Rethinking Reading for IEPs | Undivided Conversations

Full Event Transcript: A lot of times teachers will tell us that a child isn't ready. Is there a readiness point, or is there always ways of getting a kid to readiness? That is one of my biggest frustrations with this population of kids is that whole issue of they're not ready until they're speaking in full sentences, until they're doing this, until they're doing that. And my philosophy has always been, you're ready. You're three, you're in preschool, you're ready, and we can start so much earlier. We had... when I worked at the University of Saint Joseph, we had a clinic where parents of kids with intellectual disabilities could bring their children as young as two- and-a-half, and our students would evaluate where they were in their early literacy or language, all related to future reading. And kids came often between three and four, and we followed those kids, they’re now in high school. And sure, when they came to us at three, they were not going to sit for a half an hour reading lesson, and they were not going to be answering comprehension questions, but we played games, phonemic awareness type things and parents, because schools certainly at that time were not doing this, parents implemented these lessons at home and they would come back and our students would say, okay, this is the next thing. And so we watched this group of 100 kids following them through up to high school and saw that you're ready. Don't wait. Because if you wait, you lose so much time. And kids are developing in other ways and they're... it's so much more difficult. Having said that, I've taught kids who are young adults who never learned to read, and they do learn, but it is nowhere near as easy as when you're young. So I can’t cite all of the research about brain plasticity. All I know is my experience. And I say at three, when you start with other kids, with nursery rhymes and all, do the same thing, maybe at a higher intensity for kids with intellectual disabilities or with any sort of delay in their learning. And they're ready and you're going to start and then you're going to just see how it goes. So should a student with reading difficulties have separate IEP goals for comprehension and for word recognition, phonemic awareness, or wherever they are in that process? Should that... Should they sort of have separate goals or... Quite often you see just a goal that is aimed at reading level. In terms of writing IEP goals or other goals around the area of reading, I think one area that teachers can kind of tap into are those Commong Core foundation standards that I think they really do a nice job of unpacking developmentally how you move from phonemic awareness to phonics to fluency, etc. So I think the first way I'll answer this question is say, in terms of the last half of should they have goals in word recognition, phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, I think that's very individualized to the student. What are we working on? What's the next developmental advancement to get them to be an independent reader? So I think that half, I would say, is very independent to the student, but I would also say for every kid, if they have a reading goal, they should very likely also have a reading comprehension goal even very early on. And people might want to reference, Diane Browder has a paper on teaching literacy for students with cognitive disabilities that has a really nice model that really has two components. One of it is advancing students’ independence as a reader, and many of those components focus on the big five in reading and other things like that, but the other half of the model is really focused on helping people or helping students stay on track to be comprehending grade level material, and so that's where I think we often fail some of our learners is that we say, well, we’re gonna spend the next three or four years on the basic phonemic awareness and letter sounds and stuff, and we're not really going to get into comprehension until you can read a first grade or second grade passage, and I think that that's very problematic, because it doesn't help these learners understand that reading, the only reason we're doing this, is because it's supposed to make sense, and you're supposed to be able to get information out of text, and in her model, she will spend a lot of time doing, even in the beginning, like if a student is not a strong reader, doing listening comprehension and shared reading activities in support of peers so that students, although they're spending some time working on their basic reading skills, they're also spending time talking about and discussing more grade level appropriate material that they have heard read aloud, and they can still stay up with the conversation. So I would think that keeping that comprehension goal is important, because it helps remind the teachers and the parents that the whole reason we're doing this reading thing is to eventually get to comprehension. So what kind of intervention is best for kids who need to improve fluency comprehension? Yeah, so I think fluency is one that we do have several practices that are important, and I think the main idea here is practice, practice, practice. We use a lot of activities, things like repeated reading. So we know students, when they repeat read a text multiple times, they increase their fluency. There are programs like partner reading where we can have students... We teach them strategies to work together so if they're reading a text, and if one... if the student who's reading makes an error, the coach quickly says, “Oh stop. That word is dog. What word?” “Dog.” “Good. Go back and read the sentence.” So they're getting that immediate corrective feedback. I think it's important that we're placing students in texts that are at appropriate difficulty when we're building fluency, so working on texts that hopefully they're reading maybe 95% of the words correctly, so that you're building that muscle, but not over stressing it. And so we know that just having students read and reread and reread builds fluency and you can do really cool things where you have students do a cold read, you graph their score, you give them some time to practice, go back, and have them read again, and almost always the score goes up and it’s very motivating and reinforcing, and they can see that fluency is happening. So I think those things are important for fluency. Comprehension is a totally different beast and a much harder beast in a lot of ways, and so we do have, I think, several things that we work on when we work on building comprehension are teaching students comprehension