of investment.
And so if a kid starts... and I do things with problems per minute, not digits correct per minute.
But anyway, kids generally will start between 8 and 12, and then at the end of the intervention, they're generally up in that 20 to 25 problem per minute range.
Gene Tavernetti: Okay.
And so- Just to... I just wanna be, be clear again in the language.
You're calling the entire program an intervention.
You're not talking about, "Let's take these kids out. Let's have an intervention teacher." This is an intervention for the entire class for math.
Brian Poncy: That's right.
Because again- Okay ... yeah, 'cause again, you go into any school, and their core curriculum are generally you know, more in query and concept-based, which I'm fine with.
But because they are so ambitious and teaching so many standards and concepts they don't really provide that they, they don't provide that time for dedicated practice, and that's where Facts on Fire comes in.
And so you basically know regardless of what you're doing, probably supplementation to kind of, automatize your basic facts is a good idea.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, you know, it's interest- it's interesting, like, I said, you know, I just talked about the word intervention, and because I know I've talked to Sarah Powell before, you know, University of Texas and her math, and she started out as an interventionist, you know, working with struggling s- kids, not necessarily identified for special ed but struggling students as you talked about here.
And then I've talked to Sarah Oberly about executive functions and how, you know, these are for all kids.
And I talked to Faith Howard about the literacy work she's doing in secondary with her with her intervention.
But what she's doing in her intervention class is exactly what she's doing with her regular ed students.
So I I've always been puzzled by these programs that are successful and that have been proven successful.
Why haven't they migrated to tier one and just say, "This is what we do in tier one instruction"?
Brian Poncy: Yeah, because generally really successful interventions like, like mine, they're very, they're reduced down to a very kind of- Target skill, right?
So I look at computation.
When I go out and I train schools, I never tell them like, "Well, you get your kids automatic in their math facts, we're done.
Pat ourselves on the back." "This is fantastic," right?
Like literally i- if alls my program did was affect their fact scores their computation scores, and not their broad math scores, then why would we do what we're doing?
But where I think core curricula, they try to be they try to be everything to everybody.
And because they do that, they're a jack of all trades, master of none, so to speak.
And so what people like Dr. Powell have done is, you know, look at vocabulary instruction or scheme instruction, or me with computation instruction, and we've just said we are gonna very carefully scope and sequence what we do, how we design it, how we sequence it, so kids are constantly being introduced to one new thing all the time, right?
A- as compared to you may go a week and now you do another unit that's not even related to it, right?
And so it's just not scope and sequenced in a way that's skill-focused.
It's more idea-focused, I think, in those core curricula.
And of course, we know to think and to kind of connect concepts and ideas, we have to have a lot of skills.
Well, I think sometimes the core curriculums focus on concepts and ideas really outpaces the skills they're building within the students.
What we do is just focus on the skills.
And then lo and behold, when kids get the vocabulary and the fact skills and the schemas, you know, now all of a sudden when teachers are teaching, you know, the concepts and the ideas, they have the things to connect.
They have access to it.
And, you know, the same teacher that was ineffective like two years before- ... they do Maths on Fire, now all of a sudden their state test scores increase a lot, and their map scores or their benchmark scores increase because the kids coming to them have that better skill base.
And so it's not all a all or none, right?
It's we need to do... A- and it's not about balance either, so I hate that term.
But I mean, we have to be very systematic and programmed about how we design curriculum, match instruction to that.
And, you know, as Dr. Oberly like talked about on y- on your podcast, right?
Like- ... there's things, especially for young kids, that we need to take into account.
So for example, when she talked about executive functioning, well, think about my program.
They get the s- the same whiteboard, the same directions, the same structure.
Everything's predictable.
They're setting goals.
The routine's all there.
Well, what's that do?
It allows the student to focus in on exactly what we want them to do, and there's no confusion about what we're asking them to do, right?
Right,
Gene Tavernetti: right.
