Walker and Wasowicz
to the classroom: Episode 21
September 18, 2023
Today’s episode is a double – I have two guests to teach us about a speech to print approach to spelling and phonics instruction. John Walker is the UK-based creator of Sounds-Write. Jan Wasowicz is the US-based creator of Spell Links. We’ll talk about the differences–and benefits–of using a speech to print approach. Later, I’m joined by colleagues Macie Kerbs and Rosie Maurantonio, as well as the author of We Do Writing, Leah Mermelstein, for a conversation about practical takeaways for the classroom.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I am so excited today to welcome John Walker to talk with us about a speech to print approach to phonics and spelling. Welcome, John.
John Walker:
Thank you very much. Thank you, Jennifer, for inviting me. I'm, I'm very excited as everybody says that, everybody's always very excited, but I listened to Daniel Willingham on your podcast recently and I really love that. Yeah, very, very interesting. Thank you.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Thank you. And I know you're joining me all the way from England, so thanks so much for the dealing with the time zone differences too. So let's just start off, for people who haven't heard about this approach to phonics and spelling. What's the difference between a speech to print approach and other approaches to phonics and spelling?
John Walker:
Right. Well, first of all, of course you are absolutely right. It, it's not a speech to print approach is not at all well known anywhere, really. I believe that we are the only ones in the uk --Sounds Right--as far as I know, that we are the only ones in Australia. There are few in the United States of America, which include Photographics, Speech to Print, and EBLI as well. They're, they're all speech to print programs. And I think that the advantage in such a program is really quite simple. It's all about prior knowledge. They all know how to speak and listen. And there've been many studies on this. I mean, Pinker, Stephen Pinker is one of the leading proponents of this idea. It's as natural to us to learn to speak and listen as it is for spider to spin a web. I think he mentions in one of his books there. But if you can teach children, if you can show children, how, in their everyday speech, every word that comes out of their mouths maps to the spelling correspondences. Some people say letters, I like spellings better because spellings is more accurate. Are we talking about a one letter spelling, a two letter spelling, A three letter spelling? Four letter. So if we talk about sounds and spellings, I think that that's more accurate. And of course we start from the simple one-to-one correspondences, simple words like mat and sit and sat and van and vet and all of that sort of thing before move on to the complexities.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So you still have a scope and sequence. You still start with, you said basically CVC words, short vowels, right, and consonants. And then you move into more complex spelling. Yeah. So there's still a framework and a scope and sequence that you think about, but the difference is that you're starting with the language. Do I have that right? Yeah,
John Walker:
Absolutely. That's right, absolutely. Because there are very, very, very few children who can't speak and listen when they enter school. I of course, I can see that there are some, and for those children, they need special kinds of help as well. But I think unless a child is almost totally deaf without hearing, and of course there are many things, there are many aids that technological aids we can give them these days. I think that every single child can learn to read. It might take a lot longer in the case of some children, but I think that all children can learn to read. But yes, in answer to your question, you do need a curriculum. You need a curriculum that moves from simple to more complex, and that will include what you call short vowels and short and consonants. We don't use that language
Jennifer Serravallo:
Oh, you don't call them that? Oh interesting.
John Walker
No, we don't. We just simply say that these are sounds, representations of sounds. This is a sound, this is a sound /A,/ we don't talk about short /A/ and long A, because long A is, this is the way we spell A, there's no need to talk about long and short because children don't see it like that. Young kids think if you say long and short, you're talking about the size of the letters they think you might be talking about capital letters or lowercase letters.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So as I'm understanding it, teachers will have a sense of a scope and sequence. Teachers might use some of that language to talk about the kinds of spelling. Would they actually, I, I'm assuming consonants, vowels, short vowels, that kind of stuff, like that's teachers speak in your mind, but for children you don't, you don't burden them with those terms. It doesn't matter.
John Walker:
No, we don't and we don't find them useful, really. We find that it's extra baggage. Personally, I think it's extra baggage for teachers as well. Because if you said to me, okay, what about the sound /A/ I'd say, well, there are eight common ways of spelling the sound. /A/, and there's a possible ninth in a very common word, but you only get it in that one common word, and that's A I G H in the word straight. But yeah, so there are different ways of spelling the vowel sounds. So we are very specific about it. How many ways are there a spelling the sound, /E/, how many ways are there? Are there a spelling, the sound, /O/ and so on? And what we teach is when we say we teach from simple to complex, we'll teach four common spellings of a sound in year one, and in year two we'll teach the rest of them. Or we might be talking for your purposes about grade one and grade two. The difference for your American audience is that grade one children are, we teach them in the same way that we teach year one children in the uk, except that they're about 10 months older in the United States. Our kids are a bit younger. They start on their fourth birthday in what we call reception, what you call kindergarten. Okay.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And it sounds as though from just what you've described, you're working on phonemic awareness while you're working with letters. They happen at the same time. So there's not like a period of time where you're doing phonemic awareness and then you start introducing letters later. Is that right?
John Walker:
That is absolutely right, yes. So we start off by teaching. We teach the skills of blending and segmenting right from the off. And we do that in what we call a word building lesson. That's where we introduce sounds and spellings, and that's where we also teach segmenting and blending at the same time. And of course, what we are also imparting to, although it takes I think probably a little bit of a while, there's always a lag between conceptual understanding of factual knowledge. So it takes a while for them to understand that you can spell sounds with one letter, but what really brings that into sharp relief is when after a short period of time you introduce the double L, double S, double F and double Z. So in words like hill and fell and miss, and then we teach that you can spell a sound with two letters, but it's just one sound. And that's exactly the language that we use.
Jennifer Serravallo:
It's so clear. It's just so clear. That makes perfect sense. So just so people can visualize this, can you just help us imagine what one lesson might look like? Take any spelling or any sound that you would want to, just to give an example, how long is the lesson? What are the routines that the teacher's going through? What is the teacher doing? What's the student doing?
