Assessment and intervention for an SSP approach: Q&A transcript
Kerrie Shanahan:
Q: Where do I start in supporting my students with progress monitoring?
Elaine Stanley:
Progress monitoring can either be on a big scale through the whole school or whole cohort, or it can work just as well in an individual classroom. You can still use your progress monitoring as long as you're following a set progression and do that Response to Intervention (RTI) analysis with your students in your own grade. Lots of teachers actually are doing that just on an individual level in their own classroom and it will really inform how you form your groups and what your focus will be for your groups. But it also helps you to really track your students and know how they're going. And it also helps you work out the pace of instruction, whether you can sort of speed up or slow down. At an individual classroom teacher level, it's still really useful to have in place if you can.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Q: How long do I keep sounds that we need to practise or build fluency with in our daily review sessions?
Elaine Stanley:
If you've identified letter–sound correspondences or areas you want to bring into your daily review, then once they're in there you really need to track how students are going with them, in order to decide whether to take them out or not. When you can see students' responses are really accurate and automatic and they're able to apply those letter–sound correspondences to reading and spelling, then you can think about taking those back out for a while.
Some schools actually have a really formal procedure for working out what goes in or comes out, and we did talk about that more in Topic 2 as well if you'd like to go back and see that live session.
[Lit Hub: add link to topic 2 vis on this – not sure which one! - LH I'm sure it's the one I added below... do you want to check with ES?]
https://www.literacyhub.edu.au/search/demonstration-of-a-daily-review/
If you've just taught it, then bring it in for the next two weeks, and then if students are going well, they might take it out and then bring it back in again later. So it's constantly moving in and out what you need to. And also things that you notice during lessons. If they're rusty with something or some things, you're noticing they're not responding really accurately and automatically, you can bring that in as well and take something else out. It's constant juggling there.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Q: How do I know where to begin SSP instruction with my Year 2 students?
Elaine Stanley:
If you're just beginning instruction and you want to know where to start, then it's a good idea to begin by collecting some data for your students if you don't already have that. You could do a letter–sound assessment to really assess their code knowledge and maybe phonological awareness assessment as well to really find out how they go with working with sounds in words. But also because it's grade two, the Year 1 Phonics Check is a really good assessment to do as well because that will really assess their code knowledge that they have at this stage, but also the complexity of words that they can apply that code knowledge to. That's a really good one to give you an idea of where they're at to start with.
And, actually, in our live session for this topic, which was two weeks ago, we talked about all the areas for assessment within your phonics instruction and we have an overview for that to show you all of those areas that you can be assessing. We might just put the link in the chat now for that topic so you can go back and there's also some suggestions for some of those assessments that I've just spoken about as well there, which might be helpful for people.
[Lit Hub – add link to topic 5 video about areas for assessment]
Basically, when you've got that data to start with, you can then determine where you are going to start instruction for your grade, for your Year 2s, and then it's a matter of beginning your SSP instruction against a progression and working out where your starting point is and progress monitoring students then along the way just to see how they're travelling and really to see if there's any other gaps that come up that you notice along the way as you're going.
For progress monitoring, because you're starting everything at once, even if you just progress monitor their letter–sound correspondence knowledge with what you're teaching as you start and how they apply that to word reading and spelling, that will still give you a lot of information even if you're not doing the full suite of progress monitoring at the beginning.
And that data, just collecting that data as you go, will really inform how your students are travelling because it's all new to them and you’re new to teaching it as well, just how they're travelling and how you plan your whole-class teaching, but also your tiers of intervention as well for your students along the way.
I would say, if this is the first time your Year 2s are doing phonics learning as well around the phonics knowledge and skills, don't be surprised if they really start at the beginning of a progression because there's probably lots of gaps to fill. You might be starting right back at the beginning stages, but then the older students are, the more quickly they sort of progress as well through progression.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Great, Elaine. So it's all about getting that data and then working from there at that earliest point of need.
Elaine Stanley:
That will lead you. Yes.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Q: When do you make time for Tier 2 and Tier 3 instruction during your literacy block?
Elaine Stanley:
Ideally, your Tier 2 and Tier 3 instruction happens when your other students are doing independent practice, so that ‘You do’ time in a lesson. You've done your explicit teaching for that lesson, and you check for understanding to see that students have really understood the learning, and then when they go and practise and apply what they've learned in that independent practice time, that's when you can pull out your groups that you're working with or those individual students for Tier 3. The key to that working really well and allowing you to do that work with your groups is setting up that independent practice time really early on in the piece with your grade so that students really work efficiently during that time to complete tasks on their own, which really frees you up. They sort of have to learn not to disturb you when you're with a group and all those sorts of things.
