Melanie Kuhn
To the classroom: episode 6
March 27, 2023
Today’s guest is Dr. Melanie Kuhn, who you may know from her research and teacher professional writing around reading fluency. We’ll talk about what fluency is, how to best assess and teach it, and ways to differentiate instruction in K-5 classrooms. Later, I’m joined by my colleagues Gina Dignon, Macie Kerbs, Lainie Powell, and Lea Mercantini-Leibowitz for a conversation about what we are most excited to bring to the classroom right away.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So welcome, Melanie.
Melanie Kuhn:
Hey, it's nice to be here.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Thank you so much for making the time. I'm really excited to talk with you. My first introduction to your work around reading fluency was when I read your book for educators called The Hows and Whys of Fluency Instruction. I think I read it back in 2009 and though I know you were studying the topic well before then. What got you interested in reading fluency in the first place?
Melanie Kuhn:
The reason I got interested in fluency is we would have these students come into our clinic classes and they would have fairly good decoding. They could decode well in isolation, but they had incredible difficulty with connected text and we would use some fluency interventions.
We would have them either twice a week during the fall semester or five times a week, I think it was for a six week summer intervention. And you could see these kids making three years gains in terms of their correct words per minute and becoming really fluent readers in a really short period of time.
Jennifer Serravallo:
What were the kinds of things you were teaching them to do that they made such dramatic gains in such a short period of time?
Melanie Kuhn:
Well, that was the fascinating thing. We did some repeated readings. Did repeated readings but we used a intervention that Jean Chall had used at Harvard when she was running the reading clinic. And we would take an hour and we would divide it into various components. And part of what we were doing was just partner reading with the kids. So there was some intentional fluency instruction, but there's also a lot of paired reading, partner reading going on. And that seemed to make a big difference because it was the kids, oh, I should step back a minute. The research in the seventies or eighties, Linda Gambrell showed that kids were reading in classrooms, you'd have an hour session and they'd only read about three or four minutes. And Freddie Heibert and Devin Brenner have done an update on that. And I think it's gone up to maybe seven minutes of actual time reading connected texts. And I feel like that's something we really need to focus on and it doesn't ever get to be the focus.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I'm all for teacher direction, but the practice, the connected text, reading, the partner reading absolutely important. Yeah. So can you help us just start by a simple definition? You said one of the ways you measured increased fluency was word correct per minute, but that's not all fluency is. Right. What else should we be aware of when we're thinking about fluency?
Melanie Kuhn:
Yeah, fluency, really it is three pieces that lead to a becoming a fluent reader. And so you need the accurate word recognition and you need that word recognition to be automatic so that students aren't spending their time thinking about the words. When they're thinking about figuring out the words they can't comprehend because there's just not enough mental focus or energy leftover. But the second piece that tends to get even now still overlooked a lot has to do with prosody. And those are the pieces that connect to making when you're reading, whether you're reading aloud or at least in my case when I'm reading to myself, I have that little reader voice in my head.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Me too.
Melanie Kuhn:
And it makes, I guess some people don't, but I do. And it makes the reading sound like language, you know, you can hear the ups and downs, you can hear the emphasis. All of those pieces. Where to pause, all of that. And you find if you don't pause in the right place or you don't emphasize the right words, the meaning gets distorted. And we've done some research that shows that it actually does have a unique contribution to comprehension. And so if you're leaving that piece on the table, you're leaving a connection to comprehension on the table.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So we've got the Simple View of Reading where is not directly anywhere on that model. We've got Scarborough's Rope where the word fluency appears at the end and almost seems as if it's a byproduct. It happens automatically at some point once kids have integrated those two things down the road in the Active View of Reading, Duke and Cartwright's model they published in 2021, they describe it as a bridging process that you need to have the language comprehension and the word recognition together and then work on it. And then Chall describes stages of fluency or stages of reading development, with fluency as part of one of those stages. So I'm just curious for teachers trying to make sense of all these different models, there's some overlap, there's some contradictions, there's some additions to some that don't, aren't included in others. Which one do you think correctly places fluency in the context of how we should be thinking about it as educators or best explains what's at play when readers are fluent?
Melanie Kuhn:
That's a really good question and it's a hard question. I personally sort of cutting to the chase for educators, I think it's important to think about how does this instruction, how does this fit into your instruction? And I think it's definitely a bridge between decoding and skilled reading. At the same time, I think looking at it developmentally is very important.