John Walker:
Sure. So right at the very basic level, of course lessons look somewhat different as we move through it, but all our lessons are take roughly about 30 minutes when we talk about a Sounds Write lesson, we mean an activity really. So ideally there'd be three activities in a Sounds Write lesson. And the first activity would be a review, and that would be a review of previously presented information and of course skills. So that's what they'll be doing for the first eight or nine minutes, perhaps maybe even 10. But this is entirely up to the teacher. One of the things that we really favor is giving teachers as much knowledge as possible so they're able to make their own decisions for themselves. So that that's why we don't call Sounds Write a program because programs are programmatic and we don't want them to be a millstone 'round teachers' necks. But the second part of the lesson would be teaching new material. So that might be teaching new sounds, spelling correspondence or correspondences depending on what they've already learned. So building up that schema for sounds and spellings or even when it comes to teaching consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant words or consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant words, which we think needs to be taught really, really thoroughly because it's the area in which we find that kids going into secondary schools fall down. If you can't segment and blend a consonant, consonant, vowel consonant word, and you are reading something like crab as cab or spelling crab as cab, then actually you never get out of the spark starting blocks. So it could be that in that period, in that main section of the lesson, when we're teaching new information, we might be concentrating on the skills, but we are teaching the skills and the concepts and the new code knowledge or reinforcing the old code knowledge. And then the final section would be either reading or dictation. And we start dictation within four to five weeks of starting sounds right with children in reception. So they're already, we are dictating sentences like "a man sat on mat" and so the teacher will write up any words or any sound-spelling correspondences on the board that the children haven't yet been introduced to. So for instance, we haven't done /uh/ yet, a man sat on a mat, the teacher will write up, this is the way we write at the beginning of a sentence. This is the way we write. The second time we see it in the sentence. And then children write, man, man sat at, sat on mat. And then the teacher will be going round all the time and the teacher will be giving immediate responses to the children. So if a child writes the spelling S the wrong way round, the teacher can quickly intervene and say, this is the way we write /s/, is yours like mine? No, what do you need to do? And the child fixes it and so on. So all the time, error correction is taking place formatively, or it could be responsive teaching whichever term you prefer. And then after that they read the sentence through. So straight away, not only are they learning and reinforcing sound-spelling correspondences, the skills of listening to words and representing the sounds in them, but they're also learning what a sentence is and practicing those very basics from the start. So everything's kind of wrapped up together, but introduced a little bit at a time.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Thank you. That makes perfect sense. So I have so many questions to follow up. So one of the things I'm wondering is do they need to know their alphabet before they start this? I feel like it's common to start singing the alphabet song and know all the names of the letters from the outset, but you're making me wonder if that's necessary with this approach.
John Walker:
Right. Okay, so the answer to that, it's a great question actually. And the answer to that is absolutely not. We don't teach letter names. Yes, we recognize that lots of parents teach their kids letter names before they get into school. But what we try to create is a level playing field for all kids who are coming into that classroom from the beginning to learn to read and write. Some kids know letter names, some kids have learned sounds, but don't say those sounds very well. So the teacher will start them off by doing word building. And for instance, I saw a child in class not long ago, the child was building the word van when the teacher says, what sound can you hear when my finger's under this line? Because we give them plenty of scaffolded support on the board. So there'd be three lines on the board. What sound can you hear when my finger's under this line, when I say Vvvvvvan? And the teacher said, and the child said, V, I can hear V said that's a letter name. Can you give me the sound? Listen again, van, oh, I can hear /v/. Yes, you can hear which of these is and so on. So we don't need letter names. Letter names actually don't help you to read and spell. If I said to you, spell chlorophyll for me, you'd probably have to go, Clara, Phil. Now how do you spell the CLO bit C H l O? You see, you've got to go through all that stuff. Whereas if you taught this from the start, kids go, yeah, okay, C H L o R O, and they just rattle it off because they've had so much practice. And of course practice is essential for this.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So one of the things that I understand to be a claim within speech to print approaches is that there's less cognitive load. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about cognitive load theory for people who don't know what that is and how speech to print might require less cognitive load than other approaches.
John Walker:
I think all the time what we are thinking of is we are thinking about load reduction and we are thinking about the principles of cognitive load theory. And the principles really are direct teaching, explicit teaching, and we're talking about giving children the opportunities for as much practice as possible with what they're learning. We are thinking about giving immediate feedback or feed forward if necessary. We are thinking about reducing load. And reducing load would amount to, in this case, what cognitive load theory is proposing is that in terms of working memory, which is what we are using to think with right now and talk with right now, if you are introducing new things to people, then working memory is both time and capacity limited. It's time limited in the sense of being limited to something like 20 to 30 seconds and it's capacity limited to about three or four new items. I think that, I'm just trying to think of his name now. In 1956, Miller, that's right. Did some research on this. And he maintained that you could hold seven or eight items in your working memory at any one time. But that's only really if you've come across these things before, what if they're new items? And certainly if you're a young child, you can't hold more than say three, four items at the very most in working memory. Now obviously with practice, what you're trying to do is get what's going into long-term memory. And once you've got it into long-term memory, the theory is that you can bring it back into working memory as if it's a single chunk. So in other words, what we're trying to do is we are trying to build schemas. We are building a schema for sound-spelling correspondences, the alphabet code. We're, we are building a schema for a conceptualization of how it works that you can spell sounds with more than one letter that you can spell sounds in more than one way, and that many spellings can represent more than one sound. So all of these things we build on very slowly so that these networks of schemata, if you like, are all connected together and they're connected together through everyday practice of reading and writing. And by the way, whatever children do in terms of reading, when they build a word, they built the word vet, they write the word vet and they say the sounds as they write it because we found that getting them to say sounds, helps them to get it into long-term memory. It helps them to remember it when they're reading a word, similarly, they'll write it. Which is why we think that dictation is so, so powerful.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I'm thinking about from the research I've read, some students will kind of get, it'll click with one exposure, two exposures. They've got it, they've got the sound spelling correspondence. Other kids could need dozens of exposures to be able for it to click.
John Walker:
Absolutely. I also think that repetition, this is a strange idea as well to most children as they come in that we are teaching them that these squiggles on the page represent the sounds of the language. So the repetition is strengthening the connections between sounds and spellings all the time. And one thing I would like to differentiate is recognition memory and retrieval memory. So when recognition memory, you've got it on the page in front of you, you can see it right in front of you. You don't have to drag anything up from your memory. Whereas with retrieval memory, you've got to remember how we spell the /c/ in crab and the /r/ in crab and so on. So all of these things, actually, what Diane McGinness says in her books is that in fact it's a much deeper kind of memory, and that's what we find, which is why we build in lots of writing and lots of dictation.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Makes sense. Yeah. And I'm wondering about the overall speed. Is it faster to teach kids how to spell and how to read when using a speech to print approach than another approach Overall, do you find you spend less time in these lessons, fewer years, fewer months, 30 minutes a day is pretty typical I think, for the amount of time per lesson, but the total duration necessary? Is there any difference there?
