S7 E7 - Why Your Spelling Approach Might Be Working Against You (Part 1)

WEBVTT
00:00:48.609 --> 00:00:56.609
Hello, hello, welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded right here in Burnie, Tasmania, the lands of the Palawa people.
00:00:56.609 --> 00:01:04.370
I'm Jocelyn, and today I want to have a really honest and difficult conversation about spelling instruction.
00:01:04.370 --> 00:01:11.730
We're not going to be talking about spelling tests or lists, we're not talking about Friday dictation (that tells us very little).
00:01:11.730 --> 00:01:25.409
I mean the actual teaching and what the research tells us it really should look like, what it often looks like in practice, and what happens when there's a significant gap between these two things.
00:01:25.650 --> 00:01:40.370
So I'm going to be framing this conversation particularly around upper primary and lower secondary, that is, Years 3 to 8, because I think that's where some of our biggest unfinished business in structured literacy sits.
00:01:40.370 --> 00:01:53.170
We've done a lot of really important work in the early years; we've got phonics screening checks, we have systematic programs, teachers in Foundation to 2 are in many schools much better equipped than they were five years ago.
00:01:53.170 --> 00:02:06.049
Now the job's not done in the early years for sure, but in Year 3 to 8, that's where students with unresolved gaps are quietly, or not so quietly, struggling through every single day.
00:02:06.049 --> 00:02:09.490
And I know this because that's what teachers tell us.
00:02:09.490 --> 00:02:22.129
In our work, we spend time helping schools unpack their data, talking with teachers and leaders about the struggles they have and helping them work out simple solutions that get everyone learning.
00:02:22.129 --> 00:02:27.569
So that's where we're going to spend our time today, thinking about the Year 3 to 8 space.
00:02:28.050 --> 00:02:34.769
I'll also be doing something that I rarely do, which is talk quite a bit about our own programs.
00:02:34.769 --> 00:02:51.969
Now we recently published Spelling Success in Action 1, a program component that we have designed specifically to address the issue of gaps in student phonics and orthographic knowledge, that's the spelling rules, for students in Years 3 to 8.
00:02:51.969 --> 00:02:54.290
But I want the evidence to come first.
00:02:54.290 --> 00:03:06.290
It always comes first: when we create a program, when we're making a podcast, when we're helping a school solve problems, the first port of call is what does the available research tell us?
00:03:06.290 --> 00:03:16.290
And let's be clear, research doesn't answer every question we have, but it can give us guidance that gets us headed in the right direction.
00:03:16.290 --> 00:03:30.129
When we understand what the components of really robust instruction are, we can evaluate our approach or a potential program, including the one that we have just recently launched.
00:03:30.449 --> 00:03:37.170
So this episode is in two parts, one part was just way too long, and so we've divided it into two.
00:03:37.170 --> 00:03:48.449
And today I'm focusing on the research about what the evidence tells us about spelling instruction, not just what is important, but also the how.
00:03:48.449 --> 00:03:55.889
We're going to talk about the reading-writing connection and what good instructional design actually requires.
00:03:55.889 --> 00:03:59.170
In the next episode, we're going to get really practical.
00:03:59.170 --> 00:04:06.850
I'm going to share four student profiles that we see coming up again and again in classrooms, and we're going to talk about how to respond to them.
00:04:07.410 --> 00:04:18.129
So let's start with something that I want Year 7 and 8 teachers in particular to hear, because I don't think that this gets said clearly enough.
00:04:18.129 --> 00:04:45.810
If you are a secondary teacher trying to teach students to write essays, engage with complex text, and produce work that reflects the student's genuine intellectual capability, and you are finding that a significant number of students simply can't do this, I want to suggest that spelling and word-level knowledge may be a much bigger part of the picture than we typically acknowledge.
00:04:45.810 --> 00:04:51.490
And I'm not here to say that Year 7 and 8 teachers are clueless because you're not.
00:04:51.490 --> 00:05:05.170
But what I do know is that if we primary school teachers have been poorly equipped to manage this in the primary school, that secondary teachers have been even more poorly equipped.
