Elfreida Hiebert
To the classroom: Episode 5
March 20, 2023
Today’s guest is Dr. Freddy Hiebert. We’ll talk about her newly published book about vocabulary instruction, her work around text complexity and her site textproject.org, how to ensure self-selected reading time is worth the time, and more. Later, I’m joined by my colleagues Macie Kerbs, Rosie Maurantonio, and Lea Leibowitz for a conversation about practical takeaways.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Thank you so much for being with me today, Freddy.
Freddy Hiebert:
It's my pleasure.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
So I want to start with your incredible website, textproject.org, because I want to make sure everybody knows about it. There's so much great stuff there. For teachers who are not yet familiar with it, can you give us a quick overview of what they can find there?
Freddy Hiebert:
Well, the first thing I'd underscore is that everything on the website is available for free download.
I think there must be well over 400 texts for teachers to use. And what I have done is basically written prototypical kinds of texts that I hope can influence publishers and make a difference in terms of the kinds of things that kids can read. So there are texts for students from beginning reading all the way up through middle schoo/ high school. We've just added a new program called "Topic Reads" which is about couple hundred texts for kids in middle grades. I think we're starting to hear a lot from middle grade teachers about kids who not necessarily can't read but won't read or don't have enough stamina to stay the course for a text. And then the other major resource on the website are vocabulary lessons. So we read words, words mean things, and expanding your meaning, your vocabulary, is really what we do as teachers of English language arts, whether that vocabulary is thematic or it's in a literary text. So there are lots of forms of vocabulary lessons, and again, I underscore that all of those are for free download.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
It's an incredible resource. I recommend that everybody check it out. And there's also
your professional texts, entire books that you can read for professional development. It's just incredible. So thank you for putting that together. And something else that's unique about it is that you have a leveling system that you call TEXT, which stands for Text Elements by Task. I think some people might be familiar with quantitative leveling systems like Lexile or qualitative leveling systems like the F&P Text Level gradient, which uses letters. What about yours? Can you tell us a little bit about it and why you developed it?
Freddy Hiebert:
What I'm interested in is not just giving a book, a single score, whether it be qualitative or quantitative. So I don't want to just say that To Kill a Mockingbird is an M or it's 600 Lexile. To me, that's not very useful. What I want to know as a teacher is what are the kinds of words that kids are going to need to be able to know to proficient with that with the book? So my text analyzer, you can really use a lot of different things about it. So it's like not a single formula.
So what I have is a text analyzer that basically will give you the distribution of at least 12 to 15 features of a text. So for example, if I were going to do a chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird, I could tell you the percentage of words in the text that come from the most common words, and then I could tell you which words are very rare and how often those rare words occur, how long they are. I can tell you about whether they are part of rich morphological families or whether it has an orthographic structure that might be difficult for kids.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
So important that, yeah, we're not boiling down a text to a letter or a number because that doesn't really tell us what sorts of things to support kids with, what to unpack for them, how to help them through that text, what kinds of words to be highlighting, those kinds of things. So I think it's so valuable to have these qualities or features of texts really clear.
There's a lot of conversation now about what text to use with beginning readers in particular, pattern texts have been really common for a long time, and now there's a lot more people talking about decodable texts and making sure that beginning readers have texts that really set them up to be successful as they're applying their phonics knowledge or their newly formed phonics knowledge to different situations as they're reading. I'm just wondering what you think about ways that people might use different text types in the classroom.
Freddy Hiebert:
Well, this is how much time do you have?
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
I know. I basically come up with questions that each one could be its own podcast episode. So...
Freddy Hiebert:
Well, this topic, I think this is the most critical topic that teachers are facing right now. So when you think about text for students who are beginning, or students who aren't highly automatic in grades beyond the primary grades, the thing that we have to keep remembering is that English is a quasi, has a quasi regular orthography. What that means is that an English word always uses the 26 letters of our alphabet, but the relationships between the letters and the sounds can vary a lot, especially for vowels. So in Ed Fry's analysis in an article in Journal of Literacy behavior, I think it was 2004, he identified 106 different ways in which graphemes and phonemes can be partnered for vowels. That's a lot. The real question is how many of those are very rare, and a significant portion of those are, and which ones are the most consistent and common?
