I have used SWI with struggling learners who couldn’t learn with phonics for 9 years. Children who were stuck on three letter words for years started learning to read and spell. They learn beginning suffixes before they make sense of short vowels when morphology and phonology are taught together. Learning the morphology leads to them to learning the phonology over time. This is in line with the research that reported morphology instruction led to increased phonological awareness ability without directly targeting phonological awareness skills. If you want to teach to the middle use phonics if you want to reach all learners use SWI. By the way I think Pete was gracious to continue after being interrupted so many times. He wasn’t able to finish and make his point and your comments indicated your misunderstanding and prevented the listener from following the topic.

As a tutor who often meets kids after years of failed phonics first school intervention I have some thoughts. First, many of my students know how to sound out words letter by letter without any regard to graphemes (digraph, trigraph, consonant blends and clusters or vowel glides) or vowels that may be affecting preceding graphemes. But if they are a somewhat adept reader, their spelling is phonetic...that's cognitive overload. When writing a sentence and paying attention to what one is writing and how to form the letters and then spelling, they often resort to sounding it out which fails. To correct I might ask, what do you mean, and if they've studied with me, they often see their errors. One speaker expressed hesitation about spelling out a word by letter names as it can confuse a kid for spelling empty or enter. If you have taught kids how to spell out a word by "graphemes" not letters, they have an awareness of what grapheme choices. Also, do letters ever write "their name". Where would they get that idea? Does phonics terminology still teach (or teachers still teach) "silent e" or "magic e" as making the vowel before it "say its name". I once asked a 5th grade student what <ea> is writing in "break". We had the word in front of us, and he said "e". I then said "break". His response: "Wait a minute. My teacher told me that when two vowels go a walking, the first one does the talking." Don't teach something you will have to unteach later. The idea that kids are not ready for prefixes and suffixes in Pre-k - first grade is preposterous. If you ask a kid to redo something, do they know what you mean? If you don't know, ask them. I've never had a kid that has not said "do it again". We have morphological awareness through speech. A kid knows that when you have more than one cat, you have cats verbally. They also know that if you have more than one coffee mug you have mugs. If you show them the spelling, they have the flexibility to see that <s> is writing two different phonemes in those words but the morpheme is the same. My issue with heart words or irregular words is this: they are irregular only based on exceptions to a phonics rule. The whole "I before e" rule has to do with <ei> writing "e" when followed by a <c>...or writing "a" in neighbor and weigh. Alternatively, one can teach the bound <ceive> bound base morpheme and its connections to <cept> bound base morpheme and the underlying meaning connection. And with neighbor and weigh, we can teach about the <igh> trigraph and what it writes when it is the only vowel grapheme in the word and what it writes when it is preceded by another vowel letter. That requires a little knowledge about Old English etymology and may need to investigations in other Old English words and graphemes. I've been volunteering in a preschool class to observe a structured introduction into the written language and I see how we set kids for frustration and a lifelong belief that English spelling is "crazy" by introducing letters and sounds in isolation and when we limit them to CVC words. If a child knows what the word "leap" means, he should be taught how to spell it and read it and not by teaching them that <ea> writes "e" but it can write it and then later when it doesn't they aren't surprised.

Why are you bashing Pete? This came out very accusatory towards him even if that was not your intention. SWI is a great method once you learn and understand in. I've been trained in OG and also use SWI. SWI takes word learning to a whole other level.

It's a bit of a shame Pete didn't get to finish the example of teaching I-N-G to the fourth-grader, at it's very revealing. (He does discuss it in other videos, with video footage.) The boy could not remember letter names to save himself, but took to suffixes like I-N-G like a duck to water, and very proudly displayed his growing list of suffixes and prefixes at home. His teacher was amazed that he was suddenly grasping the letter names and identifying prefixes and suffixes in words and successfully reading out longer words. The grouping of letters together, along with morphology study, seemed to be the key to helping this boy out of his dyslexic ditch.

It is so important that teachers keep learning about the English language and how children acquire language. If we're open to incorporating new knowledge into our schema, then info like this isn't a threat to our teaching, it is simply putting tools in our teaching toolbox. I love this stuff. (And I love your podcast.)

I don't find Bowers convincing on why we think what we think. I believe him when he says that he isn't doing morphology training, he is doing SWI training. A lot of his people all bash phonics. They insist that phonics is evil. That doesn't come out of nowhere. I also feel that he creates strawmen.

