Episode 8: Literacy Interventions with Jacinda Vaughan

In the eight episode of The Sounds-Write Podcast, Sounds-Write's newest in-house trainer, Jacinda Vaughan, talks about literacy interventions. She discusses the difference between 'keep up' and 'catch-up' interventions and gives some really practical guidance for setting up intervention sessions for struggling readers. Enjoy!

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Transcript

Laura:  00:02
Hello, and welcome to the Sounds-Write Podcast. I'm the host, Laura, and in today's episode, I'm speaking with Jacinda Vaughan. Jacinda just began her role as an in-house trainer, and is actually the very first member of our in-house team in Australia, which is really exciting. In this episode, Jacinda talks about different types of literacy interventions, how they can be carried out effectively, and pretty much just all things related to intervention. A quick message before we get started. You might remember in the last episode that I put a little spoiler in there about our Portal. Well, the news is out and I'm excited to tell you that this Sounds-Write Practitioners Portal will be launching in May. This will be available to access for free for everyone who has ever trained in Sounds-Write. It will be the go-to place for CPD, webinars, word lists, activities, and loads of other stuff as well. To make the sign-up process really easy we've opened registrations for pre-approval now, which means that we can check your Sounds-Write practitioner credentials, so you can gain access to the portal as soon as it launches. The link is in the show notes for anyone who has trained in Sounds-Write to apply. Anyway, on with the episode. Hi Jacinda, thank you for being here today. 

Jacinda:  01:26
Thanks for having me, Laura. It's really a privilege to be here today. And I'm really excited to talk about Sounds-Write as an intervention and how teachers can really support their students effectively.

Laura:  01:37
Yeah, great. So, Jacinda, you're our newest member of staff here at Sounds-Write. So, first off, welcome. Could you tell us a bit about your background in teaching and what you'll be doing in your role at Sounds-Write?

Jacinda:  01:52
It's been a bit of an adventure being Australia's first in-house trainer. It's so exciting. It's really fulfilling a dream for me. So, in 2016, I sat in my first Sounds-Write training with Mary and I remember looking up at her and saying, I want to be her when I grow up! So, I really am living my dream. So, that was seven years ago now, and since then, I've used Sounds-Write in my whole-class teaching, within interventions, coaching other teachers across my school from Kindergarten to Year 6. Before I trained as a teacher, I studied in Psychology. So, for me, it's a natural progression that I moved into that inclusive education coordinator role. And within that role, I really helped my school roll out Sounds-Write across Kindergarten right through to Year 6, and then we used it as a Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention. So, I had my inclusive education team and the incredible classroom teachers, and we worked really collaboratively. I also have students in my private business where they have really complex needs and what I've seen across all the different domains is that Sounds-Write has such an incredible impact on students' learning outcomes and their confidence overall.

Laura:  03:10
Lovely. You mentioned there Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions. Could you just give us a really quick summary of what the differences are and what that means?  

Jacinda:  03:21
So Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions. So, Tier 2 is where a child might need a little bit of extra help keeping up with their cohort. But a Tier 3 student is catching up, so they've got significant gaps underneath their learning, where we're working towards getting them to their peers' level.

Laura:  03:41
Right. Thank you so much for clarifying. I think we're going to come back to that a little bit later.  So, first off, at Sounds-Write, obviously, we all know, we're strong believers in teaching phonics whole-class. But, there obviously might still be students who do need intervention. Could you give us a little introduction into what the differences are between whole-class and intervention settings?

