Conradi-Smith, Amendum, Williams
To the classroom: Episode 17
September 11, 2023
My guests today are three authors of a recent article in The Reading Teacher about Maximizing Small Group Instruction: Dr. Kristin Conradi-Smith, Dr. Steve Amendum, and Tammy Williams. They’ll share essential recommendations for forming and conducting effective group lessons for readers. After our conversation, I’m joined by my colleagues Emily Strang-Campbell, Clarisa Leal, and Cristy Rauseo for a conversation about practical takeaways.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Welcome, Dr. Conradi Smith, Dr. Amendum, and Tammy Williams. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Kristin Conradi-Smith:
Thank you for having us.
Tammy Williams:
Thank you.
Steve Amendum:
Glad to be here.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I loved your paper about small group instruction. I feel like it's so important, so I'd love to talk with you a little bit about that today. I was a New York City public school teacher before becoming an author and consultant, and I had really big classes. The cap was usually around 32, and I had huge ranges in my classroom from first grade level to fourth grade levels in a third grade class. And so I found that I had to be doing small groups, that my whole class instruction really wasn't meeting everybody where they were, that I had a variety of different needs in my classroom. And I don't think that's unique. I mean, people, maybe the size of the class is kind of unique. People have smaller classes than that, but small group instruction sort of seems like a no-brainer to a classroom teacher who has experienced such a wide range in their classroom. So I'm wondering if you can summarize your findings about first, how we should be grouping children when it comes to small group instruction.
Kristin Conradi-Smith:
We don't have a lot of research describing traditional small group instruction where say a teacher has two hours of ELA time a day and they devote 60 minutes to whole group, 60 minutes to small groups. We don't have a lot of research describing those. More of the research was on tier two intervention research where they had groups of anywhere from three to 15, and they looked at whether multi-component or one component interventions worked. And when I say one component, like an intervention that just focused on fluency or comprehension.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So when I wrote my second book Teaching Reading in Small Groups and I was doing workshops about the book, I would have a lot of interventionists in my workshops and they would ask me about how to best lead their group. And I'd say, well, tell me how your kids are grouped. And they'd say, well, I meet with all the kids on the third grade hallway at 10 o'clock. And so I would say back, that's a scheduling efficiency that you're kind of seeing everybody on this hallway, you're gathering them together at the same time. But I would always say they're not a group if they don't have something in common, being a third grader isn't enough in common. If you've got kids who need help with fluency and you need to have kids who need help with comprehension, many interventionists are kind of forced to work with kids because of the schedule, because third graders go to lunch at 1130, so they're free at 10. So that's when you work with them.
Steve Amendum:
One of the key findings that we had was one of those how not to group your students in some ways. And right to your point about just being third graders isn't sufficient to form a group, and it plays out in the research, is that there just is not evidence to support grouping students by text level. What we're finding now is that that's just not an effective way to group kids for many reasons. And so as you start to dig into some of the evidences, as Kristin was saying, even when we start to look at some of that Tier 2 or small group intervention evidence, what we find is that there's a lot of efficacy for grouping students based on very specific needs. So children who all of needs in fluency or some aspect of word recognition. And then to match our small group instruction to those very particular needs, being very explicit and systematic during that time.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So if you're thinking about tier 2 support, how do you manage that flexibility, kids might need fluency in September, then they might become more fluent and be ready for comprehension by November. That's what we hope anyway. So how do you manage that flexibility necessary to be always making sure that you're responding to needs?
Tammy Williams:
Well, I really think that kind of comes to play and as we mentioned in the article about assessments and really just making sure that we are progress monitoring students, we're utilizing assessments to really drive what we're doing for instruction and that we're being flexible with our grouping because that's exactly what you want to happen if you're in a second grade classroom and at the beginning of the year you've got a large group of students who are still decoding, and then obviously you want to move them out of those foundational skills. You do that through instruction assessment cycle, and then you just continue to see their needs and move them to the next grouping if necessary.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. I love how you all frame that in your article. You have the ABCs of effective small group instruction as you're speaking to Tammy, a being assessment, and you talked a little bit about assessments for word level reading to help get a sense for kids decoding and spelling abilities, transitional and proficient, really more about fluency and comprehension. And I'm wondering what advice you have for how teachers could use the various assessments they have to figure out what comes first if they notice kids need support in more than one area, and then how to group kids accordingly.
