The Road to Reading with Elana Gordon

Elana Gordon is the fifth Goyen Fellow to join the podcast. Like the others before her, she is a knowledgeable and skilled educator who shares her expertise through videos, blogs, and a highly regarded podcast focused on literacy instruction from kindergarten through secondary grades.

X/Twitter:   Elana Gordon (@mommagordon2) / X

Substack:  @‌VoicesfromtheField

Podcast: The Road to Reading

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What is Better Teaching: Only Stuff That Works?

Descriptions of effective teaching often depict an idealized form of "perfect" instruction. Yet, pursuing perfection in teaching, which depends on children's behavior, is ultimately futile. To be effective, lessons and educators need to operate with about 75% efficiency. The remaining 25% can be impactful, but expecting it in every lesson, every day, is unrealistic. Perfection in teaching may be unattainable, but progress is not. Whether you are aiming for the 75% effectiveness mark or striving for continuous improvement, this podcast will guide you in that endeavor.

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 [e-mail].

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 Alana Gordon.

Alana is a K six Reading interventionist at Warren Park Elementary School in Cicero, Illinois.

She is certified in both letters, language essentials for the teachers of reading and spelling and EBLI, evidence-based literacy instruction.

Alana was a Goan fellow in 20 23, 24, which allowed her to share evidence-based teaching practices through social media.

She is the creator of an in-house podcast in her school district called The Road to Reading.

The podcast focuses on how teachers are aligning instruction to science of reading and science of learning practices, and sharing teacher shifts in its instructional practice.

In addition, she is the author of several articles published with Edutopia and Her Substack Voices from the Field, which highlights educators and evidence-based practices.

Alana is a founding member of Speech to Print Illinois and the soon to be IDA Chicago chapter.

She is currently a doctoral student at Mount St. Joseph.

She is passionate about making sure all children learn to read.

She lives in Buffalo Grove, Illinois with her family and in her spare time.

She loves anything outdoors, especially attending summer concerts.

I think you're gonna like this one.

Good morning, Alana.

Thank you for being on better teaching only stuff that works.

Thanks for having me.

I'm excited to be here.

Oh gosh.

I've been looking forward to this.

And as I told you before when we started chatting, I had gear butts on quite a while ago, and he talked about being a Goan fellow and what's a Goan fellow?

I had no idea.

And now you are the fifth Goan fellow who has been on this podcast.

And the reason is, I mean, all of you are so, so knowledgeable and so impressive, and I think, you know, provide a great service to to the rest of the, to the rest of the teaching community.

In fact, could you just start.

By talking a little bit about the Goan Fellowship and the types of things that they do.

Sure.

It's a non-for-profit organization.

So it's run by the GoYin Foundation and Cada Solo is the executive director.

And one day I was perusing X or Twitter back then, and I saw the advertisement for applying to be a fellow, and I had.

Seen Becky Palone, which I think she was one of the first educators who did this, who was a fellow and she had such a huge following and would post videos of her work in her kindergarten classroom.

And I just fell in love with the idea of seeing good instruction.

And so I was.

Thinking, you know, I'd give it a try.

Like I really wanted to be part of a community of educators that would reflect on their practices.

And so that's really what we do.

We videotape, we kind of have a direction for our year of what kind of instruction we'll be showcasing.

And then we videotape or record, lessons or snips of lessons and we post them.

I think that the foundation has become better at this.

When I started, I just posted, I took videos on my phone and posted on X alot.

Now they have a YouTube channel and I think that's.

Pretty popular.

And then, you know, along the way we write some blogs about our instruction.

And these days on Substack, they embed videos so that teachers can actually see what they're describing in action.

And I think for me, it's one of the best ways to learn.

We would also reconvene, we would convene together once a month and somebody would lead the meeting on something they were passionate about.

And so we would just have an opportunity to learn.

And I know you said you had Kayer on and he was in my cohorts.

That was like 20, 23, 24.

So I learned a lot about fluency instruction from Kayer and leadership.

In fact, when we first met it was at research ed in New York City and.

You know, the whole meeting or meeting people, you know, air quotes or somebody call 'em scare quotes, you know, about meeting people online.

It's only partly, you know, you read their posts and you go, oh, these people are great, blah, blah, blah.