00:05:05.170 --> 00:05:14.129
So we understand that there's a recognition of these lack of skills, again, because we're talking with teachers every day.
00:05:14.129 --> 00:05:20.449
We are also working with secondary schools in the Year 7 and 8 space to help fill these gaps.
00:05:20.449 --> 00:05:23.170
And we see it in the data as well.
00:05:23.170 --> 00:05:33.089
So many students, far too many students, arrive in Year 7 with unresolved gaps in their phonics knowledge and their understanding of how words are constructed.
00:05:33.089 --> 00:05:36.769
They can't reliably decode unfamiliar words when they're reading.
00:05:36.769 --> 00:05:39.490
They can't spell accurately when they're writing.
00:05:39.490 --> 00:05:55.490
And because spelling is not yet automatic for them, the cognitive load of putting words on the page is consuming all those cognitive resources that should be available for thinking and arguing and organising ideas.
00:05:55.490 --> 00:06:03.889
Even students who look like they're good spellers can come completely unstuck when they have to read and spell unfamiliar words.
00:06:04.050 --> 00:06:10.529
Now, Berninger and colleagues have been really clear about this, as have many others, such as Steve Graham.
00:06:10.529 --> 00:06:19.329
Automaticity in spelling directly frees up working memory for the higher level processes of writing composition.
00:06:19.329 --> 00:06:24.849
So when spelling is not automatic, text composition suffers.
00:06:24.849 --> 00:06:27.649
Reading comprehension suffers.
00:06:27.649 --> 00:06:30.129
It's not a small effect either.
00:06:30.129 --> 00:06:39.009
And for students who are already managing the additional cognitive load of reading difficult texts, this all compounds really quickly.
00:06:39.329 --> 00:06:42.610
So what does this look like in practice?
00:06:42.610 --> 00:06:54.209
It looks like students who choose simple words in their writing rather than the precise word they actually want to use because they're not confident that they can spell it.
00:06:54.209 --> 00:07:02.769
It looks like students who write short sentences because longer, more complex ones require holding more information in working memory at once.
00:07:02.769 --> 00:07:07.009
It looks like students who avoid writing altogether when they can get out of it.
00:07:07.009 --> 00:07:21.009
And it looks like students who are disengaged or being "difficult" when they're actually exhausted by years of not being able to do things that they think everybody else can do without any effort at all.
00:07:21.810 --> 00:07:33.889
Whenever I'm in the classroom with older students, I say, put your hand up if you have interesting things to say when you write, but you don't write them because you aren't sure of how to spell the words.
00:07:33.889 --> 00:07:35.089
And you know what?
00:07:35.089 --> 00:07:42.529
Just about every hand goes up, every single time, no matter the socioeconomic background of the school.
00:07:42.529 --> 00:07:50.769
Then I say, keep your hand up if you write words and they don't look right, so you put an E on the end, hoping that will fix it.
00:07:50.769 --> 00:07:56.849
And so many hands stay up, and yes, there's a little bit of giggling that goes along with that one.
00:07:56.849 --> 00:08:00.930
But what we're seeing is a lack of confidence in spelling.
00:08:00.930 --> 00:08:09.969
And this lack of confidence, this lack of understanding of how words work, is a real problem that teachers are encountering every day.
00:08:09.969 --> 00:08:14.050
And it impacts every single curriculum area.
00:08:14.529 --> 00:08:17.569
This problem is not going to fix itself.
00:08:17.569 --> 00:08:34.850
Students who arrive in Years 3, 5, 7, or 8 with significant word level gaps and do not receive the explicit, systematic instruction they need, are not going to catch up through exposure to good literature and writing tasks.
00:08:34.850 --> 00:08:46.610
They will develop increasingly sophisticated strategies to hide their problem, and they will move through secondary school carrying a cognitive load that is genuinely unfair to them.
00:08:46.610 --> 00:08:57.730
Now the good news, and there is really very genuine good news here, is that the brain remains responsive to high-quality instruction well beyond the early years.