Now, one of the difficulties we really have, because English is unlike almost every other language, a language that has two distinct linguistic forms, that means that German initially, and then French is added on top during the Norman invasion. So the English court speaks French for a long time. So we've got a lot of words that we use in academic language that have a French origin, and those systems have different orthographic patterns. And so we've got a lot of words in our most frequent words, which come from German that are the consonants are pretty consistent except for the word and "the" is the sound that is less frequent for the so th and that is the more common sound, but we've got all these words with irregular patterns. So you've got a system that yes, is an orthographic system representing two different language sources, and you've got a bunch of words that don't always hit the pattern. So to become proficient at that, yes, I mean it's unequivocal that you need consistency, you need to be introduced to this system of orthographic relationships, but the expectation that it's perfect is problematic. So kids really need from the get-go to have something called a "set for variability." They have to be ready for the fact that when you see the E in the, it's not going to be the same as when you see the E in B E "be" or "me" or "he."
So is there one particular kind of text? I mean there's the belief that decodeable texts can be created that match perfectly a kid's knowledge? Well, I haven't seen them yet, but that doesn't mean that you don't need text with consistency. So what I've worked on, and for example, the Beginning Reads at Text Project support kids in reading books where there are words that are the most common and consistent in terms of vowel patterns. So that's pretty important, but it's hard to write anything connected text without having some words that don't fit the pattern. So the idea that there's a perfect kind of text and those can be mandated is a real problem. So in a recent analyses of meta-analyses that my colleagues and I have done we actually have found that in interventions in beginning reading studies where they use both decodable and level texts actually had higher effect sizes than either treatment by itself.
Now, what I really recommend for teachers to do in the interventions that I've worked in, what we've done is taken existing texts that have interesting information because another big issue in learning to read is that knowledge is so central. Absolutely, yep. So what I talk about is re-sorting texts. And in the studies that I've done the interventions and Linea Ehri who was the architect of the phonics section of the National Reading Panel, has done the same thing. What we've done is we've taken a series of books and we've actually re-sorted the texts so that kids see a critical mass of consistency in certain kinds of words. I mean, there's so much we don't know in the current decodable model, the view is that it's good to see lots and lots and lots of different exemplars of a pattern. Well, I don't think that that's the way most kids actually learn.
I think it helps to have, if there's a particular word that means something to you, and you see that word a bunch of times in texts and then you see some of its mates that that's a really good system to take. So that's why I talk about re-sorting. And I think that that's where there's some shared knowledge. So if you have a whole bunch of books on plants, you're going to see some of the same words over and over again. You know, might see seeds and pine cones and so on. And they're not just going to appear in one book, which is really good because one of the problems with pattern books is that you're memorizing the pattern. You're not attending as much to the words. So a knowledge based set of books, and that's what the Beginning Reads at Text Project are. Topic Reads are like that you're not only helping kids see some words repeatedly in different contexts, and research also lets us know that that's important to see a word in different contexts. Because a lot of words also have a lot of different meanings. There are very few words that have a single meaning, and most of those are pretty rare words.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
That was a really helpful explanation.
Freddy Hiebert:
One of the perspectives that's really influenced me is Seidenberg, whose work has been raised a lot in the last six or seven years, talks about orthographic knowledge being a product of having encountered a lot of print. So I personally think you have to from the get go, start applying what you're being taught in text.