John Walker:
Well, certainly there is. For instance, I have run my own reading clinic for over 20 years. And what I've found is that children who are sent to me are children who of course have usually had an educational psychologist diagnosis of dyslexia. And what I find is that within a very short period of time, I can get them really well into reading so that they're doing incredibly well. And with practice, they're going to build on that. I think spelling takes a lot longer for the reason I've given already, retrieval memory is much more difficult. So I'll give you an example. I was given a 15 year old boy by the educational psychology service locally. This boy was 15 years old. He had a reading age of eight years and three months, and after 11 hours of teaching of instruction, and this was them testing the boy, by the way, on their various psychology tests, eight years and three months, he got 11 years and nine months.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Wow.
John Walker:
So in that very short period of time, 11 hours, three and a half years, he put on, and that was because he was a bright lad. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him. He'd just been badly taught. Very poor instruction. So he was a casualty of that poor instruction. But on the spelling tests, there was hardly a difference. So out of 50 words he was given, I don't think he even got anywhere near that. The spellings that he got rght were hardly anymore than when he'd started. There was one difference though, and that is he was spelling some of the words plausibly with incorrect spellings, but he was listening to what he could hear and representing what he could hear on the page. And that was a huge step forward. Whether he managed to then improve on that later on, personally, I think you need more instruction to become a really good speller. Yeah. So yes, you can make a lot of progress.
Jennifer Serravallo:
There's so many words that are spelled irregularly, and I'm wondering how this approach handles irregularly spelled words, like words that we know, like ballet, for example, that come from the French, the et. We don't say the sounds. Yeah, the E and the T, because it's morphologically, it makes sense, but it, or etymology, from an etymology perspective, it makes sense, but it doesn't make sense from a spelling perspective, from an orthographic perspective.
John Walker:
Right. Yeah. So what we are talking about here is frequency. We are talking about frequently encountered sound, spelling, correspondences, and there are lots of them. And we'll teach a lot of those, as many as the 175 or so common spellings over the first three years of school in bits and pieces, slowly, but of course grouped according to sound. So we'll teach four spellings of O, the O, the ow, the oe and the oa, so that if a child spells word goat as G O T, we'll be pointing to that and saying that is a way of spelling O in some words, but in this word, you need the OA spelling. And by the way, time we get onto year one, we are teaching them letter names because letter names is a good shortcut. So for instance, when my daughter was learning was doing the Egyptians, she asked me one day, dad, how do you spell archeology? And I knew that she knew the ch. And I said, well, what's the difficult bit for you? And of course, she moaned and groaned at me for not giving her this all the spelling of the word. But it turned out
Jennifer Serravallo:
Teacher parents always going to teach, right?
John Walker:
It turned out that, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's having a teacher for a dad. It really is a pain in the backside. But so she said, it's the E Sound dad. I said, oh, that's the AE spelling. It's because it, we get it from Greek. So trying to answer, kill two birds with one stone here. Yes, we teach them the sound spelling correspondences. Many of them are more infrequent than others. So the A in ballet and other words that are derived from French. So chef and I don't know, champagne, love it, one of my favorite words, you spelled the sh sound with a c h. And these are words that we get from French. Of course, there are many other words that are derived from Latin and Greek words, and we love etymology. So we run a years 3-6 course on etymology and more advanced polysyllabic word reading and that sort of thing. And so you can combine the two, certainly you can combine etymology and morphology at a very early stage by building on what children already know.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I love this. And what about, just last question for you. What about very young children who need to learn some high frequency words that are irregularly, spelled like of O F or have H A V E? Do you still just say, break down the sounds and then you match the letters to the sounds and you just say, and then we have this E on the end, or that it doesn't follow the same pattern as this other word that we learned? How did you handle those?
John Walker:
Well, you've given me two beautiful examples actually, because F in of is the only example in which F represents the sound /v/ in the English language.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Are you serious? It's the only one? Oh, I didn't realize that.
John Walker:
Yeah, yeah. It's the only one. So when we come across this word, the teacher will say at first it when they write at the beginning, and this word comes up in a decodable reader, they'll say, this is of say of here. And the child says of, as the understanding becomes more sophisticated, the teacher will point to the F and say, this is /v/, it's the only time when this spelling is /v/, but say /v/ here. And the child just says, are of okay in dictation, of course, the teacher will write the word on the board and they'll say the sounds as they write it. This is the way we write of in our dictation today./uh/ /v/ when you write it, I want everybody say the sounds just like as I've done. But let's take this other example. I love your other example have, because there are three sounds in have now, when you've covered the idea that we can spell sounds with two letters, you point to the ve and you say, this (singular) is two letters, but it's one sound. It's the way we spell at the ends of words. And apart from a couple of words in the English language, I believe shiv is an American word for a knife, a stabbing instrument. I think slav is another one. There are hardly any. So that later on when you come to words like sleeve and grieve and what have you, then you point to this and you say, this is two letters, but it's one sound. Do you remember what this is? And either they say it or you say, this is /v/, it's one of those two letter spellings. So you building up as well, this conceptual understanding, which I think is a golden thread, running all the way through the alphabet code. Yeah. So double S, two letters, one sound. Pteradactyl, two letters, one sound psychology p s, two letters, one sound. This is the way we spell in this word.
Jennifer Serravallo:
John, you have made this exploration of how our language is spelled sound so exciting. Thank you so much for being my guest today. I appreciate you.
John Walker:
All right. Thank you. Thank you.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I welcome. Now, Dr. Wasowicz, thank you so much for joining me today.
Jan Wasowicz:
Hi. Thank you, Jennifer, for this opportunity to be here with you.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I would love to start off by hearing how you would describe which to someone who doesn't know about a speech to print approach, what's the difference between that and what's typically done in phonics instruction in the classroom?
Jan Wasowicz:
Yeah. Well, so when I define what a speech to print approach is, I kind of focus on three points, three main points. There are a lot of nuances, but I think first of all it's, it's important to know that it's an approach that puts focus first on phonological encoding, which is the big fancy term for spelling. So first comes spelling, yes, reading is also part of speech to print instruction, but it's the spelling piece that comes first, and that's primary. Two other points though that are just as important to keep in mind is that speech to print instruction is organized around the units of spoken language, oral language, rather than organized around the letters of printed language. And then finally, it also just really acknowledges that there is a definite advantage that's been documented in the research showing that a speech to print approach does have advantages over a print to speech.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And so what are some of those benefits that you see with a speech to print approach?