strategies. So very explicit, structured ways of approaching a text to get information out of it. So, for example, one that we often use is something called ‘Get the Gist’ where we will have students who are going to read a paragraph, and this works really nicely with expository text, like science and social studies. So, we have them look at a paragraph and identify, okay, what's the most important who or what in that paragraph. What's the most important thing about that who or what? Now put it together in ten words or less. And so we train them on that strategy. We use a very explicit instruction model or I do... I'm going to model it as the teacher and show you how to do it. We do. We're going to do this together, and I'm going to provide immediate corrective feedback to make sure that you're staying on track and getting the correct answer. Then we move to you do, where they do it more independently, but still with very close adult supervision, so that corrective feedback can jump in. So that strategy tends to be really helpful to get kids to understand that passage, but wrapped around that, we have the teacher make sure that they're selecting texts that the kid can independently read, that they're developing a purpose question, which helps the student understand why are we reading this material. And so, for example, might be we're going to read this passage. We're going to learn about erosion, and what I want you to know when we're finished is what are two causes of erosion and two solutions. So now the kids have some idea of what they should be paying attention to, which gives you a lot of help in structure and comprehension because you're not overwhelmed with all the details. You know what you're looking for. We teach some background knowledge and we think of background knowledge as instructional Velcro. We know that learning occurs best when you can map it onto something that you already know and relate it, and so often we'll use a little 30 second, one minute video, just kind of get that interest going, and then we pre teach vocabulary and we think of looking at that vocabulary very specifically of what are the words you actually need to understand to answer the purpose questions. There may be words in the passage that you don't know, but they're not so essential to answering the purpose question, and then we teach the words, some of them we just... you just need a synonym. You don't really need to know a lot about the word. You just need to kind of know what it kind of means to help you a little, and then some words are deep words that you really need to understand, some examples, non-examples and things like that. So there are other comprehension strategies that we often look at but they’re very similar. It provides a very structured set of steps, and we often think of these comprehension strategies as training wheels. You know that you're not going to need to do ‘Get the Gist’ for every statement for the rest of your life, but it does give you a structure to think about how do I get meaning out of text. And then probably in addition to all of that, I would just say continuing building language and having great oral discussions about content area text, even sometimes when it may be listening comprehension because the topic or the text is too challenging based on the kids’ current reading level. Is fluency something you think we should concentrate on, especially for children who have speech difficulties? Fluency is highly correlated to comprehension and that's why I think it is very important, so if a child is reading fluently, that goes back to my earlier comment about having the brain power left over to concentrate on comprehension. You're not focusing so much on your decoding, and so with fluency, I think the very first thing you have to look at is, their decoding skills, are they solid? And so for kids who don't have an intellectual disability and kids who don't have a speech difficulty, I think that fluency is extremely important. Schools, especially in my state, they measure fluency and it's the be all and end all. That's what they use for every indicator, and for kids with intellectual disabilities or a speech difficulty, if they're not speaking fluently, it’s not really going to follow that they’re going to all of a sudden read fluently, so I always want to be sure that people are taking that into consideration. So for kids with Down syndrome, if you listen to a child's speech and it's halting and not very slow, well, you know, their reading is probably going to be similar, so the only caveat for me is not using that fluency score as a way of holding a kid back. So with students who are working through a phonics program, something like an Orton–Gillingham program, and they... that program includes regular progress reports that might come every six weeks or so, how do you build that into an annual IEP goal? Yeah, so I think we would always probably say to not put a program in the IEP because doing so might limit the teacher's ability to adapt and change if she or he needs to. Although sometimes parents want that program in there to make sure that's what they're getting, so I understand that. First of all, what we very frequently use, particularly for our learners who are maybe still reading at a third grade or earlier level, curriculum based measurement or CBM progress monitoring tools like DIBLS, AIMSweb, those kinds of things, I think, can be very, very valuable because they are aligned with early reading skills. And we have good benchmarks of, if we're going to get you to a first grade level, you need to be able to read this passage fluency with 40 words correct per minute by the end of the year, and we use those types of measures in our studies, and I think that they are very helpful at monitoring that progress and making sure that well, we're not seeing advancement towards this goal. Let's make some changes. So I think second, I would say sometimes using CBM, students are not making as rapid progress as we want, and it can be a little hard for teachers to figure out what should I do next in instruction, so often we will have teachers also develop goals that are aligned with the scope and sequence of the program they are working on. So lessons one through five, these are the skills that are taught. So the goal is to master 95% of the content of lessons one through five. That's one way to do it. A second way to do it, especially for programs that have nice checkpoints that you get to end of lesson five and it says, do this test. Okay, you can move on. Or, actually you need to go back and do one through five again. Sometimes we even make goals that they will just make it through lesson 