 Hey, hi. Just getting started. Nobody's in here yet, so I'm talking to nobody right now. Oh, I got somebody in here. Hello. So I'm going to just wait a couple minutes until we get more people in the room. Hi, everybody who's coming in. Thanks so much for joining me. Hey, I can see some, hey, is it Nicole? I looked at your name on Twitter over and over again. I swore I was going to remember it. And now, now I just see your Twitter handle. So hey, if everybody could just for a couple minutes when we're first getting started, if you wouldn't mind just typing in the comments your name if it isn't obvious by your, yes, hi, Nicole, if it isn't obvious by your Twitter handle, and then we'll just get started in just a couple of minutes. So if you are, hi, Mario. Thanks for coming. Hey, Chris. Hi, Marilyn. This is great. Hi, Cheryl. Hi, Amy. Hi, Susan. In PA, Nicole, I went to Penn State. I know PA pretty well. I even know that people say PA. Hi, Rebecca and Carla. It's great to have you guys here. So hey, Sheila, if you are, if you are just getting on, hey, Marjorie, if you're just getting on to Periscope for the first time, hi, Nancy, because I sent out to my email list this week some instructions and telling people that, hey, you know, I do this thing on Periscope and I'm guessing that there are probably some people who are on here for the very first time. And so let me just do a little bit of teaching to you just so that you understand how this works. So right now I am literally live if you're watching this at 8.30pm Eastern. I am sitting in my back spare room and my kids are in the other room and they could interrupt at any time. Hi, Stephanie. So the way this works is that if you want to comment, there should be a little bar underneath that says say something. I'm on an Android. That's what it says on Android. If it doesn't say that on iPhones, it'll say something similar. And then you'll see these hearts that are rising up occasionally. That is people basically sending me hearts. It's a way of like doing a thumbs up or a like. Thank you for that, for the iPhones. And the way you do it is you just tap the screen. And you can actually tap it over and over again, which is kind of awesome. But that's all that is. And I guess Periscope sort of keeps track of how many hearts I get. So that's what's going on over there. Thank you everybody for all those hearts. And so hang on a second. I just learned how to block users and I just had to do that. I have a friend named Gretchen Schultek who was doing a broadcast earlier this week and had some inappropriate commenters. So I made sure that I knew how to block users this time. So okay, we're going to talk about spelling. And I have gotten three different emails about this from three different teachers over the last year. I got one just the other day and I thought, okay, I have to deal with this. So I decided that I was going to try to answer it. And I've been doing a lot of research today trying to look for the right answers basically. Am I a teacher? I was a teacher. I was a seventh grade teacher for, not seventh grade, middle school teacher for seven and a half years. And then I moved to the university level and I taught teachers for four more years. And now I just do this full time. I have a website called Cult of Pedagogy, which is just all for teachers. It's everything for resources and book reviews and I have a podcast and it's all, I just serve teachers basically. So a lot of teachers have been asking me, what is the best way to teach spelling? And this has been teachers of younger kids and also teachers of older kids. Thank you all so much. And they want to know, I mean, basically this has been the dilemma. They're saying that they are hearing some teachers say that teaching like a traditional sort of spelling list where you give them the words on Monday and you test them on Friday. Some teachers are sort of throwing that out the window saying it doesn't work and then others are standing by it. There are whole school districts who are abandoning, who are abandoning the practice of giving spelling tests, you know, and others who are, you know, really sticking to it. So I decided to try to figure out and a lot of these teachers are saying, I'm not sure some of them are saying, I don't know if I should be giving up the spelling or if we should still be teaching it. Some people feel like they really should still be teaching it. So, so Cheryl, I'm going to answer that. How do I feel about spelling homework? I've got three kids who are in elementary school. And so spelling homework as a parent has sometimes frustrated me just because sometimes I feel like the homework they get is a little bit busy work. I like that they're studying spelling and I think I think it's worthwhile. And I'm going to get into the research in a minute. But my own personal opinion of it has been that I feel like it's kind of a good discipline, but sometimes this year in particular, no, last year too, they were bringing home these things called spelling tic-tac-toes where the student could choose an activity to do with the spelling. And some of the choices I thought were not really going to help them learn how to spell the words right. For example, one of the choices was to write the word in fancy letters and then trace the outline of