Brian Poncy: So when people are like, "How does that work so well?" Well, it's design, and so i- it's scope and sequence that's matched to instruction that takes into account those kind of environmental variables that can kind of add to distracting or kind of overloading students in the process.
Gene Tavernetti: So, if a Tier 1 teacher does what you just described and again, we're looking at the fact fluency math, you know, m- math facts, not the general math capabilities.
But if they do that I wanna ask you a percentage and I'm gonna give it some context this time.
So, i, I thi- I think like in California, I know at one time, you know, if you had over 10% of your kids identified for special ed state was gonna come looking at you- Mm-hmm ... 'cause you've ident- you've identified too many kids.
Brian Poncy: Yes.
Gene Tavernetti: So if a teacher and I would guess that some of, only some of those kids would have some sort of deficit or discrepancy or whatever word I'm supposed to be using you know, today in math.
It would be in math.
So what would be a an expectation of a classroom teacher doing this well?
Could she expect 95% of the kids to be successful?
All
Brian Poncy: right.
I wish I could share screen with you.
Okay.
I literally have bo- I have box plots up, and I know this- Okay ... doesn't help your audience, but let's put it this way.
In first grade the average kid was about at six problems, and the bottom quar- quartile so, so the 25th percentile was at about four, and the upper 75th percentile was at around 12.
And so after the 30 lessons the average went from about 8 to 18, and the bottom quartile was from about probably s- 16 to 32.
And the average, yeah, and the average is, again, right around that kind of 19, 20 area.
But the point is like in the box plots, they don't overlap.
Does that make sense?
So, I mean, are there kids that don't respond?
Of course, but your bottom 25% of kids went from about three to four problems per minute to about probably 15, 16 problems per minute, and then your upper kids went from about probably it looks around 13 to about 30.
Gene Tavernetti: And we're talking about a six-week intervention.
Yeah,
Brian Poncy: so that, that would be their sums to 10 growth.
Gene Tavernetti: Okay.
so in a school year with 36 weeks
Brian Poncy: Mm-hmm
... Gene Tavernetti: we might not get those that much growth replicated, but would there certainly be continued growth?
Brian Poncy: Yeah, they typically go fr- across about three to four skills in a year, and we suggest right now that you kind of move those kids along uniformly because we don't wanna overload teachers with having to juggle a bunch of balls.
Although the ones that are using it, they're like, "This works really good," but like I feel like, you know, some kids could really take off and run with this, which they can give them packets and just have them practice on the side, right?
Now, with tiered intervention, the kids that are non-responders those kids probably need a double dose of this, and with those you'd probably know very early on in the intervention process, like 'cause of the small sets, like four per day, like you would see them grow from that baseline across all the problems on those first four.
You're gonna wanna see them go from like eight to, you know, 16, 20, 23 problems, you know, because it's on that small set, and that shows that within-session growth.
And if you get a lot of within-session growth across sessions, you're gonna have good pre/post growth.
Does that make sense?
Gene Tavernetti: That make, that makes sense.
So, so, and this is always, you know, we always wanna know we use these words that are measurement words but sometimes don't mean a lot, so what would be an expectation of proficiency or grade level or, you know, what would we be shooting for in these?
Brian Poncy: I had that, the same conversation with the school earlier today, and this is how I want people to think about it that's really simple and it cuts through all the psychometric jargon, right?
So, a- if a kid does six problems per minute- They're doing one problem every 10 seconds.
That's horrible, right?
If they do 10 problems a minute, that means a kid is getting a problem right on average every six seconds, right?
So ask yourself as a teacher, if you're in fourth grade and you give a basic fact assessment and your average is 10, then that means if you show a kid six times four on average, it'll take him six seconds to answer it, okay?
Now, if we did that with a phonics card or is- like, no one would stand for that.
So then we get to 20, right?
And obviously 20 is one problem right every three seconds.
And then obviously you go up.
If you get 30 problems per minute, now you got one problem every two seconds.
And so if... and so, there's a lot of people that have a lot of different criteria.
This is mastery.
This is instructional.
