Know Better, Do Better
-David & Meredith Liben
A couple of school years ago, as I started my journey as an Instructional Specialist for Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, I took an online course for Foundational Reading Skills to brush up on the latest research and teaching strategies for reading instruction in grades K-2. It had been 15 years since I last taught kindergarten and my phonics were rusty.
One of the instructors for that course was David Liben. I loved his instructional style and his sense of humor. The way he communicated instructional strategies through stories and reflection kept me engaged.
It motivated me to purchase his book, written with his wife, Know Better, Do Better: Teaching the Foundations So Every Child Can Read.
David and Meredith tell the story of the Family Academy in Harlem and how they took the students at that school from the lowest performing readers in all of New York City to proficient readers and what they learned along the way.
“This whole book is about teaching children what they need to learn about reading on time so almost no one needs intervention.”
Each chapter is dedicated to an essential element of reading and includes a story from their experiences at Family Academy. Below are some key ideas from each chapter that resonated with me. To learn more you can read the book for yourself!
SOME OF MY TAKEAWAYS...
Chapter 1 - Letter Recognition and Alphabetic Knowledge
Alphabetic Knowledge is a key building block for reading English. Children must recognize letters and know their most common sounds - with automaticity.
Assess each student for their knowledge of letter names and sounds separately. You need to know that every child knows the name of every letter (upper and lower case) and can recognize each letter.
Kids love familiarity, repetition and don’t mind practicing things. Even if they have mastered them. Alphabet songs, alphabet books, and various small group activities should be used to practice letters and sounds.
When learning letters and sounds, a Letter of the Week scope and sequence weakens sound symbol connections because TOO much focus is put on an individual letter in isolation for an extended period of time. Introduce 2-3 letters a week and review learned letters along with new learning.
Inventive spelling is fine while students are learning their sounds. Once children have been taught a phonics pattern, you should expect to see them produce those patterns accurately in their writing. This is true for whole words you’ve taught by sight, too. If they can’t, it means they didn’t learn them, and your diagnosis here should lead you to provide these children with more practice opportunities to strengthen their weak areas. This is systematic phonics.
Most importantly, learning should be FUN. Make it ACTIVE.
Have students use their WHOLE BODY and MOVE!
Phonological Awareness and Phonemic Awareness
A student’s exploration into the world of reading should begin with an understanding of what words are, what words do, and that words can be spoken and written.
Specific information is given about the difference between Phonological Awareness and Phonemic Awareness.
“It is NOT an option to skip or shortchange phonemic awareness! Children without mastery of it will inevitably struggle.”
This chapter is chock full of lesson and activity suggestions to teach ALL aspects of Phonological Awareness. A reminder is also given that during ALL foundational skills activities, there should be a focus on vocabulary.
Proficient readers know LOTS OF WORDS. They know the meaning of lots of words, how to spell them correctly, how they’re pronounced, what part of speech they are, and even information about where the word derives from (morphology). This learning needs to begin right away in kindergarten.
SYSTEMATIC PHONICS
Weak oral language in children makes learning to read harder because they have fewer words to draw on and less experience listening and saying words with a large variety of sounds in them.
Successful decoding DOES NOT guarantee reading comprehension but poor decoding guarantees POOR comprehension.
Successful decoding DOES NOT guarantee fluency, but weak decoding guarantees WEAK fluency. And weak fluency guarantees weak comprehension.
The hallmark of a systematic phonics program is that it delineates a planned, sequential set of phonic elements, and it teaches these elements explicitly and systematically.
Use the same daily routines each time a new concept is introduced. Learning is better if children move and use their bodies as much as possible.
ALWAYS review past learning.
NOTE: In leveled readers, children have lots of assists to help them read. They have pictures, syntax, context, or repetition patterns to name the word. THEREFORE, they do not have to focus on the actual WORD. When you ONLY have the word, you are more likely to focus on the WORD. Decoding it properly. Imagine that!
Reading words should be learned OUT OF CONTEXT. Reading words should be practiced IN CONTEXT. Practice, practice, practice so that children commit learning to long-term memory for accuracy and automaticity.
For children learning to read, access to books where they recognize words and can read words is very rewarding. Regardless of the content of the story.