it in different colors. I didn't see how that was going to help them learn how to spell the words. So I ended up, last year and this year, sort of having to advocate to the teacher, is it okay if I just have them have him write the words and then I'll give him a test and then, you know, I can have him practice a little bit on spelling city and they said, that's fine. I just kind of felt like, yeah, it felt like it was busy work. One of them was to put like rice in a huge tray and trace the words. And I thought, oh, that's going to be a huge mess for me to clean up. And again, I don't know if there's going to be a lot of academic value. So the homework, I didn't necessarily know if there was a lot of value in that. The issue of homework overall is a separate, we'll do a separate post on that or a separate periscope on that because there's a whole lot of stuff out there about that. And I really feel like I kind of like my kids to have some kind of like regular stuff to do. But then again, as a family, it can be very, very inconvenient when they've got activities after school. But let me get into the research on spelling. Okay. Because the reason that teachers are debating about the best way to teach spelling is because my goodness, there is a raging debate out there about it. I shouldn't say raging because it's not like there's a whole lot of current stuff about that, but it's definitely been covered by different researchers. And there are, there are different opinions about it. But what I found were, and I'm going to tell you right now, I found three studies that I think are going to are pretty good. One of them is a meta analysis, which as you probably know, is a study of a whole bunch of other studies. And so this one was done in 2014 and it's a meta analysis of a lot of other studies on spelling instruction. And this is the one I'm going to talk about the most. But if you would like to see these studies, what I've done is I've created a page on my website where you can actually click a link and find stuff. So it's cultofpedagogy.com, my website. And if you're new to this and you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, then after this scope, just look at my profile and it's got a link to my website and then just put slash periscope. And I'm just going to put a link to these studies. So you could actually go right now if you've got a separate device or something like that, cultofpedagogy.com slash periscope. And there I'm going to put a link to these three studies. And so here's what this one in 2014 said. And so if anybody were to ask me, based on what I learned today, sorry, I just got a comment from a friend of mine. Hi, Ben. I was almost ready to block you because I've had a few obnoxious commenters tonight. So, okay, if somebody were to say to me now, hey, you study education, what do you think about spelling homework and spelling lists and that kind of thing? Here's what I would say to them now based on what I have read, I would say that there is more value in studying spelling lists than in not formally studying spelling at all. And this is what this, this main meta analysis has told me today, that they sort of looked at like 52 different studies. And so giving kids spelling lists to study in some sort of a formal way is better for their actual spelling skills than doing nothing at all. And I know that could be kind of a duh thing, but a lot of teachers are feeling like they're, it's kind of pointless for them to give kids any spelling lists at all. And so what, what these studies are saying is that there is benefit. Now, there are better ways of doing it than other, other ways. So one of the things that they say is that it's really important to do the pretesting. And I know a lot of teachers will do this. There's no point in teaching kids spelling words if they already know them. So the practice of pretesting kids on a list, and then adjusting their list based on what they already know, if you're doing that, you are doing that that is in line with good research on teaching spelling. However, one of the things that one of these studies said is, you should also be testing them on the challenge list. So I know like my son, that's he'll, he'll do a pretest, and then he'll get a challenge list. If they, if he did well on the pretest, but I don't think he gets pretested on the challenge list. So, so the words themselves should be chosen carefully. And one of the things I learned about when I was reading this is that the companies or, or if it's a company that has a good reputation spelling test maker companies, they actually do quite a bit of research on what types of words kids tend to use at different grade levels and tend to get wrong at different grade levels. So if it's a well respected company that creates these spelling lists, then that is a good way to go. However, one of the other things that these studies talked about is that the words themselves need to be grouped in a certain way. So for example, one thing that some teachers will do is they'll make thematic lists of spelling words, where it's just a bunch of words that all connect to like, a same topic like these are all words that have to do with Valentine's Day or something like that. That is not going to help the kids get better at spelling. This last comment that just