Tim Rasinski
Episode 20 To the Classroom Podcast
October 2, 2023
Today’s guest is Dr. Tim Rasinski. We’ll talk about his newest book, Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading, along with several of his recently published studies that offer ways to support students’ fluency development through the use of poems and Reader’s Theater. This conversation is packed with ideas you’ll be able to use right away. After my conversation with Dr. Rasinski, I’m joined by four of my colleagues – Darren, Lainie, Macie, and Gina – where we’ll share our responses, ideas, and further questions.
Jen Serravallo:
Welcome, Dr. Rasinski. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Tim Rasinski:
Hi, Jen. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Jen Serravallo:
So I was wondering if we could start off by talking a little bit about why fluency is such a passion of yours. Maybe what got you interested in the first place and what keeps you going after all these years?
Tim Rasinski:
Okay, you'll have to put you in the Wayback machine for that one. Goes back to the mid 1970s or so. I had gotten out of the service and Vietnam was ending, and I used the GI Bill to become a teacher in Omaha, Nebraska. And I started first as an elementary classroom teacher and developed an interest in working with students who are struggling. And so I went on and got my master's degree. Anyways, long story short, I became an interventionist, a Title one teacher working with kids who were having problems K through six. And for the most part I was doing, I thought I was doing a pretty good job. These children were progressing, but there were some kids, I like to say I just could not move off the dime. I tried everything. I worked on phonics, I worked on vocabulary, comprehension, reading to kids, all these things, and it didn't seem to matter for them. Fortunately for me, I was working on my master's degree at the time, and the profs had me reading some of these articles that were beginning to appear on reading fluency. One of 'em was Jay Samuels, the method of repeated readings, and then there was Carol Chomsky. After decoding, then what? What do you do after you teach kids phonics? But they still are not making any progress. And of course her answer was fluency. So I started my own classroom research. I started applying these methods with kids, and lo and behold, they began to take off. In some cases it was really quite breathtaking. In other cases it was more muted. But they began to make progress. These kids who previously were, in a sense, flatlining began to take off. And so when I went to Ohio State to get my doctorate, I was fortunate to have a colleague who was interested in that, Jerry Zutel, and he became my advisor and one of my longtime friends and colleagues. And we have been working on fluency ever since. So that's my backstory, if you will.
Jen Serravallo:
Yeah, it's so interesting because when you look at some of the models of reading comprehension, like the Simple View or Scarborough's Rope, you don't really see a lot of mention of fluency, and yet you're saying that you were reading papers in the 1970s about it.
Tim Rasinski:
It was just beginning to appear. I remember Dick Allington's piece in 1984, 1985, he said, Fluency the Neglected Goal. He says, it's not hard to find to discover if kids having problems in fluency listen to 'em read for 5, 15, 20 seconds. But the thing is, he said, what do we do about it? And at the time his answer was not much. And I think that is to some extent still the case, even though we're trying to place more emphasis on it. I like Duke and Cartwright's model. It's come out more recently. I like both The Simple View and Scarborough's rope, but every one of these models becomes a bit more complex, and I think Duke and Cartwright reveal the deep complexity of reading. Of course, they got phonics and fluency in the model, but they also have cultural and content knowledge, morphology, executive function, motivation, and these things are important. We can't neglect them. Interestingly enough, Matt Burns, a solid scholar, did a meta-analysis on the contribution of each of those factors on reading proficiency. I'm talking about the Duke and Cartwright model.
Jen Serravallo:
Yes.
Tim Rasinski:
And what he found was that it was the bridge, the bridging processes, that component that includes reading fluency had a substantially greater impact, or in fact, on reading development than on word, the word recognition component. Again, not to say that phonics and word recognition aren't important, but they are, they're critical, but they're not the whole story.
Jen Serravallo:
I couldn't agree more. And I think that this kind of nuance and complexity that the Active View shows us of all these different parts that make up proficient reading and that support a reader require attention. And I think for anyone who's been in the classroom like me and we've seen the diversity in our classroom, the diversity of needs and had to respond to the variety of different needs in the classroom, it just made immediate sense to me when I saw it.
Tim Rasinski:
It sure does.