20 in this program, and that is only smart to do if the program actually has data driven ways to move kids through the program, because if it's just, did the teacher teach those 20 lessons, that's not about the student learning, but if, to advance through the lessons, you have to demonstrate learning, then that goal is very meaningful. And then the last thing I will say is we also sometimes use what's called the goal attainment scale or GAS. It is really helpful, particularly when we are maybe moving into more some functional reading goals, or goals where... Thinking of... There's this really great program out of Ohio that does adult tutoring, and so they were working on seeing whether goal attainment scaling might be helpful for them, but we had this one young woman that she wanted to increase her independence. She loves to go hiking. She doesn't know how to read the signs in the park she wants to go to, so she can't be as independent as she would like. So they have created a bank of words that are all on the signs in her park, and those are her literacy goals for her tutoring. Again, she's an adult and it... It's very... it makes sense because it's what she wants to learn, and so with goal attainment scaling, you think of the most typical version starts with this... It's a scale of zero to five. Zero is usually where the student currently is with this skill, so she knows zero of the 40 words. Level four is where we want her to be at the end of the tutoring period or the end of the year. So we want her to know 35 of these. And then we have two benchmarks in the middle, maybe 15 and 30, something like that. You might make that more mathematically even. And then five is kind of if you blow the goal out of the water, where do you go? And that kind of data... Also, the goal attainment scale does have a lot of good evidence behind it, that it's useful, and I think it's also especially useful for students who have limited verbal abilities, because the curriculum based measurements are more difficult to do with a student who doesn't have strong oral language. And so I think those are three ways that I would really think of monitoring progress. -- Children who were past third grade or may even be in middle school and high school and still not strong readers, they might need other ways to access the stuff in the classroom that is being taught with text, with the written word, right? What do you recommend for that? And do you think if they go completely to things being read aloud to them, are they not getting enough reading practice? I think that it is kind of a trade off, but that in a content area class, the focus should be on learning the content, and if a child is reading below grade, they're not going to learn the content by reading the text themselves, and so I think that even though it would give them more reading time, I don't think it's productive reading time, so however that information can best be conveyed is what I think we should go with. So for some kids, depending on the gap, how big the gap is, there may be material that's at a lower level that gives the same overview. I think it's critical that someone is looking at what are the most important concepts, so the child's not focusing on some minuscule little fact when the bigger picture is getting lost. So these are the important concepts, and this is how we're going to convey that, either through reading material that's accessible to that student, text read aloud, video, audio, YouTube. We have tons of choices now. So I think the most important thing is to be sure the child is getting the content in a way that they can access and understand. And that brings up another issue about the reading, they do need to have more opportunities to read, and that is where I think parents can really be helpful about increasing their reading time at home in order to make up for that. Just generally on reading goals in an IEP, what would be your three top tips for parents? One, I would just say that reading should be, especially in early school, one of the very top goals for every kid. And again, going back to Diane's model that sometimes that means listening comprehension. But I do think, prioritizing it and making sure that the school is working on it from the very beginning. So if a student is in kindergarten and the school says, “We're not ready for reading,” don't let that happen. Reading needs to be a priority from the very beginning. Second, I think that any time parents are working on reading with their child at home, it should be enjoyable and fun. That it is not drill and kill. That it is really language based, shared book reading, maybe vocabulary, but fun and game-like and keep it social and follow students’ interest in that. I think that's important. And then probably three is that making sure that you and the school are on the same page related to the data that's going to be collected so you know when progress is happening. But I also want to acknowledge that although we think reading is important, it's one aspect of your child and one aspect of your family, and regardless of your child's reading abilities, they are an important and valued person, and we need to kind of remember that, because I think sometimes we get very frustrated, especially for students who are just making slower progress, and I think it's important to continually think as students are getting older, how can we use technology and other things to support them if their reading skills remain a bit limited, and I think with technology we have a lot of abilities to engage learners in classes where, yeah, maybe you can't read this text, so I'm going to have ChatGPT drop it to a lower level. I'm going to have some... one of your buddies read it out loud to you. I might use audio. I might try to find a video that covers the same information so you can get it. So, thinking about what are the multiple ways we can get content into a kid's head, even if they can't read it. But then there are multiple ways to get content out of a kid's head if they can't write about it, and I’ve had some teachers do amazing things for the other students in the class. Sixth grade social studies class, students are writing an essay, this student can't write an essay, so they make a nice video on their phone. And I think that we... I think the most important thing is that we never limit what we are teaching or how we're expecting students to respond to that teaching based on reading level. So we need to... it's kind of two tracks. We need to be continuing building reading skills as much as we can, but we also need to be making sure that regardless of reading level, we are getting content in and content out.