🤓 Well that clarified many things…

Mic drop “th” “e”

The work of Lynn Erickson on Concept-Based unit planning and later Julie Stern as well fits with this.

I am shocked that morphology didn't impact comprehension considering it assists with meaning.

Thank you for this! This conversation is wonderful on so many levels. Looking forward to learning more about LIFTER and IOWA's work.

I really appreciate the variety of guests and the depth of knowledge your guests have. I was suprised to learn that Dr. Danielle worked with the Bowers brothers, glad I listened to the entire talk to hear her perspective. My take away is that we need to connect all learning for our students (reading/writing/math/geography/social studies) to the content they are learning that year. Thank you for your work and love for literacy learning. I love morphology and the idea of making young students aware of it through oral language. I teach it as an initial lesson and throughout my instruction. Seeing, hearing smelling, tasting, touching, stressing the /ing/ is the repeating sound pattern in each of these words, and each word has a free base. From there talking about the meaning of these words and using the head to point to each of the 5 senses. Assessing thier knowledge of initial, final and medial sounds in each of these words with gems of 2 colors, blue for consonants and white for vowels, then asking them to attach the sounds to letters. On another note I love asking them to create a sentence using a base word with varaible suffixes, for example a sentence for jump/jumping/jumped/jumps or a simple noun like cat/cats. Some can do so easily but some cannot, telling me that there is work to be done with oral language comprehension. I think I've digressed. Just thankful for your work!

Judy ALWAYS hits the heart and asks the key question. Morphology is import and and I learned a ton. Now how much of my literacy time should focus on this?❤Judy❤

Improved Spelling does not necessarily improve reading like decoding does because decoding is part of the reading process. Spelling requires brain and auditory processing without any letter or word clues in front of the student

Great discussion. I would love to have heard Danielle's views on S2P vs P2S. Does anyone know if she's spoken about it elsewhere?

Can you please post the Google Doc on your LinkedIn feed? I will repost.

I loved his discussion regarding "mix and match" from a variety of programs. For a while I was against doing this because I felt like I was messing with the fidelity of the program. However, I am now operating from a "fidelity to the evidence" perspective. Is this working for THIS kid? If it is not, we need to trust our professional judgement enough to move on without feeling the "fidelity firing squad" is waiting for us 😂

Cheers for Judy!! We think they won’t get it - but they CAN!!

I believe there is value to understanding some rules and syllable structures, but it seems they are most helpful after students have mapped some words to which they can relate the rule, and then carry it forward in new words. I also think these should be pointed out and not left for students to discover. But as students are first learning to read I find it is a lot to process and can overwhelm the system in terms of developing fluency and comprehension. It's like trying to teach it ALL at once, but perhaps it can be learned better in stages. Re "God will help them." Yes, through the people (teachers) in their life!

I believe spelling rules are only helpful if they help the student. When you make it a lesson that has to work for everyone that's the problem. I think when you partner rules with etymology and morphology it makes more sense than just in isolation. We need to stop expecting all students to be neurotypical. Obviously 20% of the classroom will be neurodivergent.

Many programs are good enough. Don’t arm another spending spree. Use what we have and strengthen instruction

UFLI is the only program that I know of that is both research AND evidence-based.

Great discussion! Thank you for sharing the information, I hope the suit is a step in the right direction.

DI has an insane amount of research behind it, literally all the programs to some degree. Look at Jean Stockard's latest book, which is the largest metanalysis ever, literally. Nate Joseph can eat his heart out on this one. It is mind boggling how well these DI programs work in all key areas of foundational knowledge. Glad to see Zach out there talking them up, not sure why it hasn't caught on more in the larger "SoR" community when Zig had all this figured out back in the 60's and research is only starting to catch up to him. As Zack mentions, What Works Clearinghouse has absurd and non-scientific parameters, which Stockard goes into in depth in her work that is worth the price of admission. It should be on any serious "SoR" readers list and Seidenberg should be first in line for a copy if those are the comments he is making about quality materials. I've seen what Zach talks about and have found DI programs shoved into cupboards behind hoards of random worksheets and other nonsense. Meanwhile I have to move in to clean up a mess left in the prior teacher's wake. It's a travesty. So much money, time, effort, and lives utterly wasted. I listened to a talk from someone in the precision teaching community recently about all of this. Their main takeaway was that we need to start putting more effort into POLICY changes. Make some actual STANDARDS and have ACCOUNTABILITY, without reservation. If we put too much effort in programs and publishers, once a leader or this or that teacher leaves, all their work goes up in smoke. I've seen it in programs I've built and it's unfortunate but to be expected when the profession has no real professional acumen to it.