Kristin Conradi-Smith:
I think what we recommend in the article and just in general, it's helpful to do a screener first. You can go, Hey, these kids by and large can access grade level text pretty well. And so if I'm going to work with them in small groups, I'm work on say some of the more sort of difficult things that sort of are variable per text, so say vocabulary, text structure, comprehension. But if I do it that way, then I have to assess fewer students. But with those students, I have the time to go deeper. And then for those students who you notice they're still struggling, that's when I would go down into some kind of decoding or spelling measure to get at their sort of understanding of how words work. And that'll give me some explicit guidance to go, oh, this kid needs support in long vowels, and I know kind of where I can move them along faster.
Steve Amendum:
I think that idea of starting with a screener and then moving deeper as needed into some diagnostic assessments that can really help pinpoint instructional goals for students is really helpful. The one caution that I try to make about screeners is that screeners tend to be,indicators of reading, but not necessarily reading itself. And so what you have to remember is that those screeners, even though they're a quick assessment, they give you a snapshot of particular skills that students may have or indicators of those skills. For example, nonsense word fluency is a great indicator of students' ability to decode, regular words -- regularly spelled words. But we have to remember that it's not exactly the same as the decoding tasks that students are going to face when they get into authentic texts. Not all the words are going to be decodable in that way. There will be ways that they'll have to think about long vowel patterns and other pieces of it. So I do think that we have to remember the purposes of these assessments and then use them accordingly.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think that's so important. And I see a lot of teachers, like you said, Kristin spending a lot of time administering assessments that are required oftentimes by their school or by their district, they get printouts, long spreadsheets. I was looking at one, I won't name it, but I was looking at one report the other day from a very commonly used assessment, and I said, where would I even begin? There are 50 different items on here per child. How do I know what's first? How do I determine where, what's my first group? What do I tackle first? Because we don't want the instruction to be all over the place. We want to focus on one thing at a time. So I was just wondering if you have advice for the "What's first?" question. So you're saying first do a screener, but then if I determine from that screener that the child has needs with word recognition and the child needs with some fluency stuff and there's some comprehension needs, what do I do first?
Kristin Conradi-Smith:
I don't think a small group time needs to be all things for all people. I trust that a teacher in six hours in a given school day is going to have a very language rich, knowledge rich, text rich sort of environment for the students. So what goes first, if I'm teaching fourth grade and I have a handful of students who aren't able to read connected text very well at all, they're struggling to get their way through, say two syllable words, that's the urgent priority for me, and I'm going to invest that 15 minutes I have a day with them to really shore that up for them to ensure that they can be as successful as possible. And I'm going to trust that the rest of my day is providing some of the other components. If I try to instead say, oh, well, real reading involves motivation, it involves fluency, involves vocab, involves all these things, then suddenly they're 15 minutes. They're only going to get four minutes of what they really, really need. We want at least 50% of any small group time to be eyeballs on text because even if they are learning how to say decode multisyllabic words, we then want them to immediately apply it in text. So I do have that sort of part that I always try to incorporate in. But otherwise, if fluency's not their issue and they're just really struggling to think while reading, that's the thing I'm going to focus on. And so it's going to vary depending on my grade level.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Another trend I see is one where the small groups simply repeat the whole class instruction. So the idea is that small groups are to give kids more practice with whatever the grade level standard is or whatever the grade level lesson is or whatever the whole class lesson is. And what I hear you saying is no, you have to trust that there's balance across the day that you're addressing grade level standards through the curriculum and through the whole class instruction. And that the small group time is really meant more for targeting specifically what students need. Is that an accurate representation?
Kristin Conradi-Smith:
It could be that for some of those students, an extra dosage of what they're getting in whole group is the thing that they need. So I would say yes, but maybe.
Jennifer Serravallo:
…it could be, maybe it's not. Yeah, it could be. Yeah. But it's got to be more responsive to student needs.
Kristin Conradi-Smith:
And I would be suspicious of a program where small group is just intended as a sort of small group replication of whatever they're getting in whole group, because that sort of seems not disingenuous, but it certainly doesn't seem data driven or student driven. It's not really about the kids that are in your class and the immediate needs that they have.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Let's move on to the B of your ABCs, basics and books. Let's talk first about the book or text selection. I think you offer some really important guidance and advice in your paper about that.