Jen Serravallo:
And I know you're somebody, you're unique as a researcher because you don't just do controlled experimental studies. You also collaborate with practitioners in the field, design studies with them, publish with them. And in the world of reading research, it seems like it's kind of uncommon. Would that be fair to say?
Tim Rasinski:
It's not as common as I would like it to be. We need more folks who are, I guess I would call myself a bridge person, kind of trying to straddle both the research and the practice. I think, but in some ways, this kind of research is harder to do. First of all, you have to have the trust of schools and teachers and parents to actually do the work. You should have some experience in schools yourself so that you have those creds that teachers know you're just not coming in from the outside. But it's difficult to publish these studies. They're not as clean cut as the more basic research studies. There's less control over the variables. The assessments you use are often limited to what the schools, schools use, children miss school, there's snow days. All those things that anybody's been in a classroom…
Jen Serravallo:
It's real life. Yeah.
Tim Rasinski:
Now, I don't want to dismiss the work of those researchers, do the more basic research. It's critical, but unless we have folks who can make that research translated into practice, then that wonderful research and those understandings gained through that research are not going to have the impact that we deserve. We may end up with programs that really don't work because they don't really tap into what I would call the art of teaching, not just the science, not the science of reading.
Jen Serravallo:
I, I'm thinking about your 2017 Reading Teacher piece where you argue for an authentic, intentional, intensive, consistent synergistic approach. You recommend this approach for reading fluency for all K-2 students. And I'm wondering what you're seeing in classrooms that leads you to believe maybe there are some areas to grow there that it's not yet either authentic, intentional, intensive, synergistic or consistent, or if you're thinking that we're going in a direction that those kinds of qualities are threatened, what are you seeing? What do you think about that?
Tim Rasinski:
Well, yeah, again, this is my personal view, getting out into the classrooms and seeing teachers and talking with teachers. We're getting these overly scripted programs in which essentially the teacher is left out of the equation. We take the research and we say, okay, how can we apply it in the classroom? But we don't take in regard the teacher, the creativity of the teacher, the authenticity of the activity. And people are thinking, what do you mean by authenticity? Well, something that should reflect real life. One of my favorite quotes is John Dewey, and I'm not exactly sure if I'm quoting him, but he said, what we do in school, should we reflect what happens in real life so kids can make that connection. If you can't make that connection, then school is completely divorced from real life. And when we see kids reading lists of words, maybe words that are made up, words, not real words, when they're reading decodable texts. Now, don't get me wrong, decodable texts have improved over the years, but "Dan, the man sat in his van," that kind of stuff. It's just, you can see it on the kids' faces. If they don't like it, they'll do it because they're good students. But we can do better than that, I think. And when we need to claim that role of, as artists, teachers do, the researchers have claimed the role of scientists, and that's very appropriate. But we need to also help teachers understand that they are the artists. They're the ones that, the research that that's their palette, and they can need to choose from that palette to create instruction that works for their kids.
Jen Serravallo:
Oh, so agree with you. Just this past week, you and I haven't spoken about this yet, but just this past week, I saw a tweet from Bill Gates who said that pretty soon they're going to have AI robots, I guess, or computer driven AI that can teach children to read in 18 months. And there's already a program I was looking at that has this avatar where kids read into the computer with headphones on, and the "teacher" on the computer gives them feedback on their reading. It's al that's already here. Right. And I just love the humanizing view that you have of the importance of the teacher. And I worry if I'm getting, especially dystopian, I worry about removing the teacher either through scripted programs where the teacher doesn't really have as much of a voice or through technology, which is replacing a lot of teacher-student interactions, at least. If it's not replacing the teacher yet, it's replacing some of those critical interactions where teachers provide feedback. What are your thoughts about that?
Tim Rasinski:
Yeah. Well, if you think about it, I think this, but pretty much anybody, their best memories of school are their interactions with other people, with their teacher. I can tell you right now, my best teacher I ever had and my best year in school, but my friends that that's what matters. And why don't we take advantage of those things, allow kids to work with their classmates rather than put 'em off into individualized instruction. You said it right? We need to humanize schools. We need to again, be that notion of artists that I like to use a lot.