Jacinda:  04:07
Yeah, that's right. So, Sounds-Write is designed as a whole-class instruction, but I absolutely believe that all children can and should be part of the class instruction. What this is doing, it's providing opportunities for them to participate with their peers and have exposure to the code at their cohort's level, which I think is really crucial. So, what this is doing is ensuring that they've got continual progress and that we're minimising the number of gaps in their learning. So, what we found is that if you have students who are continually being removed from the whole-class instruction for intervention, that they struggle to actually ever catch up with their peers. So, the difference between whole-class and intervention settings. So, whole-class settings is the classroom teacher is using the Sounds-Write scope and sequence to plan their mixture of Sounds-Write lessons and to build their classes' code knowledge, their skills and their conceptual understandings. This is where everyone's included and they're supported to access the current unit of learning. They're going to do this through the in-built scaffolds within the Sounds-Write lessons. So, the lessons have been designed for children to get mastery, and you're peeling back layers of scaffolding as your students show that they're building independence. So, Sounds-Write has been designed with cognitive load theory in mind, which means that they've managed the amount of new information that's been presented, and the way that that information is presented to children, to ensure that working memory is able to process and shift that new learning into long-term memory. It means that students are getting that deeper learning. They've also designed the lessons and the planning structure to include enough repetitions and practice and interleaving of skills and knowledge, and that spaced repetition over time, so you're building those functional skills for children to become successful and effective writers. The key features that you're going to look at in that whole-class instruction, is you're considering your lines and your gestures, you'll see them on your scripts, and these can be added and removed as students need. So, you're carefully planning your words that you're selecting for your teaching. This includes the word structure. So, for example, if you're teaching in the Initial Code Unit 8, which is CVCC, you may have students who still need to consolidate in the CVC level. So you're giving them, in a word build, a CVC word structure so they're able to get up, participate, and be really successful. You could use your continuants, so, they're sounds that can be stretched without distortion, to aid in that blending. So, you could be using words like ‘swim’, which is easier to support blending than the word ‘crab’, because the /k/ you can't hold on to.  You can also consider the order that you choose your students in, because when students have the opportunity to hear other students really successfully completing the activity, then they will be successful when it's their turn. So, you're building in those repetitions and you're building that student's success. Students really don't notice the order that you choose students in or the words that you've given them. What they do notice is that everybody has been included and they're really engaged and successful.

Laura:  07:25
Yeah, we've talked about this in a couple of podcast episodes now, actually. Teachers kind of experiencing children having those little wins for the first time in front of their whole class. I know Teresa, for example, who's one of our trainers, she always tells this story of this little boy who came up to the front. She was teaching a whole class and using this method of differentiation. So, she gave him a slightly easier word, maybe with continuants and he was able to do it. And he just suddenly, his whole demeanour changed. He almost, she always says, he almost grew in size with pride and the whole class just gave him this big round of applause. And it was kind of the first time that he really had that success in front of everyone, by the teacher using this method of differentiation.

Jacinda:  08:22
Yeah, they really love it. It's really important for them to feel successful in front of their peers. As a classroom teacher, when you're thinking about that intervention setting though, you're either providing revision of what's currently being taught in class, so that's repetitions of the current unit, or you'll be looking at supporting a student with those significant gaps in their knowledge and skills, and we're trying to move them closer and closer to their peers. The ratios for students and teachers will be different for these two different settings, so if it's a keep-up, you can have more students working on what they've been working on in class and doing that revision. But if it's a catch up, you're looking more like at that one-to-one or one-to-two teacher-student ratio for that extra specific targeted support. So, it's really important that when students need that extra support with intervention, it's not that they need something different. Sounds-Write principles are how children learn to read and write. They're really deeply rooted in the research, so it's not something different, it's more of Sounds-Write.

Laura:  09:23
Great, thank you. So, how would you go about identifying those students that you think will need some extra support? 

Jacinda:  09:31
That's a really good question, and it's one that I hear all the time. So, as teachers, what we do first and foremost, is we're using our classroom's formative assessment. We know our students, so we're using that knowledge to help us find a profile or a baseline for our students and their areas of need. So, the things that you can use to identify that keep-up or catch-up intervention. You might be using your quizzes or dictations, but remember that you need to use dictations that are looking at information from two-to-three units prior to that current-code teaching. You might use decodable text. Again, there's a lag in those of one or two units behind where you're teaching. And you might use your student's own writing from across the curriculum to have a look at the things that they're doing in their writing, what they can and what they can't do, independently. The Sounds-Write Diagnostic Assessment is a really powerful tool for you to assess your students blending and segmenting and that phoneme manipulation skills, but then also looking at the alphabetic code knowledge that they have. On the website, in the Practitioner Downloads, you'll also find a non-words reading screener. What this one does is it helps you to identify the strategies that students might use when they're faced with an unknown word. It's really assessing their decoding strategies rather than maybe their visual memory. There are other standardised tests that you can use within your school setting and there's the Young's Parallel Spelling Test. What this does is, it shows you your spelling age as in comparison to a chronological age. So, recall memory, which is spelling, is significantly more challenging than recognition memory, which is the reading. It's a really good indicator for literacy development. So, all of these different assessments are creating a clear picture of your student’s profile and giving you information of where you're going to start that student, whether it's a keep-up or a catch-up. Sometimes, you as a teacher might feel that students do have underlying conditions that are having an impact on the learning outcomes and this is where we're really looking to engage professionals that are outside that educational context. I always say to families and teachers, start with the basics. When you think about a student's vision, we can easily get that screened for. So, sending them off to have a vision check, what I find, more times than not, is that children come to school a few weeks later with some shiny glasses and they're so excited to do their reading. With the hearing screener, that's another really easy one. Children may have hearing difficulties that have not been picked up. Another question that I've asked is, do they have a history of ear infections, or glue ear, because that can have an impact on early literacy development. And then there's the auditory discrimination and speech processing. The other professionals that are fantastic to engage with are speech therapists, and speech therapists both look at the articulation of sounds, so the production of sounds, but also that expressive and receptive domains of language and possible difficulties that children could have there. So, when families go off to developmental and educational psychologists to investigate that cognitive functioning, what they very regularly say, is they come back and they say, has the child had six months or more of intensive, evidence-based interventions like Sounds-Write? Because what this does is it's a way from an actual diagnosis of a learning difficulty. So, if a child has been instructed with effective practices, like within that structured literacy block using Sounds-Write, as opposed to an actual learning difficulty, it's really screening to eliminate that element.