And I remember, you know, meeting you and the initial meeting was at, like I say research ed New York City, and you were sitting with Laura Stam at breakfast.

And and I remember we, we introduced ourselves and you know, oh yeah, I'm Laura.

I'm Alana.

Okay, great.

And then later towards the end of the day, we met at the, where people were selling books.

And you know, you and Laura were trying to decide you know, what you were gonna buy.

But in between that time when we finished the bookstore, in between that time, I realized that Laura.

Was stamp who I had been, you know, following on Twitter, but it's just hard to make those connections some sometime.

And so it was very exciting, you know, after to meet you.

But the thing that made this memorable is you and Laura were at the the book, the little bookstore.

And my friend, you know, you were trying to buy a book and my friend I was almost embarrassed because he kept picking up my book and hand it to you.

You need to read this one, you need to read this one.

You need to, is that what your recollection was?

I mean, you're being too hard on yourself.

I was there and I saw, I really had my eye set on a Kate Jones retrieval practice book, because that's what I was focused on.

But they happened to be sold out of that particular book.

And then your friend, I think Andrew, right?

He, yes, he handed us this book and said, you'll never regret it, or something like that.

And I was like, okay, I'll give it a shot.

I mean, before that breakfast, I don't think I, I hadn't known about you or your work, but after, and Laura was the one who made us sit there and said like, look at who we're sitting with.

And I was like, okay.

And then I think you ended up in a session that we were at too.

And then, yeah, I mean, after that day I went home and I read that book and I, you know, there are so many guests that I've had on my
podcast that have mentioned your Fast framework and I know that you were on and you walked us through it, and I haven't regretted it at all.

It was one of the highlights.

I mean, I put it in my show notes all the time because it's something that I think all teachers, like, I wish I had that book when I had graduated, you know?

And gotten my degree.

I wish I'd had that right away.

I think it, it centers you on the things that are most important.

And so, I mean, even though Andrew was the one who pushed it towards us I was very grateful that I got a hold of it then.

'cause it, it is one of my favorites.

I wanted to bring that up because I was hoping you would say everything that you just said, all those nice things about it.

But also I think the idea of, you know, we talked about what the Goan Foundation does and what you do as a Goan fellow to help spread the word, but also, you know, being, you know, being able to meet people at places like research ed.

I don't know if we talked about this before but do you have some like favorite experiences or favorite things, favorite ahas or something that you came away from the research ed and said this was really worth it?

I really enjoy just seeing educators that I'd seen or heard about through X.

You know, I'd watched them or read some of their substack or their blogs and being able to see them put that into action.

I think the session we attended we saw, we went to Zach Rochelle's session and seeing the amount of opportunities to respond that students had.

I think he had us watch a video and we had to count how many times.

Students responded in like a minute and I actually just presented in Illinois and I used that same technique 'cause I was in, in a 45 minutes or a second clip.

I mean, those kids had responded over a hundred times and that's just like eye-opening to a teacher.

Like, look what you can accomplish in such short amounts of time if you're very focused and explicit.

So I really appreciated that.

We saw Patrice Bain.

Who is an Illinois educator and has since been on my podcast, so I really appreciated hearing her.

There were so many great people that we didn't get to see.

I mean, the one drawback is that everyone presents at the same time.

You know, there's different sessions, but there's so many good ones.

So I'm hoping to go to the St. Louis.

Research ed coming up in September and the fall, so I hope I get a second chance.

Alright, great.

well, so you've learned a lot of these techniques.

What's something that you, and you have a lot of training, formal training as, as well as was mentioned in the introduction.

So what are some things that you have started doing in in your work as an interventionist and maybe some things you stopped doing?

Well, so there's kind of like a past and occurrence.

So in the past, like, right, like I'll say five years ago as the past, like, that's when I really started learning about the science of reading and then even more recently learning science.

But I came from a balanced literacy district, so we were doing guided reading in small groups and differentiating or so we thought and like level text and all those kinds of things.

And we really weren't meeting the needs of our students.

We weren't.

You know, focused on phonics instruction or phonemic awareness.

My background actually was in intermediate grades.

I was a fifth, sixth grade classroom teacher when I started.

And so we really don't learn any of those things when we're in our, you know, education program and then coming out and just being in the classroom.

No one really ever guided us towards the things that mattered.