Jan Wasowicz:
They've compared students who receive decoding instruction, practice and just instruction decoding words with those who receive encoding (spelling instruction and practice). And then of course, they have their control groups. But what they find pretty much across the board is that those who receive spelling instruction will be able to spell those words correctly and read those words correctly. Whereas if they receive the reading instruction, they can read those words pretty much correctly. But there's limited transfer over to spelling.Not only does it transfer to the same words, so if you got spelling instruction on a set of words, you'd be able to read those words, but it transfers over to novel words that share some of the same patterns, letter patterns or other types of patterns. So there's a really nice generalization and transfer from spelling instruction to reading that you don't see from the reading instruction to spelling. And then finally, one of the other really, to me, exciting findings in the research is that the encoding or the spelling instruction, the speech to print approach is shown to set up stronger, more robust representations of words in long-term lexical memory. So when we're going to read or spell a word, we have to grab that automatic word recognition for reading. And then when we're writing, we have to automatically access, retrieve, that word. What they've shown in the research is that you can set up stronger representations and lexical memory through spelling than you can through reading. So we're all at the end of the day, focused on reading automaticity, fluency, and writing fluency. And of course, the upper level skills too, because from reading fluency, you get good reading comprehension from writing fluency, you can express your thoughts. But at the end of the day, to have that automaticity, you really need to have these robust lexical representations of words, and speech to print instructions seems to provide a benefit there.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I'm also curious to know if there are certain reader profiles like certain sorts of language based learning disabilities or students who have particular difficulties with learning how to read or spell that this approach is particularly helpful for?
Jan Wasowicz:
Yeah, that's a great question. There isn't any research that has addressed that. So I can just talk about my own observations and what I've heard from others. And certainly what I hear a lot is that when you have a student who's a non-responder, right, they're not doing well in the classroom, some supplemental interventions have been tried, maybe even some pretty intensive interventions have been tried. And if you have that non-responder when they've made the switch over, and those programs are almost always print to speech, whether it's the classroom instruction or the intervention, but when they switch over to a speech to print approach, almost invariably see an immediate I improvement. Now that doesn't mean they're done, they have ways to go but it, there's just something different there that clicks for them. And I've had students say, this just makes so much more sense. And I'm sure if we get the research probably will at some point see that there, well, we know there's an advantage for this approach for typical learners. It makes sense there would be an advantage for struggling learners as well. And I'd like to use the sock drawer analogy, and I don't know, Jennifer, if you've heard me do this analogy before I
Jennifer Serravallo:
Read your paper that you sent me where you used the analogy. So yeah, go ahead and share
Jan Wasowicz:
With anybody. So if you think about it, we all come to school with our brains wired for oral language. By the time we're coming in for kindergarten, all students, their oral language systems are pretty much developed. They'll continue to develop of course, but they're mostly developed by the time they walk in those doors for kindergarten, certainly their phonological systems for the sounds of oral language, those systems are pretty well developed or nearly developed. And assuming English is the common language, it gets more complex if you layer in other languages, but still is fits within this model. But anyhow, let's assume English is their language. If you think about how you organize the socks in your sock drawer or the materials that you use for teaching or your files on your computer, you have a very organized system.And then if you think about while you're here today listening to the podcast, what would happen if someone went into your soc drawer or your files on your computer or your teaching materials and they rearranged them and they created a very organized system, definitely organized. It's just different. It's very different from yours. How would you feel? How would you operate? How easy would it be for you to function when you go back to that? And it's really kind of like that for our kiddos who are walking into kindergarten that first day, and they all have the same sock drawer. It's all organized one way. And instead of working with that system of organization, the phonological oral language system, we introduce a whole new system. It's the letter system, it's the orthography system, it's the print to speech system, and it's a pretty well organized system itself, but it doesn't match with the phonological system. Now, some kiddos in the classroom, they're going to do just fine. They adapt, no problem. But the majority of kiddos are going to struggle to some degree. So going back to your original question about which kids does this seem to be of greatest benefit for, I think all kids would benefit, but I hear kids say something like, oh, it just makes more sense, I think because it connects with the way their brains are already organized, and it just fits into the sock drawers.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I actually heard about you and your program from a teacher who is a listener of the podcast and said, she was asking me what I thought about a speech to print approach. And I told her the little bit that I knew, and I said, it sounds really promising. I'd love to learn more. And she said, well, we have seen tremendous growth with kids who were just stuck and weren't getting it with all their approaches. And I think you should interview Dr. Wasowicz on your podcast. So that is where this started, was actually this idea that there were kids where it wasn't clicking, but in using a different approach, it really started to click. So
Jan Wasowicz:
Yeah. Well, thank you. And again, that echoes what I'm hearing and seeing as well.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I'm wondering if you could describe a typical lesson, how long does it take, how's it organized? What's the flow of the lesson? What's the teacher doing? What are the students doing? Just so we can kind of visualize and maybe people that teach in with a different approach could kind of compare how their typical phonics lesson goes compared to this approach
Jan Wasowicz:
It's always the encoding first. I always use an I do, we do, you do model, but I will ask them to segment that word. So let's just take the word bed. They don't see any letters. There are no letters present yet. So bed. We might have little tokens that they move for the three sounds. We might draw dots with a marker on the dry erase board. And now they'll have, let's say they have three dots on their dry erase board now. So then I actually show them the printed word, they see it, and now they're going to sound it out again. And this time, as I'll say, okay, as each sound comes out of your mouth, I want you to look here at the word fed and I want you to copy the letter or letters that go with that sound coming out of your mouth, because I'm really drawing attention to that connection between these sounds have to go with letters and those letters represent these sounds. So then they'll do that book and they look up at the printed word and they copy letter B, eh, and they copy letter E, and they copy letter D. So even if they're not quite sure about how to form the letters or they're still working on it, there's opportunity for that model and that practice. And so then they would spell a set of words. We would then shuffle him up, read the words, and then we would go and do some application to writing a short phrase or a sentence and then reading pattern load materials. So that might be one, that's just one activity for mapping phon, graphing, mapping that are obviously, that's just one piece, but we have 30 minutes, so
Jennifer Serravallo:
So kids are not, at the beginning, they're not having to come up with these letters because they haven't necessarily learned all these letters. They haven't necessarily learned the whole alphabet first. Is that right?