David Share, an Israeli researcher, talks about the self-teaching hypothesis. So at what point do kids actually start making that extension? Our curriculum in American schools right now assumes that you go through each of these patterns and each of these patterns is equally important. They're not, and it may well be, we don't know this actually in research, I actually posted 12 questions that I have for scientists about some of these specifics. How many patterns do kids need to see before most of them start generalizing and keep remembering for kids who have had lots of reading experiences at home, they've been processing the data for a while. So from Siedenberg's point of view, it's a statistical learning issue. So what you see over time influences what it is that you're learning and just somebody telling you a pattern, I mean that can be helpful to spell it, to see a bunch of words that share that pattern, but eventually you actually have to see some text where you apply it. And what's the best kind of text to do that? I happen to believe it's texts where you have some of the most consistent and common patterns, but you're always going to have some irregular words that where the consonants work, it's the vowels that don't typically work.
I mean, I'd rather have the discussion of how much text than exactly what kind of text
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Or sometimes what happens is I think there's a lot of attention paid toward the explicit teaching of phonics patterns. And what I'm seeing now in 2022, 2023 is there seems to be a call to remove independent reading from the literacy block that independent reading is not worth the time that more needs to be teacher directed. And I know you've written a lot about this for more than a decade and I'm wondering about your perspective on that. Going back to what you're saying, it's not just what texts, but how much text. And if we're not giving kids time to read quantities of texts in the classroom, when are they getting that time?
Freddy Hiebert:
Well, you've got to read a lot. You've got to do a lot of something to get good at it. So I have to do a lot of German reading to get good at it. I have to do a lot of Pilates to get good at Pilates, which just always amazes me that in some of these programs now they give the lowest readers less text. You can't teach kids to read if they don't do it. I think little guys can have a really hard time picking appropriate texts for themselves.
I think of Tanya Wright and Gina Cervetti's study where they gave kids just a ton of books on birds and you start getting good at birds versus getting just a whole bunch of science books that were on all different topics. And it turns out you actually start becoming expert on something. I want to give the kids some choice of where their expertise can be. And I'm not going to just say you have to go into that little bin because I personally don't know how those little bins, the books and those bins have gotten there usually by being assigned a single letter which I never can see how you can do that, but that's for a whole 'nother podcast. But I would prefer to have some support for the kids whose reading experiences occur largely in school so that I as a teacher have a model for where I'm supporting the kids in finding the books that are appropriate for them. So I'm just saying to me, self-selected reading is possibly the most sophisticated aspect of reading that you have to develop. And it isn't just go and find a book.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
So yes to it, but with some parameters and supports from the teacher, whether that's curating select texts that have something in common from a topic perspective, maybe offering kids support in the form of small group instruction or conferences to teach them what to be doing or how to be selecting texts. Are there any other parameters or supports that you feel like research has shown help this self-selected reading time, independent reading time, silent reading time, whatever you're calling it to be more worth the time?
Freddy Hiebert:
Well, there has to be something that comes out of it. And I don't mean a book report.
And I remember having written about this <laugh> at some different points in my career. And I'm happy to work if there's somebody who's listening to this that wants to work on a project with me to actually test out some of the ideas. But I know that Jay Samuels was really upset with some of the conclusions or the interpretations--he was on the National Reading Panel--about independent reading and he did a fair amount of work and on tracking what it was that was highly effective. And it isn't just saying to kids, "Hey, you got 10 minutes, do anything you want." Because when I've been in classrooms, I've seen the kids who are most in need of using that time just repeatedly going and getting another book. So I think there has to, I want to invite kids into this culture where you're seeing what books can do for you. And I want to have some books available to say, we're going to be studying about Egypt this next quarter and here are books if you for take home or for independent reading that can help you become an expert on a aspect of Egyptian culture.