And Matt Burns has done a lot of really great research on it, as Robin Codding, and I've even done some.
And kids need around 10 digits or 10 problems per minute at least to respond to things like explicit timing.
And so, you know, to me 10 digits to, to 30 digits is what I have as an instructional range, and that just means that kids can independently kind of do timed practice and they'll respond fairly well to it.
If they're below that, then that's a frustration level.
It's really hard.
I mean, it's taking a kid, you know, six to 10 seconds to do every problem, and so they are deep in a burdensome cumbersome you know, procedure at that point, where they're counting or doing, you know, whatever they're doing to come up with answers.
And so in the spirit of the program, you know, I want, like, I want kids between 30 and 60 problems per minute, but I know if I go into schools and be like, "Well, we need to set our goal at 60 minutes or 60 problems per minute," you could get there with this program, but you couldn't get there in six minutes a day.
You'd have to do a higher dose.
And so, so when I designed this, I'm kinda thinking to myself, "Well, I have to... i- if we don't provide a short enough amount of time, then nobody's gonna adopt it.
But if we don't do it for enough for a high enough dosage, then kids aren't gonna respond." And so, you know, basically I kind of went with the six-minute timeframe, and what we're seeing is it's getting your average kid pretty much around 25 problems per minute, which in sums to 18 and multiplication is around 40 to 50 correct digits per minute, which is in m- into mastery ranges in, in most kind of research published criteria
Gene Tavernetti: Well, you know, it's interesting.
You were gracious enough to share some correspondence you had with a teacher and asking your advice about how to move some students along.
And one of the things that, that caught my attention that I hadn't thought of before was how quickly a student can actually write and form numbers with a pencil.
Brian Poncy: Yes.
Gene Tavernetti: And had never thought... Are there any other confounding factors besides just knowing the facts and writing that you could think of that teachers should be aware of?
Because, you know, now we see that, you know, handwriting is gonna be, you know, we're gonna emphasize handwriting a little bit more.
Any other factors that could confound the issues or...?
Brian Poncy: You know, I look at things as alterable variables, like things we can control.
And so, you know, I look at, you know, I'm a behaviorist in my training and my philosophy, and so I always wanna do direct observation of behaviors that are amenable to intervention and change.
And so, you know, are there biophysical genetic, you know, kind of caps on performance?
Maybe.
I can't change those.
And I mean, for example, I did a research study one time it was s- it was second graders, and I shrunk the set and we gave a lot of a lot of practice, but we got the entire, like, second grade class to 80 digits correct per minute.
I mean, you know, like people will be like, "Well, kids can't really do things that fast." And it's like, well, it depends on how much time you spend on it.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, it, and it brings me to something else.
I don't know if y- you, if it was in the stuff that you sent me or somebody else talking about motivation.
Oh.
And I think of these, and I think of these kids you know, getting the... I- if they're, they don't do well with their math facts fluency in the early grades, and there's not some sort of effective program like yours, they're doing the same stuff over and over again, day after day, year after year.
That's gotta be an important factor, the motivation
Brian Poncy: it's a huge factor.
And so, you know, as a behaviorist, I refer to that as a learning history.
And so when kids see things like computation facts on a page yeah, i- if... A- and think about it.
If you're a teacher and you're like, "Well, I know fact fluency's important, so I'm just gonna go print a worksheet," and the worksheets are randomized, and you do it once a week, you're literally wasting the child's time, right?
Because they're only... Y- you don't even know what problems they're doing, how many repetitions they're getting, and the, and if it's hard for the kid you know, when you start at the beginning of the year, they're gonna make no growth more than likely across the year.
Now compare that to, you know, you take a very tightly controlled, and now they're practicing maybe...
And teachers do this all the time, right?
They do it with twos, and then they'll move to fives, and then they move to tens.
And so they'll do these small sets, and kids get those.
The point is that eventually you gotta interleave all of those together.
You know, and that's kinda what the fluency practice does.