Laura:  13:18
Yeah, and we talked about this before we started recording actually, that, you know, we don't want to be overdiagnosing children who maybe just haven't been receiving literacy instruction that is effective. And so, you know, having that opportunity to have some intervention that is based on research and the science of reading, first. And then going to those other professionals if that still doesn't work and looking into other causes and other solutions, it's important.

Jacinda:  13:53
Absolutely, I've seen this a number of times when I've started interventions. A lot of children, they're that keep-up group. The keep-up group are generally children who just require more repetitions within that Sounds-Write program, rather than them having difficulties with the processing of the information.

Laura:  14:12
Yeah, and that leads us on really nicely, actually, to the next question that I had for you, which is, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the differences between keep-up and catch-up interventions and the kinds of contexts in which they might be necessary?

Jacinda:  14:30
Yeah, so learning falls within a continuum. So, all children fall within that bell curve. The majority of children, they're only going to need that 20-to-30 repetitions of a word for that to shift into their long-term memory. Some children are really lucky, it only takes them a few repetitions, but then there's that group of students that need significantly more repetitions. So, using your data to decide which group that that child falls into is important. So you've got your keep-up intervention, so that's those children, more repetitions of the same information or the same unit that you're using in your classroom teaching. So, it's not something different, it's more of, and more opportunity and practice. But one thing you can do here, is use those follow-up scripts on the reverse side of the main script. That's keeping it fresh and interesting, presenting the same information, but in a different way. Children really enjoy that. Those type of children, when we're talking about keep-up children, giving them opportunities to practise multiple times a week on top of your whole-class instruction is really important. So, in settings where I've practised, if you've got the opportunity and the privilege of having extra intervention staff, so, it could be an intervention teacher or an intervention assistant or the classroom assistant, two-to-three times a week of about 20 minutes, reviewing the content that they've been learning in class is really helpful. The catch-up group's a little bit different because these students have gaps in their code knowledge and the conceptual understandings and their skills, that could be quite different to what you're doing within your class context. Of course, they're still involved in that because we don't want them falling behind further, but the scaffolds that we discussed earlier are really supportive for them to engage positively there. But, in the catch-up interventions, they're short, sharp, and shiny. They happen daily, so they could be about 10 minutes. And the people that can engage in that 10-minute slot can be your intervention teacher, your classroom support assistants or the classroom teacher. It's really being creative with who's doing that, but all of those people need to be Sounds-Write trained. That's really important. I think what's really important here, is that when a student starts experiencing difficulties: that you identify it, you pick them up and you give them that responsive intervention as soon as you see it because keeping up is much, much easier than having to catch up a little bit later. So, as soon as you see it, being responsive and start that intervention straight away.

Laura:  17:16
Fantastic. That's really helpful for me actually, to be honest, I hear these terms all the time mentioned and I don't think I've ever had anyone explain it to me as clearly as you just have, so thank you. So, let's imagine now that I'm a teacher who has identified which students need which types of interventions, what would my first steps be? Because I can imagine that's really daunting for someone who's just started teaching Sounds-Write. So what should I consider before I begin? 

