 Welcome, this is the education community in the Vermont House of Representatives on May 19th, and we are welcoming in three students from the University of Vermont, Vermont, who have looked at reading proficiency for us at the request of representative Austin. Representative Austin, do you want to just tell us about your process on this. Rowan, did you want to say something. Yes, I was just going to mention that the way that we wrote this report was a, it was collaborative and so all three of us were working on it so if you don't mind. We'll kind of be going back and forth to explain different sections the sections that we worked on and the ones we know best so we can give you the best overview of the research that we've done. Thank you that sounds great. So, Hannah would you like are you starting or. Yeah. Hi guys, I'm Hannah. I'm a junior here at EVM but I'm actually graduating this Friday so I'm very excited about that. And Maron and I are part of a Vermont legislative research class, and we put together this report on literacy methods for pre K through three students at the request of representative Austin, and we started off by looking at academic literature, and books about what practices in literacy work the best and gave a report of that. And the big focus of our court is that only 37% of Vermont students in grade four are literate so it's very important that we get it right with the literacy so we're going to move into some definitions to start. Oh, who's ever next. So first out or first I made nearly thank you for having us this afternoon. It's a pleasure to be able to come and speak with you guys. First of all we're going to be talking about the reading wars because that's kind of the frame in which this whole battle is taking place. And basically, it's been occurring for at least 40 years, some research, some researchers considered to go back even longer than that. So there's two different arguments for either a phonics or a whole language approach to teaching children how to read. And obviously, this is a big battle, and why we're doing this report, and essentially to put it in simpler terms, the debate is about whether teaching kids should be about vocab and phonics or a whole language approach, where you identify words in your everyday life, and then sort of from that. So, the two camps are phonics, and then whole language. So phonics is about like chunks of the word, like C, H, or AE, what sounds those make. And it's very structured hence it's going to be used in structure literacy. So that's. Hannah, can you speak up a bit. Yeah, sure. It's hard to hear you. Okay. Thank you. So you have the phonics approach which focuses on the chunks of the words and how they sound, and that's focused on getting kids to recognize how a word is actually constructed. And then you also have the whole language approach, which is less, there's less methodology to it more just kind of like how kids learn to talk, they'll learn to read by reading by reading books and by being put in situations where they're confronted with language, they will learn how to read. And before we move on to explaining structured literacy and balance literacy, which are essentially these two camps, I just wanted to say something briefly about the science of reading, which is a scientifically based research that's been going on for 15 years. The most important part I think is that it's interdisciplinary so it focuses not only on education research but also on neuroscience and linguistics and many different ways of understanding how to read. And so the science of reading is, it includes experiments and observation that's been going on for the past 50 years, and all the research is peer reviewed and published in journals. And so it is legitimate research that we were using to put in this report to describe all the different methods that we found. And the science of reading, the main goal is to understand why people have a hard time reading, how to best help them and then develop the best practices and methods to address reading issues, literacy issues, and just make sure that kids are able to read the best way that they can. Thank you. I will go forward with speaking a little bit more in detail about structured literacy, which was obviously the topic of the request brought to us by representative Austin. So, what I used for the definition was put forth by Lewis Spear Swirling, she's a professor of the Department of Special Education and Southern Connecticut University. To begin structured literacy includes explicit and systematic sequential teaching of literacy at multiple levels. So this means phonemes, letter sound relationships, syllable patterns, morphemes, vocabulary, sentence structure, paragraph structure as well as text structure. So this is a cumulative practice and it constantly takes ongoing review, which is the structured part of this you can hop back to wherever students may have gone awry or didn't learn completely one of the lessons so you can go back to that and help them go forth with it. This takes the use of carefully chosen examples and non examples typically put forth by reading experts and they have different specific books you can give to these kids, which emphasize certain letter sound relationships and vocabulary things and this includes quite a bit. And further you want to teach the kids the decodable text, and then prompt corrective feedback, and it also involves a lot of teacher and student interaction so the teachers really have to be able to care for the needs of the students as well. If you have any questions about the phonemes or the more specific vocabulary that I use in that I have some definitions as well that I can run through. I think we've actually spent a bit of time on that this year so I think we're in the structure, the different structures. So, yeah. It's not normal