Now all of you aren't going to want to do exactly that. I mean, when I worked with a digital publisher on increasing independent reading, we actually were giving kids here out of a selection of 10 articles, you need to read three of 'em or four of 'em sometimes. What I've also done is a little card, here are topics. I want you to try out all the topics, and then you decide which one you really want to become an expert on. So I think that there are some ways to do it. I don't know. And here, Jen, you might have a much better notion of the research than I do, but I don't know who's really categorized or summarized some of these strategies. To me, self-selected reading. I hang out with other readers and we have places we go to find the next book. And that has to be taught.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Thank you. Well, let's shift gears cause I'd love to talk about your new book called Teaching Words and How they Work, which for anyone who's looking for a really super practical use-it-right-away book for supporting vocabulary development I highly recommend it. One of the things I love about it is the framing.
I love how you frame the idea that change doesn't need to happen by throwing everything out and completely replacing it with something new. You talk about this idea of small changes and that there's a trap of this unattainable goal that we want to do these big sweeping reforms, but oftentimes what's most helpful are the small changes. I'd love to hear you just talk a little bit about that concept because it shows up again and again in every chapter.
Freddy Hiebert:
Well, the ideas of small changes, or as BJ Fogg talks about --he's a researcher at Stanford--he talks about tiny habits. So in my life as a writer, and as a speaker, and as a human being, as a friend, as a person, I really believe in looking at what's the smallest thing I can do to start something in place. I mean, sometimes I'll look at a paper I want to write and it just seems so overwhelming. So the question is, what's the smallest thing I could do that would get me started? And as a teacher, I mean teaching is so complex, or as a student, I want kids to be thinking this way: as a kid, what's the smallest thing I could do to get to be a little bit of a better reader?
Freddy Hiebert:
I mean, some of it is really having to be clear about what your goals are and your vision, right?
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Absolutely. And when it comes to learning words, which is the focus of this book, one of the messages is that when you're selecting words to teach children, you should be really economical. If you can't possibly teach them every single word individually, you have to teach words with purpose that connect to other things that have a root that's similar, that has some kind of morphological connection to other words. So you're again, a small change that's going to bring about a big difference. Let's talk about word selection. So what are some of, what's some your advice that you share in the book?
Freddy Hiebert:
Well, if I could see put in place a small change, that actually is a very big idea. And that would be for teachers and kids to think about the fact that there are systems for how semantics, orthography, and morphology work.
We've treated vocabulary as kind of this ad hoc kind of thing. It's like each word is an island or something.
And the thing about vocabulary is that words are connected in various systems. So our vocabulary has some systems.There's the orthographic system, there's a morphological system. There are also semantic systems. So words don't just happen on their own.
But there are likely two to three words kids haven't encountered before in every a hundred words they read. Now, if you act like those words all need to be taught and that it's a serendipitous process what they are, that's going to be a problem. Well, it turns out genre influences how the words act. Okay. So in stories, narrative writers think very differently than people who are informational writers.
So a narrative writer is really intent not to keep repeating the same verb over and over again. I mean, some of us learned to read with Dick and Jane where they kept repeating the same thing all the time. They would jump Jane, jump, Sally, that kind of thing. Well, that's not literature. So what a good narrative writer has are certain words to create motion of characters, motion of offense the traits, and they don't keep repeating those words over and over again. Which means that when you get to a story, you need to anticipate, this is kind of one of these systems, when I'm reading a story, I have to anticipate that there're going to be a lot of different ways in which the writer is helping me understand this character. And an informational text. In fact, a mathematician isn't running to a thesaurus to find a substitute for the word equation.
That doesn't mean that's better if you keep repeating equation. I'm just saying it's a different purpose. So kids need to understand some of these expectations. And we also need to underscore, and this is really one of the things that's underlies the work, Text Project, and also the vocabulary activities, is that about 90% of the words we read as adults come from a group of about 2,500 word families. And a word family is like: help helper, helpful, helpless, help me. Those words actually, they matter a lot. So if you're not very automatic with some of those and keep remembering, the more common the word, the more likelihood it has a multiple meanings. So that's another principle of language is principle of polysemy. Many meanings. And the more a word hangs out, the more different meanings it gets.