Steve Amendum:
So I think we would recommend that teachers come at it by thinking about the purpose for the text. So what is the content of that text? What is the purpose that makes it a really good match for this particular group? So just a quick example, if students in this particular group are focused on decoding, that might be a really good time to pick a decodable text that matches up to the very specific decoding skills that you were practicing with those students so that they, as Kristin was saying, have a chance to immediately apply that systematic and explicit instruction in a text. The other thing I think that's important to think about is content and topics. We want texts that are going to be engaging for students. We want texts that will also supplement and build on their core instruction that they're receiving in ELA, but also in science and social studies. So thinking about texts that would be appropriate for particular reading skills but also are able to address some of those needs is really important as well.
Tammy Williams:
Yes. So as Steve mentioned, sometimes the texts that we choose have some kind of connection to social studies or standard science, so social studies or science standards that we are also doing. So we call them "companion texts." So sometimes in our small group we use those types of texts to build background knowledge, for example, or vocabulary to help students access ideas that are in more complex and challenging texts that they're reading during whole groups.
Kristin Conradi-Smith:
And I would say, for example, I got in, I was able to go visit a classroom at your school where they were reading Wild Robot as a class, but then in small groups they had these sort of shorter texts about everything from what wasn't it, robots.
Tammy Williams:
Yeah, we built the background knowledge about what robots were. At one point, the character, Roz, who's a robot, he has to look at the animals and learn about instinct. And so we had a little text about fight or flight. So we were trying to look at what the complex texts required of the reader, and then we were, we'd found smaller texts that again created this idea of a text set and provided that in small group as well to help build that knowledge for students.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I believe you also talked to your article a little bit about relevance, right? Cultural relevance, and you gave some suggestions. You cited Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop and gave some suggestions about where to find texts. Does anyone want to talk a little bit about that?
Kristin Conradi-Smith:
I'm happy to. I just think there's no reason that we should ever be using, forgive my language here, but just crappy books. When I have the opportunity to work closely with six students and for the next four weeks we can really dive into a novel. I want it to be a novel that connects with them, that teaches them about the world, that sort of, they're going to maybe see themselves reflected, or again, see a window into the world, kind of Rudine Sims Bishop's mirrors and windows. So we see in the science of reading movement, a lot of discussion about skills and making sure kids are readers, but it's like to what end? Why are we reading in the first place and what are inside those books?
Jennifer Serravallo:
And even decodable texts that Steve, you were talking about before, they've gotten so much better. There are some available now that weren't available 10 years ago that have, I'll say storylines, that have actual characters. I've seen a lot of intentionality around diverse representation in the text. So depending on where you're getting some humor, the Fly Leaf ones are so sometimes kind of funny. So there are much better options now. So absolutely doing an audit of the texts and considering are we using crappy books or are we using those, that's a good filter. Actually, before we move off of books, one other thing I wanted to ask you about books is you talk about not grouping kids by level, but then you also talk about making sure that the texts are grade level. And so one of the things, this is a confusion I'm hearing a lot out there is are we leveling books? Are we not leveling books? What leveling system are we using? How do we know if a book is a grade level book if we don't have a leveling system to use to level it? What do you say back to that? I know this is a little out of the scope of your article, but it touches on it, so I'm just curious to hear what you're thinking.
Kristin Conradi-Smith:
I'm glad you're bringing up the question. I don't know if I'll be able to bring clarity to it with my answer, but I would say absolutely there are systems out there that can order books in terms of complexity. We can either apply some quantitative criteria like number of words in a sentence or number of, syllables, number of long words and say Text A is decidedly more complex than Text B. So there are systems out there and we don't want to discount them. What we're discounting when we say the idea of small groups by level text is this idea that kid A can only be in this type of text based on some arbitrary criteria, and we want to kind of move away from that. Instead say, let's look at a level text system, let's look at the guidance to say in third grade, here are the sort of appropriate levels we should expect in that grade.
Steve Amendum:
So I agree with Kristen, and I think there are good systems out there that can order texts in terms of complexity. And I think what we have to make sure is that students are getting exposure to grade level texts, both in core instruction, but potentially in small group instruction as well. I mean, I would say yes in small group instruction, but what we have to think about is what types of supports or scaffolds do they need to be able to be successful with that particular text.