I want to clarify before we even get any further: stages are not static and they aren't lockstep. But, students make tend to make that transition from where they're getting to the point where they can recognize words so they have accurate decoding and become fluent readers.
But a lot of kids really need fluency instruction and spending a lot of time with scaffolded reading of connected texts to make those kinds of gains and make that transition from decoding to what we would consider skilled reading. And eventually that will work its way into silent reading because when you're reading silently, you still want to have that smooth
Jennifer Serravallo:
Good pace,
Melanie Kuhn:
Good pace, understanding what they're reading. You don't want them just to be able to read words.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So if fluency—smooth, accurate, expressive reading—requires both an automaticity and accuracy with word reading and comprehension, it seems like the assessments we use have to help us to diagnose exactly what's going on so that we can use appropriate instruction to support kids with the areas that they need it. And I know a lot of people use words correct per minute.
Melanie Kuhn:
Mm-hmm.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Take out a stopwatch, listen to kids read, and it's one quantitative measure to help us understand if kids are making progress. It sounds like that's what you use as a researcher to determine if kids are making progress, but for a teacher who's looking to diagnose what's going on, exactly what the student's fluency, so I can respond appropriately. What kinds of assessments do you think are most helpful?
Melanie Kuhn:
I think it's absolutely essential that you incorporate some measure of prosody so that, because you can get kids who read relatively quickly but sound very monotone, sound very stilted. And it's almost as if that prosody is an insight into whether or not they're making the connections again, as long as they haven't memorized a text. So if you use a, there's several versions out there of assessments. Allington has one, Tim Rasinski has one, and Paula Schwanenflugel worked on one with our colleague Rebecca Benjamin. I had a little bit to do, not that much to do with it, but it's called the Comprehensive Oral Reading Fluency Scale.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And then as for instruction, if you want to link this to instruction, you and your colleagues write about what you call the Fluency Oriented Reading Instruction or FORI. Can you give us a summary of what is involved in that approach to fluency instruction?
Melanie Kuhn:
Absolutely. And again, we saw such growth in these students when we use this. There are two versions. There's a wide version where the students read three books and there's a repeated readings version where the students read one book over the well story over the course of the week. And what we have done is these are whole class approaches. They're a way of focusing on the shared reading that you're doing as a class. Initially the teacher reads the story to the students and they discuss the story. On the second day, they echo read the story. On the third day they choral read the story. On the fourth day they partner read the story and on the fifth day they do their extension activities.
And the students in our study we found not only did they make greater gains in terms of word recognition, but they also made greater gains in terms of comprehension. And what was really interesting for us was a year later they still had those greater gains in comprehension.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Wow
Melanie Kuhn:
So we had long-term results, which we found really, really amazing.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I have a couple questions follow up. So is the teacher selecting a grade level text since it's whole class? Is she or he selecting a text kind of within the scope of where kids are reading independently, but just a little bit of a stretch? It's hard, of course, with whole class instruction you've got a wide range of abilities, but I'm wondering about the text selection
Melanie Kuhn:
They are using in schools that have basal readers. They use the story that's this assigned from the basal text. I guess those are not basals anymore. Where do they
Jennifer Serravallo:
Core reading program,
Melanie Kuhn:
Core reading programs or I know there's another term for them, but anyway so it is a grade level text. The reason this program was invented in the first place was the district where my major professor first worked, Steve Stahl first worked, was mandated to use grade level materials. And so they had no choice but to use grade level materials even though they were very challenging for the students. And so he came up with this and the repeated version of this in order to help those teachers help their students access those very difficult texts. And they were successful.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And they were successful. I think that's important. And you think about the level of scaffolding and then the releasing of scaffolding over time. There's this problem sometimes that kids who are reading below grade level don't get access to those grade level materials. So really concrete practical ways to help them be successful with those grade level materials. And then as you said, benefit in terms of fluency, word recognition, and comprehension. It's a win-win win, right?
Melanie Kuhn:
Yeah, It is. It really is. And it's so easy to implement. I really wish it was getting picked up more.