Jan Wasowicz:
Yeah.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So you're giving them what the letters look like, bed's particularly challenging because of how typical it is to confuse B and D. But you're giving them the letters so that they know what they look like and you're helping them match what they already have, their oral language to the visual representation. Is that Correct?
Jan Wasowicz:
Yeah, that is correct. And you're right, that is not the best word to use there for that reason about the letters. But no, they might not know all their letters yet, or they might not have mastered the letter formation yet. And so yeah, we provide that model. I always like to say, because sometimes I'll put that word in front of my student and they try to spell it from memory, and I'll say, this isn't a spelling test. I want you to copy. And as you say, this sounds, because we want errorless learning is what we're going for. And so we always want to scaffold our students and support them that level to have error errorless learning or near errorless learning.
Jennifer Serravallo:
That's interesting, errorless learning. So how do you handle when a student does make an error? How do you correct that or help them to correct themselves?
Jan Wasowicz:
Yeah. Well, and it would depend, are they doing authentic writing? Are they in the lesson itself? If they're in the lesson themselves, it's a very teachable moment. And I would cue them and prompt them as they go through the speech to print program I'm working with, they are learning 14 metal linguistic strategies. So things like making sure there's at least one letter for every sound coming out of your mouth. Things like using an allowable spelling. So I might, depending on where they are in their development or instruction they're learning, I might prompt them with, oh, that was a foul, and that might be all they need. Or catch the beat, meaning you need one letter, one vowel letter for every syllable. Sometimes, for example, I see a lot of students, they spell the word car c r, and all I really need to say is, Oop, catch the B. Which again means you need at least one vow letter for each syllable. And almost invariably, I've seen students then go and put in a letter A, it's like they just need to be more mindful about it. So it becomes an opportunity to turn an error into a teachable moment, which is always very powerful. It's also an opportunity to practice and apply these metalinguistic cognitive strategies we're teaching them. Because at the end of the day, I can't teach, none of us can teach every word. We have to teach our students how to be independent readers and spellers. And we do that by explicitly teaching these 14 metacognitive strategies and giving lots of opportunities for them to practice the application.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I would love to talk more about this practice and application. I'm wondering if in classrooms where there are these speech to print lessons, but also there is maybe interactive writing lessons going on, or there's also a writing or workshop or writing time where kids are writing, composing their own pieces of writing that are not dictated, but that they're able to put words on the page matching what they want to say. Just the ability to practice more writing with teacher support or independently if it helps to accelerate the speed with which they're learning, or it just helps to cement the learning better. What have you found, and I don't know if this is a question from the research or just from your own observations that you're answering.
Jan Wasowicz:
Yeah. Well, so again, we always want, I think with any kind of learning, we always want to find those opportunities to facilitate the application. We can't just teach a skill and expect that all students are going to magically apply it. Some of them do. So in a writing context like that, I would probably, well, first of all, the focus there is on expression of ideas. I always say, well, what's your goal? Well, it's on expression of ideas. I would be encouraging my students to use whatever spelling skills and strategies they have. And again, this is where the strategies come in handy, but again, the focus there is not perfect spelling. The focus there is to do their best with application and to us, for us to gradually facilitate that.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And then how do you handle irregular spellings? Let's start with very beginning, irregular spellings, like some of the high frequency words that kindergartners are going to encounter. You really can't write a sensible text without some of the words that are like the, for example. So how do you handle those?
Jan Wasowicz:
Yeah, that's a great question too. So I'm going to take the word any, because I was talking about the short follow, and this all fits in. So in the speech to print approach, as I said, we would organize instruction around the phonological and oral language units. So we would be teaching the word any in the same lesson and set of activities that we teach head and bad, and all those others, because they're all around the pH name at now. We teach it differently. There are different things they have to be able to do, and they actually need more repeated, meaningful exposures. And with that word, because it has an uncommon spelling, but it's taught within that lesson, and that's how it's organized. They have a sock drawer. We put that word N into the short bowel E word drawer because it has the uncommon spelling for now in a classroom setting, which is what you're asking about. We we're a big believer in phom walls, and these are not the walls that show how the mouths are positioned and postured. These are pictures that represent the different pH sounds. For example, we might use the word the picture, a picture of a pot for the P sound. Okay, just a picture. No letters, because it's about sounds, not letters, speech to print for the word. I'm sorry, for the pH name, eh? We would have a picture. You could have any picture. We use a picture of a bed. You could have a picture of whatever you want. I would stay away from the word ag, though, because it distorts the sound. Okay. But anyhow, so we have a picture of a word bed. And what we do through, as they go through instruction is when they do learn about or encounter an uncommon spelling for one of the sounds that we've been covering, we put that word up on the sound wall. So now when they get to a word, let's say they want to spell any teacher, I don't know how to spell any, right? Instead of saying a n y, we want them to look and then use their look it up strategy, copy the letters as they say the sounds. Well. So I would say if my students said, I don't know how to spell any, I'd say, okay, let's sound it out. What's the first sound you hear in any, eh, eh. Okay, look up at the sound wall. Find the picture for, eh. Do you see any in the list? Cause we would've put it up there, right? It's a high frequency, and then they copy and say their sounds because that reinforces the phonological orthographic mapping.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Fascinating. So I'm trying to picture what your scope and sequence looks like. So it's not like I'm used to seeing scope and sequences from other popular programs that are spellings, right? Or start with the consonants. Then we move into the short vowels, then we move into the magic E, then we move into, right. So what does your scope and sequence look like?