00:08:57.730 --> 00:09:03.649
These students and their lack of this foundational knowledge are not a lost cause.
00:09:03.649 --> 00:09:14.370
They just need teaching that's straight to the point, engaging, and delivered in a way that meets them in the Goldilocks spot: not too easy, not too hard, just right.
00:09:15.570 --> 00:09:26.530
And on that point about it not being too late for them, the oldest person I ever taught to read was 62 years old.
00:09:26.530 --> 00:09:38.129
And when I showed him the I, the G, and the H and said, when you see this, that spells the sound I, he said, Why didn't someone just tell me that in the first place?
00:09:38.129 --> 00:09:46.610
So it is never too late to build foundational skills that will help empower people, regardless of their age.
00:09:46.930 --> 00:09:51.330
And before I go further, I want to address something that might be sitting in the back of your mind.
00:09:51.330 --> 00:09:54.690
Because this podcast episode is about spelling.
00:09:54.690 --> 00:09:58.370
And we've just released another element of our spelling program.
00:09:58.370 --> 00:10:01.890
So why have I been talking about reading and writing?
00:10:01.890 --> 00:10:03.090
Here's why.
00:10:03.090 --> 00:10:15.730
The research is very clear that phonics instruction is the primary mechanism by which students who are at risk of failure develop accuracy in reading and in spelling.
00:10:15.730 --> 00:10:21.090
And that's not just true in Year 1, it's true for struggling readers of all ages.
00:10:21.090 --> 00:10:35.810
When students can't reliably decode unfamiliar words, words they can't recognise from memory automatically, they guess, substitute, or skip, and they do it for reading and for spelling.
00:10:35.810 --> 00:10:47.970
And the texts that we want students, older students in upper primary and secondary, to read and write are full of the words that they find the most difficult to spell and read.
00:10:47.970 --> 00:10:59.090
And here's the bit that is particularly compelling, and we have a whole podcast series on this, a Research to the Classroom about connected reading and writing instruction.
00:10:59.090 --> 00:11:06.770
Spelling and reading draw on the same underlying orthographic knowledge and morphological knowledge as well.
00:11:06.770 --> 00:11:16.450
When students practice spelling a word, actually encoding it, not just copying it, they are strengthening the same neural representations they use to read it.
00:11:16.450 --> 00:11:23.090
That comes from Lanaya Erie, who you may not have heard of her directly, but I bet you've heard of orthographic mapping.
00:11:23.490 --> 00:11:26.690
Spelling practice is reading practice.
00:11:26.690 --> 00:11:33.170
That's why we always say include as much spelling in a lesson as you have word reading.
00:11:33.170 --> 00:11:35.090
These are not separate skills.
00:11:35.090 --> 00:11:39.250
They're not identical, but they are two sides of the same coin.
00:11:39.250 --> 00:11:44.370
Timothy Shanahan describes this as we build the knowledge like in a well.
00:11:44.370 --> 00:11:50.930
And then we have two buckets that we dip in, one for reading and one for writing.
00:11:50.930 --> 00:11:54.850
Connect these things together, and we're going to get much better outcomes.
00:11:54.850 --> 00:12:03.890
So when we invest time in appropriate spelling instruction for older students, we're getting a really nice extra.
00:12:03.890 --> 00:12:08.850
We are directly building the foundation of reading accuracy as well.
00:12:08.850 --> 00:12:18.210
And for the students sitting in orange and red in your screening data, that foundation work is not supplementary, it's the main event.
00:12:18.210 --> 00:12:31.009
It needs to be the core instruction delivered several times a week, ideally four or five, for a large enough amount of time and done in a way that's targeted to their needs.
00:12:31.570 --> 00:12:41.490
And of course, this has a direct implication for writing, because if a student can read unfamiliar words accurately, they encounter more vocabulary.
00:12:41.490 --> 00:12:45.009
When they can spell accurately, they write more freely.
00:12:45.009 --> 00:12:48.050
When they write more freely, their composition improves.