Setting all of that up, and making sure the tasks that are ones that they can complete independently without you, really helps you run your groups during that time. Also, there are other things, it's not just that time for your Tier 2 and Tier 3 students, there are other things happening all through the week as well and through your lessons. Even your daily review really supports those Tier 2 and Tier 3 students as well, and you can differentiate slides for different abilities in your grade or parts of slides and they know which bit they have to do. You're supporting those students all the time as well if you've got all parts of instruction working together. It's not only that time when you pull them out.
When everything's set up to support all students, it's happening for Tier 2 and Tier 3 students as well within the classroom. The only other thing I'd say about Tier 3, as well, is often students are taken out of the classroom for Tier 3 sessions, so it's really important to make sure they're not always taken at the same time. Just to really timetable that, they go out at different times in different lessons so they're not always missing the beginning of a reading lesson, for example, because it's really important they're still in the classroom for that as well. Juggling everything and getting everything into place supports them all through the week really.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Excellent. Thanks Elaine. So yes, making use of all those different times in the week, not just a one-off session.
Elaine Stanley:
And, actually, we might just put a link in the chat as well for Topic 2 because all of that is explained in more detail in Topic 2 and how you run your lessons and include all of those areas. If you haven't seen that, that might be good to have a look at as well.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Q: How long do we use one dataset to plan instruction for all the students' needs?
Elaine Stanley:
Really, one set of progress monitoring data is your current set until you collect the next set, when you've taught the next phase in a progression. What you're trying to do is cater to the students’ needs and cover the areas that pop up in that dataset as much as possible while that one's current. If students are developing their skills, for example, say they're still working towards working at the sentence level and they're building their skills in a certain area, that might actually carry over into your next progress monitoring dataset anyway, so you'll be working on building those things over time. But what you really want to do in the dataset you’re working with is tackle the letter–sound correspondence knowledge that you've taught within that phase, and the application to word reading and spelling and capture as many students from that dataset to really bring them up to speed with what you've learned as you can.
I've always found that having that data accessible all the time on your computer screen or next to you printed out or whatever works best for you, helps you to really capture some things incidentally as well that come up in your data. For example, if a child was away when you did something and you know they'll grasp that easily, you can just do some things incidentally and be ticking off all the things that have shown up in that dataset as much as you can. But, basically, you're trying to close the gap as much as you can within that dataset before you move on to the next one and keep the spread as small as possible and just not let any really large gaps appear.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Yes, that's great Elaine, great tip there, too. Having it accessible all the time so you can just quickly look.
Elaine Stanley:
Yes, because some things you can deal with in the spur of the moment, as well.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Q: How do we use ongoing assessment to monitor across year level cohorts?
Elaine Stanley:
I've seen it work really well in some schools where teachers actually collect and analyse their data as a team to plan for the needs of their students really across the cohort. Then it becomes, really, we’re catering to the needs of our students, not your students and my students and you're not having to cater to all the needs of your students completely on your own. Building that culture of trust and data transparency is what's needed there for that to work really well. Then it builds that shared responsibility and shared ownership. You’re all working to move all your students along. It's really supportive of teachers when that is in place. I've even seen where teachers in one cohort have one single spreadsheet, and they all enter their data onto that. Then everyone owns the data in that case and everyone's responsible for it.
The benefits of doing that is that you can discuss as a team what difficulties your students are having and then share expertise or resources or ideas of things that are working in different classes. Sometimes even you can go and observe what another teacher's doing if they're saying, ‘well, this is working really well for my students, come and have a look’. It just builds that team effort. If you've got that consistent approach to collecting data and talking about data, then it's really easy to just pass that up. If year levels are using the same sort of methods of collecting and using data, it's really easy to see where students are at and what's being put in place for them in a certain year and then pass that up so it starts from there the next year. It works pretty well.
Kerrie Shanahan:
I love that idea of that team planning and using the data and there's so many benefits, isn't there? That whole-school approach, if you can get that going.
Elaine Stanley:
Just makes life easier for everybody.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Yes, sharing the load.
Elaine Stanley:
That's it.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Q: We are using a commercial program for teaching phonics. How can we monitor students’ progress when the program we are using has no progress monitoring assessment?
Elaine Stanley:
We do have a blank template for progress monitoring. We talked about that in our live session, and we can just put the link in the chat maybe for that now. And it's also in your handouts for this Q&A.
https://www.literacyhub.edu.au/search/progress-monitoring-tool-template/
You can use that to create a progress monitoring tool against your own progression that you’re using. What you'll have to do is just insert your letter–sound correspondences that you’re learning at each phase, and then add some words for reading and spelling and some sentences, which takes a bit of work, initially, but then once you've got those made, it's there forever and for all teachers to use.
It is really worth doing that and it helps you really track your students then really closely. And also it really helps you achieve that consistency of instruction across grades to make sure that your instruction just is consistent for all students within a cohort, for example. It brings everything together. It is worth investing time into that if that's what you need to do to create it.
