In today's episode, recorded live at the CEC 100th Anniversary, sit down with Dr. Holly Lane. Dr. Lane is an Associate Professor of Special Education at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on literacy intervention and prevention of reading difficulties through effective early literacy instruction and teacher education. She has conducted studies of tutoring interventions, increasing access to books in children's homes from low-income families, and teacher knowledge of literacy. If that is not impressive enough, she has also worked on projects to study reading intervention in juvenile correctional facilities and develop teachers' professional development materials.
Tune in as Drs. Rebecca Hines and Lisa Dieker honor, celebrate, and reflect on Dr. Lane's career, the Council of Exceptional Education (CEC) 's past 100 years while also thinking ahead to the future.
Don't forget we love to hear from our listeners! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. We look forward to receiving your questions on our Google Phone (407) 900- 9305, Facebook (Practical Access), Twitter (@AccessPractical), or Instagram (@Practical_Access).
In today's episode, recorded live at the CEC 100th Anniversary, sit down with Dr. Holly Lane. Dr. Lane is an Associate Professor of Special Education at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on literacy intervention and prevention of reading difficulties through effective early literacy instruction and teacher education. She has conducted studies of tutoring interventions, increasing access to books in children's homes from low-income families, and teacher knowledge of literacy. If that is not impressive enough, she has also worked on projects to study reading intervention in juvenile correctional facilities and develop teachers' professional development materials.
Tune in as Drs. Rebecca Hines and Lisa Dieker honor, celebrate, and reflect on Dr. Lane's career, the Council of Exceptional Education (CEC) 's past 100 years while also thinking ahead to the future.
Don't forget we love to hear from our listeners! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. We look forward to receiving your questions on our Google Phone (407) 900- 9305, Facebook (Practical Access), Twitter (@AccessPractical), or Instagram (@Practical_Access).
Rebecca Hines 0:07
Welcome to practical access. I'm Lisa Dieker. And I'm Rebecca Heinz. And Lisa, today, we have a friend who's right down the road.
Lisa Dieker 0:18
introduce our guest. Yeah. So welcome, Holly late. Professor, University of Florida. We're so excited to have you, Holly. Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. Yeah. And Holly is not only literacy guru, but she's the director of the US literacy Institute, also known as you fly. And we go way back in just really following in and respectful and celebratory of all of the impact you've made for kids who struggle as readers. So thank you for that work. Thank you so much. We try. Yeah. So I think that's really going to be our first question, thinking it your career to this point? What are you most excited about in the work that you've done or the impact that you've made?
Dr. Holly Lane 0:57
Well, I guess, probably the most important thing to me is helping teachers become more confident and therefore more successful in their capacity to help kids and you're reading,
most of us would agree is one of the most important things that kids need to learn how to do in school. And for kids who are struggling with that, that has a huge impact on kids. And so, ultimately, if teachers know what to do, and feel good, that they are confident, and that they can be effective, then kids are much more likely to learn. And kids who learn how to read are going to be more successful, and it's in school and as adults.
Rebecca Hines 1:42
So how like, we're all in the in the practice of helping prepare people to be those good teachers so that kids can acquire those skills. So kind of off the bat, let's think about what what would you say are two practical things that a teacher can do? A young teacher, a new teacher, when they realize that a student is struggling as a reader? Yeah, so really, one of the most important things is to pinpoint what what is the problem.
Dr. Holly Lane 2:11
So a lot of the work that we do is theoretically grounded on a pretty easy to understand theory, called the simple view of reading. And the simple view of reading is depicted as a mathematical formula, which kind of makes it interesting as a reading, reading theory, but it's D times LC equals RC, so d is decoding, you've got to be good at decoding. LC is linguistic comprehension, you have to be able to understand the spoken language. And those two things. There, it's times there's a multiplication factor in there because
that reading comprehension is a product of decoding and linguistic comprehension. So if you do the math, and either one of those things is missing, you maybe have great language skills, you can talk and understand when you're spoken to very well. But you can't decode you have zero in that slot in the equation, then reading comprehension is going to be zero. And the reverse is true. Maybe you can decode really well, but you've got really weak linguistic comprehension, you don't have very good vocabulary or something like that's interfering, then you're going to have weak comprehension as well. So understanding that is really important. So
typically, struggling readers are identified with their problems in reading comprehension. And if a teacher doesn't know what to do, what they typically go to is let's teach comprehension strategies. And that's almost never the right choice. Right? So going back in the equation and figuring out well, is it a decoding problem? Is it a linguistic comprehension problem? Or is it both? Sometimes it's both and those kids tend to have the most difficult to
remediate kinds of problems? So that's one of the main things I think, is understanding what goes into proficient reading and figuring out how to pinpoint where the problem is. And then once you've pinpointed the problem, it's a lot easier to tackle, right? One thing to know is that
a much larger percentage of kids who struggle struggle on the decoding side of the equation, so around 90%, in fact, of struggling readers struggling decoding, around 20% of those also struggling linguistic comprehension. And then there's another very small around 10% of struggling readers who struggle only on the linguistic comprehension side. So if you then learn effective strategies for teaching foundational reading skills, teaching kids how to read words, then for the vast majority of kids, you're going to be able to help them solve their problems.