But if we think about, you would get small sets to build accuracy, but you also wanna do small sets to build fluency to those really high levels.
But then you have to be systematic about folding in new problems and interleaving.
So, you know, like in my program, I start with four problems and I end with four problems.
But in that time, like, they get exposed to all 36 problems.
Now, you probably have people listening being like, "What the hell is he talking about, 36 problems?" So what our research has shown is that zeros and ones, like most kids know those and they're rule-governed.
That's 33% of the problems.
So if there's 100 problems, you take out zeros and ones, boom, right out the gate, right?
In addition, what we know is if a kid knows three plus five, they generally know five plus three.
So boom, now you take out half of the 72.
That leaves you with 36 individual problems they need to work on automatizing.
Gene Tavernetti: You know, d- you made me think of something that's I never asked anybody that actually knew the answer.
So I always wondered, you know, well, the kids know their twos, and they're two, four, six.
It's almost like a song.
Same thing with fives.
Can't we do a song with sixes and sevens?
I mean, I mean, no I, you know, I know you're laughing, but I'm serious.
It's like the ones that they don't know, could it, isn't it just as easy to start?
Because they, it's not like they're knowing the meanings or anything.
Sure.
It's like singing, it's like singing the alphabet, which will become useful information later, but they don't know what the letters mean.
They- It's just a song
Brian Poncy: It, why is, why are songs important?
And why do they enhance learning in young children?
Do you know?
Gene Tavernetti: That's why I have experts on the show.
Brian Poncy: Okay.
So- the ABC Song, do you know what song that is?
Gene Tavernetti: No.
Brian Poncy: Twinkle, Little Star.
Gene Tavernetti: Oh, that's right.
Brian Poncy: Yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, so basically when you s- w- like sing songs, what it does is it allows you like 'cause some people think it's all musical and they do all this.
But no, what it is it's a learning history of, and it cues how to organize information.
And so they basically put the letters in order and they kind of hook it into that melody that a child should already know with Twinkle, Little Star.
And that's why it helps guide and cue that.
So it's not a biophysical thing that our brains are wired for music.
It's, you know, about you know, it's about prior knowledge and automatized you know, over repetition with the nursery rhyme that you attach those letters to.
Gene Tavernetti: So could we find a song for sixes and sevens and eights?
Brian Poncy: Well, my guess is that I know they're out there, and my guess is if you ask teachers "Do you sing-song your skip counting?" And then you would ask them, "Is it a different song for each number?" And they would be, "Oh, who would do that?
That's dumb." Yeah.
"No, it's the same song, it's different numbers," right?
And- Yeah ... and my guess is that's what, you know, that's why.
But again, you know, when we think about explicit instruction and how we wanna break things down into small chunks, but also attach it to our prior knowledge, that's why, you know, things like that work.
But I mean, I've talked to kindergarten teachers, and they're just like, "Kids learn so good with music."
And it's like, well, let's really think.
A- and not that it's not true.
It provides those hooks.
Yeah.
But you know, like learning is not magic, right?
Like learning is not magic, and I wish people would get away from thinking like, "Well, if I knew their processing speed," or, "If I knew this," this somehow would open up this magic.
It's like, no, learning is really predictable.
You know, it's about what do they know?
What am I gonna teach?
How do I task analyze and break that as, into components?
And how do I systematically build on one of those you know, to put things together into larger skills?
So- If people really wanna get into some awesome reading precision teaching and they literally talk about this as tool skills, which would be like writing numbers, and then com- component skills, which would be like your single digit facts, and then a component skill, which would be a multi-digit algorithm.
And so if you want a kid to basically learn the com- the composite skill, they need to have the tool skills and the component skills.
And before you learn that component skill, single digit addition, you probably need to have those tool skills as well.
And so everything's very sequential and you know, built on, every- everything you do instructionally should be dependent on what you've done before.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, I'm gonna mention it one more time, because if I have a listener who wants to try a teacher who wants to try to go to those six, sevens, and eights earlier- Because I have never talked to a teacher that did say, "Oh, they just have trouble with the six, sevens, and eights."