conversational language so we understand this specific terms that have very specific meanings. Absolutely. Further I'll just go on to mention a couple of the bigger studies that I had used throughout our research and the first one was citing Carol A. Denton. And this was a 2010 study conducted in 31 elementary schools, and it looked to compare the differences between typical school practices and responsive reading instruction and responsive reading instruction can really just be replaced with structured literacy and the programs that go along with that when you implement it. And the purpose of the study was to look at different differences in phenomic awareness, word identification, phenomic decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension as well as oral fluency. And the study found that on average those who received the RRI or responsive reading instruction were placed in the 25th percentile and oral reading fluency. And in contrast, those who just received the typical school practices placed in the 18th percentile. Further, 40% of the students in the RRI group tested out of special educations after the study was conducted. Those that were a part of the RRI group, as well as it helped with at risk learners or at risk English learners more specifically. And that's when you have just certain students who may not have English as their first language and then they struggle a little bit more obviously because learning a second language certainly can be difficult, especially when you put in different cultural settings, as well as everything that can go along with that. But this isn't to say that structured literacy is exactly perfect. Some experts do warn against strictly phonics based approaches. It's common within structured literacy programs, and this is just an opinion from the national panel for reading that concluded its report by saying systematic phonics instruction should be integrated with other reading instruction. Phonics should not become the dominant component in the reading program, neither in the amount of time developed, devoted to it, nor in the significance attached. It's important to evaluate children's reading competence in many ways, not only their phonetic skills, but also their interest in books and their ability to understand information that is read to them. And that's, that's a bit on a structured literacy. Thank you. We definitely spent some time looking at that. So appreciate that. Thank you. So then I covered balance literacy, which Adam was kind of talking about how at the end of that structured literacy shouldn't be the only thing that is used and balance literacy is said to be this compromise between structured literacy and the whole language approach. So they're supposed to cover each other's shortcomings. So when you are learning how to read and you might know how to sound out a word, the whole language would provide you with the context of what that word means in reading. So balance literacy is seen as a compromise between those two ideas. However, it's not well studied because it's just this blend of the two. There's no specifics on how much structured literacy and how much whole language is actually used. So there's not a lot of academic research out there about how balance letter, but balance literacy performs against structured literacy and some scholars condemn it saying that it's just the new whole word approach. But then others would also argue that it's not a problematic idea. It's a good idea. It's just been executed poorly. And we need to have more definitive guidelines for teachers so that they know how to teach both structured literacy and whole language literacy to have that actual truly blend approach. Sorry, it's having trouble with the button there. I wanted to just mention a couple of different subsets of both of these approaches to teaching literacy. There are a lot of different methods out there. Some of them are really good. Some of them have research behind them and some of them don't. I chose two that are that are different. Different from what I've seen and some of them just have a little bit modification on either structured literacy or balance literacy and some of them have a lot. It's a lot different, such as one one method that was formed by two researchers named Dale Rose and machine man. It was, it was conducted over 13 year period, nine different studies in 100 schools in Chicago affecting more than 10,000 students. And so this curriculum focuses on five critical reading area areas that were identified by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which are phonemic awareness, systematic phonics, or reading fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension. So this particular, this particular program is different because it uses drama and music to teach literacy. It's, it's an alternative, not it's an alternative, alternative art space reading curriculum that's very different from the normal non art space curriculum. And so, results of the study found that when students were taught to read using art space methods. They had significantly outperform their peers so using those five different methods the phonemic awareness systematic phonics or reading fluency. And it was also helpful when they were in small groups and there was frequent feedback from the instructor. And once again, just they outperform their peers they had the reading level was above people with the typical reading practices. In this case they were also able to increase engagement and the subject they will be able to contextualize the reading a little bit more, which throughout all of the reading that I've done on on the literature that's a very important aspect of it is contextualization being able to understand reading and literacy within a subject or a thematic area of focus. So this study doesn't particularly mention like I said, it