Kerrie Shanahan:
That's great, yes. That template is really helpful and then you can link it to any progression that you're using.
Q: How do we assess our non-verbal students?
Elaine Stanley:
That's a question we get quite a bit actually, and it's always a tricky one to think about. Basically, you're going to find ways to make accommodations in the assessment that work for your particular students, and most probably they're going to be the same sorts of things you find work in class when you are teaching your students and working with them. Some ideas that I've seen work in the past is if you're trying to assess, for example, letter–sound correspondences, you could have all the letters that were in a phase in front of the students and if you make the sound, students can just point to the letter or letter patterns that make it. You're still assessing their knowledge, but they're not actually saying it themselves. The same with assessing word reading. You can say the sounds and then the student can blend them in their head internally and just point to the word that they make, they blend to make. You're still assessing their ability to blend sounds and identify the word and read the word, but you're just helping them.
Writing words is a bit easier because you can say the word and they can segment and write them, so that's easy to assess. But, even at the sentence level, I've seen teachers before just have two pictures and one sort of matches the sentence and one doesn't. They get the student to read the sentence internally and then just point to the picture that matches. So you know they've understood what they've read and they've been able to decode. And actually these strategies also work with students with severe speech difficulties as well. That will really help with those two.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Q: How do I marry the need for decoding skills and increased English vocab in high EAL schools?
Elaine Stanley:
Actually, my last school was high EAL population, so we had around 87% of students with English as an additional background, so that was really an important factor in building oral language skills and in teaching the phonics area as well. Really, you need that focus on both areas at the same time because you're trying to build oral language skills, but you also need to unlock the code of the written language too for students. One thing we used to do was really incorporate a vocab focus into the phonics lessons as well, in terms of really spending that time unpacking the words that students were reading and spelling. Sometimes we would show a picture cue to explain the meaning of the word that we were using in our lessons, or we would put the words into sentences for students so they understood the context of the word before they read and spell it.
Trying to include that vocabulary focus within your lessons really helps students and support students. But the decoding part and the encoding, the reading and spelling is really important because in systematic synthetic phonics, because they're building from the smallest parts of language and building up, it's really important for students who don't have English as their first language because it cracks the code for them and it just builds their knowledge of English incrementally. It unlocks the language and all its mysteries for them.
Just the fact that you're doing SSP, and especially with that really supportive EDI approach, is really supportive anyway of building students' language when English is not their first language. Something else I'll say that has cropped up at schools that teachers I've been working with that as children go up the school, their oral language skills can develop, but you might still find their written language skills when English isn't their first language, their written language skills still has some gaps. That's where your phonics is so vitally important. Even if the oral language side is going well, you still need that focus on both.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Sort of the balance, isn't it.
Elaine Stanley:
It is.
Kerrie Shanahan:
And combining it as you say.
Elaine Stanley:
Both areas.
Kerrie Shanahan:
It is really helpful for those kids.
Q: How is implementation and differentiation impacted in composite classrooms?
Elaine Stanley:
Yes, another big question. Good question. In a composite grade, you've got to consider the needs of your students in terms of that RTI response and catering to the individual needs, but also planning your tiers of intervention for students that need support in different ways, but you've got to juggle that as well with the curriculum expectations for each year level. I've had quite a lot of experience myself working with composite grades, so I understand the challenge there that you have. I think in any grade it comes back to your instructional decisions are always driven by your data. You need that first to really, if you haven't got it with students as they come up, you need to gather some data to really know where you're starting from with your students. And then you want to find out whether your higher-grade students, so let's say if it was a 1/2 classroom, you want to know if your twos have got all the knowledge and skills around phonics that they needed to learn in grade one. Are they already operating at that higher level or are there some gaps in their knowledge and skills which tells you where to start? Your data will tell you that.
And often, in my experience, the higher up you go in a school, the less instruction students have had around phonics because it's just the nature of schools haven't been doing it intensively for very long. If they have started it, it's often only been a couple of years. The higher up you go, the more gaps appear for students. When you get your data, it might actually be that you're actually starting at quite a similar sort of base with, say, it was ones and twos, with the ones and twos. Which means you're going to have to backfill some areas for your grade twos. They might actually start quite close together to begin with and you might actually be teaching some of the same letter–sound correspondences for students.
If that's the case and you're backfilling, you can still differentiate in the complexity of words you want students to read and spell, but they might still be learning the same sort of content from a progression. And I think this is where it's also really important to know the curriculum well. You need to know what is expected for each of the year levels you're teaching because then you can work out, even if they're starting here together, I can work out what's coming up in the next year that students need to learn in the higher grade that I can slot in and just extend them from what we're learning already. There are some things that fit really well with whatever you need to backfill and you can just extend those older students. You need to know your curriculum well to know where that is, and you can sort of space things out over the year that way.