And again, listening to you and what I know about instruction, it seemed like maybe those are the ones we should be hitting more.
They should get- Yeah ... more frequency.
Now,
Brian Poncy: are you talking addition or multiplication?
Gene Tavernetti: Multiplication, yeah.
Brian Poncy: Yeah.
Yeah.
So the problem is, I've had stu- I had a student come in.
She was a professor's kid, just bright kid, and I was like, "You know your math facts?" And she literally sings, she sang her sixes and sevens.
'Cause I'm like, "Six times seven," and she's like, "7, 14, 21, 28, 35" Oh.
I'm like, "Well, okay." But anyway but the problem is with that is even if you taught that that would give them access to respond to the stimulus, like six times seven.
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.
Brian Poncy: Right?
But if kids use that now, we're usurping all that working memory to focus on a counting procedure, which would be skip counting.
And so it puts you in the same exact problem of, well, what do you do when it's 729 times 34?
Oh.
We want them see- things, you know.
Now, I get it, it's a bridge.
Okay.
Right?
It's a
Gene Tavernetti: bridge.
Tha- thanks for raining on my parade there, Brian.
Okay?
I tried to
Brian Poncy: rain on your parade.
Gene Tavernetti: I'm sorry.
Okay.
I'm, I wanna go way back to the beginning of this, because you alluded to something and I wanna be clear, okay?
About what do we do with the kids that don't get to those levels that, that we want, that we're expecting.
And you mentioned some some ways that the instruction might look different in, and I'm gonna call it tier two, but I'm gonna call it outside of the regular instruction.
And you mentioned some things.
You mentioned fewer problems in the set.
Mm-hmm.
What were s- what else were some of the things- Yeah
that a teacher might do?
Brian Poncy: Yeah, fi- there, there's five points.
As a school psychologist, when I had a treatment non-responder, I always look at five things.
The first one is are we on the right skill?
And so that's where that scope and sequence is really important.
And what I wanna do, and think about a child that you wanna, want them to you know, have high oral reading fluency scores, but they don't.
Well, then I would go back to, you know, probably some y- you know, their nonsense word fluency.
So kind of CVC letter sounds you know, that kinda thing.
And I would just make sure that those sub-skills were known to kind of mastery levels, right?
And so the first thing, so, so if, i- if your target is oral reading fluency, but the child's still at, like, 30 sounds per minute on their individual sounds, then the right intervention target isn't oral reading fluency, it's letter sound fluency.
So the first thing you gotta make sure is don't expect the child to grow on a skill when they don't have the prerequisites, okay?
And so that's the first thing.
Are we targeting the right skill?
So we do that.
Now we're on the right skill, but now we need to know are we matching, doing the right skill by treatment interaction.
So Matt Burns does research on this skill by treatment interactions, and it's I'm gonna assess them on those letter sounds or math facts, and if they're accurate, right, then I can just have them probably, you know, do explicit timing and just, you know, high rates of practice to get better.
But if they're inaccurate, now if I do timed assessment, it's gonna be very detrimental to the child, right?
And so in that case, I need to do things like flashcard drill, cover, copy, compare, maybe tape problems.
But you're gonna have to have instructional components you know, that have antecedent and consequent procedures.
So we're on the right skill.
Now we need to see is the child accurate or inaccurate, and then you're gonna go ahead and choose interventions that incorporate those instructional components, because the instructional components need to build accuracy are different than what's gonna be needed to build fluency, okay?
Yeah.
So now- I'm sorry, go
Gene Tavernetti: ahead.
No
Brian Poncy: Yeah, now let's say we have those.
Now the third thing I'm gonna check is motivation.
Sometimes it's the right skill, it's the right topography, and kids aren't growing.
And so now I'll add reinforcement because some- And the reason why is 'cause it's easy for a teacher to check out.
But sometimes kids actually respond, right?
They do the practice, but they're just not really focused in on the practice at all, right?