And so, I, you know.

As soon as I heard about the reading science, it just made so much sense.

We always knew something was missing.

We were missing the mark, but we couldn't quite figure out what exactly it was.

And so, you know, being explicit and teaching students how to match, you know, phon and graphemes and, you know, put and blend those together and move on from like the basics.

So I mean, those are things that I stopped doing immediately and I started implementing structured literacy practices.

Along the way I learned more about ex. Explicit instruction from like Anita Archer and you know, being very focused and.

You know, teaching steps in small incremental ways and checking on student responses, things like that.

Making sure I'm including and making everyone's thinking visible so I can be responsive.

Those are all little things I think that I've changed in the past few years.

And then about two years ago, I I realized that a lot of the practices that I was using were effective.

I was seeing student growth, like I had never seen.

Seen before in intervention work, but I felt like it was still not fast enough.

Like I work all the way through sixth grade and my kids were leaving and they don't have a lot of time left sometimes when they come to you in fifth grade.

And so to catch them up several grade levels is a large task.

And so, I was searching for something that could accelerate growth, not just, you know, give me growth, but accelerate it.

And so I stumbled upon speech to print or linguistic phonics as it's being thrown out there now.

And and so I, I got ebley trained and there's other ones, you know, Marni Ginsberg has reading Simplified sounds right is another version.

So there are different programs, but I chose ebley that's the founder, Nora Shazi.

And I got ly trained like two years ago and I started implementing it.

And it's just there are just some basic principles that are slightly different.

Not that everything is different, but we do a lot of work with.

You know, integrating all parts of literacy.

I do a lot of work more with authentic texts than I do with Decodables these days and things like that.

And so I I have seen a lot of accelerated growth last year alone.

I think I exited 21 kids out of interventions, which to me was.

Kind of unheard of.

I had never seen kids leave interventions before.

And there is not really one child out there now that I feel like I can't teach to read, you know, and I can't catch them up to their grade level where
they are reading grade level texts and can join their class again, because I think Sean Morris's always telling us like, there's an opportunity cost there.

When those kids come to me, if we don't have that time built into their schedule, they're missing instruction, they're missing content, which is super important as well for knowledge building.

And so, you know, it, it matters how long they're in interventions and so getting them out as quickly as possible so they can rejoin their classmates and do grade level work is, you know, is extremely important.

And so that's really where my focus has been the last couple years of trying to refine my practices, learning about speech to print.

I have, okay.

I'm trying to think of all the questions that I wanna ask.

What's the best order?

The one on the top of my head.

That in most recent, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a teacher and she's changing grades and she's going from experienced teacher, been teaching, you know, over 20 years.

And I'm in California.

And she said, yeah, I've got a new partner.

And you know, she's all into science of reading.

And she rolls her eyes and she rolls her eyes because I've been through this before, you know?

And so what do you say to those folks?

And you know what I have a lot of empathy for?

I mean, I've been in education a long time and this is always the answer.

This was always the answer.

I remember when we were doing balance literacy, I remember I, you know.

All of those things.

Now how do we go to the teachers?

How do we move that research to practice, especially in folks that have been through these shifts before you have any suggestions.

I think the key is not just to be telling people things about the research.

I think they have to see it in action, which is one of the things I really appreciate about the Going Foundation and other organizations like Step
Lab and things that are showing us what that instruction looks like in our classrooms, and they're giving us these opportunities to rehearse it.

What does that feel like?

What do you say?

Like, do you have a script for that?

Do you know exactly where you're going to?

Stop and ask a question.

I think one of the hardest things for educators is to leave professional learning or development and go back to their classroom.

Like they either wanna be perfect, so I'm not gonna implement it till it's perfect or they're afraid.

Like it's, I tried it.

It wasn't exactly what I thought it was going to look like, and now I'm just.

Done.

Like I'm not, I don't wanna continue because it's hard work and it can be messy and it's not always a straight line to from point A to point B. So I think you have to be willing to like jump into the messiness and you know, reflect on your practice.

I think.

You know, recording yourself for the sake of just you watching it is a valuable, you know, skill to learn.

I think having a coach work with you is really valuable if you can get that kind of support and I think that.

Just having discussions and then finding a topic you're interested in and really learning more deeply about it.