Kristin Conradi-Smith:
And one thing we have to do as teachers, and I'd love Tammy to chime in here, is like, I shouldn't just trust a numbering system that says, okay, in third grade, these are my possible texts I can choose from. I need to learn how to look at a text and size it up. And that involves some of those quantitative factors I alluded to. But there's also kind of a host of qualitative factors that really we have to train ourselves as teachers for how to look at a text and anticipate what could be challenging and recognizing that it'll be challenging for some of my students in one place and some others in another. So Tammy, do you want to share some of the things that you sort of thought about it?
Tammy Williams:
We learned to start taking a look at those books and looking at the qualitative features, what would get in the way. So we had to kind of read those books a little bit differently and think about what background knowledge does the author expect us to bring to this book? What vocabulary words do I need to pre-teach and make sure that I'm explicitly teaching those before so the students can get the understanding that they need? What's the author's craft? I mean, we had our fourth graders reading this beautiful book called Song for a Whale, and there were flashbacks in there. And so we had to think, okay, we've got to make sure we debug this part of the text so that they don't misinterpret what's going on. So we started to again shift away from, as Kristen was saying, these arbitrary ideas of leveling to more qualitative features that really can trip up a student when they're accessing that text.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think that's such helpful advice for everybody. And I think that leads really nicely into your C of your ABCs, which is clear directions and feedback. So we know we're grouping kids based on need. We're choosing texts carefully, thinking about grade level expectations as well as what the text lends itself to, and that match between the text and what the reader needs. You talk about an overall structure, so the "what happens?" during the group part of setting the purpose, providing targeted feedback during the group, and then offering global feedback, which ties to the lesson and the overall learning trajectory or skill progression. I'm wondering if you can elaborate if you found anything in the research, in your review of the research around some of the teacher moves during the lesson that have shown to be most impactful for learners in the small groups.
Kristin Conradi-Smith:
In that section, we didn't go to the research as much as just sort of describe what we've seen effective, but I do think research would back us up on the importance of explicitness, of being very explicit about what's our purpose here and what are we doing?
Tammy Williams:
And so for example, in the beginning, it's always that pay attention to statement. We talk about text structure. That's been a big thing that we've talked in our before reading. It's like letting them know, Hey, this is how this text is structured. Here's where we are in this piece and this is what you can expect. And then kind of like that during reading strategy, that's where the during reading pieces is where we're looking at giving that feedback to students. Just having times to stop and summarize, stay the gist, making sure there's no misconceptions. And then finally following up with after reading activities such as asking inferential questions, digging a little bit deeper maybe going into it. So we've really tried to take a look at before, during reading, just to have that in our brain as we're leading our small groups, what's it going to look like? Let me make sure I don't skip over and I hit these important parts.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think structure is so freeing in a way because if you've got these parts, It allows you then to play with the content or to innovate a little bit about what am I teaching, what text am I teaching with? How is this lesson going to go?
Steve Amendum:
Could I just add one thing too I want to add as we're thinking about feedback? I think that one of the aspects that becomes really important about giving students feedback is sort of demystifying some of the tasks.And that could be feedback in the moment. It could be feedback afterwards when students have done something well or when they need some more support. So for example, I think one of the things that I often found when I was a teacher is that I felt like it was cheating if I told students the answer and I'm using air quotes here. And so I would try to ask them questions or I would try, I would say, try that again, try that again. And it was sort of pulling teeth. It felt like when sometimes it's really important to just be very explicit and say in that word that E says /eh/, it doesn't say /e/. Try it again. And to actually give them some of the information that they need in order to then be successful and try again. And so both in terms of skills, like reading words where we might do something like the example I just gave, or in terms of comprehension, I really like the way that you were thinking about what happened to Ivan in this chapter because as we were reading, you said X, Y, and Z that really showed how you were thinking about this.
Jennifer Serravallo:
That's really helpful, Steve. Thank you. And I'm wondering too about, back to the question of explicitness and tying feedback to the reason that kids are in the group in the first place, we want to make sure it's targeted and precise and focused. I'm wondering if you've thought at all or seen anything in the research around the role of strategy instruction as one of the ways to be explicit.
Tammy Williams:
We are trying to do more strategy instruction in that "during" reading. And we're doing it kind of in two different ways. One, and when the teacher models using a think aloud to try to say, here, this is how I'm thinking about this text. So we do a lot of that and that kind of can go to what Steve just said about that explicit, but really modeling what we're doing. And then another one is to really try to use some of that academic language with strategies, but keeping it very minimal and keeping it based on what the text requires, if that makes sense. So that's sort of what we are doing with strategy instruction with our small groups at our school.