came up, it is much better if the words are in a list with other words that have some sort of a similar pattern. Because then kids can actually study that pattern together, and then they can apply that to other words that are similar. So if the words are chosen at an age appropriate level at words that students are likely to use in their writing, or to attempt to use, and then if they are similar in pattern so that you can actually do word study, which is another topic that a lot of teachers were asking is word study better than doing the list. And what the research is that I'm finding is that you want to kind of do both, give them a list, have them do word study. And if you're not familiar with that is I was not an elementary teacher either. So I kind of had to learn a little bit about it. But my understanding of word list is, is yes, grouping words together with like their families. So if a word and like night and I g h t, and you would have a lot of other words that would have the I g h sound. And then in that same list, you may also have words that have the a u g h like the word laugh. And so that they're kind of looking at how that G h behaves in different words. And then one of the things they can do is do a word sort where they are actually taking this list and looking at the words that have the I g h and the a u g h pattern and the ones that have the different sounds and that's supposed to be very, very beneficial to having the kids be able to recall them later. And then actually yeah and teaching the Latin roots to them to can be very helpful. And one of the things that the research is also showing is that when kids are learned or taught to do that, it actually helps their phonemic awareness so that when they are approaching a brand new word that they've never seen before in their reading, they can actually make a better guess at how it is, how it is pronounced and what the word actually is. So there really is some benefit. There's quite a bit of benefit to formally assessing or teaching spelling. I want to take a look here. Okay, so another thing that several of these studies talked about is that self correction is one of the best strategies for having kids improve their spelling. And they were pretty specific about what that actually meant. They didn't just mean like looking over their paper and like fixing the misspelled words because anybody with logic is going to say, oh, well, how are they going to know it's misspelled if they misspelled it and they don't know how to spell it correctly. But they were talking really about working with the list. And so you sort of give them a practice test and you can even have the kids do this for each other, read the words and then they write them down and then their partner can read the correct spelling to them. Yes, it's immediate feedback that's self directed. So my partner, after I take the test, then my partner will say, okay, this is how number one is spelled. You check it and I look at my own words and the student will read it out loud to me as I go. And they actually said to have them put a dot underneath every letter that's in the exact right sequence and put like a circle if something is missing. And they said that this self correcting is really, really valuable for students to really learn the spelling of the word. Another thing that they mentioned in here that actually reminded me of a book study I did last summer called Make It Stick. Make It Stick is a fantastic book and I talk about it on my website. If you go to where I talk about books, you'll see it. It talks about how people learn, basically the neuroscience of how people learn. And one of the things they talk about a lot is frequent testing. Yeah. Frequent testing. Testing has got such a bad, bad name right now in the world because they, people equate it with standardized tests. But the actual act of quizzing somebody on their knowledge, informally quizzing them, low stakes, no grade. The act of trying to recall the information is so valuable in terms of actually burning that information into your neural pathways. So with spelling, here is how you do it. Instead of just giving the list of words to the kids at the beginning of the week and saying study it or draw it in rice or whatever, you can actually have them like give each other practice tests. You know where you just say, don't look at the words. We're going to give you just like three or four of these words or something like that. The ones, you pick out the ones that you think are hardest. Okay. Look at them really carefully. Say them really slowly and then turn your paper over and have your partner read you and try, just try to remember how to spell and actually trying to write it out. Thank you so much for all these recommendations. These are fantastic. Anybody who's watching this in the in the in the replay will be able to catch those. So these are wonderful. So anyway, the act of trying to recall how to spell it and attempting it, it is actually helping that child remember how to spell it. Even if they spell it wrong, they're going to have that immediate feedback as soon as they see the correct spelling. And then they're going to be like, okay, no, and they'll make that correction and it will help them learn how to spell the word better. So here's the stuff I don't know