Because I hear a lot of times when we go to sessions, oh, I do that.

Yes, you do that to some extent, but there's so much nuance to things that you might not have quite thought of.

You know, when I started learning this year, I joined a research.

Study from the University of Maryland on, and they we taught Reading Mastery, which is a direct instruction program, which I had never done before.

And just even that sequence of asking a question, the pause and the name sequence at the end, I hadn't really done much of that before.

And so having somebody show that to me and now I can see the value, right?

I now get to see the.

Thinking of all students and then kids have their time to shine, we call it.

And I can see the value in that, but without that experience I might not have stumbled upon that.

You know, I think what you said is very important about being able to see it because many times, you know, teachers, you're gonna believe this.

And I don't, maybe some of the people in my audience, Alana, some teachers are not that excited about having coaches.

And one of the reasons that they're not excited about having coaches is they think coaching is gonna have somebody who's gonna come in and tell 'em, don't do this anymore.

And what I've found with experienced teachers is that it's usually not a big shift.

You know?

It's a small sh it's a big shift in their head, maybe, you know?

Yeah.

But what it looks like is not that different.

But also I want to.

Emphasize the point you made about you think you're doing it, you know about having somebody do it, because one of the things that we see in education.

Forever.

We've watched is that people mimic things without understanding the underlying, you know, what's going on.

And one of the things that I'm worried about, well, I'm not that worried.

I don't worry about it but I'm afraid that what we're gonna see is they're gonna take a look.

Everybody's gonna take a look at the Mississippi Miracle and say, oh yeah, well, we have to hold kids back in third grade.

Geez.

It's not.

The holding them back.

That's not what it is, but that's the surface level.

That's what we, that's what we see.

Thank you for allowing me to go off here Alana, a little bit.

Well, you know, one of the, one of the interesting things that I think, you know, before we started recording, you were talking about
that you have done things in your intervention group that you they had been effective, but then you found something more effective.

Now and I think just having that self worth, could you talk about, you know, like, like something that you've done that you could think of that, that fits?

Yeah, sure.

I feel like you know.

Every scope and sequence in a curriculum, right?

You know, you follow it, it's you're looking for something systematic.

We start at simple.

We build to more complex.

But one thing that I've learned in speech to print is that, you know, I don't have to I used to use a more structured literacy lesson plan where I would start with phonemic awareness and then I would go to a phonics.

Piece.

And then I would do encoding and decoding, and then I would move to connected text and maybe do some dictation.

So it was all kind of step by step.

But what I have found is that integration piece, like I might do a little phonemic awareness work outside of my Authentic lesson, but every time a student makes some, as you know, says a sound incorrectly, and I say this.

And I trade a sound with them and have them rebrand.

They just substituted, they just rebleed.

They're using their phonemic awareness in the essence of the active reading.

And so by integrating these pieces and not keeping them so isolated, I'm finding that there's an acceleration in that.

And I also, like another example would be in a Scope and Zs, a lot of times we teach.

Silent E and every couple of days is a new vowel pat, you know, a new vowel.

There's an E at the end with the A, and then E and I. And the thing is, it's the same concept, right?

It's every T when you see that E at the end, it often, you know, you're saying the name of the vowel.

So I'm gonna teach you the concept behind that, and then I'm gonna have you practice it.

And of course, you know, thinking about like the instructional hierarchy, I'm gonna.

Start with, you know, block practice, and then I'm gonna mix it up and then I'm gonna keep moving, but I don't need to spend two to three weeks teaching you a concept I can teach you in 10 minutes and then involve all the different VS.

And practice.

So that piece of practice is so important and we see it in so many other ways.

We see it in musicians, we see it in sports, and yet in education, we don't give enough time to that.

Rehearsal or practice part.

And I feel like I've been able to increase the amount of time that students' eyes are on text and I've really seen that lead to acceleration.

I think what you're describing there, you know, is that, like you said, I could teach this in 10 minutes.

and, but we're gonna practice it the rest of our lives or the rest of our lives as readers.

So I think that's confusing sometimes for teachers because, okay, we're gonna focus on one thing.

we're gonna do this today.

And they say, well, they're not gonna learn it today.

This is gonna take days.

Of course, it's gonna take days to practice, not to learn it, you know, and it's funny you mentioned the silent E I've been on a, it's been years, I've been trying to get people to change the way that they spell cheese.