Jennifer Serravallo:
How many minutes a day? Yeah, abosolutly, Everybody go out and check this out. So how many minutes a day are we talking whole class? 15 minutes a day
Melanie Kuhn:
Between, well between 20 minutes and 30 minutes. It depends on the text obviously, you're seeing this gain happening and it really is, especially at that age where there's so much overlap in terms of the words that are getting used in texts you're going to see the same kinds of words a lot that there is something about actually looking at that material and reading it for yourself that makes a big difference.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And it makes a lot of sense because if you think about the research on orthographic mapping of words, for example, you're seeing that word as long as you're attending to the print and you've not memorized the passage, it's probably too long to be able to do that. You're attending to the print, you're reading through those words day over day over day and without much time those words become part of your sight vocabulary. You see those words again on subsequent text. It makes perfect sense. Yeah, why it works. So everyone should be incorporating that. Absolutely.
Okay, so that's whole class, that's a model for whole group instruction. What about small group instruction or individualized instruction? You talk about the importance of was it in the Kappan piece you sent me maybe the importance of differentiating instruction. What would small group and individual instruction look like in the classroom?
Melanie Kuhn:
It's so dependent on student need, but in general there's been some very successful approaches and I think Harold Chomsky had a very successful approach, which reading while listening. So there were recordings of books and the students basically did what we did in the class with the teacher, but they did it with their own recording on their own time in their own pace. They chose a book that they wanted to read, they reread it several times and when they felt they were fluent with it, they would read it to the teacher and then they'd go get another book. It's important I think when you're talking about any kind of repetition to remember that the maximum growth happens between three and five readings. So if you're working with any material and the student's reading it 7, 8, 9 times and they still aren't getting it, then you really need to either choose text that is simpler or figure out maybe they don't have the decoding piece down well enough to move to that step of fluency.
Another approach again is approach I did for my dissertation and the reason we did two versions was we noticed Steve Stahl noticed that when students were reading repeatedly they were making gains, but when students were reading the same amount material without repetition, they also made similar gains. So it was not necessarily the repetition that was the key, but the fact that kids were accessing connected text. And so we have two versions of small class three days a week, anywhere between 20 minutes and 30 minutes we would spend with the students.
And most recently I used social studies text informational narratives, informational picture book, historical fiction, we used traditional non-fiction and we used it with third graders who were struggling and we either read three books on a topic like the Statue of Liberty or George Washington Carver, I guess that's an individual rather than a topic. Or we would read the same book three times and we saw for different students, they made different growth. The students who had the lowest initial score on the Tower, which I love, it's an assessment by Joe Torgeson and the kids with the lowest scores on the Tower did better with the text that was challenging but not too challenging and was repeated. And the kids who were closer to grade level, which was their grade, were reading texts that were multiple texts and one time only more challenging texts, they make greater growth. So it was really interesting. But I think the most interesting thing was the kids who were closer to average and the kids who were at the lowest point in the standardized tests or the QRIs. That gap closed after 10 weeks, I think eight weeks of instruction. There was no difference, no significant difference between the kids who were struggling and the kids who weren't struggling.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think it just shows the importance of tying assessment information to instruction how what's right for certain kids maybe be different than other children. So I know in a recent piece you wrote fo Literacy Today you advocate for this flexible reading instruction that addresses students' needs. You argue for the importance of differentiation across all stages, all ages, reading development. And I think it's a really important read and I'll link to it in the show notes. Aside from what you just talked about with regards to fluency, are there any other key points from that article that you want to share with listeners?
Melanie Kuhn:
I want to start I guess with, I understand why we are going to whole class instruction. Absolutely. Whatever works for teachers in a difficult environment, I absolutely understand why you use that. If you can figure out any way to differentiate that work with your students, then please do so. We had, even in our first working with the FORI in the mid nineties, we had had one student who was a skilled reader. He did not need to spend time working with the FORI process. We let him read independently.
So you can go with paired reading, you can go with partner reading, you can go with what is it, the books, the recorded books that Chomsky used not just for listening but for actually reading and being accountable for reading the text. There are lots of ways that allow you to work with smaller groups and if you can, I'm not saying that everyone can, we're all at different stages as teachers as well as kids. But if you can, that's a really wonderful thing to do
Jennifer Serravallo:
One thing I wanted to ask more about too is in the FORI process or in some of the small groups you discussed, I'm wondering about the role of teacher feedback or strategy instruction. So you're not simply just reading with them,
Melanie Kuhn:
We were!