yet. And I was looking and looking for research on this because I have my own suspicions. And I want to know what you think about this too. Word searches and crossword puzzles. I don't know how much value there is in there. And I and I looked for research and I could find some that I thought was there. But then it was kind of like, eh, I feel like word searches don't do anything. I mean, I guess they kind of can help the student pay a little bit more attention to the order of the letters. But compared to the amount of time they take, really, and the payoff, it doesn't seem like it's necessarily worth it. I think that I think that it kids like doing it because it's fun. But I don't know if it's valuable in terms of helping them learn how to spell the words. And I just I just would love to see somebody do a more careful study of that. Because I think I think it's a really common practice, especially wish to me I think might even be worse is make your own word search, have the kids make it them because again, that seems like more more busy work. It seems like it could be like a bonus activity for and a couple people are saying that word searches are not good for students with dyslexia and learning disabilities. So I think that's a that's really important to know. And that's something I have very little experience with. Hey, Panthers D1 Oh D 100. I know what you guys are you from that blogging group. Hey, OK, I want to talk about reading in general really quick in terms of spelling. I am a really good speller except for the typos in general that are mistakes. But in terms of knowing how to spell stuff. And I firmly believe that 90% of my spelling ability came from the fact that I just read a lot. Now here's the thing. There are probably a lot of people who were voracious readers and still cannot spell their way out of a paper bag. Here's the thing. Different stuff works for different kids. So all kids need to be reading for pleasure widely at lots of different levels. They should be reading at their own level, but I just heard something the other day about a kid who said they wish they could read at different levels in my own son says this. He wishes he could occasionally pick a book that's a little bit lower than his level because it's stuff that he wants to read. And it's interesting and that's still exposure over and over again to correct words and correct punctuation. And so I can't see how that would hurt anybody. And I really do believe that one of the reasons if we're seeing more spelling issues, it's because we're doing way too much close sort of test prep types of reading and not just enough exposure to just text for pleasure and just regular old reading. So I do believe that that is the way that kids really do become very, very good spellers and no amount of formal study can really replace that. But as for the answer of should I be teaching spelling formally, I think the research says yes, but I do think there are better ways of doing it and there are not so good ways of doing it. So if this is a topic that's interesting to you and you would like to read a little bit more about it, if you go to my website cultofpedagogy.com slash periscope, I'm going to start putting links from my periscopes in there so that people can find them. There, there are three studies on it. It's just a Google doc that I'm linking you to that you can then go to and they're they're kind of long. One of them you actually have to have a subscription or you have to get through a university. And that's another topic I'd like to talk about. Why is it so dang hard to get a hold of university research without paying $49 for a PDF? Yeah. Thanks for the hearts on that one. So that just drives me nuts. I mean, if we're supposed to learn about what's going on in academia, we have to have access to it. Anyway, so I should put a sticky you know what I should put a sticky wall like I tried one time to hold a sign up. Apparently I'm reversed on this. So it came up backwards. I felt like such a tool when I put it up. But I'll figure out a way to do that next time. But it's okay. So I think I am going to head out now. That is the best I've got right now with spelling. I really think that I think one of the things I'm planning on doing with some of these periscopes is they're almost like rough drafts of future blog posts. I did one a couple of weeks ago about working with slow readers. Oh, that's good information. Oh, okay, that's good information. Thank you. Sorry. And I'm now going to turn that into a blog post because I got so many good suggestions just from the comments that and so I may do a blog post once I can get a little bit more feedback on the research on spelling. But I do think that in general the jury says, yes, you should formally teach it. There are a lot of benefits to it. But learn a little bit, definitely lean more toward the word families, the word sorts, not just random lists, pre test kids and have them do the sort of self correction. That's one of the best ways to do it. Thank you all so much for coming. I'm really, really enjoying this. I don't know. I don't know why I just really like doing it. So okay, have a great week. I will be back next Tuesday with something else. That's it. Now I have to again figure out how to turn myself off. Thank you. See you later.