So they're, it's kinda like that kid you talked about, like, "I've done this forever. I don't like it." And so, like, if I go out and I'm practicing basketball, I can haphazardly throw up 100 shots, but it doesn't make me good.
What would make me good, right, is if I'm focused on technique and where my elbow is and when I'm gonna release my shot, so I can be very mindful about the practice that I'm engaging in.
And so by re- mo- motive- you know, providing a reward for a kid to beat their previous score, what you do is you check to make sure they're giving optimal attention and engagement you know, in, within those intervention sessions.
Gene Tavernetti: So do your materials contain some sort of protocol or assessment for those ar- those sub areas that you just described?
Or it'd be kinda hit-and-miss for the teacher?
Brian Poncy: Not yet.
I will be making a two things.
I'm working on a book right now, a second edition with Robin Codding when, and Rob Volpe, and we're gonna, in the book we're gonna go through this intensively.
And then also I'm going to, this summer, make an intervention manual for Mind 2.0, and within that I'm gonna subsume the other interventions so it'll all be a single intervention, and it will it will describe how to use this across tiers.
Gene Tavernetti: But I think if a teacher, you know, is working with a student who for whatever reason is in that Tier 2 environment if they start with something and it's not, that's not it, they could move on to something else.
It doesn't have to be this formal type of assessment to, to move them on.
Brian Poncy: Well, it's it's just formal hypothesis testing.
Okay.
Right?
Okay.
Yeah.
The, so, so with the small sets, what's so cool about it is you don't have to wait a long time to know whether it's gonna work or not, right?
So you can do a can't do, won't do assessment.
If a child's not really growing and you could be like, "Well, I'll give you five minutes of tablet time if you can beat your score." And if the kid jumps, you know, like 50 to 100% on their score, so they go from like 7 to 12, then think about if every single time the child practiced their math facts, you know, they were more engaged and they nearly doubled their practice.
You're gonna see better long-term gains, right?
But let's say you assess the kid and they don't get any better, and we all know these kids.
They're trying hard they're doing the work, but they're not responding.
And so you're like, "Well, should I back up a skill?" You assess that and you're like, "No." And so then that's when you're like, "Now I'm gonna increase the dose."
That's the fourth thing you can do.
You can just say, "Instead of doing Facts on Fire for six minutes a day, now I'm gonna do it for 12 minutes a day, and we're gonna see if that works." And so there you know, there's research out there that shows kids are non-responders at one level, but then you increase that dose, and then they'll finally respond, right?
And then the last and final one, and this is especially relevant for students with severe disabilities, is, you know, if I have a set of 12, they're, you know, it may just be too many items for them to focus on at once.
You know, a- and so because the more items you have, the less repetitions per session you're gonna have.
So then you shrink the set size.
That's the fifth thing.
And so then you might use the same intervention, but you shrink the set.
And so again, instead of doing like eight items eight items with you know, 10 repetitions, you could do four items with 20 repetitions.
Does that make sense to you?
Gene Tavernetti: That
Brian Poncy: makes sense.
And so you basically would kind of... So, so, so the whole goal is regardless of the child's disability or processing speed or any of this stuff, you're "How can I systematically manipulate the instructional components that are alterable so I can find the conditions under which this child is successful," right?
And again, alls you can do is what does the child know?
What do you wanna learn, them to learn?
You shrink it down into bite-sized pieces, and then you literally make sure they're engaged, they get ample opportunities to respond, and they get those repetitions to have within-session growth.
And then after they have within-session growth, now the next day you're gonna check to see if they maintain that growth, right?
Because again, k- all kids learn pretty much the same way.
It's just they're different in the rate in which they learn and the rate in which they forget.
And so again, in my view, learning is a very predictable exercise.
It but the complexity isn't in the instruction, it's actually in the curriculum.
And so it's really about how you you know, kind of distill and break up those component pieces and systematically put those together, and the degree of automaticity which you program those prerequisite skills so that, you know, they link to the new information.