00:12:48.050 --> 00:12:54.450
All of these things are not separate creeks or rivers, they all flow from the same source.
00:12:54.850 --> 00:13:05.330
Alright, now let's change tack a little bit and talk about instructional design, because I think this is the next frontier in education.
00:13:05.330 --> 00:13:14.770
We, and I say we broadly in education, have so many boxes of the science of reading in air quotes being ticked.
00:13:14.770 --> 00:13:17.250
The what is being covered.
00:13:17.250 --> 00:13:23.890
But we are still very far away from getting things right from an instructional design perspective.
00:13:23.890 --> 00:13:31.730
And please understand me, I'm not criticising teachers, I'm just naming up the situation that I see.
00:13:31.730 --> 00:13:42.450
I think of teachers like builders: they need lots of skills, lots of knowledge, and there's absolutely expertise that is developed over time.
00:13:42.450 --> 00:13:46.129
But teachers are not architects.
00:13:46.129 --> 00:13:50.530
Educational architecture involves a different skill set.
00:13:50.530 --> 00:14:03.170
And frankly, one that I've spent years developing and one that I want to unpack a little here so that you have a framework for evaluating whatever instruction is currently happening in your school.
00:14:03.970 --> 00:14:12.770
A lot of spelling programs do break content down into small parts, that's one of Rosenschein's principles that you're probably familiar with.
00:14:12.770 --> 00:14:27.009
And that is, in principle, aligned with cognitive load theory and Sweller's work on managing the demands of working memory learning, small steps are good, explicit instruction is good.
00:14:27.009 --> 00:14:31.730
I'm absolutely in favour of both of those things, of course.
00:14:31.730 --> 00:14:51.170
But here's the issue that I'm seeing in practice: much of the time, lessons are broken into smaller parts, but then students are presented with so many different small parts in such rapid succession that the lesson becomes a bit of a revolving door of concepts.
00:14:51.170 --> 00:14:59.170
You might have a new grapheme introduced, a new suffix applied, a new convention explained, all within a single lesson.
00:14:59.170 --> 00:15:05.810
Now each element is theoretically small, but the total load is high.
00:15:05.810 --> 00:15:17.090
And for students who already have insecure foundations, the working memory cost of managing all of that simultaneously means that very little is actually consolidated.
00:15:17.090 --> 00:15:20.210
And let's even think about that across a week.
00:15:20.210 --> 00:15:27.570
All of those different parts might not be tackled within the one lesson, perhaps they're built over successive days.
00:15:27.570 --> 00:15:43.410
However, what's happening is students are not being given enough time and repetition in a variety of contexts that slowly builds over time to encode that new information into their long-term memory.
00:15:43.410 --> 00:15:49.490
The lesson or the unit looks busy, the students look busy, but the learning doesn't land.
00:15:49.490 --> 00:16:02.050
And the next week or the next fortnight or the next term, when you want to come back and use what you think you've taught, you find that most of it, if not all of it, has already faded.
00:16:02.530 --> 00:16:17.170
Cognitive load theory is really clear on this, the goal of the instructional design piece is to manage the total load on working memory, not just the size of all the individual components.
00:16:17.170 --> 00:16:32.610
When we layer multiple new concepts into a single lesson, even lots of small ones, we can easily exceed what working memory can handle, especially for students who don't have strong prime knowledge to scaffold that new learning.
00:16:32.610 --> 00:16:38.610
Now, when we have established schema or long-term memory for something, we can layer in many elements.
00:16:38.610 --> 00:16:44.129
And the challenge for the student then becomes coordinating them to achieve a particular outcome.
00:16:44.129 --> 00:16:53.410
That's fine, that's desirable difficulty, but when we are first learning something, the goal has to be instructional precision.
00:16:53.410 --> 00:17:02.850
And I really feel like I need to trademark this term: instructional precision, one concept, taught well, practiced deeply.
00:17:02.850 --> 00:17:15.650
And you may have heard me say over the years that we get much better outcomes for students when we go an inch wide and a mile deep versus going an inch deep and a mile wide.