being balanced or structured but I think it was more of a combination of the two and it was definitely alternative to both balance and structured because it uses that drama and music based learning. So one that I wanted to speak about briefly was interactive read allowance, where teachers are really being the ones to read aloud and interact with all the students getting students to be a part of the conversation. I read an article by Shannon you are in her colleagues, a compile a bunch of information describing how these interactive read allows can help students to read particularly English learners so students who didn't go up or don't have English language as English as their native language excuse me. This particular method improves contextual learning especially because of the explicit vocabulary instruction. There's culturally relevant learning environments. There's comprehension exercises to ensure that students are understanding everything discussions with the teacher as she's reading or as they're reading excuse me. And it can also help create more community feel according to one teacher that they interviewed for this article. Another thing I wanted to mention was the idea of reading to learn or learning to read this is something that I came across quite a bit in the literature. And so in the 1990s it first came up as the idea of learning to read and reading to learn. The first is that in grades K through three children are learning to read, but then four through 12, they're reading to learn and so that means there's little contextualization. And so it's harder to grasp subjects if you're not combining both reading and learning at the same time. There's research showing that skills and information that are learned together yield the best results later on in schooling process. And focusing only on reading to learn after grade three results in narrow skill development and children who struggle to read particularly struggle if they aren't able to contextualized what they're reading or how they're learning to read. Dr. Juliet Halliday at the university is one of our more the people that we spoke to she's an expert in literacy instruction and K through three education in particular. She recommends that teachers use contextual learning programs and thematic curricula in particular to enhance learning, not just at young grades because often in kindergarten or pre kindergarten, you can have specific themes, such as top off the top my head and thinking about dinosaurs you can have learning about dinosaurs and at the same time going through reading and literacy exercises and what she recommends is that this be continued throughout all schooling before college so K through 12. One other thing before moving on to expert instruction was that there's some difference in reading level as a base going into school based upon socioeconomic status. Students with families that have a lower socioeconomic status or lower income may not. The families may not have the time or resources to help students interact have students interact with books before they even get into pre K or kindergarten. This is just what one. Some studies find. And so it's not 100% set in stone that that's how that happens but sometimes students can be set back because they weren't exposed to reading just by having parents sit down with them with a picture book or something. And Dr. Lynch porjowski, who was the former president of the Vermont Stern Center. She essentially completely disagrees with this and thinks that even though some students perhaps may come in at more of an advantage than others when they're going into pre K or kindergarten. She is adequately prepared and well taught has the adequate resources, has the time to dedicate to individual students, any difference in basic reading level going into kindergarten or pre K can be made up for as long as the teacher has the skills and resources to make up for it. And I just, we spoke to a few different experts. Dr. Porjowski was one of them. We also spoke to two experts I mentioned one. Dr. Katie Ravel and Dr. Juliet Halliday at the University both are experts in literacy methods and K through three education. And so Dr. Halliday believes that there's a lot of good approaches for methods other than structured literacy. And she says that there's some evidence and the she's some there's some evidence against it kind of like what Aiden was saying earlier, you have to be cautious about that. What she's saying is, there's these kind of the war that was going on that was mentioned earlier between the balance letter series structured literacy. Dr. Halliday said that it feels like they're trying to solve a complex problem with a simple solution by just using structure of literacy. She doesn't believe that structured literacy is necessarily the right approach, but linguistic knowledge is really good and so that has to be incorporated into both and adjust a simple phonics approach isn't good either. Dr. Katie Ravel on the other hand, believes, not on the other hand I suppose she believes that really a combination of both structure literacy and balance letter C so the phonics approach mixed with a whole language approach is the ideal way of improving literacy in K through three. She emphasizes that these two camps don't really exist anymore even though unfortunately that's not what we found in the literature that we read there's still quite a difference between structure literacy and balance letter C. And so what she recommends once again is a combination of both. And Dr. Pojasky is a huge fan of structure literacy she spoke very very highly of that method. But once again her most important point is helping the teachers help the students. And just a quick little note that kind of supports what Ron was saying the national reading panel, which was created in 1997 by Congress did a