Jacinda:  17:47
You're right, it's very daunting and I think that it's really important that teachers realise that they're not an island and they're not just solely responsible for that students’ learning. You're really part of a wider community and I really recommend that you engage with your inclusive education team. Because when you have those conversations over the data that you've got for your student and you've got a collaborative and coordinated approach towards supporting that student, it's always more powerful for their learning outcomes. In an ideal world, you would have tidy groups that these children fall into. But in my experience, that really doesn't happen. So, what you're doing when you're grouping these children for keep-up and catch-up, is you're looking at their code knowledge and their skills. And it's absolutely fine if you've got students that aren't clumping quite right, that you take children that are slightly lower or slightly higher and bring them into that same group. Because just like in a whole-class, you can scaffold the ones that need just a little bit of extra help in that group and you can stretch those ones that are slightly higher using your word choices, as we said before. Preparation goes a really long way for the sustainability and success of any intervention. So, that's where you're thinking about the resources that are appropriate for each of those types of interventions. So, Sounds-Write has a vast range of resources because their mission has been to improve the life chances of children by ensuring that they become proficient readers and writers. So, they've got a really great library for teachers to draw upon and the majority of these are free. You can buy some resources, but, for you as a teacher, you really can draw on that resource library to have effective intervention straight away. So, watch this space. There's so much coming out behind the scenes. Being a new trainer, I've been privileged to hear about the wonderful things that are happening, and I can't wait for them to be released, because they're really going to be so supportive and powerful in those classroom contexts. I just wanted to give you a few examples of the types of resources that you can find on the website. You've got word building, word reading and writing, sound swaps, dictations, decodable text. The ebooks that are freely available are absolutely amazing. And children and families feel really confident using them and they really enjoy them. There's also scaffolded activities that you can use as your follow up activities. So, what you're doing is you're looking at the units that those children need to work on, you're matching the resources, and you're really organising yourself before you start that teaching, because that's what's going to make it sustainable. Because I've seen so many times that if you're not organised, the groups don't happen, the teaching isn't effective, and they kind of fall down.

Laura:  20:43
Yeah, and I will put a link to our free decodable ebook series in the show notes of this episode.

Jacinda:  20:50
Awesome, it's amazing.

Laura:  20:52
So, we talked before about how important whole-class instruction is. So, how would you go about integrating intervention sessions with whole-class instruction, because obviously we know that students who are having intervention sessions shouldn't be missing out on what the whole class is learning and therefore falling even further behind. So, what would that timetabling look like?

Jacinda:  21:18
Yeah, absolutely. So, outside of the whole-class instruction. So, timetabling is a tricky one and every school is a little bit different in the resources that they have available to them and their context. If you have the privilege of having an inclusive education teacher or classroom support assistants that can run those intervention groups, you can have your keep-up and catch-up sessions. So, the keep-up we said before were 20-minute sessions, maybe three times a week and they're outside that whole-class instruction. Then you've got your catch-up students that are high frequency sessions that are short, sharp, and shiny. And you've got to be creative about how you use your resources and when you can do this. And before we said that you can have your assistant, the teacher or the intervention teacher, as long as they're trained in Sounds-Write, doing these 10-minute sessions. Sometimes, you might think about when that's going to happen. You don't want it impacting other parts of the curriculum. So, they may have difficulties with literacy, but you don't want to be timetabling it in your Maths sessions. You also want to be thinking when those interventions are happening, don't run your PE sessions and your Art sessions, because a lot of the children that are in those intervention sessions are really strong there and that's their passion, so watching their class file out past them while they're doing a Sounds-Write session can be really heartbreaking. So, timetabling your interventions within your structured literacy block. And what I've seen done really effectively here, is that every teacher a few times a week getting their whole class to do a consolidation activity like seek the sound and decodable books or sorting and categorising spellings. That usually takes about 20- to 30-minutes, so be strategic in when you're putting that. And it could be a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, it doesn't matter which days you put it on. But if you're doing those consolidation activities with your whole class, those intervention catch-up and keep-up sessions can happen during that time. So, you're not actually interrupting your writing, your explicit direct writing instruction, or your reading instruction, those children are still within that Sounds-Write teaching. And those 10-minute sessions could be you one-to-one conferencing with your student, or just before or after that 20-minute session with the keep-up groups.

Laura:  23:48
So, who would generally be teaching those intervention sessions? I know you kind of touched on it a second ago, but could you talk a bit more about who that would actually be? 

Jacinda:  23:59
Yeah, absolutely. So, just remember, you are not an island. It's a community that educates a child and I truly believe that partnerships are paramount and when we foster this within our school community, we have really powerful impacts in our student learning outcomes. So, we really recommend that every individual who is supporting the student is Sounds-Write trained to ensure that the students with the highest needs get the people with the most knowledge in this area. So, I said before, the classroom teacher, your classroom support assistants, and your inclusive education coordinators, all Sounds-Write trained. However, families are no exception here and Sounds-Write has their free parent Udemy course, and I think that it really empowers families to feel confident and effective at home when they have that knowledge, and I think that that course has been a really effective way of providing that for families. You can send home things like the decodable texts and word building, word reading, and the sound swaps. And families feel really good when they're able to engage in their children's learning and feel that they're doing it in a way that's going to make a difference in the long run. 

Laura:  25:08
Yeah, and again, I'll link the parents and carers course in the show notes below. So, once you've got your intervention sessions set up and you've begun teaching, what's next? 