Jennifer Serravallo:
That's it! You weren't prompting them,? "Let's go back and smooth that out" or "Let's see if we can get our voices to sound like the character?" You're just reading.
Melanie Kuhn:
We had time for discussion afterwards. It was always student-led. They brought up the questions, they brought up the words they were confused about and we talked about it or we just talked about the text. So there was always a focus on comprehension. But we spent that time because there was the echo reading or the choral reading, they didn't really, by the time they got to the partner reading, they were okay. They weren't great but they were okay. And so spending time fixing words, I would do that at a different, I would do that but in at a different time.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Thank you so much for your time today, Melanie. I've learned so much from this conversation.
Melanie Kuhn:
Very excited to be here. So I appreciate your asking me very much so.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So I now welcome my colleagues, Macy, Leah, Lanie, and Gina, thank you so much for being here today. What ideas do you have about how we can bring these ideas to the classroom?
Lea Mercantini Leibowitz:
One of the first things that came to mind was the need perhaps for teachers to engage in these different kinds of activities such as echo reading choral reading, and have them become the student first. See what it's like for them to engage in these kind of activities before we ask them to do it with their kids.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Maybe we should take a second and just define these echo, choral, round robin. Does anyone want to go ahead and define those for the listeners?
Lea Mercantini Leibowitz:
So echo reading I think is the idea that we first need to make sure that we are a small step ahead of the students and they are just right behind us. So essentially they're echoing what it is that we say.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And then choral rating based, you want to take that one? What's choral reading. Yeah,
Macie Kerbs:
So choral reading, you're all together in an orchestrated fashion and the class reading the text at the same time. And I think it works best when students have been exposed to the text well in advance.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, cause I think we've all been in situations where we try to do choral reading, we put the text up there, everyone in one voice, let's go. And you have some kids mumbling through and then you have some children just looking at the words and it's going too fast because they haven't been given the scaffolding of having a model given to them first before and then they might not be accurate with those words or whatever standing in the way. And then Gina, do you want to take on round robin reading? The practice she advises not to do...
Gina Dignon:
Reminds me of more traditional, I read this, then the next person goes and the next person goes. And it's more kind of what I engaged in my K-8 Catholic school experience and I just remember counting how many paragraphs to me and I would just sit there and reread it and reread it until it was my turn. And so I didn't really listen to anybody else was
Lainie Powell:
And it was particularly painful when you had a teacher who did popcorn readings, you
Jennifer Serravallo:
Remember even worse than Robin. Oh my gosh, yes. So stressful
Lainie Powell:
Always on guard. You're like meeting is this really anxiety thing.
Gina Dignon:
The thing that struck me most about not most, there was a few things, but how simple--you read it, you model expressive reading, they do it, you model expressive reading, then they do it in different ways. And how sometimes in schools that I'm in the read aloud get pushed out because of timing and just how important it is for kids to have a expressive, more an adult reader model for them each and every day I think is just so important.
Macie Kerbs:
And in relationship to genres. So she was saying there's some texts you read out loud when she was saying poetry or even speeches. Some of these texts are written to be read out loud and performed in a way.
Gina Dignon:
I was surprised Jen when you asked about the feedback,
Jennifer Serravallo:
And she was like, "none"
Gina Dignon:
But then she did add on that they talked about the reading. So she did add that on after and it was more student centered and it just, I'm going to go back to the idea of read aloud and whole class conversations or partner conversations and how important that is to include especially for older kids.
Lainie Powell:
I was glad, I think Jen, you mentioned this when she was talking about the different small groups she did were one group read a text set around a topic and others did repeated readings and you said it highlighted the importance of tying assessment to instruction. And I was thinking about that in the context of primary teachers that I support. And I was just thinking as teachers, we need to be intentional about really watching our kids.
Teachers think about strategy groups and they think about guided reading, but thinking about a small group of listening while you read and then maybe talking about it or a small group of teaching kids to do echo reading together or partner reading together. Just expanding the instructional options when we get better at assessing.
Macie Kerbs:
I loved that thought too. When I was thinking about just how dynamic fluency is, and we can do this in kindergarten, even though words correct per minute isn't the goal, prosody and expression might be, and that's where the Elephant and Piggy can come in handy. But then in the older grades, fluency can look a lot different. So it's almost like painting a picture of that continuum of fluency over time or the progression of skills like Jen has done so beautifully and especially the 2.0 revision of just helping us paint a picture of that fluency and be a goal in K and 1st.
