Interview with Meghan Hein

Sep 16

Proudly been in education for 20 years with jobs as a 2nd grade teacher as well as a math coach.
Eventually transitioned into a literacy intervention teacher and served there for 5 years.
She’s now back in the classroom using the skills and knowledge she learned as a literacy interventionist.

I began my account before I went back to the classroom so I could follow as many teachers as I could. I did this in order for me to go back into the classroom since I’d been out for a while.
Always More to Learn fits me well because I’m not afraid to show and tell what I don’t know - I like to be a transparent person. I was born with a growth mindset mentality, so it’s just who I am.
Once I started to get the hang of the classroom again, I wanted to share what I did know and what I did learn. Now, I feel so connected to teachers through my account as we are working through things together. We should never be afraid to try new things, even when we fall flat.

A few years ago, I got into the SOR movement. The foundational skills aspect of it (phonemic awareness, phonics, etc.) was so intriguing to me since it was such a different way than what I had initially learned.
Once I got the hang of that, I thought to myself, “What am I still not doing well?” And after reading The Knowledge Gap by Natalie Wexler, I came to realize what I was missing: building knowledge.
We have a skill-based ELA curriculum at our school, but also has an aspect that relates to science and social studies. So I asked the question: “How can I leverage what we do in language arts and still ensure students are learning deeper social studies and science concepts that get hidden in these skill-based lessons?”

When I looked at units and focused on what I could bring to them to make them more accessible, I realized that teaching can be so much more fun than how I was initially doing it!
Songs are a great way to begin, and AI does a lot of this for us in recent days. We like to do a song or two for each thematic unit and it’s our favorite part of the day.
When we begin with an ELA unit, we always begin with the science and social studies standards. We base our units around these standards and take a look at our texts and see what stories we can pull from them. When we know where we are going as teachers and have a vision and goal, we can be more focused on where we are headed.
We also love charts and pictorials. I am trained in Project Glad, which has helped with guided language acquisition design. I’m also a dual language teacher where I teach the English portion of the day, so language is a massive component we think about when we learn units. Therefore, we rely on interactive learning, visuals, and vocabulary.

Partner and team work is a huge part of what we do because we want to foster the production of language. Everyone is placed in specific spots. Within these spots, I ensure that we have the domains of language we are focusing on: listening, speaking, writing, some aspect of reading, and critical thinking. All five of these domains are at the heart of what we teach.
When we kick off a unit (that’s usually 4 weeks long), we are flooding them with information and knowledge. It’s very heavy work, but worth it and essential. We do this through movies, videos, songs, read alouds. We use these activities to get them ready for what they’ll do with this grade-level content.
By the 4th week, we’re doing much of the curriculum-based work. At that point, they’re prepared for it. But that first week looks very different with project learning, group collaborations, team tasks - all centered around science and social studies learning.
The instruction looks like Scarborough’s Reading Rope. There are explicit and foundational aspects, and there’s also language aspects (talking, speaking, teamwork).

The big difference now is that the outcome is more on the knowledge rather than the skill. In our small groups, we’d practice skill-based comprehension questions. Yet when we gave them the passage, the students were cold despite practicing. They didn’t have enough knowledge on the topic so the skill-based practice wasn’t translating.
The big change is that we aren't giving a skill and then practicing it over and over on different topics - it’s about taking a deep dive into the topics that they can access for years to come.

20 min - explicit instruction in foundational skills (phonics, dictation, etc.)
With the aforementioned 4-week unit, the language component is heavier at the beginning of the unit. By the end of the unit, students are reading something every day. This could be partner or table talks with talking tokens.
Then, students write every day about what they're learning.

Students have yellow counters inside a bowl on the table and I’ll tell everyone to take out two.
I’ll offer a topic for them to discuss and they use one token to share what they learn and another token to add on to what someone else said.
After they share and learn from another, they move onto writing about it.

Check out these awesome resources at Literacy Edventures that correlate to this interview!

Structuring Literacy Blocks