Because I mean, how many rules about long E do we have to have in one word?

We got the silent E at the end.

You know, we got the two vowels that go walking.

I mean, you know, so I mean, how, anyway I can't get people to get on board with that though.

So as you're talking okay, so we've talked about some of the things that you did, but you do better.

Is there.

Anything that you've just I love, I would, I wanna get back more to, to, to intervention.

So how are students identified for intervention where you are?

So we have a universal screener, which was new to our district within the last five years.

So we give a benchmark test.

We use DIBELS eight.

And so everyone takes the benchmark and we have different measures that it includes to kind of give an overall picture, and then we look for students that are like in the bottom.

20 10% ish.

Our system isn't perfect.

It's still overloaded in intervention work.

We're not quite at where, you know, every grade levels, it has kids in the 80%, you know, mark for proficiency.

And so we have way too many kids in intervention for all different sorts of reasons.

But we look for those kids that are most struggling, who are, you know, in the well below category, you know, bottom 10, 15, 20%.

And those are this.

Students that my, my intervention team picks up.

Me personally, I tend to work with students who are very inaccurate, who have low accuracy in their reading and have a low rate of reading.

And so, what seems to happen with with work.

Through Ely is that I'm able to increase their accuracy fairly quickly within like a couple months even, you know, so, so they become very accurate,
very quickly and speed up that process so that we can think more about fluency and what does that mean, and comprehension and things like that.

So do you have multiple interventionists at your site?

Yeah, at my, in my particular school we have two bilingual interventionists, and we had, this past year we had three English interventionists.

And it kind of depends on the year, how many we have at each building, but it's somewhere around that number.

So you and you supervise these folks, when I say supervise, you provide some support for them.

Not really.

Once upon a time I was a coach, I was a literacy coach in my building for 10 years, but I don't do that anymore.

But I mean, I think being a teacher who's knowledgeable and is thirsty for learning is, you know, can help a team and, you know, think about what it is that we wanna focus on, like.

Can we make tweaks to our, you know, multi system, a tiered system of support?

Can we add things and look at data differently?

And so, I mean, I'm always bringing things to my team.

Yeah.

I don't know if I would call that what you said.

The reason that I asked that question is you mentioned that you had the kids you were working with had a specific thing that you were working on.

What was that thing?

Accuracy.

AC accuracy.

Okay.

But, so I was wondering if the kids were.

We're, you know, they do the screener and then, well, Alana's gonna take these kids for accuracy.

Somebody else is gonna take these kids for something else.

But that's not what's happening where you are.

That's just something, that's a decision that you made about what you're gonna focus on.

Oh I think we just think about the intervention.

So I'm the only ELI trained interventionist, but we use other programs.

So some of us use uly and some of us use a program from Anita Archer Phonics for Reading.

And so I think it just depends on what we think is a good match for those students.

You know, what is it that they're working on?

Is it more fluency?

Anita Archer's program has like bridging texts, and so they're nice because they move from more decodable types of texts to more grade level types of texts.

And so sometimes teachers will take those interventions will take students who are already accurate, who need to work more on their rate of reading and ity, and so they'll use that intervention.

Some other teachers who are not speech to print trained, they'll they'll use u. So do kids move between the groups?

Do they graduate?

Sometimes?

Yeah.

Yeah, sometimes, I mean, some students exit some students after, so after a couple cycles, if we don't see a change, you know, I might say to a another interventionist, you know, can you try this student with this intervention?

Because I don't see the progress that we were hoping for to meet their goal.

So sometimes there's some changes, but I mean, there's old systems left over.

Not everybody is accepting of wanting to give up students, they think of their students as theirs.

And so we don't always share Nice.

You know, so to speak, but we're working on it.

So are you one of those you like to keep yours?

No, I like to exit mine.

I like to teach them what they need to know.

No, I like to get students what they need.

So if it's not what I'm giving them, then there's something else out there that matches their need and we need to find it for them.

That's our job.

Okay.

So you've been an interventionist, you've been a coach.

You've been a coach.

For interventionists.

So I guess one of, one of my questions is what are we doing differently now or do we have any hangovers?

Okay.