00:17:15.650 --> 00:17:29.170
We feel good because we got to tick off lots of things from the scope and sequence or the curriculum, but all of the learning has been nothing but surface-level short-term learning, and therefore it's not learning.
00:17:29.170 --> 00:17:34.690
Because remember, learning is a permanent change to long-term memory, thank you, Mr.
00:17:34.690 --> 00:17:35.410
Sweller.
00:17:36.049 --> 00:17:40.609
The second issue I see is instructional intensity.
00:17:40.609 --> 00:17:47.970
Now, some programs teach a pattern using very few words and then just their immediate relatives.
00:17:47.970 --> 00:17:51.970
For example, erupt, erupted, eruption.
00:17:51.970 --> 00:18:01.569
Now, teaching those three forms in a lesson will help students learn specific words that relate to eruptions.
00:18:01.569 --> 00:18:06.930
But that is much closer to a vocabulary lesson than a spelling lesson.
00:18:06.930 --> 00:18:15.890
In a spelling lesson, we want students to internalise and remember the patterns, whether that's phonics or morphology.
00:18:15.890 --> 00:18:28.529
In order to do that, we have to see the pattern across multiple different words, across multiple different encounters, across multiple different days, and with context.
00:18:28.529 --> 00:18:42.130
So if we want the students to learn the base 'rupt', they need words like eruption, disruptive, corruption, bankrupt, more than once and with meaningful context built in.
00:18:42.130 --> 00:18:51.170
That volume of exposure is exactly what allows the brain to learn the pattern 'rupt' and generalise it to new words.
00:18:51.170 --> 00:18:57.009
Teaching just one word and its family is item-specific learning.
00:18:57.009 --> 00:19:02.450
It doesn't build schema for the main thing we wanted the children to learn.
00:19:02.769 --> 00:19:06.130
And this matters most for students who struggle.
00:19:06.130 --> 00:19:15.490
Students with reading and spelling difficulties don't generalise learned patterns to new words as easily as their more fluent peers.
00:19:15.490 --> 00:19:20.769
They need to see more examples to get a pattern, not fewer.
00:19:20.769 --> 00:19:30.850
A program that only has a few words is actively working against the students who need the instruction the most.
00:19:31.330 --> 00:19:45.250
So when I think about what genuinely effective instructional design looks like, reflecting on both the cognitive sciences and the literacy research, I come back to a few key principles.
00:19:45.250 --> 00:19:51.730
One concept at a time taught well and practiced deeply.
00:19:51.730 --> 00:20:03.009
Multiple words, not three, but more like 13 or 15, multiple words representing the pattern, not just that one base and its family.
00:20:03.009 --> 00:20:17.250
Metalinguistic complexity or how much of the added linguistic or language elements are included, needs to be managed deliberately, particularly for students who are still building foundations.
00:20:17.250 --> 00:20:32.450
And there needs to be enough time within the lesson and across the week for genuine encoding to happen, because the encoding doesn't happen unless the students have done the heavy lifting on the thinking.
00:20:32.450 --> 00:20:40.130
And you can't get that with a snappy, snappy, snappy speed lesson that goes at a million miles an hour.
00:20:40.130 --> 00:20:48.130
And you can't get that in a lesson where the teacher is taking the students on a tour of content and occasionally getting them to do some things.
00:20:48.130 --> 00:21:00.130
And you can't get that in a lesson where the intrinsic load of the task, how hard or easy it is, hasn't been carefully managed to find that Goldilocks spot.
00:21:00.130 --> 00:21:05.730
So the question we want to ask is not, are we breaking things down into small steps?
00:21:05.730 --> 00:21:17.330
It's does the total load of the lesson across all of those small steps remain within what students can actually hold and process in a way that is optimal for learning?
00:21:17.330 --> 00:21:26.930
That is a meaningfully different question, and it's one worth sitting with, and it's one worth asking, and it's one worth answering honestly.
00:21:28.930 --> 00:21:31.650
So that's where I want to leave things today.