Gene Tavernetti: So if a, And you've done this several times today, you have also compared this to reading, and so this is...
A- and now you've said learning, you know, learning is predictable, it's the curriculum.
So having said that if the teacher gets better at doing these interventions, gosh, I hate to use those words.
If the teacher c- you know, gets better at this instruction with these kids in math, it's gonna carry over into the instruction in language arts and reading and other things, because the learning is learning.
And,
Brian Poncy: S- and I... Yes.
And the thing is, a- and this is I have a saying, I say this on podcasts, so I'm not trying to be redundant, but empirically validated interventions were really cool to me when I was young.
But it didn't take me long to realize that it's really kind of- It's not all that helpful of a term because you can take an empirically validated intervention, and in one context it'll work great, in another context it won't work at all.
And so, you know, to really be an expert, you know, with you know, a- as teachers are, you know, you really begin to figure out the context under which this intervention works and this one doesn't, and that's where that skill by treatment interaction stuff comes in.
So, you know, there's very, it is act- A- and so again, w- like when we get into, well, should we do explicit instruction or inquiry-based instruction?
There's times when inquiry-based instruction is the right thing to do, right?
And, but that is in like if we talk about the instructional hierarchy or h- explicit instruction, it's at the end when we know kids have the prerequisite skills, and now we want those kids to kind of model, you know, whatever more kind of larger database problem-solving or critical thinking skill or whatever it is, which is basically a multi-step procedure where they're gonna put those things together.
And you know, and again, I think that's what a lot of the, you know, kind of progressive folks, they really love that type of instruction and outcomes because that's what experts do.
But I think the explicit people are like, "Well, we want that too, but we gotta start very controlled." And so it's not balanced by any means.
It is literally about if you're building accuracy, you do this, when you're building fluency, you do this, and when you kind of program generalization is what we call it.
But basically, when you're applying skills to controlled you know, kind of settings you know, that would be pretty explicit.
But then when we get ki- people into novel problem-solving, then that's highly independent, and that's when inquiry-based, problem-based approaches when you have assessed and know kids have the prerequisite skills, when those are highly useful.
Gene Tavernetti: All right.
Well, Brian I think that's a good place to leave it.
I think the, for me, the most important thing that I got out of this conversation is that the Like all programs it's going to take teacher the expertise of the teacher to manage it.
The program isn't magic.
You know, you have to, you know, as they say, you gotta work the program and then take that data and what did you call it?
Hypothesis- Yeah
... Brian Poncy: yeah.
It's called inductive hypothesis testing.
Yeah.
Which is it, which is another just way of saying kids are really complicated and but we wanna use if/then statements, so we make a hypothesis.
I think a kid is struggling because of because they can't accurately respond.
So if I do this instruction, they'll learn how to accurately respond.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, I think your place is a, you know, your stuff is a good place to start.
And and I think that's how we become expert.
We use somebody else's stuff, and then we take care of the nuances after we are- Yeah, that's right ... after we have some fl- some fluency with that and some generalization.
Well, Brian, do you have any questions for me?
Brian Poncy: Oh, man I do.
I, so, you know, listening to your podcast, I know as an instructional coach you know, in, in your notes you talked to me about working a- and getting, In special education, a lot of kids are reported to have processing difficulties.
Gene Tavernetti: Yes.
Brian Poncy: Okay?
And so my question to you as an instructional coach is do you feel that you know, kind of fixating on within child hypotho- hypothetical constructs like processing speed do you s- did you see teachers using that as an off-ramp to justify why students can't learn things that typical students learn?
Gene Tavernetti: Well, , first of all I'm kinda laughing because whenever I work with a teacher and you know, we do we do lesson design for, you know, we'll meet for a coaching cycle.
We'll meet to talk about a lesson and then observe the lesson and then debrief it.
Usually the first meeting to talk about lesson design, that's when I find out, "Well, I have this many English learners.
I have this many kids on RSP, this..." You know what?
And I don't care you know, because we're gonna do the, we're gonna do the instruction.