Lisa Dieker 4:56
So what about that kid so I'm a parent, I'm a teacher. that that solution, you know, doesn't work. I know you've been doing lots of great curriculum development and interventions for kids and parents to think about, what what is the go to when when you know, that treatment just doesn't doesn't get us where we want to go? Where do we go next?
Dr. Holly Lane 5:19
Well, I mean, I think, mostly going back and figuring out is this the most effective form of the intervention that I can be providing. So I would never encourage anyone to just give up and go a different route, if there's still a chance that you can actually address the difficulty. But for some kids that, you know, it's not reading is not gonna be in their card, you know, and so finding a good accommodation to meet their needs is going to be the next step. So if you've got kids who have been through years and years of decoding intervention and still can't decode, or they've been through years and years of well supported effective linguistic comprehension intervention, and they're still not understanding and figuring out other ways to help them learn what they need to learn in school without reading, and in the meantime, you can use those accommodations, to keep kids up to speed. So if you've got a student, say, third, or fourth grader, who is expected to learn a lot through reading in their social studies, or science classes, but they're struggling with decoding, you don't want them to fall behind in the content and developing their knowledge because they can't read the word. So using strategies like text to speech kind of software, so that the text reader can help them keep up is a really important strategy.
Lisa Dieker 6:47
And I love that, you know, don't don't give up too fast. But make sure it's evidence based. Like I love that, that you keep saying that, because I think that's the mistake is a lot of kids get, you know, every every experience that I can provide them was decoding, but they were all wrong and bad. So yeah.
Dr. Holly Lane 7:04
And I would also say, Don't get hung up on a program. There are some programs that I hear, you know, the parent is demanding that you use this program, well, there isn't a magic, you know, key to solving the problem in one particular program. And I don't, it's not the program, it's the instructional methods and the content of those methods that are important. You know, in our teacher preparation program, one of my mottos mantras is that I want my teacher candidates to be program independent, I want them to have the knowledge and skills so where whatever district they go to whatever program is put in their hands, because teachers very seldom have choice in what curriculum they're using, whatever curriculum they're handed, they can make it as effective as it can be for every kid in their classroom. Because there isn't a program that doesn't require teacher expertise as part of it. And so to have the the capacity to tweak it in the correct places and figure out where it's lacking and solve those problems for kids is where the teacher comes in.
Rebecca Hines 8:21
Right. And you know that that's so true that we don't know what program anyone is going to have out there. Or if they're even going to have a specific program, in some cases.
Dr. Holly Lane 8:31
In a lot of cases. Yeah. So let's so
Rebecca Hines 8:35
can you break it down to just one simple and I am going to go with decoding? Lisa. So 90% of the students who struggle have decoding issues, and I'm a teacher who, wow, I haven't I haven't looked at the reading stuff in a bit. Do you have anything simple, I can try to get started.