Jen Serravallo:
So let's talk about the teacher as artist in the context of fluency instruction specifically, what are some examples of instructional approaches or routines or activities where the teacher is really supporting the student and engaging with the student in a way that helps their fluency?
Tim Rasinski:
Sure, sure. Probably the most common one, especially if you're talking k-2, is the use of poetry. I would call it "poetry cafe." The idea is that early in the week, you might introduce the children to a poem or a song for that matter, put it on display, large display, and over the course of a week, simply practice it.
Some people will look at that and say, oh, that's just fluff. You're just having some fun. And my response to that is, what's wrong with the fun? Especially you have the research that shows it works. And that's where this thing called the Fluency Development Lesson that I've been speaking about for over 30 years comes in. It's a daily lesson. It was actually recognized by the National Reading Panel back in 2000 as evidence that fluency instruction actually works. Here's how it goes. Same thing as that weekly poetry cafe, except we do it in one day. So every day a new poem is given to kids. So for example, "Chicken Soup with Rice," and kids get two copies of it, and we start by the teacher reading it to the children. They follow along, they talk about the meaning, they talk about the teacher's reading it, how she read it, might even read it a couple times. Then the teacher invites the children to read it with her. And then of course, the children practice on their own. In our reading clinic, we divide kids up into twos and threes and they'll practice for five or 10 minutes. It's a short poem, so it's not all that difficult to learn. The teacher goes around encouraging kids, giving 'em positive feedback, and then the kids perform. In our reading clinic, they'll go out to a parent or two or sitting out in the hallway and they'll perform for the parent who gives them a hug and sends them back into the room. We do some word study then. So we look at some of the words that they have just read and we'll actually allow the children to choose some they think are interesting. We'll do some word study, maybe we'll do a word ladder, perhaps some word sorts or perhaps looking at word patterns that can expand into other words. And that's about a 20 minute lesson, 25 minute lesson. We encourage kids to take. If you recall, I mentioned you get two copies of that poem and we encourage kids to take one copy home where they can continue reading to their parents. In many cases, we have parents who themselves may have difficulty in reading, may not want to read to their children, but anybody can listen. And so we have kids reading to their moms, dads, grandma, grandpa, calling 'em up on the phone, reading to the dog. Dogs are great listeners. And then of course, we do it the very next day, except this time with a new poem. So it's taking that idea that's been around for years, but just kind of putting it together to get that synergy and acceleration that our younger students are, I'm sorry, our struggling readers need so much of that. Another approach, if I still might, would be moving on to Readers Theater. Readers Theater is a performance of a script that is short script, three to five pages in length, doesn't require any acting, props, costumes. It's simply minimalist theater. Kids stand up and they perform. But again, doing it over the course of a week can be really quite powerful. Early in the week, the teacher takes the greater role of modeling the script and then goes on to coaching the kids. Over the course of the week, the kids practice on their own. They do dress rehearsal, and on Friday they invite the school principal and the neighboring class to come in and they have a grand performance. And again, doing this on a regular basis, this isn't something that's done during Right to Read week, but done every week. And when you have that, you get that synergy. It all comes together to build not only fluency, but actually several other of these competencies that we recognize as critical for kids' development. I've been working with my colleague Chase Young for a number of years on this, and we've gotten some remarkable results in the research that we have done.
Jen Serravallo:
Yeah, I read a 2018 paper that you wrote with him about Reader's Theater, which was really striking. And I know that both you and he have a lot of resources available for free on your website -- different scripts and things like that to encourage these kinds of practices. So thank you for making those available. Let me ask you about grade levels. What grade levels do you think should be doing this poem, this daily poem, FDL kind of lesson, or the Reader's Theater? Where do you see them fitting in?
