How A $30 Book Changed the Way We Teach
No, I do not receive a commission for promoting this book. It is just THAT good. I want everyone to know about it and to consider using it.
Five years ago, our district’s Science of Reading journey began. We adopted the Bookworms Curriculum. We began listening to Emily Hanford’s podcasts . Our wonderful principal encouraged, supported, and guided us. Along with the new curriculum, all of the reading interventionists (including me) started using How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction by Sharon Walpole & Michael McKenna to guide our work.
Before this shift, we sat on instructional support teams for years, knowing that we needed to change something about our reading instruction, but we were unable to identify what. After starting the lessons and diving into the research from Walpole and Mckenna, we began to understand that our phonics instruction needed to be systematic, explicit, and intentional in order to see student growth. But that wasn’t the only thing that changed!
So what did we do before? What do we do differently now? It is so hard to believe this is what it was like before this book.
SCREENING BEFORE: As a balanced literacy school, our screening and data-gathering were inconsistent. We used DIBELS in grades K-2. We only used DIBELS in grades 3-5 when students weren't meeting benchmarks and we needed more information. In addition, we used the Fountas and Pinnell benchmark assessments to find every student's reading level. If they were below the benchmark they saw a reading interventionist. Then, the reading teacher might do additional testing on high-frequency words and phonics elements, depending on what they thought was most appropriate.
SCREENING NOW: We DIBEL all K-5 students 3 times a year. We look at every individual component of the assessment. For grades 2-5, if a student is below benchmark in words per minute (WPM), we will administer the IDI (Informal Decoding Inventory) found in The How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction book. The combination of these two assessment tools helps to determine students underlying skill deficits in decoding or fluency. These assessments allow for more accurate grouping, and they guide our intervention. In 1st grade, we use the students' performance on their nonsense word fluency (NWF) to determine the need for further assessment. If they are below the benchmark, we give the IDI to determine specific groupings. In Kindergarten, we work informally with students until January by pushing into the classroom and providing reteaching lessons around letter formation, letters, and sounds that are taught during Tier 1 instruction. We use classroom assessments around our Tier 1 curriculums (Fundations/Bookworms) to determine if further testing is needed to determine if official reading services are needed.
READING INSTRUCTION BEFORE: In our intervention groups, we taught many different reading strategies to help students but did not specifically teach students how to decode words. You will no longer find these posters in our building.
We used leveled texts based on their F&P assessment, and we gave instruction based on this level. The students were never explicitly taught how to sound out the words in these leveled books. Often these books were too challenging for students because they had not been taught specific decoding patterns. The students were just guessing at unknown words because of the strategies we were teaching.
READING INSTRUCTION NOW: No more guessing, no more leveled reading groups. Our students now practice applying new phonics skills with decodable texts. We use Geodes, Reading A-Z, and UFLI. In intervention groups, we group students according to their foundational skill needs, and we change our groups regularly based on DIBELS data. We are explicitly teaching phonics skills in an intentional way.
PLANNING BEFORE: We used to spend the majority of our time planning lessons and pulling materials from multiple different resources. Teachers Pay Teachers was our go-to resource to find supplemental activities to support reading skills but they didn’t always cohesively align.
PLANNING NOW: No more hunting for materials. All of the materials are right there, down to wordlists and lesson plans (a link is provided for a PDF version which makes for easy copying). Now that we have an explicit scope and sequence with scripted lesson plans, we have more time to understand the materials and make our instruction more intentional. There is no need to plan anything extra. We know the students are getting exactly what they need. Students love the predictability of each lesson and how they build on each other. The skills spiral so students are constantly practicing what they have learned.
DATA BEFORE: Data meetings were spent talking about kids who were not making progress, but we didn’t know what specifically needed to be changed. We would experiment with different kinds of interventions (decoding, fluency, comprehension) and would see what stuck.
DATA NOW: Data meetings are still spent looking at data. But now when students are not making progress we know what instruction the student has had and can make adjustments accordingly.