Lainie Powell:
And typing it to comprehension, right? You're not just doing it so you can sound like a Broadway actor, but really so that it aids in comprehension.
Maybe why to match this particular method with this observation about showing something like the Active Reading Model and how fluency becomes this bridging process so that the dots for me, that was really enlightening to study that and think about that in the context of your reading block or your shared reading practices.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And that bridging I think, and that it doesn't just happen by magic that you've got to practice it and have support from the teacher. Absolutely.
Gina Dignon:
I am just thinking about what you mentioned Lainie about Active Reader Model. And I've had luck just when I'm just recently highlighting the revisions to the 2.0 and listening to Jen's workshop recently about just how it builds on the other two models. And then now I'm thinking adding in the idea of the developmental stages and how that's, it's not static, but that it really is just visually in the middle, the fluency. And then looking at the skills page and the goal section of the fluency goal. I had teachers because that's the sample in the Getting Started section of the book. Then we just flipped there and teachers were like, I never thought of inferring as part of fluency. And I was like, you know what? I don't know if I did either. But it makes total sense as the bridge, and even if it's the sentence level, the paragraph level or ... it's like how do you actually really know to inform your voice, right?
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I appreciated all the different ways she called out what differentiation can look like. What are some other ways she talked about differentiation, pulling groups together based on different particular needs.
Gina Dignon:
I don't know what I think about this, but how she said, we just let some kids read independently and other kids need more scaffolding. So philosophically I feel like every kid needs to be met with at some point. It's just more of how often that kind of thing. And I'm sure she does too. It's just more of when you're focusing on the strugglers, they need something different than a student who is reading fluently and is comprehending it grades level and beyond text. So I think that's what she was saying.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think she was saying is when you're working on fluency in particular work with the kids who need fluency and excuse the children who don't need it and they could be doing something else, but then that there's other opportunities in the day. I hope that you would go back to the students and if they're working on a research project or whatever they're doing, that's how interpret Leah
Lea Mercantini Leibowitz:
I agree and I jotted down this quote that she said "we have to find a practical way to help kids be successful." So that differentiation is what is the practical way that this could be successful. And one of the things that we know we're always struggling with is time and all these things are going to take time.
I think it makes the call to action for, well how do we reuse that time in a way that kids are taking more
Lainie Powell:
That number 5-7 minutes. I was like kind of like that stopped me in my tracks a little bit that that's how many minutes on average kids were reading in an independent reading chunk.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I think it's maybe in classrooms where there's much more of a core reading program, basal reader type thing. Cause that's not what I see in the classrooms we work in. We absolutely have kids reading much more not just like a free for all DEAR time or SSR time or whatever it was called when we were kids, but a really intentional structured goal-directed, goal-driven, and scaffolded independent reading time.
Lea Mercantini Leibowitz:
I think it's when the kids know what it is that they're working on and they know that there's that accountability piece where my teachers going to come in to see how that's been going. They are more productive because there's clarity around why I'm doing this. So as long as that's in place, I think independent reading is certainly more successful than the three to five to seven minutes.
Macie Kerbs:
What I was kind taking away, was permission as a teacher to design my classroom in a way that meets the needs of the learners that are sitting in the seats. And she really empowered teachers to, I know sometimes we have this demand of full class instruction or core programs and we can't necessarily change some of these things that's outside of the teacher's control for those students.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Thank you all so much for joining today.
Lainie Powell:
Bye!
Lea Mercantini Leibowitz:
Bye, take care everybody
About this episode’s guest:
Melanie R. Kuhn, PhD, isProfessor and Jean Adamson Stanley Faculty Chair in Literacy at the Purdue University College of Education. In addition to reading fluency, her research interests include literacy instruction for struggling readers, and comprehension and vocabulary development. Formerly on the faculties of the Boston University School of Education and the Rutgers Graduate School of Education, Dr. Kuhn began her teaching career in the Boston public schools and worked as an instructor at an international school in England. She served as a member of the Literacy Research Panel for the International Literacy Association. Dr. Kuhn has published several books and numerous journal articles and book chapters.