Tim Rasinski:
Yeah, every grade level. Certainly K-3, k-2, K-3, where you're trying to develop that strong foundation. As kids get older, I think fluency is still something we should be working at. We find, like we did a study with eighth and ninth graders, we found a significant number well below what we would expect in terms of their fluency development. So certainly there's a group, large group of kids beyond the primary grades who need that and the, it's the same basic tools. We model reading for kids, read to them, we do the read with them where they read and hear somebody read with them, whether it's a partner or choral reading. They practice, especially the repeated practice. All these things are basic tools, and they can be used at every grade level. The only difference is we choose the text differently. With younger children, it's the simple poetry, the nursery rhymes, the songs that most children learned, what "Wheels on the Bus" and so on. As kids get older though, we move on to more sophisticated poetry. How about the work of Amanda Gorman or Robert Frost, or Emily Dickinson or Emma Lazarus, the word, the poets just go on and on. Langston Hughes, poet of the Harlem Renaissance. And same thing with the scripts. We actually can have kids writing scripts based upon books that they have read, whether they're picture books or perhaps a chapter out of a storybook they've read or some content that they've learned. Speeches from American history. I was working with some upper elementary great kids a few years ago, and we got into them. We were studying the Civil War, and somehow we stumbled on the Gettysburg Address. So we wrote that up as a script.
Jen Serravallo:
Yeah, it's just such incredible integration. You think about reading and writing and speaking and listening and performance and rehearsal and fluency and all the skills, and they're not siloed or drilled. It's joyful and it's meaningful.
Tim Rasinski:
And here's the best part. Well, not the best part, but there's science that supports this. Chase and I and others have done research on this, and we've got 'em published and peer reviewed articles. That one study that you mentioned with the 2018 study was second graders where students did Readers Theater over the course of a school year versus another class that did the same thing, except for that 20 minutes to devoted to reader's theater. They were doing what we would normally call "business as usual" other activities. What we found was that over the course of a year, the students in the Reader's Theater Group made more than twice to gain in terms of words, correct per minute or reading fluencies. They never were told to read fast, though. They just did this kind of practice. If you looked at the norms, at the norms, Hasbrook and Tindal have these great norms that we can look at. The class on average was reading at the 75th percentile in terms of automaticity. And we know that automaticity is highly, highly related to, of course, comprehension and reading achievement here. Well, one last thing, if I might mention our work with Readers Theater not only shows it improves automaticity, but prosody or expressiveness, comprehension improves, word recognition/accuracy approves. So as you were mentioning earlier, it's across the board's synergistic.
Jen Serravallo:
So let me ask you about the role of strategies. I read a lot about strategies and my definition of a strategy is a how-to giving kids clear steps to follow, explicit step by step, how-tos, and I'm wondering about the role of strategies when we're trying to support students' fluency.
Tim Rasinski:
What the teacher can do is engage in what we might call a think aloud, where they actually explore the strategy that they used after reading to kids. I often talk about, did you notice how I changed my voice when I became a different character? What were you thinking when I had this long, dramatic pause? And I want them to develop that understanding. That I was using my voice, not just the words, but the way I perform those words to convey meaning to them. And of course, the notion to them is that they should be doing the same sort of thing. Developing those strategies. Look over a text before you read it out loud, and make sure that you have those inflection points where you want to change your voice and essentially change the meaning that you're conveying to an audience. Sometimes, by the way, when I read to students, I do it in a non-fluent way. I read in a word by word, excessively slow manner. "Sylvester Duncan lived with his mother and father on Acorn Road," and well, you know, can't go very far. And before they're looking at you kind of funny, and I'll stop and I say, what's wrong? I got all the words, isn't that good enough? And they said, of course. They quickly understand that reading in that excessively slow staccato like manner is not real reading. It's not really very satisfying as all. So those kinds of things, talking about what you're doing and helping kids apply... to me, that form of strategy, what did I do to be able to read something with good expression for my class? I had to rehearse it. I had to look it over.
Jen Serravallo:
Absolutely. One of the things that's on every teacher's mind I think, is how do I fit all these great ideas into my classroom? I was yesterday studying one of these core programs that's showing up on a lot of approved lists. And man, there's just a lot there. I just can't even imagine doing all this stuff in that program in a day, fitting that all in. And so you hear this great idea, teachers are going to be listening inspired to try this poetry or Reader's Theater practice, and something's going to have to give, right? Yeah. So what do you keep cut? How do you fit it in? What does an ideal literacy block look like according to Dr. Tim Rasinski? Let's talk first grade first and then we can talk about upper elementary.
Tim Rasinski:
Okay, that's a tough question because again, that's a hard question.