00:21:31.650 --> 00:21:33.250
The evidence is clear.
00:21:33.250 --> 00:21:37.890
Spelling gaps in upper primary and secondary are not a motivation problem.
00:21:37.890 --> 00:21:39.970
They're not a lost cause.
00:21:39.970 --> 00:21:41.970
These kids are never a lost cause.
00:21:41.970 --> 00:21:46.210
There is no such thing as a student who is a lost cause.
00:21:46.210 --> 00:21:49.330
What we have is instructional issues.
00:21:49.330 --> 00:21:57.410
We have systems and structures that are not supporting the students in the way that they need to be supported.
00:21:57.410 --> 00:22:03.569
And a program is part of the system and structure of your school and how it works.
00:22:03.569 --> 00:22:08.690
All of these problems are entirely solvable.
00:22:08.690 --> 00:22:38.529
But solving them requires instruction that is precise, that manages cognitive load deliberately, and that provides enough volume of practice for patterns to generalise, with lots and lots of reading and spelling, more importantly, that the students are actively thinking about the words and they're using them with some context, not writing full narratives, but there's context involved so the meaning connections can be made so that these words stick.
00:22:38.529 --> 00:22:42.529
And when we do this work, great things happen.
00:22:42.769 --> 00:22:50.289
Now you might be thinking, Jocelyn, that's all very nice for you to say, but you haven't seen our data, you haven't met our kids.
00:22:50.289 --> 00:22:57.250
We have a relatively small school with kids with all of these issues, or we have whatever the issue is in our context.
00:22:57.250 --> 00:23:00.370
And I'm coming to you from this perspective.
00:23:00.370 --> 00:23:01.890
I've done it.
00:23:01.890 --> 00:23:19.490
In my own work as a school leader, in the schools that I have led, and the work that I'm now supporting other schools to do, I have actually done the work in circumstances that were not just difficult, they could have been called almost impossible.
00:23:19.490 --> 00:23:31.009
In the last five years, I've also had the headspace and the time to learn, to read deeply, to be able to ask the question: what does the research say about that particular thing?
00:23:31.009 --> 00:23:36.049
And how do we incorporate that with our professional understandings and the way that we work?
00:23:36.049 --> 00:23:39.330
I'm not coming to you with pie in the sky ideas.
00:23:39.330 --> 00:23:44.690
That's a nice idea, but it has no backing and no one's ever really been able to do it in practice.
00:23:45.170 --> 00:23:52.850
In the next episode, we're going to unpack a few more elements of quality instruction, and I'm going to get practical.
00:23:52.850 --> 00:24:03.330
I'm going to walk you through how to identify the profile of the students sitting in your classrooms and how to match instruction to those profiles.
00:24:03.330 --> 00:24:10.370
Also, I'm going to share some more about the specific design decisions behind Spelling Success in Action 1.
00:24:10.370 --> 00:24:18.610
You're also going to have a set of reflection questions that you can use to evaluate your current approach right now.
00:24:18.610 --> 00:24:30.930
But start with that reflection about are we actually getting the cognitive load of the instruction right from the start in terms of how many elements are included in a lesson?
00:24:30.930 --> 00:24:33.970
And is this right for our students?
00:24:34.529 --> 00:24:54.210
In the meantime, if you'd like to download the free early morphology diagnostic assessment, that will tell you whether your students really understand suffixing conventions, the drop the E, the Y to I, and the doubling rule, you can get that on our website, just go to the Free Resources tab and you'll find it there.
00:24:54.210 --> 00:25:00.930
Data is a great first step to understand where your students are actually up to.
00:25:00.930 --> 00:25:06.529
If this episode has been useful, I'd love for you to share it with a colleague.
00:25:06.529 --> 00:25:12.210
That's how we help grow our collective understanding and collective efficacy.
00:25:12.210 --> 00:25:13.730
Thanks so much, everybody.
00:25:13.730 --> 00:25:14.850
I'll see you next time.
00:25:14.850 --> 00:25:15.330
Bye.