Jacinda:  25:23
So, we did talk about finding that baseline and that profile. So monitoring, tracking students’ progress is crucial because it means that you're responding and adjusting your interventions to your students' needs in a timely way. So, this can look different across all different settings that we might be completing our Sounds-Write interventions in. However, tracking the mastery of the code can be done through formative assessments, so using your quizzes. Some people have used spreadsheets to keep a track of this. Another way is that writing samples through dictations provide an absolute wealth of information. Not only are you looking at the code knowledge, but you're looking at the skills of managing the adjacent consonants, letter formation, and understanding the elements of a sentence. You might see the capitals and the punctuation that you're seeing in dictation, whether they're there or not. Another thing is also in the general writing samples. So, when a student is independently recording their learning, this shows what they're transferring from your teaching in Sounds-Write lessons, so you can identify the types of strategies that they're using or not using across the curriculum.  Periodically re-administering the Sounds-Write diagnostic is very useful here, but I would caution that you don't overuse this. So, maybe every 6-to-12 months to see the tracking of that progress and the skills and that code knowledge. The same is true for those standardised assessments that we were talking about, like Young's Parallel Spelling Tests, you might only do this once a year. You might put it at the end of the year, and you are looking at the spelling age as opposed to the chronological age and watching that gap get smaller and smaller as they progress towards their peers. So, decodable texts are looking at the functional skills like fluency and therefore comprehension. What you're doing is you're tracking their words per minute and Sounds-Write really is looking at word reading and the fluency of being able to do that within the context of a written text. You're looking at analysing their decoding strategies when they're facing a word that they've never seen before. So, what are they doing when they come against words that they don't know? What strategies are they using? Are they using what you've taught them? And remember that all assessments must have a functional purpose, I'm a big believer in not assessing for assessment's sake. You're using those assessments and that data to adjust the support, you're being responsive and flexible in your teaching. So, being aware of the effect of learning difficulties, and what the impact that they have on students' well being is really important to me. Really, truly celebrating student success, at every little step, is important for building a student's positive self-image as a learner.  Learning is incredibly hard work for many students, and it can feel like an endless struggle when you're learning to read and write. So, I really do recommend that you stop regularly and you celebrate with your students their growth. It's also worth mentioning here the effects of cortisol on neural pathways, because when a student is stressed, those pathways are weakened and it takes much, much longer for students to transfer that information and that new learning into their long-term memory so that they can use it effectively. So, minimising the anxiety that surrounds learning to read and to write will really bolster powerful effects of your interventions. And showing the respect for the dignity of students and acknowledging the hard work that they're putting in, means that you'll have settled, secure students and they'll be engaged and motivated in classrooms and everybody absolutely wins there.

Laura:  29:02
Yeah, John actually talks about this quite a lot. He's done quite a bit of tutoring, especially for children who have learning difficulties. And he discusses when, you know, when they come to him for the first one or two sessions they'll have this look about them. They're just so angry. They're upset. They're feeling so frustrated. They have all of these really negative associations with learning to read and write because they haven't had success and they, they feel really - there's a lot of anxiety around it. And then there's that huge difference when they do actually start to have success and they go from, you know, angry, anxious, frustrated to feeling excited about reading and writing. It's brilliant.

Jacinda:  29:50
I've seen the exact same things, whether it's in a school setting or within my private practice, is that children walk in and they look completely deflated and defeated, and they've gone, ‘oh gosh, here I go again, I'm that kid that gets taken out, and it's really hard, and this is just another thing’. So, I love when they work with Sounds-Write and they get into the routine. They can really trust the process because Sounds-Write is giving them a really clear structure and scaffold, through the routines of the lessons, that children really embed that quickly and then they go, ‘Oh, I can trust it’. And when you're giving them decodable text to practise those skills that you're teaching in the Sounds-Write lessons, you can say you can trust this. They trust the process and therefore they can use the strategies that you've given them without that guessing and questioning themselves. They can start to go, ‘Oh, I can do this. I can use what you've told me and put it into practice’. And you can just see the change in their whole demeanors and going from going, ‘Oh gosh, it's this again’ to, ‘I can't wait for it’, you know, and to feel that success is really beautiful.

Laura:  30:54
Well, as you know, we are strong believers in leaving no child behind on their way to literacy. So, thank you so much, Jacinda, for sharing your expertise. And hopefully this will be really helpful for listeners who are wondering how they can support the most struggling readers in their classes. Thank you so much, Jacinda. 

Jacinda:  31:17
Thank you very much for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure. 

Laura:  31:20
All right. Bye everyone. See you next time.