I know that one of the things that when I was an administrator, I was most disappointed about finding out that many of our interventions looked just like what was happening in the classroom, except there were four kids.

And it didn't seem like that was the answer to me.

And of course, you know, I'm going to stipulate, you know, I'm not an expert in the, in this area, but if we go to an intervention, I would expect something to look different.

Doesn't intervention look different in general now, but.

Has the intervention, do we still have hangovers in intervention?

We send kids to intervention and it doesn't work.

Not in your school, not in your site but as you hear what people are doing in interventions.

I think that there are lots of students that are stuck in interventions, and we call them lifers.

They've been there for as long as you can remember year after year, and that should tell you something, right?

If the instruction isn't working, why is it not changing?

I think when you had asked me earlier what's something that have changed, I think across my teaching years, that realizing that it is my instruction that needs to change and not the student, right?

It's never a problem with this.

Student.

It's always something in my instruction that needs to be adapted.

And so I think that lots of us suffer from that.

You know, like we're not, sometimes the instruction does look the same sometimes, you know, maybe we're not looking at data close enough, and so we haven't analyzed it to the, to, to the degree that we need to.

And so we're not finding like, what is that, you know?

Minute struggle that the student is having that we can build on.

I do think that the research does point us in the direction of aligning, you know, for MTSS aligning our instructions.

So interventions shouldn't look wildly different, but they should be more intensified.

Right?

And you can do that in different ways.

It can be smaller group size, it could be more opportunities to respond, it could be more models, more explicitness.

So I think that.

It's not the alignment piece, but I think that we need to improve our practice around some of those other pieces that we're still learning.

Is there anything as you continue to learn that you look back on that you were doing and you thought, why did I ever think that was a good idea?

Yeah, I, well, first of all, guided reading and I, we, after we moved from we did guided reading using like Fountas and Pinel resources and materials, and then we moved to Gian Richardson's literacy footprints and we kind of sprinkled some phonics in there.

And we used to, actually, in my district, we threw out Decodables.

We didn't think they were useful.

We didn't understand, like you said, we didn't understand the.

The idea behind them, why, what purpose did they serve?

And so we said these stories didn't make sense and we threw them out and no one told us differently.

And so I think that realizing, you know, some of those practices, like kids are not looking at pictures, they're not just guessing at words.

They need to know, you know, how the code works, how the system works.

But also we also had units of study by Lucy Calkins.

And we taught strategy of the day or the week, you know, like main idea.

We would teach it in a text and test it.

And then we'd go down to point of view and author's purpose.

And we didn't really integrate any of these things.

We weren't building knowledge because we were changing topics all the time and we weren't getting a sense of what kids could or couldn't do.

And then I think in terms of writing instruction, we were asking kids to write five paragraph essays about topics they had.

They could say maybe.

Three words about, and so I don't know how you can speak, how you can write before you can even speak about a topic, but learning that, you know, things we needed to teach about cohesion and we needed to teach about, you
know, ref reference and we needed to teach about sentence level learning first and writing and breaking things down for students, it's in nearly impossible to write a good paragraph if you can't write a good sentence.

And so learning how to.

That struck him that way was something that was a huge change for me.

I hadn't ever considered those things before.

You know, it's interesting you talked about knowledge building and, what do people call it, the skill of the weak is now what you read about it, you read about it on Twitter.

What is, you talk about it.

And I'm just shaking my head, oh yeah, Alana, you know, go for it.

What's the tension?

What in the world what's the argument here between the knowledge building and the skill.

And the skills?

Well, I think, I mean, I think it's different for experts versus teachers.

So I think teachers, like we, we adopted core Knowledge or CKLA and Caminos, and so we have a knowledge building curriculum, but I think a lot of teachers are afraid of the depth of the topics for their students.

I also think that.

The strategies are embedded within the teacher, you know, lessons, but they're not as explicitly stated.

So like when you're reading about different civilizations, they're gonna ask you to talk about them and you are comparing and contrasting them.

But maybe, you know, you're not just reading a piece that's just done and contrast, and this is like what we're focusing on because you don't, on any given day, you're not focused on that one strategy.

Student needs lots of strategies to be able to make their way through a text.

And that's what makes them complex.

And so, you know, I think that when we focused on just one strategy, we were telling students like, this is the only thing you do in this text, and that's not accurate.