But there'll also be things, because they're two different year levels, there'll also be things that are just standalone things. If you have to teach the, say it's ones and twos, if you have to teach the ones one thing and the twos something different at certain points, then what you need to do is work out how that's going to work in your phonics lessons. We're talking about phonics here, so how's that going to work in your phonics lessons? And what you might have to do is actually do two explicit teach parts, so two mini explicit teaching sessions within the one lesson. Where that happens, your daily review would stay the same for everyone, so you're not running two completely separate lessons. You can still do your daily review and you can just differentiate. Some slides are for the ones, some slides are for the twos, or this bit of the slide students know is for, it could be a different colour, and certain students do that bit and it's more challenging. Other students do the main bit. You can differentiate daily review in that way.
Then when you get to your explicit teaching, you might have, I'm going to do the explicit teach with the ones first, the twos can do some independent practice, then I'll swap over. Explicit teach with the twos, the ones can do some independent practice. So that's how you can scaffold that. And then your independent practice time would be the same. Everyone's doing that at the same time, then you could still pull out your groups. It's trying to make that work so you're not teaching completely different lessons all the time. You're still trying to combine it in the one lesson.
Sometimes we get this question as well from country schools, where there's smaller class sizes, and it might be prep to three in one grade, and in that case, if you've got preps who can't read and write at all, and you've got grade threes and they're all in the same classroom, sometimes you might just need to run your phonics lessons in small groups and they do run pretty separately. It's really dependent on your context and always driven by your data that you collect, and see where the needs are.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Great, Elaine.
Elaine Stanley:
That was a big one.
Kerrie Shanahan:
A complex answer. But you broke it down really well.
Elaine Stanley:
A great question.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Lots of good tips in there, and as you say in many of your answers, it gets back to the data and where the kids are at.
Elaine Stanley:
That will lead you in terms of the best way.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Q: What adjustments should be made for special needs settings?
Elaine Stanley:
We have actually had our resources used in some special needs settings before with success for students. What we found is it's really about slowing the pace down so you're not moving as quickly. Really slowing down that pace and having that greater level of teacher support in terms of your instruction. The repetition is really supportive of students in the special needs settings, that repetition and consistent lesson structure, so students know exactly what's going to happen in each part of a lesson is really supportive.
What usually happens though is teachers will need to spend a longer time in each phase, so you won't move as quickly, but just higher level of support and longer time in each phase without moving on too quickly. We've also found that it can be helpful because students can really fatigue quickly. It can be really helpful to break sessions up over several points during a day.
You might do your letter–sound correspondence in the morning and then reading words, but you break up the session and maybe do the writing later in the day, so you give them a break in between and come back to it. That can be really helpful just to structure that. And then for some students it might be incorporating pictures, picture clues as well, or some movement in the middle of the lessons. Anything that you find really works for your students that supports them can be incorporated as needed then into that lesson structure. But, I think, again, the SSP, starting from the smallest units and just working up really gradually as slowly as students need, and, also, that EDI structure is so supportive of students in special needs settings as well.
Kerrie Shanahan:
That's right, Elaine. As you say, that repetition and routine, it really helps all students, but especially those special needs settings.
Q: How do we introduce progress monitoring and the response to intervention model to all staff?
Elaine Stanley:
Hopefully, our recording, our webinar, would be helpful to people. If you haven't seen that already, we can put the link in there. Oh, it's already in the chat to Topic 5 actually.
[Lit Hub – add link to all videos from 1st webinar for topic 5?]
Hopefully that would be helpful, because what we did in the webinar was first of all we talked about the areas for assessment, so that can be useful to schools to see if they're assessing in the right areas to inform that progress monitoring and response to intervention sort of model. But, also then we looked at analysing data from a whole-grade perspective, what your whole grade needs in terms of next steps. And then also Tier 2, Tier 3 intervention as well. I'm thinking if you don't want to overload staff all at once, you could actually break that session down and do parts in different staff meetings. That can be supportive just one part at a time, not the whole lot at once.
But other things on top of that, I know schools have introduced to staff by just having maybe a pilot group or one grade that they're doing the progress monitoring with and then collect the data, trial the progress monitoring, analyse the data together and then present back to the rest of the staff. Just introduce it gradually that way. Or even working with staff to just start progress monitoring, but just on five students in their grade, say for a few weeks over a period of time, and then do that response to intervention analysis and see what the data tells them. It's just introducing staff to that gradually, and you want to really make that manageable and not too overloading for staff. And I suppose it's a case of if you're asking staff to take on something new like progress monitoring, what else can sort of give for a good while so that they've got that space and time to really take that on and adopt it. So just a gradual approach.
Kerrie Shanahan:
Yes, that's great Elaine. And just like we do with the students, small chunks and small steps and not everything all at once is probably the way to go there.
Elaine Stanley:
That's right.