Jen Serravallo:
It's a hard question
Tim Rasinski:
Again, that's the artist. You have to do it, do it yourself. But okay, you asked me, I'll give you my ideal. I like Tim Shanahan's model that 30 minutes per day devoted to phonics and word instruction, 30 minutes to fluency, 30 minutes to comprehension, 30 minutes to writing. Some people call it balanced reading or balanced literacy. And I know that's not a very positive word nowadays, but isn't it?
Jen Serravallo:
It's Balanced! Yeah. And so maybe if you happen to have a resource, if teachers that are looking, that have a resource that has a lot of stuff right now to say, I'm going to pull from it as a resource being the artist that I am, and choose the things that align to those different major objectives. Does that make sense? Is that that advice? Yeah.
Tim Rasinski:
I see. I happen to know somebody who has a book like that Jennifer Serravallo!
Jen Serravallo:
Oh, well, sure. I hope my strategies make their way in too, but I'm talking about one of these core programs that's got all these different lessons and all these different components, and like I said, you literally can't fit it all in one day. How about for upper elementary? Would you still do 30, 30, 30, 30? Is that balance the same?
Tim Rasinski:
To some extent, yeah. You know, could vary a little bit on each side. Again, word study, 30 minutes of that, but more the focus would be on vocabulary rather than phonics. In terms of vocabulary we call morphemes or morphology and work on that. I think that's one of the most underdeveloped areas of our curriculum. I like to call word roots. Just to give you a quick example, the word route tract, it means to pool or drag. It's from Latin. But if you know that, and if I had students, I might ask 'em, okay, can you tell me what a tractor is? What does it mean to distract? How does the notion of pool or drag or drawn from that? Well, when you're pulled away from somebody's attention, I had a tooth ex extraction yesterday, what do you think was that? Well, it was pulled then. Or when pol politicians have to make retractions and you get the idea. I love that idea. And that should be a big part of that vocabulary in say, grades four and above there think we're moving in that direction, but I think we can move a lot more fluency. Again, same thing, but again, more sophisticated text.
Jen Serravallo:
Absolutely. I'm wondering if you have any last words to share before we say goodbye for today, just about embracing the science, but not losing the art and having the synergy between the two. Any final thoughts?
Tim Rasinski:
Yeah, I don't want to at all give the impression that I'm dismissing the science. We know how important the science is, but we have to embrace the full science. Science as we know it currently understand it identified for us, those critical competencies phonemic awareness, phonics, automaticity and word recognition, prosody, comprehension, the role of knowledge, understanding of this. See, all these things are important, but we just can't focus on that one piece, which seems to be the case sometimes there. So definitely we need to tell the whole story or understand the whole story. But the art of teaching is how these competencies are actually addressed in classrooms. They need to be, as we talked about earlier, authentic: put on plays, play word games. Nell Duke wrote an article in a A S C D blog not long ago about how Wordle reminds us how important it is to be…
Jen Serravallo:
Loved that piece. Yeah, that was great.
Tim Rasinski:
Yeah. Yeah. Needs to be aesthetic. We need to teach not just to educate the head, but to touch the heart. And I love to tell the story of a teacher friend of mine who I think it was fourth grade, she told me a few years ago, she wasn't going to teach "Where the Red Fern Grows" to her kids anymore. She said, Tracy, why? It's a great story. He said, I know it's a great story, but I don't want my kids to see me cry at the end when those two dogs die. Oh, I think kids need to see their teachers cry. Well, you know what I mean? But those kinds of write their own stories in songs and scripts. Ya know...in doing this instruction there's that synergy we want to get when kids create their own scripts from a story they've read or content they have learned, their writing is a mentor text that synergy when they practice and perform, they're doing repeated readings for fluency, porsody, and automaticity. But we also know that it improves word recognition, accuracy, and also comprehension. And of course, all these things tap into what I think is the most important competency: motivation, and love for reading. If kids leave school knowing how to read, but choose not to, what have we actually accomplished?
Jen Serravallo:
That's a beautiful last sentiment to leave on. I just am so grateful for your time today. I will link to your Twitter handle, which everybody should follow because you share free resources every single day. And your wonderful book about the art and science of teaching reading, thank you. And your website where people can get scripts and plays and all kinds of great stuff. I'm just so grateful for your time today. Thank you for joining me.
