Interview with Wiley Blevins
Podcast #39 - Interview with Wiley Blevins
Show Notes
All About Wiley Blevins:
Author, travel-lover, and expert in all things literacy.
Comes from a history of grandparents who were illiterate - books were not a part of his everyday life. It was these limitations that encouraged him to perform well in school and learn to read.
When he began teaching, he didn’t know how to teach reading, so he had to do his own mini studies in his classroom.
This led him to graduate school at Harvard where he learned how children learned to read.
His educational journey led him to work with and learn from people like Jeanne Chall, Marylin Adams, and Louisa Moats.
With their expertise, he took their research and knowledge and applied it to his own classroom, made it practical, tested out nuances, and talked about how we can better help our students.
Can you talk about your work in phonics and instructional practices?
I am constantly testing out materials and fine-tuning them and sharing them with publishers.
For example, NYC is revamping their literacy programs and we’re currently working on a lab site where we work with teachers, dig into the research, and take a look at the practices.
This intense work of moving the needle is really important work. We chat about the difficulties that teachers are having with these new practices, how do we set reasonable goals, how long does it take, etc. This is my favorite type of work.
As we’re making this shift in literacy within our schools, what do you feel we are doing well in, and in what areas do you feel like we could improve?
Teachers are having a huge sense of urgency to make this shift towards better reading instruction. The hard part is that there’s so much information coming at teachers but it’s at a surface level, and therefore there’s a lot of misinterpretation and misuse of the ideas.
Teachers have such much information, but no one is taking the time to go deeper with these concepts. My biggest fear is that people have taken these generalizations that could take a good thing and make it bad. We need to get these nuanced understandings to teachers quickly enough so those misgeneralizations don’t become a habit.
You say that you see lots of good phonics instruction in classrooms, but that we need to spend more time at the application level. Can you elaborate on that?
Each time I go into a classroom, how much they're picking up a book or a pencil is proof at how well that phonics instruction is going to land
But we aren’t spending enough time at the application level. Here’s an example. There’s a great 2nd grade teacher at one of the schools I work with. One day at the beginning of the year, it took her 20 minutes to get through the lesson and the kids read 4 words. By early November, it was 10 minutes and the students read 19 words. Finally in early January, it was where it was supposed to be: the instruction took 6 minutes and the students read 20 words. That’s where it should have been all along.
We must focus on pacing because it’s the application where students need to spend the most time.
Cumulative review is also essential with reviewing previously-taught materials for 4-6 weeks. This is particularly helpful in order to get students to spell correctly.
You talk a lot about how students need access to grade-level content. Can you speak to that a bit?
Accessing grade-level content is essential, but the issue is they don’t tell teachers how to do this.
In terms of phonics instruction, I saw lots of schools evaluate students at the beginning of the year and put students in small groups based upon what they needed to know. This would give students specific instruction tailored to their needs. And this is all fine and good, but what ends up happening is that students are missing a very large portion of grade-level content if they’re constantly learning at their level. For example, a student coming into a first grade classroom who is at a kindergarten reading level will get kindergarten instruction. But by the end of first grade, they’ve missed a great deal of first grade skills, so when they enter into second grade, it puts them even more behind.
This means we have to have whole group lessons where students are able to access grade-level content. For our students who are below, there does need to be some scaffolding and support. For our students who are above, we can’t have them bored, so we need to talk about enriching their experience. There’s also multilingual learners who need context for everything being taught. Differentiation within whole group instruction is absolutely essential, but a lot of the resources that teachers have teach to the middle and aren't exactly differentiated.
Take a look at Differentiating Phonics Instruction for Maximum Impact: How to Scaffold Whole-Group Instruction So All Students can Access Grade-Level Content. This takes you through routines that can easily be folded into your lessons. It’s the hope that these routines become habits because they're simple and straight-forward.
We must also think about the “choreography” of the lesson - when are children on the carpet, how many words they're reading, partner interaction. Planning this out (the movement and engagement) elevates the playfulness and fun in a lesson. Consider partner reading and even debates in simple texts that can make the lesson engaging and fun.
If you had to give teachers three tips for enriching and differentiating whole group instruction and scaffolding these lessons, what would they be?
Start with blending, dictation, and reading decodable texts. If we’re blending, I’ll take whatever skills we’ve previously taught and get some of those lines, as well as lines with skills we’re currently learning or lines that are challenging to them. Maybe we add in a blend or digraph so that everyone gets something they need. When it comes to dictation, if you’re doing a certain skill, back it up a bit to simple words. For example, take the word train. You may consider starting off with a simple word for students who need vowel teams and end at the grade level multisyllabic word. For example: rain → train → training → retraining. This way, the “rain” students read “training” and the grade level students read their word, too. This can be simple, yet you can level up these experiences. Consider echo reading in small groups before reading in whole group, have some students read a few sentences instead of paragraphs in partner work, for children above level, have them read another book to read if they’re ahead of the current one others are reading.
Practice modifying on the spot. Think about the possible issues that may arise in a lesson before it begins. If you know there’s children who need certain supports during a lesson, prepare that ahead of time. When you prepare for these modifications, whatever comes up, you’ll be ready with resources at hand. The more you know your students and pre-plan, the more you’re able to adapt in those moments of struggle.
Check Out Wiley Blevins:
X: wbny
Website: http://www.wileyblevins.com/
Books:
Other Resources:
Check out these awesome resources at Literacy Edventures that correlate to this interview!