Kristin Conradi-Smith:
And I would say strategies have gotten to be a little bit of a bad word of late, which is just crazy and mind boggling because we're all really strategic when we read. And so I think us, again, it's good to turn away from strategies of the week from this idea that for the month of March we're working on clarifying and then expecting that students to sort of master that by the end, and we never have to touch it again and instead really model for and teach kids that for any text we have to use multiple strategies. And it requires active reading. It requires stopping and thinking and clarifying and all of those kinds of things. And so background knowledge for sure is important. It wasn't talked a lot when I was going through my training in the late nineties. Now we recognize it and I'm excited about that, but I don't want to see us throwing out strategies because I do think we have quite a few students who ultimately, that's one of the things that they're really going to need in small groups.
Steve Amendum:
And I would just add, so I agree 100% with Tammy and Kristin about that. It's "during" strategy to really help us make sense of the text. We might need multiple strategies. We might rely on one mainly, but it can never be the outcome. And I think that's where we got off track. For me, I think about it, the National Reading Panel brought comprehension strategies to the forefront, and then we went all in on strategies where that became the outcomes were sort of the goals of these lessons rather than the tools to help students really achieve the goals of comprehension.
Kristin Conradi-Smith:
And so to bring that back to feedback, if I have students who kind of struggle to be metacognitive as they read, if that's sort of my identified group and we're working on reading The Wild Robot, then yeah, maybe we're doing, we're focusing on a couple of the strategies that particular chapter required of us as we read it. Then I want to make sure that I tailor my feedback that week, that session to those things that we're working on. And that's where, that was sort of the genesis of this article in general, if you're going to do small groups, you want to make sure that you're maximizing what you're doing, every single component of it, and you're providing that sort of, again, purpose and the feedback so that we can sort of grow students.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, I think that's a great place to stop for today. Thank you all so much for your time and for all your insights, and thank you for this article. I'll make sure to link to it in the show notes.
Kristin Conradi-Smith:
Thank you.
Steve Amendum:
Thank you.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I now welcome my colleagues, Emily Strang-Campbell, Clarisa Leal and Cristy Rauseo. What'd you think?
Clarisa Leal:
I think the first thing that when you starting talking about the ABCs, one of the things that really caught and brought to my attention and the connection when they were talking about the screening, immediately I thought about an assessment conference. When you do an assessment conference, I think that's just kind of a quick screening that can help you figure out, at least get a quick idea of where your students are at based on the hierarchy of goals. And when we find out that they need to work on several goals. What Dr. Conradi Smith said, I think is so important, the fact that we need to make sure that we're exposing our students to different structures during the day so that we can tackle the different areas that they need.
Jennifer Serravallo:
The whole warning against strategies, just for strategies sake or strategy of the month. They've sort of contrasted that with teaching strategies that the text demands, but then I feel like they were really saying, we're grouping kids based on their need and we should be teaching to their need. I think what we're really doing is we're tying the strategy to the need that they have rather than to the text or even to the strategy of the month.
Cristy Rauseo:
I totally agree that we have to screen texts to see what the demands are, and especially if you're teaching multilingual, learners, you have to see what vocabulary to anticipate, what kinds of things you need to frontload for students. My confusion was how do I make sure that that strategy, they know that's transferable to any other text, and how do I make it more general to, this is not only here that you're facing it, this is like to look for another texts so that you can use this again.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So important.
Cristy Rauseo:
To me, that was more, that's more what is more important, because I want them to know that this is something we did here. I'm going to teach you because I have the text here and this is what the text required, but try it again in another text.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think that's a really important point, is that, yes, the text is demanding this of us as a reader. So it's the perfect time to teach this particular strategy and also this strategy that I'm teaching you is a way to approach any text that's similar in this same way, and that it's not about doing the strategy, it's about being active and strategic. So I'm trying to be active. I'm trying to do things, take action as a reader when there's challenge, when there's difficulty, when the text demands it, now and in the future. So I think that's an important complexity to sort of tease out a little bit. Emily, what are you thinking?