study where they looked at literacy methods that were appropriate for kids age pre K through three. And they found I'm going to read the ones that they said were very important alphabetics, which is phonics fluency comprehension teacher education and reading instruction and computer technology and reading instruction. So, their findings kind of support the idea that we need a breadth of approaches when looking at reading instruction. Yeah. Oh, sorry, do we have just a couple other brief, a couple of the comments if you don't mind. Okay, good. We have to go to the floor pretty soon so I just want to have a couple more minutes. Yeah, we were just going to mention, we looked into two different states, Michigan and Massachusetts, and just looked at their practices we included. There are links to what they've developed in our report so if anyone's interested in looking at that they're there. Since we're running a little short on time, I probably won't go through all of it, but the reports use both structured and balance letter C to develop better methods that they've been able to start practicing in both Michigan and Massachusetts. And I just wanted to make that quick comment. I know we do have some folks that came in who do teach use the balance literacy approach and we certainly heard structured literacy as well, probably leaving us with that feeling that structured literacy was unnecessary but not perhaps not a sufficient condition. And there's a combination of bottom up and top down kinds of thinking. We have just a couple of minutes I just want to make sure that you have an opportunity for some questions. I'm so curious how you ended up agreeing to this topic. Or if any of you are considering being teachers or anything. So, yeah. Personally, my sister, she works in Massachusetts as a kindergarten teacher in the town that she works in I know it's, it's very like socio economically they're not in the greatest shape. And they also struggle with having a lot of children that come in that previously have never learned English. So, this was kind of a passionate topic for me my own is also a principal, and she was very curious on it and it, I don't know, it just was something that personally to me I felt was pretty interesting and I enjoyed learning about it. And I know that there's a lot of pitfalls and a lot of struggle within teachers and, and they have a pretty difficult job. So, it'd be nice to set things up where it's a little bit easier. Well as a teacher has his or her hand, their hands, the more likely they are to be able to respond to the child in front of them. Hannah what about you. Um, I studied environmental studies at UVM so this is totally out of my element I have never done anything with education or literacy. And since it was my last semester here I kind of just wanted to try something new. I think it's super important for kids and especially for going to save the planet. They need to know how to read and take care of it. Good connection. And we're on. I'm interested in environmental education and so I made a little bit of interest in education but this was really, really interesting to learn about and I really enjoy doing this report I think I think I got a lot out of it, and it's definitely helped me re evaluate how I see education and how much I value it. Yeah, the skill of the teacher. Thanks to be a good teacher again. Representative Austin last last question. Yeah, no question just want to say thank you so much and wishing the three of you the best of luck I really appreciate the work you did. I was very impressed so thank you. And I know the committee thanks you as well. I also want to just remind our committee members that this is a resource available to us, and we have got a bunch of questions coming forward, whether it's environmental issues and in our school buildings. There's a variety of meals that we're looking at that there are a variety of things so if there's some time before we end the session let's let's have a little conversation see how we might use this group. Again, to do this work. It's a great great service to us and we get to meet amazing students who take this on. Thank you so much I'm looking I've got the report up here right now I see you did have Massachusetts I'm sure Aiden that might have had something to do with your interest as well. Yeah for sure. Yeah, thank you so much three of you. We'll be heading back to the floor, I just wanted to give you one of the committee one minute to just tell you what's what's coming forward. I am looking into helping to build a little background on some of the complex questions before us related to education funding. The OPEB conversation is one. And so I have invited we have invited in Chris group who's been working on this with with the various players related to pensions to talk to us about the OPEB and as well as the OFO to talk about implications to the Ed fund. And I know that ways and means is right now looking at this issue they've got to have been looking at some possible options. I probably will watch that testimony later I think they were looking at the possibility of, of, well, I'll wait I don't know. I don't know if they've actually put that forward yet or not but they're looking at a potential financial resource to pay for the OPEB. So, and I'll let you know when it was just the whatever the most recent ways and means conversation that should be there. And with that, I guess we can head back to the floor. Yes, as 115 is on notice. Representative Conlon. Are you are you prepared to do that or were you going to leave that to me. He's he's involved in some other things so I won't get. Hi Kate sorry about that. Yeah. Yes, I think for safety purposes if you could present the last minute of the minute that would be great. Okay, sounds good. Thank you. Okay, we will head to the floor. Thank you so much.