Dr. Holly Lane 8:54
I don't know if I call it simple. But it's it, it boils it down. It's pretty concise. So actually, we, we have three things that we say, when we're doing our training for field experience tutoring for our early students, what we tell them is that they need to be good at three things in order to be effective tutors. So the first one is sounds. You'd be astonished how many adults in how many teachers even don't know the sounds of their letters. And not to say that they don't know a sound true letter. It's just not the sound that is actually used. And so what I mean by that is, is knowing blendable sounds. So if you've learned, for example, that B says BA, and you're going to try to decode a word like big, you're going to decode it like Ba, ba, ba, and you're good. What is that Bottega? I don't know that word. So you need to learn a sound that can be blended and so a better sound instead of BA or B would be If you say, a big, big, big Oh, that then then you can say, Oh, I know what that word is. And that is such a critical piece. So learning blendable sounds, and then learning a strategy for helping kids segment the sounds in language so that they can write those sounds. And also that helps them decode. So we do a lot of our decoding instruction through encoding, which is spelling. So the better you can spell a word, the better you're going to be able to read the word. So the strategy that we typically use is called L Conan boxes. And l. Conan was just a Russian psychologist that was his name, a person who developed this strategy. But l Conan boxes give you a way to segment the sounds in a word and practice that segmentation of getting, being able to break that word big into big cat and to act and be able to say each sound. And then you need a strategy for manipulating letters. So we use magnetic letters all the time, and being able to spell that word cat. And then for the teacher to be able to say, well, if I changed the cat to a, can you put a new letter there? What What word is that? And have the child read the word? Those strategies, if you can say your sounds right, you can teach kids to segment the sounds and then to blend the sounds together. And also using ways to use letters and manipulating those letters in order to encode words and decode words.
Rebecca Hines 11:38
That's perfect. I feel like I just took the class. I literally just took notes, you guys.
Lisa Dieker 11:42
Yeah. That's the power of holly. In the world of reading. Yeah. And all I kept thinking, and this is just for a quick laugh is, you know, my mother and my mother in law, always say Warsh, and like there is no. But again, it's a good example of, of, you know, not being a decoding task. And again, if you have anybody else in your life that does that, it's it is one of those words that
Dr. Holly Lane 12:06
I run into that all the time there where it's, that's a perfectly valid pronunciation of that word. And a lot of people pronounce it that way. And we, we all hear teachers say, Well, you know, my kids are misspelling the word tree, because they're spelling it with the CH and there's, you don't hear a CH and tree and like, Well, yeah, you do, when we. So understanding phonemes This is really crazy thing is that when teachers define the word phoneme, they think of it as the smallest unit of sound and language. But when linguist the people who actually study phonemes define phoneme, they say, Yes, it is the smallest unit of sound, but it's also the physical act used to produce that sound. And when you're producing a sound like a T, followed by an R, you do the things with your lips, you're rounding your lips into basically a CH. And when I'm hearing teachers tell kids, no, you're saying it wrong? No, they're saying it like most people say, you know, and so we really need to be aware of that, that, you know, dialogue, dialectical differences, accent differences are just differences in they're all okay. And that that's a really a common thing that kids and teachers run into is just, they're pronouncing things differently. And they need to figure out how to connect that phoneme that sound with the grapheme or the letters in the word. And if they say it differently, then that's what they're connecting.
Lisa Dieker 13:37
That's fine. So fast forward, you know, 1500 years, somewhere in there, I'll let you decide were thinking about all the work you've done and your vision, and I know that hard work you're still doing in your center. What do you hope it looks like for the reading teacher of the future?
Dr. Holly Lane 13:55
Well, one of the things that I'm on a mission to do is to improve teacher preparation and reading. I feel like most teachers feel like I felt, which is, I didn't learn how to teach reading in my teacher preparation program. And unfortunately, that's not just common. It's the vast majority of teachers feel that way. I thought it was me. It was years before I realized that I was not the exception, I was the rule. And so making sure that teachers while they're preparing to be teachers, learn the science of reading. And the science of reading includes content from linguistics and understanding, you know, phonology and phonetics, but also understanding syntax and semantics. And that's the content of reading instruction. So learning linguistics, but also knowing the psychology, the cognitive psychology about learning and understanding the neuroscience what's going on in the brain. I don't, they don't have to become brain scientists, but they need to understand that we do know thought about what's going on in the brain when we're reading. And so having that background, beyond just the pedagogy from education research, understanding the research from this whole big body of science, about reading is, I think critical. And so if teacher preparation programs can include that that alone will make so much bigger of a dent in the reading problem that we have than any new curriculum or anything else could do. Making sure that teachers know what they need to know to be successful.
Lisa Dieker 15:33
All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Holly. We appreciate it. And if you have any questions, you can tweet us at Access practical or you can post them on our Facebook page. Thank you again, Holly.
Dr. Holly Lane 15:44
Thank you. It's been my pleasure.