And so I think there's this, you know, I often think on Twitter though, experts kind of sometimes tell us.

They seem to disagree but loudly, but they're not always disagreeing.

So, so like there isn't so much space between them, like if you really listen or read what they're saying, I feel like they, they agree on more things than they don't, but they highlight the things that they don't agree on.

More loudly.

And so I think to me that's confusing as an educator because the majority of the average educator doesn't really read enough research.

And so we're reliant on, you know, what we think are experts to help us navigate what does the research say?

And when you're saying two different things in two different text threads, that's confusing.

And so I think that experts, it would be helpful or beneficial for experts to kind of.

Put it all together for us and come to like some consensus before they put that out into the world in front of teachers.

Really a difficult thing for teachers to be able to determine.

Again, just because this person has does good work doesn't mean they're not fallible.

And and I think like, like you did in your class, well, I, this is working, but this is better.

I've, I found something better.

It doesn't negate what somebody has said.

It's just that you found some nuance and you made it work.

And I'm gonna mention Laura Sta here right now, just because I wanna mention her in every podcast, but I call Laura the great synthesizer.

Because you can see all of these ideas that she has learned and she makes them fit into her lesson.

Her personality, her classroom, how she runs her classroom and you just see 'em.

If you know them, you see 'em.

If you don't know 'em, you just think, oh, she's a good teacher.

But but I think I think that's where the, you know.

Not being bullied into, okay, you have to do it this way.

And this is the, one of the things I always tell teachers that I ask them you know, don't do it because I said it, because then if it doesn't work, you're gonna blame me.

You know?

Yeah.

It has to be yours or you're not gonna learn.

Alana what what is important, do you think about the intervention work?

What, you know, what's the most important things?

I'm doing this work with kids.

I think within your school system you have to think about alignment.

You do have to think about what's going on in your core instruction and how can you help support that.

But finding the thing that's going to work for those students, I think that we have to really start the part of the conversation.

I feel like that is missing out there is that acceleration piece.

It's like you said, it's not about what's just working.

It's what is working the.

Fastest, and that's what we need to rally behind, right?

Kids can't be in interventions forever.

They can't be lifers.

They're missing valuable instruction in their classrooms, and that's where they should be.

And so I think that just understanding, you know, like things like the instructional hierarchy and the amount of practice.

That students need and that it's not, yes, you're looking for a level of mastery, but you're also coming back to it time and time again.

It's not just like, you know, they learned it and they're never revisiting these things.

And so, and like you mentioned, you know, I think those are all things that need to be part of the conversation, and I think that acceleration piece to me is the part that's missing the most.

And it's interesting, I think this isn't really part of the learning hierarchy, but I think it's it's adjacent and that is, as you work with these kids in intervention and you kind of see what the arc is of improvement.

And so you might have kids, you know, there, and it's been two weeks, it doesn't look like much improvement to somebody, but you know, They're right on track.

And I think that's one of the hard things not only for interventionists who are just starting to realize, Hey, you're making progress.

Don't give up.

But I think it's also important for the classroom teacher to say, oh no, we're not.

We're not gonna get rid of this kid yet.

You know, we're not sending him to Alana yet.

They're on track.

And and I think that's part of the operationalizing of the of high expectations is understanding.

There's a path here and there on it, and I am doing a good job.

You know, we can, you know, I think, yeah.

Yeah.

I think looking at data helps with that, right?

Your data will tell you, like, you know, those celebrations, those moments, even if they're incremental, like you don't get from point A to point B, you don't take this big flying leap, right?

It's steps along the way, and you have to acknowledge and plan for those too.

And with a lot of those kids, there is that flying leap as you exit them.

And then they're good.

They're good to go.

Well, Alana, do you have any questions for me before we go?

Of course I do.

I love questions.

Well that, oh gosh, we didn't talk about your podcast.

Oh my goodness.

We'll talk about it in a second.

Oh, okay.

I'm sorry.

No worries.

So I know that you've worked in a lot of schools and you've coached with a lot of teachers, and so I'd be interested into, like thinking about systems work.

I wanted to know what are like three to five actionable.

Steps that you would put in place in a school or tell leadership to put in place to get there to kind of turn a building around?

Well, I know you didn't ask this question.

To get this response but we do have a new book outta co-authored, a book called Digital Captives.