Jan Wasowicz:
For the most part, they're not that different. Interestingly, we teach some patterns that other curricula don't teach, at least not explicitly. And we do sometimes change the order a bit. Now, I'll give you one example where we do, we know that clusters are particularly difficult to spell, not so much to read. If I show you a student the word step, well, they see the letter S, so they say, and they see the letter T, so they say T, and they can generally read a word like step, but when it comes time to spell, they have to pull those two sounds apart to make sure they represent each pho name with a letter. That's a much, and coding is a much harder task than decoding, which is one of the reasons researchers believe it's more powerful for learning. They have to be much more engaged and process at a deeper level. So you will see that those are introduced later, but that doesn't mean the kids can't read 'em when they encounter them. It just means we don't hold them responsible for spelling them correctly until they've mastered those skills. So speaking of the scope and sequence, I'm wondering if you have diagnostic assessments to place children within the scope and sequence and differentiate the place where they begin, or the pace at which they're learning, or do you feel it's best to just follow the scope and sequence for everybody and
Jan Wasowicz:
Connect those levels? Yeah. Well, it depends where you're implementing. We would advocate for implementing this approach in the classroom, absolutely. But it looks different there because here it's whole group and you move at a different pace. But there are invariably students who are going to need a little extra help. So now you're talking about, okay, where do you focus that supplemental instruction or intervention, whatever the case may be. Then absolutely, we want to do an assessment, and we use a spelling error analysis. So we collect spellings, misspellings from a student, and we do a deep error analysis, not we use the spelling error analysis, not just because we're going to use a speech to print approach. It's really more because spelling error analysis is a more sensitive measure and provides more detailed information about where the underlying deficit or deficits are versus a decoding or reading assessment. I mean, there's good things to be gained there. But so we would do a spelling assess, a spelling error analysis. And so looking at the students' misspellings, first of all, which patterns are they misspelling the most? Because we want to focus where have the greatest need? Secondly, what are the nature of those errors? Because the nature of those errors tells us what kind of instruction. So let me share an example with you. I'll take that word N again. So if a student on a assessment spelled the word N as with the letters n y, that would indicate that this student needs phonological instruction for the F sound. The instruction is very specific to that sound, right? So they need phonological instruction, but if they spelled the word N E E N E, this indicates that the student doesn't have orthographic knowledge about the E sound at the end of the word is not spelled with the letter E, right? It's typically spelled with the letter Y. Okay. So that's orthography instruction or orthography focused. But if the student spelled the word any e n y, this tells me that the student can segment. They recognize there's three phone names, E, n Y at E. Great. They're making orthographically allowable spellings, right? You could spell F. In fact, that's, they're playing by the rules. I would say to my student, what a smart mistake you spelled F with the letter E. But in this case, it does have an uncommon spelling. So this means they need activities and instruction that focuses on developing that orthographic representation in their lexical memory. And that's different from the other types of activities and focus of instruction. So yeah, spelling, error analysis can really pinpoint where to focus instruction.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I loved hearing you talk about that. That's such a deeper way of thinking about students' errors, and not just that they got the word wrong or that they're missing this particular spelling. What do they know? What are they using? And then kind of building from that particular strength. That's really cool.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Thank you so much for joining me today.
Jan Wasowicz:
Thank you, Jennifer. It's been a pleasure.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I now welcome my colleagues, Leah Mermelstein, author of We Do Writing, Rosie Maurantonio and Macy Kerbs from my consulting team. Welcome everybody. So we had two really interesting conversations about a speech to print approach. Definitely a lot of overlap, but also some unique details between the two. Leah, why don't you start us off. I know you've gone through the Sounds Write Training program and I'm curious to hear what you're thinking and what you took away from that conversation.
Leah Mermelstein:
I think I'll start with the things that were the same in both to kind of think about what are some commonalities that we see in speech to print. And one thing I thought was interesting is both of them talked about phonemic awareness being inside of phonics instruction. So that's something separate. It was that you're working on segmenting and blending and phony manipulation inside of that. So I thought that was interesting. And then the other thing I thought was, which I love about speech to print is it really feels, the word child-centered kept coming into my mind because you're starting with, I love the sock drawer analysis. You're starting with the way children's socks are organized. And so even when John Walker said he could begin at four, I now understanding speech to print, wholeheartedly agree because you're starting with what they know. It's fun and engaging. So those were two big similarities I saw across them.
Rosie Maurantonio:
One of the things that I thought was really important too, that John talked a lot about the less cognitive load and not necessarily having to know long a short a yes. And that's something I see with students all the time is that when I'll say like, oh, what's the sound? They'll say the letter. I'm like, no, that's the letter. There's a lots of confusion. It's so much for them. You can kind of see them going through that filing cabinet in their head. There's so many layers of things that we're asking them to do, but not focusing so much on that. On the actual naming, short a long A, and really just focusing on what are we writing here or I can see how you having those magnetic tiles and having them choose this, what's the sound? Okay, what makes that sound Not even focusing on what's sound, what's the letter? Which is the letter. Right. And I liked how we talked about too, the pacing of it. It really made it seem like we're getting this, making sure that it's thorough as opposed to moving on. And I think moving on right away, and a lot of our programs right now, and again, he said, this isn't a program, which was great, but a lot of what we have to do is we're moving so quickly and that's why we're we're not seeing that transfer that sticking was writing. So I think that, and also starting with the writing and focusing on that piece and more of the, sorry, encoding piece I think is really key here. So in my mind, again, I'm working a school where we focus on not so much the speech to print approach, but I'm thinking, okay, what could I do? What could I switch with my language or maybe tweak some of the activities that we're doing? So we're spending more time in that end coding because it's right. We always say like, oh, they're doing it in reading, but why aren't they doing it in writing? Well, it's not them that they're doing. It's like, what am I doing as a teacher that's not really setting them up to be as successful.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And then Rosie, as a first grade teacher, I know you use a program to help with phonological awareness and a separate program to help with phonics. And you also are always saying you don't have enough time, which is like every teacher, right? So are you thinking already of ways to save time by combining the two? Or how are you thinking about managing that or just going with a whole new program that's a speech to print approach program?
Rosie Maurantonio:
I do think that the speech to print is influencing actually some of the programs that are out there to shift and make sure that if they were doing just phonemic awareness, they're starting to put more with letters in there and using that. So I see that in the programs that are there. But that, again, that's a big thing to think about is that another piece of another reason why kid teaching isn't sticking is because of that transfer and making time for us to do this in authentic reading experiences or authentic writing experiences. So that's something I don't think I can answer really quickly. It's going to take a lot of sitting and looking at what, where are we in phonemic awareness? Where are we in our phonics? And like you said, where are places that we can overlap and what are things that we can tweak and pull out and making those connections more explicit. And that's why I think with some of the work, I know that people ask, and maybe this is jumping away, I know people ask, why are you revising the writing strategies book? But I look at that accuracy chapter for reading strategies and there's so much of saying, we don't need to teach this as a different writing strategy. I just need to refer to what we're doing as reading and making it more concrete for kids as writing. And I think spending more time doing that and understand that connection is going to be key, will be key.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I actually found that was really interesting with the discussion of the meta linguistic strategies. I kind of wanted to hear a little bit more about that, but I was wondering how much they overlapped with the strategies and the spelling chapter. You have to have a vowel in every syllable or you have to slow down and listen to each sound. I don't know what all of the bar, but that kind of piqued my curiosity a little bit. Macy, what are you thinking? What's on your mind? You've got young children at home and you're watching them develop as readers day by day.