Emily Strang-Campbell:
But the ultimate goal is to make meaning of the story, to really live and use stories to make the world a better place. Strategies are actually the tools that can help us to do that. So it's really the end goal is for kids to really make sense of the text, to engage with it, to bring their own interpretation, their own ideas, their own lived experience combined with what the author's giving them for deeper comprehension that they then can indeed take to other texts or if they fall in love with this author, take to other books that this author or this genre provides. Jen, can I bring up another thing that I really appreciate that they said was, and I also got this from their article, was how much they stress the importance of purpose and really bringing purpose to the forefront, whether it's your whole class, mini lesson, whether it's your strategy, a strategy, small group, whether it's a partner talk, and just really laying out the purpose as concisely as possible so that kids know exactly why it is they're there, what it is they're ready to tackle.
Clarisa Leal:
And I would add, Emily, to the purpose that it's important also to think about the purpose of our small groups and make sure that we we're not only, like they said, we're not only grouping them because they're all ELL students, but we're really grouping them because we understand what skills they need to work on or what are their strengths and work within that make those groupings be purposeful for our teaching and for them to keep growing as readers.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I think if we have a classroom where the kids know what they need to work on because we've had those conversations with them and we know what they need to work on, the purpose is baked in because you say, remember how we're all working on tackling those longer multisyllabic words? Today I'm going to teach you another way to be thinking about that and we're going to practice it together. And the kids are going to automatically say, "Oh yeah, I know that is what I'm working on." So the purpose is very clear and it kind of gets them oriented and focused. They may have just been coming off of a whole class lesson where they were doing, studying the elements of a mystery book and now, okay, now we're back to multisyllabic words. So it kind of gets them oriented and focused for what they're going to learn that day. The breaking things down into clear steps is absolutely an ingredient of explicitness. And so in that beginning of the lesson, after setting the purpose, being really explicit about the steps that we're going to take today, the actions we're going to take, the moves we're going to make to be attempting to understand theme or character or whatever it is,
Clarisa Leal:
And even within, fluency will find students will need different skills within fluency that makes me think about the skill progression and even how they mentioned in their paper, they mentioned they call them I think learning trajectories. So the importance of looking, even if we think that they need help in comprehension, within comprehension, we need to think about what specifically if they need to under better understand characters and even within characters. I think Jen, you use a lot of cracking the goal open and looking within it.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yes. Thank you. Emily, what were you thinking?
Emily Strang-Campbell:
Going back to the strategy, how that step by step strategy layout is so key for so many students. Having the steps really laid out visually for them in some sort of a chart. And that's where your charts in the books really give purpose and also lay out the explicit step-by-step, kind of guide that helps them as they read. It's sort of like my North star as I'm teaching, and I think the visuals are also their North Star. They're kind of touchstone as they're in the process of reading. And it helps them with the feedback. In many of the videos I've seen you do in the recent videos that we filmed in the Bronx, many teachers would use that visual as they were giving the individual feedback to the students. They would constantly go back to that visual of the steps to kind of remind them, say, so right now you're doing step number two. You're so ready to take it to step number three. So it kind of kept everybody grounded. Those feedback prompts help me coach them while they're in the act of reading, which they were saying 50% of the time they need to have eyes on text. That's what makes a successful small group. So those prompts sort of allow you to coach in while still having their eyes on text.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I love how you just broke down feedback and the kind of supports for teachers for feedback, because in a lot of ways it's the most important part of the lesson and it's also the most challenging because you can anticipate as a teacher and you could plan ahead. You could choose your text, you could pick your strategy or strategies. You could think about what you're going to say to them at the beginning, how you're going to demonstrate. That's all planning. But then when you're in the midst of the lesson, when the kids are in the act of reading, and like they said half the time, I'd say even more than half the time, I'd want like 75% eyes on text. But they're reading and they're practicing, and you've got to respond. You've got to notice, and maybe it's that skill progression that you're mentioning, Clarisa, I'm looking, where are they on the skill progression? What's the next step? And I'm using that to guide me for my feedback. It's the prompts maybe that I've prepared. It's the anchor chart or the visual that I have ready to go. It's the steps to refer back to. Those are really concrete suggestions, Emily, that I think are really helpful for teachers who might feel like that's a challenging time in the lesson because it's a little more off the cuff because you're responding to what you're seeing. Well, I want to thank you all so much for your time today. Thanks, Emily. Thanks, Clarisa. Thanks, Christy.
Emily Strang-Campbell:
Thank you, Jen.