And it's pretty much about that, about developing systems that to turn buildings around.

I mean, the focus of this was initially about technology, but it's about, and just turning school around systems that need to be in place.

But one of the things.

That is most important is that there is a a common language around instruction.

You know, you don't have to say, you know, it, it's interesting a lot of you know, I talked to Zach and he's worked with places he's worked.

Like, you'll see these folks in New York talk about the work they've done, like he was at school where they, or the school district that they had the cyclone six and that they didn't say Teachers, you have to use the fast framework, but.

We wanna see these elements in instruction and other schools have done, I can't remember, you know, if they come up with some wonderful, alliterative way to describe all these good things that should be in instruction and to talk about them with a similar way.

One of the things, as you talked about earlier, opportunities to respond.

Whatever those things are, it has to be agreed upon that these are good things.

And that we're all gonna do them.

if you don't have that, everything is just somebody's opinion.

So you have to start with that.

And we've seen just a lot of success, you know, doing that.

In fact, I remember being on your podcast and you asked me about, you know, the fast framework and how it relates to, like the scripted programs or semi scripted programs, and I thought, you know, I think they're great.

I think what happens if you understand the explicit instruction, like in the fast framework, you see why these other programs work.

I mean, there's total alignment.

So we're not asking you to do another thing.

We're just bringing this to attention.

that is one of the biggest things.

Just a just an agreement about who we are here at this school.

A common language, and then having somebody to help you do that.

You know, that, that's why we have coaches now.

It's not to say you're a bad teacher, it's to help you so that you're actually getting results from the things that.

We're asking you to do because we do know that they work, they, you know, but but it's hard to know what those points of leverage are.

What are the most important parts of this?

So, common vocabulary, common lesson structure to be able to talk about that, to be able to coach, to get better, and always with the goal in your instructional hierarchy.

It's not so that teachers are robots, it's to get past the fluency and that you're making those decisions.

You know, you're making generalizations and adaptations, you know, as you're teaching.

Okay.

I'm gonna bring those back to my leadership.

I'm gonna say that Jean signed off on all of these things and send 'em the book.

Bring them the book, and, all right, Alana.

Okay, before we go, tell us there's two things, what you wanna talk about.

Number one, tell us about your podcast.

Oh yeah.

So my podcast is called The Road to Reading, and I started it as a way to support my colleagues as we were making these shifts together.

And then, along the way, we've asked some experts to be on it like yourself, and you've given us kind of some good things to think about.

And then I also speak to lots of educators who are putting These practices or strategies into their real life classrooms and showcasing what that looks like.

And so, I try to match the podcast to the professional learning that my district is doing for the year, and it just so happens that everybody gets to benefit.

Oh, Great.

So you've got your podcast, you've got your substack, which will be in the notes and the substack, As you mentioned.

A lot of the videos will show up now into the substack.

Yeah.

That's a good, that's a great feature.

Can I mention one more thing coming up?

I hope it's what you're doing with Holly.

Yes.

It just came out in the bell ringer this morning.

It's so exciting to see.

Yes.

So Holly Corby from the Bell Ringer and Kate Salo and the Goan Foundation, which is also the Science of Reading Classroom.

And myself, which my substack is called Voices From the Field.

We are co-sponsoring a virtual symposium June 30th in the afternoon hours, it's like about a half a day.

We are accepting proposals.

It just went live.

We're accepting proposals from educators that have had great student outcomes and would like to share how they got those outcomes with other educators.

And we're looking for practical strategies that teachers can implement in their practice like the next day.

And we are so excited to highlight teachers and build a community of learners together.

And so please check out the, save the date and please attend.

And I hope everyone will submit a proposal.

You know what?

Oh, I know that this will be out in time for the event for sure.

What are the proposals?

What are you asking that the proposals be in?

I believe it's like early May.

I wanna say I can't quite remember the date, but I think it's early May That the deadline says.

Alright.

We'll be able to have that by then.

Anything else, Alana, that we should be sharing that you'd like to share?

No.

I just so appreciate joining you today to talk and it's always nice to hear from you.

Oh, a lot of the same.

Thank you so much and hope to see you.

Well, I think we'll see you in St. Louis.

Oh, yes, right.

Talk to you soon.

Bye.

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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.