Also, you can have Explicit Instruction and not be 100% DI. Isn't there a a wide gap between constructivism versus DI.

Emily Hanford was writing about 3-cueing before Covid, and even before Sold a Story. I thought that I would write it.

Stretch text! With feedback and support 💖

We used to take reading tests every year. I was always way, way above reading level of my grade.

I think a lot depends on the individual teacher and the individual student.

What is phonics instruction?

So interesting and valuable.

Who, what, where, when and why.

Is there a money back guarantee? 😊

There is nothing mysterious about teaching reading. It was done in classrooms since the very creation of universal schooling before any of us - or our parents - were born. Putting aside disabilities, children in the normal range of intelligence can pick up reading to a reasonable level in a classroom of 30 students if the teacher has control of the room and if the students don't bring in anti-social behavior. I don't need a study to know this, because both my parents and I are the product of that truth. There may be an even better way than we experienced, but what has been widely used over decades now is obviously worse. Two factors have been doing the greatest harm to reading education in recent decades - educational 'reform' (yes, those are scare quotes) and the general breakdown of social order in society. Teachers can't produce competent readers if they're being attacked in the classroom with impunity by their students, and education school reform-for-reform-sake ideology have combined to put students years behind in reading ability, and have produced a generation of college students who don't read books - ever. Thank you for letting me rant.

I find this professor a joke. This assessment requires extensive training, and knowledge, in how to assess and analyze the results. This reading of science movement is politically motivated. Everybody, adult or child, learn to read by using meaning, structural and visual information. Running records will always show us what a child is doing. That's a fact and for anyone to tell you anything differently is either ignorant or not knowledgeable in a child's reading behaviors. That former reading recovery teacher was explaining my point at times....most general teachers do not have the knowledge, or the educated patience, to understand how a child processes text.

That's very good content ❤❤

This has to be my favorite episode I learned so much ! Thank you !

Loved this episode ladies! Fabulous guests 👏

What does he mean by precision teaching? I know some terminology is different than the US.

The program is a tool! 🙌

Precision Teaching needs to be more widely understood and used. My son had a very effective experience with it, even though I had reservations about the timing element and anxiety. Sadly, the only place that offers it here is not recognized by my state for interventions.

Brilliant conversation - every teacher should listen.

This is where we're going in Ontario. I'd love your thoughts on it. www3.ohrc.on.ca/sites/default/files/FINAL%20R2R%20REPORT%20DESIGNED%20April%2012.pdf

Love the discussion about the value of non-examples. Seeing high quality writing is important, but contrasting that with poor writing is also helpful. We can learn from mistakes, but they don't need to be our own. Experiencing the confusion poor writing can create, evaluating the issue and improving it can develop deep understanding of the writing task. Fabulous episode. Thank you Dr. Kim.

As a 1st grade teacher I love watching y’all’s videos. In reference to your comment about his article not containing a practical application piece..I do think every researcher should include that. Even if their article isn’t written FOR educators/practitioners..their ultimate goal should be for application and the impact in a student’s life. Otherwise what’s the point of them researching? So yes-we need the application piece also in every blog piece, every article, every post. And if a researcher can’t give that..well, that’s a big problem..lol

The Direct instruction people have manuals for ALL of this and then some. They also have 50 years of evidence to back it up. You should talk to some of them on your show. Most people are just reinventing the wheel they put into motion during the 60's. Dr. Young Kim is awesome by the way. She really knows her field.

Can you please link the referenced article by Leslie L about the baseball study? Thank you.

Thank you for sharing this interesting conversation! It's great having a platform that looks critically at the system, with the goal of improving the way we teach reading.

I just started the course through Literacy I.O. Not only is Kay super informative, she is a hoot! Love her comparison about offering strategies and her son choosing a place to eat! So excited for this course and to deepen my knowledge of most effective instruction in comprehension!!! Thank you for sharing about it!

The Literacy View, your channel is a gem, can we be friends