Macie Kerbs:
Yes. I was actually thinking through an equity lens and how this assumes that everyone coming into the classroom can learn this. Whereas a lot of the teachers, especially through the pandemic, we had such unpredictable backgrounds happening for our second graders, third graders now. We weren't quite sure what instruction looked like because it was different in every home. And now I feel like this approach assumes that everyone can and gives them the tools to build off what they already know. And so I think that as a parent, I would appreciate this approach. I would love to learn more and have some more parent education too. Cause I think we could reinforce so much starting from early preschool ages even, because so many parents go in thinking, I just have to get them to know their letters. But really that's not what it's about at all. And I think that parents would benefit from some of this information as well. And I was also just thinking of this idea of reciprocity and how we know that oral language plays this huge piece in literacy development and how reading and writing go hand in hand. But still so often we see this taught in isolation and these siloed approaches and primary classrooms. And what I was picking up from both conversation is you absolutely cannot do that and have kids transfer. It has to be explicit, it has to be connected. You have to build on these systems that they are coming with through oral language to be able to learn how to read and write independently. So it's made me think about curriculum a lot. What could curriculum look like that really embraces some of these pieces that we're learning from the research?
Rosie Maurantonio:
And Macy, I was thinking for both of your points. The first is when it comes to intervention, a lot of what happens is an intervention. Kids are pulled in small groups and we do the same thing, but just at a slower pace. Kind of like what John was talking about. But what if, again, we're trying something, it's not working. Even if we're in a place right now where, like I said, my school, we're doing more of a phonics based approach. What if the intervention was trying things differently instead of just trying slower and smaller groups? But whatever it really is, trying things differently. I think that that could make a huge difference. Again, with the examples that they gave or what it did for the writing, the reading, excuse me. And even if the writing didn't come there yet, I know John talked about there were improvements in the spelling. It had wasn't as quick as the reading. So that was one thing. I think that that's really huge. And with the transfer, I do think too, some of the things that I have to say, I was biased. Like dictated sentences was something I thought was like, oh, is that worth spending time on? Years ago I would've said, no, no, it's too controlled doing the same thing. But my perspective has really changed in talking about that's where we can think about what have we learned in, what have we learned in this space or what resources can we apply and all doing it together. There really is. There really is something to that because writing, we do focus for on the expression, the content, the stories, not that conventions are an important, but that dictated time, that control time. And I know he talked about giving that immediate feedback, which we always talk about in conferences, but it's a nice way to do that. So I think that dictation piece is key. And something I hadn't really thought about years ago, if you said to do that, I'd be like, oh, is that the best use of my time? But really shifting that,
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, I think about those dictated sentences as sort of the flip side of the decodable text. You're giving kids short term practice in a controlled manner so that they can take the first step toward transferring and applying whatever they've learned in that lesson to connected text, whether it's writing connected text or reading connected text. But then I know we're all really the kinds of educators that value authentic writing experiences in the classroom. And we want to see transfer when they're engaged in whole class, interactive writing, shared writing, when they're engaged in their own composition and their writing texts of that. They wanted that when they're writing their own texts from their own stories, their own ideas. Leah, do you want to share a little bit about what you're thinking about in trying, I know your book is about interactive writing specifically in guided practice around writing.
Leah Mermelstein:
Yeah. Well, there's a few things that this is just making me think about in terms of, cause I think of interactive in my own book, the way I talk about interactive writing, and it's only one kind of interactive writing, but it's interactive writing that's more focused. That's not siloed. It's more focused on the phonics that you're actually teaching. So it's similar to the dictation, except it's more supported. But part of, as I listen to you all, and I'm thinking about your two guests, it's making me think about as we go into schools and we're working with teachers because teachers have a variety of different phonics programs that they're using are what are some key things that teachers could do with whatever phonics program? And I feel like some of the things we've talked about is making sure that we're working on both decoding and encoding. I think both guests said, talked about that and that idea of recognition versus retrieval and this idea of retrieval is harder. So regardless of exactly how you're teaching phonics, it would be helpful to look at the way you're teaching phonics and saying, are you including both decoding and encoding in your lessons? And then that whole idea, are you embedding phonemic awareness and are kids having practice reading connected texts and practice writing connected texts? And so as part of that 30 minute lesson, that might be things that teachers want to look at regardless of what program they're actually using. Now,
Macie Kerbs:
Leah, it's making me think of a couple students that teachers will bring to my attention in a second, third grade classroom when they start decoding multi-syllabic words or encoding multi-syllabic words. There's this point of confusion for the student that might not have been present before. Maybe they just soared through early phonics lessons. They were able to decode those students and then they get to these more complex words and they don't know what to do with some of that. They can't apply those phonics skills because now the word is too complex. This approach, I think would prevent some of that, where the student would have the tools to be able to attack some of those words as a reader or a writer. So they're not facing the point of difficulty when the word is so complex. Yeah, I'm just kind of thinking about some of those students that, oh, I wish I could go back and teach some of those again.