So that answering your question, I mean, what I'm basically saying is I think it's a little thing, but it's a fundamental shift in our thinking.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Yeah, it's huge. Both in helping to advise teachers with selecting words that they can connect to other words. So that one word they learned actually opens a door to a whole group of words. And thinking in that way, it just makes things more efficient and streamlined. And everybody always needs to be thinking, we never enough time in the classroom. We need to be always more efficient and streamlined. But it's also thinking about clueing kids in to this. And so when they encounter, the teacher's not always going to be there to introduce a word meaning to them, they're going to come across words they don't know, like you said. And helping them to understand, hey, if some words that have some similar, something similar about them that could help unlock what this word meaning is, what are other strategies that can help kids when they're by themselves and the teachers not there to teach the meaning of the word to them? What are other things you want to let them know or strategies to use or ways to be thinking about approaching these words to be able to understand their meaning?
Freddy Hiebert:
Well, from my perspective, some of the things that I've been talking about, I think once kids are, at least by third grade, we need to actually have taught them some things about the linguistic system.
In every story you see, there're going to be a ton more words than I can ever teach you. So I'm not going to teach you each of the words here. What I'm saying is this particular story, the context matters an incredible amount. And what this author is going to do is give you a lot of different words to describe the setting.
Be on the lookout for that. Now I'm going to start a semantic map up here with some of the key words. So the strategy that I probably overuse, but if you go to the vocabulary exercises at Text Project, they're all around semantic maps. I can't teach you all the words in this story, but I can teach you how to look for them. And by the way, did I tell you guys that about 90 to 92% of the words in this story you already know because we've gotten good at that.
So that means together with your knowledge of orthography and morphology and using the context of the story, you're going to be able to figure out those new words. You use orthography and morphology in the context of text to make sense of it.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Thank you. Freddy,
I just want to say thank you so much for joining me for your time. We've covered a lot of ground and I had even more I was hoping to talk to you about. So we might need to follow schedule a follow up, but I really appreciate all your scholarship and all your work across all these different areas of reading. And I do encourage everybody to check out your new book as well as textproject.org for even more resources. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Freddy Hiebert:
Thank you for having me and for the work you do. Really appreciate it.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Thank you.
So I'm going to now chat with Macy, and Rosie, and Leah.
Rosie, I'd love to hear what you think first as a first grade teacher, what are some of the first things you're thinking about?
Rosie Maurantonio:
I'm always wondering about how those texts could be used in my classroom because I use a combination of decodables and level texts. So it was nice to hear from the meta-analysis that that's a way to go. I felt good about that.
I can think of certain students in my class where I'm like, oh, we've done this, but maybe we haven't...there just hasn't been that practice that they need. And I think that's one of the things I find that's missing from some of the phonics programs we work at is that there's an explicit instruction, but the connection into text and the time for kids to have that practice isn't there. So that's just something I'm constantly trying to find time to add more of.
And I think the big thing is that we shouldn't just spend one week on this chunk or one week on this pattern, but really looking at which are the more high frequency words in our language and word families in our language. So yeah, those are some of the things.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Do you have time for morphology instruction in first grade? No. Right.
Rosie Maurantonio:
I'm try. That's the other thing. I'm always like, okay, now where can I fit this in? I'm not sure yet. It so seems so important. So I'm thinking of where can we embed it and maybe tweaking some of these so-called scripted phonics lessons and try to embed more of this in. But I don't know. I don't know. It's a lot.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Yeah. Macy, what are you thinking?
Macie Kerbs:
So I was thinking about just how complex the language is. She was speaking about the linguistic side of it, and I was taking so many notes because I was learning so much as she was speaking just about the English language. And I was thinking about how much our kids don't know in the classroom about how complex it is, but we expect it to feel really easy.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
if everyone's learning the same lesson at the same time, certain kids probably know it already, others are having a harder time grasping it. And I think Rosie, about your classroom and just how hard it is to fit all of the different things in, and sometimes it has to be whole class, but just the practical, what does a teacher do knowing that you've got kids with a variety of different experiences, whether it's with vocabulary knowledge or with knowledge of the orthographic system and phonics knowledge. There's a range and you're trying to get them all to progress and to at least meet end-of-year benchmark. But if we're moving them all along at the same pace, some kids are going to feel…this is not for me. This is way too hard. And yes, acknowledging it, yes, this is hard language is complex English, especially yes. But there also needs to be a place where the instruction is meeting him where he is so that he feel successful.