Because what I have found is that there is, the more effective the instruction, you're just eliminating that variable.
From what's happening.
There was, there's enough confounding issues going on in the classroom, let's not instruction be one of them.
Let's be sure we're giving opportunities to respond.
Let's be sure we've had clear explanations, you know, e- et cetera, et cetera.
And yeah, I don't even listen.
I don't even, I don't even wanna hear it.
Yeah.
In fact you know, I've said this over and over again.
I was a principal and I was not a good principal.
I didn't know what I know now when I was a principal.
And if today I were to go back and I would get some sort of referral for a student study team or, you know, I don't know what they call them in different places, but just, you know, it's kind of like one of the steps to get to a special ed referral, things that you need to do.
I wouldn't even accept it until I was clear that instruction was going well.
There, there was a ... Oh, gosh, how long ago was this?
This was in the '90s.
California, which is where I am they decided they were gonna do class size reduction.
And they were using data and studies done in Tennessee, that they reduced class sizes everything you know, just a lot of good things happened.
California did it, and they went down to 20 to one.
Tennessee was, like, about 13 to one , you know?
Wow.
So we go- we're not, we're still not even close.
But so 20 to one, it was better.
And one of the, one of the one of the rationales for doing that is because with a smaller class size, we would have fewer special ed referrals, the teacher would be able to pr- and it didn't happen.
The teachers that had the most special ed referrals with 28 kids had the same percentage at 20 kids.
And so, so if a teacher's telling me, you know, a- all about their kids, I don't wanna hear it . You know?
Let's d- let's take care of the variable of the best instruction that we can give with appropriate materials, and then we'll take a look.
And the other thing that, that we say is that, you know, you're always gonna have some kids that are not gonna be successful in a particular lesson.
And guess what?
You're gonna have a much smaller subset of your class if the instruction was done well, as effective.
And then guess what you're gonna do?
You're gonna pull that small group of kids and do the types of things that, that you're talking about.
Maybe fewer repetitions, maybe, you know, what, all those things that, that we can do to provide support.
But, That group that you're gonna pull at the end is gonna be fluid.
Instead of just saying, "These kids aren't gonna get it," we're gonna give them a shot to get it.
Yeah.
And then, okay now let's do it.
And I think the teachers found that, And I th- and I think it gets back to some motivation too.
When the kids that never were able to do things started being able to do things, not only their motivation increased, but the teachers' sense of efficacy in- increased.
So yeah I didn't even wanna hear that, Brian, but I'm working with-
Brian Poncy: Well, here's an e- here's an easy question for you.
Where did you play football?
Gene Tavernetti: Northern Arizona.
Brian Poncy: Northern Arizona.
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.
Brian Poncy: All right.
Well, I heard that you were a football star in back in your younger days.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, you know, back in my younger days was a long time ago, Brian.
So, so anyway, yeah.
That was an easy one.
But anyway, Brian, it has been a pleasure chatting with you, and glad we got to see whatever... I never... I know it's not in person, but as close as we're gonna get.
Brian Poncy: Well, well, I appreciate you having me on.
You know, doing podcasts with me is kinda like herding cats, and so, I feel for you.
But hopefully we got some good nuggets of info out and so yeah, just for you know, teachers you know, look at the website, try the stuff out.
It's www.factsonfire.com.
People are finding really good success with it, and the kids like it.
And you know, I've really tried to make it easy for teachers and effective for students, and that, that's a good combination to have.
Gene Tavernetti: Now, if that daughter of your friend ever comes into your office again, h- do a recording of her six, sevens, and eights for me, would you?
Brian Poncy: I will do that.
Gene Tavernetti: All right, Brian.
Thanks a lot.
Brian Poncy: All right, take care.
Gene Tavernetti: If you're enjoying these podcasts, tell a friend.
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Tesscg.
com, that's T E S S C G dot com, where you will also find information about ordering my books, Teach Fast, Focus Adaptable Structure Teaching, and Maximizing the Impact of Coaching Cycles.