Leah Mermelstein:
Well, one of the things I heard, and I think I heard John say it, and the thing I heard when I took the course is over and over again, the words pin sharp and talking about the idea of sometimes we don't realize how much practice kids actually need. And it really has changed my perspective of not just the child who's struggling, but the example that you gave there. Sometimes kids might not struggle in the beginning because it's not so hard yet, but if they're not pinned sharp on doing it, they struggle when it gets to harder words. So I think really slowing down. The other thing that I think they both alluded to, and I don't know if this would be helpful to share, they kept talking about conceptual knowledge and speech to print. There's four different pieces of conceptual knowledge that I heard both of them allude to. And I think it goes back to some of the words I heard Jen say, and I heard the two guests say about precision. So the four P pieces are leathers, are symbols that represent sounds. So this is kind of the way that their sock drawer is organized. And then the next one, which I heard John say, at least once sounds can be represented by 1, 2, 3, or four letters. So the kids, as time goes on, they begin to learn that. Then they begin to learn that one sound can have many spellings. And so a lot of the scope and sequence, so for example, one unit in a speech to print might be that you're studying a sound in words. And so in that unit, which might be two weeks long, you're learning gait, you're learning rain, you're learning clay. What's the other one? I don't know. I have it somewhere. I can't think. Oh, gate rain play and great. So you might be learning that during that time. And then the fourth one is that one spelling can have many. So you might see bread break and seat, they're all spelled ea, but they all make different sounds. So those pieces of for conceptual knowledge, teaching kids, I heard your guests say slowly, but that everything fits underneath that. So there aren't tons of tons and tons of rules that it fits underneath that conceptual understanding.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I love that. It just is so clear. I feel like everything that both guests saying and just what you shared, it just feels so clear and it just makes such logical sense.
Leah Mermelstein:
And I think that regardless of what phonics program you have, I'm thinking to myself, I think those four pieces of conceptual knowledge would help me even if I didn't have an explicit speech to print program, although yes or a approach.
Macie Kerbs:
I'm wondering too what your thoughts are on this idea of a phoning wall because the word wall can be so cumbersome. And I know I've seen teachers start shifting towards more of a sound wall in some of the classrooms I'm visiting. And I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on taking some of this knowledge and making those visual representations and using our classroom space to teach and reinforce some of these.
Leah Mermelstein:
Yeah, I think so. I now, if I were teaching, I would definitely go towards a sound wall rather than a word wall, because kids begin to learn that one sound can have many spellings. And so as you're teaching that, so I can imagine that if I was teaching a sound of my class, I would have those words up there so that kids know that those are some of the spellings for the A sound.
Rosie Maurantonio:
The past few years I've been looking at how kids are using the word wall, are they using the word wall? And it seems like it's become just this overwhelming list and the kids who need it aren't really using, aren't using it. It's not as beneficial as I thought it once was. But I really like that idea of the phony wall. And again, with those, the picture representation and the uncommon spellings, because again, certain words are up there and even though we might retire them, should they have been up there, could they have used different strategies to figure them out than having that word be there? So I think that's that fantastic there, that kind of work where it really becomes a much more useful tool using it in terms of letters and sounds focusing on that as opposed to just the beginning letter. Yeah, there that some shifting has to happen there. Yeah. It's just, again, which shift, how am I going to do it? But even just using this as a starting place would be great.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I feel like, yeah, you were saying Leah, no matter what phonics program you have, even just organizing the wall in that way and then building the wall with children as you're working through this sequence just helps to organize it under one of four principles. Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Mermelstein:
And I think the whole conversation about cognitive load was super helpful as well.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So interesting. Yeah.
Leah Mermelstein:
I mean, for me been, it was really when I first started doing sounds right and they talked about not teaching leather names, it was shocking to me at first. And then when you think about it, I was like, there's no real reason for kids to know leather names in the very beginning. And for, well, I'm also,
Macie Kerbs:
That makes me think of language learners too. And even I have a two year old, and so it is very language rich right now around her. And she started picking up Spanish from school. She's in a school that teaches both, and she can't necessarily identify the letter names. No, but she speaks a lot. And building into some of that knowledge that she has, like man, the whole world is open to her. You just mean lean into the oral language side of it.
Leah Mermelstein:
Yeah. I mean, when I think about a child who's struggling, who, who's finding this hard, and all of a sudden they're trying to hear, listen to the sound of woo, when w and then remember that letter is called W, right? That's the worst one. And here's how you make it. I mean, the amount of things that we say at kids in one lesson, when probably for our kids, if think, if our goal is to get into long-term memory that it makes sense to me why I wouldn't want to be saying to kids, what leather is this? Again, in the middle of that lesson,
Jennifer Serravallo:
But practically, I mean, he did say at some point you teach them the letter names for, what did he say? For efficiency purposes? Yes. I'm assuming he meant efficiency within the lesson. So you can refer to things quickly by their names in the beginning. Leah, how do you say it? What do you say this is? So he said, this is how you spell that sound.
Leah Mermelstein:
Yeah. So here's like what the letter, yeah. Here's a common lesson that might say, yeah, so a common, that word building lesson he was talking about. So you might say something like, these are the letters that we need to make the word Matt. So then he puts, you put them up, and then you, you're pointing to the chart and you're saying, Matt, which of these, and then you're pointing are the way we spell. And so a child would point to the, and then we'd say, okay. And then we'd say, okay, as we put this down, everyone would say,
Jennifer Serravallo:
Oh, it's Montessori. Yeah.
Leah Mermelstein:
Yes.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I mean, right. Montessori does this.
Leah Mermelstein:
Totally. So I don't know. I wasn't kidding when I said it's one, it, it's so beautiful. It makes so much sense and to me, it's so child-centered.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Any final comments or thoughts that you want to share before saying goodbye for today?
Macie Kerbs:
I think the only thing I would add is that I am really grateful for these platforms and the research that's coming out and the profession of education where we can take new information and do even better tomorrow, because the amount of strategies that they shared were real classroom examples with real kids. And now I know in a lesson tomorrow I could approach it in a different way without having to uproot or overhaul everything that I've done. These minor tweaks will make huge differences for kids. So this is just my gratitude for this platform Jen. And also just being able to corral some people who have the research out there, but as educators, we might not be able to have the access to those people.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I agree. I think it's so exciting that there's constantly, we're constantly studying things, trying to make them more efficient, more clear for kids, and that we can continue to learn and to adapt always. I think that's really exciting. And to even here, Dr. Wasow say some of these things haven't even been studied yet, which profiles of readers is this most helpful for? There are still unanswered questions even with this approach. So we're going to continue learning more, and I look forward to kind of keeping up with that.
Leah Mermelstein:
Yeah. I love her idea of a diagnostic spelling. What a brilliant way to understand what kids know.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. That was so fascinating. Yeah. I'm used to the words their way spelling inventory, where you just sort of mark what's wrong, what's the part they don't understand. But really fascinating to hear her talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Well, thank you three so much for your time today. I know this is a lot of interview and a lot of conversation, but I feel like I learned a ton and I'm really grateful for our conversation. Thanks for joining me.
Leah Mermelstein:
Awesome. Thanks, Jen.
Macie Kerbs:
Thank you.