Tim Rasinski:
Well, thanks to you and your team for all that you're doing to promote that same agenda art and science in reading instruction. Thank you, Jennifer.
Jen Serravallo:
I have four colleagues with me today, Darren, Macie, Gina, and Lainie. And who should start us off, Lainie, what are you thinking? What are you excited to bring to the classroom?
Lainie Powell:
I loved that so much. So it's interesting. He really, for me, highlighted the importance of having synergy. I kept focusing on that, all of the adjectives and that quote you pulled, but synergistic, being intentional about that. And I was thinking about how all of the practices he suggested are embedded in authentic text with high energy and engagement, and they can easily lend themselves to other parts of literacy. And I also appreciated the synergy around what he was saying with your other interviews. I was thinking about Tanya Wright's work and vocabulary and semantic flexibility that he mentioned, and how Maryann Wolf talked about how the purpose of all of this is to build empathy and understand other people's perspectives in the world. And he called it touching the heart. So I just loved how joyful and meaningful all of his literacy work sounds for kids. I can just see them laughing and singing and smiling as they do this work.
Jen Serravallo:
I love that. Yeah. Darren, what are you thinking?
Darren Victory:
Going along with that, I think his origin story is so relatable. It really resonated for me when he is telling this story about how he came to be who Tim Rasinski of today. But I've noticed in working with teachers that when we start talking about fluency, that it's just not a hard sell. And I think that's because in the same way that his origin story resonates for us, they see that playing out every single day in their classrooms.
Jen Serravallo:
Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. Macie, what's on your mind?
Macie Kerbs:
The people that need to be writing the curriculums are people like Tim Rasinski speaking to this idea of you're not just teaching fluency, you're teaching all of these pieces together, and there is this synergy around it, and there's this joy. But when we silo it, which is what a lot of these curriculums do.
Jen Serravallo:
They do.
Macie Kerbs:
You teach fluency at this specific time of day, or you have this specific time and nothing's connected. It's very segmented and it's draining on teachers a lot of the times. So I just kind of appreciated how he took the opportunity to talk about what's possible.
Jen Serravallo:
Powerful. Gina, what are you thinking about?
Gina Dignon:
Wow, so much. So I think Macie, what you just made me think of is when Dr. Rasinski was saying the we need to have authentic reading experiences going on in class. And when you think of some of these core reading programs, or even if you think about some of the classrooms we go in and out of across the country, some of what I get sad about is when kids aren't engaged in authentic reading tasks. It's a lot of skill building for reading. And then sometimes I see, or I don't hear a lot of student talk. And I think it's because teachers are sort of told, you must do this at this time. I mean, of course, I think the appeal of some of these programs are the resources for teachers so that they have all these resources. But Jen, you mentioned it's a lot. It's overwhelming, and I feel like poetry gets cut out, and it's like, what a great way to bring the bridging process to life in your classroom.
Darren Victory:
And I think fluency gets cut out for many reasons. One, it's not a multiple choice question on the state assessment, but I remember as a teacher, if you're thinking about synergy and strategies, I remember as a teacher every morning standing with my fourth graders in the middle of the classroom and doing this ritual where we recite the pledge of allegiance. And on most days it was pretty tight. I'm just going to tell you, we had it down, "I pledge allegiance to the flag..." but every now and then, my principal would be out for the day or whatever, and someone would come in to kind of sub and lead that. And they sometimes, occasionally would not really have what I call pledge rhythm. So the pacing would be off. And it was almost comical to hear us trying to keep up. And of course, in that example, maybe that person was nervous. Maybe they're not used to speaking over the intercom, whatever. But it makes me think though, about our upper grade readers, middle school readers, high school readers, even adult readers. So I may have really strong decoding skills. I may have a ton of background content knowledge, topic specific vocabulary. Does that necessarily mean I'm skilled as a fluent reader?
Jen Serravallo:
And also, how often do fourth and fifth graders Pledge of Allegiance aside get to engage in oral reading or in that kind of recitation of something that's been memorized very infrequently, right? It's a lot of silent reading or listening to the teacher read. And so his suggestion to bring that back into classrooms across the grades, I thought was really striking.