Macie Kerbs:
And I wonder, I kind of wonder about what's happening to our teachers instead of from our teachers. So Rosie, you're handed all of these curriculums to balance as a first grade teacher within one day, and you also have the pressure from parents and other people in your school to meet the individual child. So just that load itself on a teacher to figure out, now I need to know who this child is and how to scale back or scale up or fit it in at this different time. That's a lot of ask on our teachers. And so I think it's nice that what Freddy brought into the conversation is that slow is better if we go slow and we focus on what really, really matters and what's going to have the biggest bang for your buck, the small changes that will have the biggest impact. And I hope that listeners whether they're administrators or curriculum developers or classroom teachers, feel that it's okay to slow down on the race instead of trying to get it all in.
It kind of makes me think about your goal setting conference structure. Jen, when she was talking about accountability not the book report, but really saying, here's why I'm choosing a text and what I'm reading and let me have this authentic experience with text and peers around text. I was thinking about that goal setting conference because how often do we walk into classrooms where teachers are using your strategies book beautifully, and they're teaching these small groups and they're teaching strategy groups and kids are really doing the work, but not always transferring it independently. And I think that goal setting conference where we're sitting down and having a conversation with a kid about their reading life or their writing life and helping them authentically choose goals based on where they see themselves as a reader that will allow us to get further in the process. And then we can make decisions about, maybe this is the time for just vocabulary, if that's their specific goal. But when she was talking about how do we hold them accountable, I said, I was thinking, man, I think that's Jen's structure
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Conferences. Yeah. Well, yeah, you start off with off setting goals so that your independent reading time is purposeful and focused so the teacher knows, what am I trying to teach?
What accountability looks like and the bringing of accountability to that self-selected reading time to make it more meaningful and more purposeful and more impactful for kids I think is really important.
Macie Kerbs:
I think with that, we almost have to do a classroom book audit of our text because she talked a lot about it not being one type of text, but having a lot of variety and being really intentional.
Lea Leibowitz:
And then how can those more purposeful collections of books fuel the intention behind independent reading and the success of it?
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
And even the idea that you should be encountering what percentage did she say? About 8% of the words could be words you are going to need to work to try to figure out what they mean. It also calls into question the complexity of the text that kids are reading. And that's maybe a small change for some people is to think, am I putting kids in books or steering them towards selecting books that are on the easy side where they're not going to be encountering any new words? And am I cutting off their opportunity to learn new vocabulary words? I think possibly. Right. So that could be a small change. That makes a big difference too.
JENNIFER SERRAVALLO:
Well, Macy and Rosie and Leah, thank you so much for joining me for this post interview discussion. I really appreciate your in insights and hearing what you're excited to try.
Rosie Maurantonio:
Thank you.
About this episode’s guest:
Elfrieda “Freddy” Hiebert (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) has had a long career as a literacy educator, first as a teacher’s aide and teacher of primary-level students in California and, subsequently, as a teacher educator and researcher at the universities of Kentucky, Colorado-Boulder, Michigan, and California-Berkeley. Her research, which addresses how fluency, vocabulary, and knowledge can be fostered through appropriate texts, has been published in numerous scholarly journals and books. Through documents such as Becoming a Nation of Readers (Center for the Study of Reading, 1985) and Every Child a Reader (Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, 1999), she has contributed to making research accessible to educators. Hiebert’s contributions to research and practice have been recognized through awards such as the American Educational Research Association’s Research to Practice award (2013).