Students should have access to a variety of different texts beyond decodables. Decodables are used for instruction and practice. For free choice reading, students should have access to decodables AND other types of text.
Let them read decodables! Children LOVE repetition. They love rituals and routine. They love knowing what is going to happen. They love being good at something.
BEST COMPREHENSION INSTRUCTION in K-2 is through the read-aloud.
There is no ceiling on complexity or richness in a read-aloud. Children access meaning through their ears and can think deeply about complex ideas and characters if the hard cognitive work of decoding is lifted out of the equation.
Books for read-aloud can easily be 2-3 years above the class grade level. Read-alouds are more complex, contain more vocabulary, and use more interesting sentence patterns. They invite deeper questions than almost anything most children in that grade can read to themselves.
Read-aloud also levels the playing field for students, especially if you make it interactive, actively teaching vocabulary, and have lots of text-based discussions. Everybody has access to the language and riches of the book regardless of how well they are currently progressing at learning to read.
FLUENCY
What is Reading Fluency?
Accuracy
Rate
Expressiveness
Accuracy - pronouncing words the way they commonly are. Ideally, by second grade, children should be able to accurately and swiftly pronounce any word that is made up of phonics patterns they’ve learned and any sight words they know (HF words).
Getting adequate practice with new patterns so automatic decoding is achieved as they are introduced is critical. Automatic decoding is a necessary prerequisite to reading fluency. Accurate reading also means noticing and reading punctuation correctly.
Punctuation helps notate the cadence of written language so it reads similarly to the spoken word. Punctuation exists to represent the pauses, stops, and inflections speakers naturally make as part of their communication.
Every sentence holds an idea. Remind students that they can think about what the sentence they just read means for a second or two. This is a huge way to assist comprehension.
Rate - the speed of oral reading. “Rate appropriate to the text being read.”
There is a Goldilocks effect with reading rate.
If you read too slowly, decoding word by word, your short term working memory can’t hold onto earlier words. By the time you get to the end of the sentence, comprehension is long gone. If you read too quickly, you’ll only get the gist of what you read. And likely make errors in reading.
Different types of text warrant different rates of ORF. With reading rate, average is FINE.
Understanding what you read should be the goal. NOT racing through what you're reading.
The goal is to read at that "just right" rate that matches the demands of what we are reading. That’s quicker when we are doing light reading or we are skimming for the gist, slower if the material is dense or unfamiliar and we really want to learn from what we are reading.
Text complexity: Two factors make a text more complex: It has less common vocabulary, and it has more sentences with complicated syntax. So whenever readers move into reading more complex text than they're used to, they’ll backslide a bit on their fluency because they’re working harder at decoding less familiar phonics patterns and probably longer words.
Fluency work needs to continue beyond second grade. Nearly all state standards include fluency and multisyllabic word study at least through 5th grade.
2nd graders are expected to improve their reading at a rate of 100% during the course of a year, as are 1st graders. In no other grades are students expected to make this much growth.
Automaticity of decoding and fluency are the two places where instructional time and practice efforts and energy should be focused during first and second grade.
Expression - Prosody
Prosody is reading aloud with expression. Prosody makes it fun to hear someone reading and helps convey meaning to listeners. Prosodic reading signals that the reader understands what they are reading and is tracking and making sense of the syntax and context clues. Children who are not comfortable, fluent readers tend to labor, reading in a wooden, flat voice.
Elements of prosodic reading are:
Appropriate phrasing
Pausing briefly
Stressing certain words or phrases appropriate to context
Rise and fall of pitch that matches the text
Expressiveness that matches the context
The best way for children to practice fluency is by following along as a skilled reader reads aloud AND engaging in repeated reading of the same passage after hearing a fluent model of what the passage should sound like.
Fluency practice can be done through:
ECHO READING
CHORAL READING
PAIRED OR BUDDY READING
REPEATED READING
OVERALL...
The information included in my notes above doesn’t even scratch the surface of the information included in Know Better, Do Better. The personal stories and anecdotes of the trial and error at Family Academy makes the information relatable.
If you want to learn more, grab a copy of Know Better, Do Better today!