Macie Kerbs:
I was kind of thinking a lot on is how much weight we put in other sciences of reading, the ability to decode, the ability to be able to word recognize all of these pieces. But actually, there's a lot of science behind the idea of performance reading through poetry and Readers Theater in his fluency lessons.
Gina Dignon:
I was wondering too, I wanted to hear more about his study with the fluency lesson development and how he said that teachers were giving feedback to kids. And I was just so curious around what was the feedback that they were giving to kids? Because I don't know, because I feel like your question around the strategies, Jen, I bet you that's when they gave them, I'm just inferring that, I'm wondering if they're like, oh, wow, you really sounded just like the character, or, oh, your voice went up at the end because there was a question mark. I, I'm just thinking, because these are all strategies that we know and love in your books, but I was just curious what that feedback is, or was it just great job?
Jen Serravallo:
I'm pretty confident it wasn't just great job because we know, and he knows that the precision of feedback is so critical. And I think that that's where a lot of this art comes into play. It's in these brief, on the spot improvised responses to students. What are we saying to them? How are we coaching them? And I agree with you, Gina, that's something worth exploring a little bit more because even if we have a scripted lesson plan, that part's not scripted because nobody knows who's in front of us. Nobody knows who our children are or what kinds of feedback, support, redirection, questioning that they're going to need when they're in the act of trying some of these things. So I'll look at the study and I'll send it to you and we'll see if there's anything in more detail, but that's definitely something worth thinking about for sure.
Lainie Powell:
I've actually, I'm thinking through my own kids. Both of my bigger kids have had these magical two first grade teachers, Rebecca and Natalie, who put so much emphasis on Readers Theater. And I'm thinking of Gina, your comment earlier about how it can be free. They don't have to purchase fluency resources, and they just pulled books from the classroom library, so there's opportunity for differentiation, engagement, and so partnerships, so there's intentional partnerships getting different books, and they're practicing and performing in front of their peers and getting feedback from their peers. And every day it was different. One day they were making their voice match the characters, and the other day they were trying on a new emotion for Elephant and Piggy. One day they had a British accent for Elephant and Piggy one day, they had a Southern accent. And you can just imagine this from a first graders just laughing and giggling and saying, "No, say it like this!" And it can be this really meaningful moment that just requires the artful teacher and not an expensive resource.
Gina Dignon:
Well, I was just struck at how much of an advocate, Dr. Rosinski is for keeping teachers in the equation. And with some of these changes that are happening across the country, I feel as though in some respects, we're trying to take them out of the equation because maybe there's teacher shortages... So I guess one part of me, I see the rational part of that. If you're in a district where you have 200 openings for teachers and you need to put something in somebody's hand who isn't trained as a teacher or is working on it or something like that, I can understand. But that should just also emphasize how important it is to have teachers in the equation, right? It's sort of this oxymoron way of thinking. I don't know. But I just felt like when he said that not many people do the kind of research he does because you can't control the variables, or there's more variability or something. I was just like, well, welcome to teaching.
Jen Serravallo:
Exactly!
Gina Dignon:
You can't control the variables, and there's so many. And I was just like, wow. It just felt validating a little bit to hear that. But then also, where are more people to do that kind of research? They're in the classrooms, they're called teachers, bring them in. Like what Dr. May was saying, get, create partnerships. I mean, he made it sound a little easier than I think it actually is to do that sometimes. But anyway.
Jen Serravallo:
And like Rasinski, he emphasized how critical it is, and I agree with you, Gina, just that the teacher, as a decision maker, as an artist, the teacher, as someone who's responding to science, the human in the room is so critical, which just means that we have to provide professional learning opportunities to support them. Especially when you're in districts where you have new to the field teachers or emergency certified teachers. They need support, and they also need our trust, and we need to make sure that we are not teacher proofing and trying to turn them into robots through scripted materials or through actual robots on the computer replacing the interactions. It's chilling, honestly. But yeah. Well, thank you so much for being with me today. I appreciate your insights in this conversation.
Darren Victory:
Thank you, Jen.
Gina Dignon:
Thank you.
Lainie Powell:
Thanks y'all.