The Science of Writing Round Table

- Cool. - Hi everyone, welcome back to the Pedagogy Non-Gradile podcast. We're back here for another roundtable discussion. This time we're gonna be looking at the science reading and I am really excited because I believe we have a truly all-star panel. I've been following the work of every single person on this panel for a really long time and I truly believe their experts much more so than myself. So I'm really happy to sit here and learn and chat with these really interesting and intelligent people. I'm gonna give a very brief introduction for each of them and then we're gonna jump into questions and as our panelists know, they can speak on each point although each question can be addressed towards a specific person. And as I was just explaining to them, I see the real value of these roundtable discussions is finding where is the consensus? Where do people agree with each other? Where is there a common understanding about what is best practice? As well as a little bit of understanding where there might be less agreement where there might be some questions where we might need future research to be conducted. Without further ado, I'm gonna start with Dr. Steve Graham. He is the more professor in the Division of Leadership and Innovation in Teachers College at Arizona State University for over 30 years. He has studied how writing develops, how to teach it effectively and how writing can be as he's the support reading and learning. He's also an author on numerous metanologies on the science of reading and writing. And I must say that is how I'm familiar with his work. I have cited his metanologies on numerous occasions. And I'm really excited to have him on the podcast again and to listen to him in person. Dr. Gillespie, Ruse Research Focus on Writing Development and Instruction, her approach to understanding writing and how to best prepare teachers to provide writing instruction has been multifaceted. She has conducted metanologies and systematic reviews to examine effective writing interventions for struggling writers and students with disabilities and analyze interview responses to understand students' knowledge of the writing process and different writing genres, conducted surveys to document teachers' use of evidence-based writing instruction and provide professional development to assist teachers in implementing evidence-based writing instruction classroom. She has also developed interventions to support primary students' use of writing as tool for learning in math and science. Most recently, Dr. Gillespie's Ruse and her colleagues had used mixed method, reality simulation support, primary pre-service teachers' development of effective writing instruction and pedagogy. And I'm gonna be honest, I don't even know what that last thing is. But I have also cited Dr. Gillespie's research on numerous occasions, especially in my books. So I'm really excited to have her on the podcast and listen to her in person for the first time. Lynn Stone is another person who is a returning guest to podcast. And I'm really excited to hear her speak again. And I've had the privilege of meeting Lynn in person and hearing her talk. And I know that she's incredibly knowledgeable, especially about linguistics, far more so than myself. Lynn's job is to use research evidence and linguistics to produce programs, methods, and text for students, teachers, and educators worldwide. She can't hear linguistics degree at the University College London and works in a variety of speech and language settings in Australia since graduating in 1994, she's also trained in Macon, Oslin, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, Reed, Rik, and Cordray, Little Learners Love, Literacy, Explosive Direct Instruction and Spalding. Lynn has been in private practice since 1998 and has continued to train and mentor teachers while developing her linguistic learning programs. Joan is an experienced educator serving in the roles of Teachers School Administrator, Teacher Trainer, and Literacy Consultants in 1975, which is provided a literacy professional without some thousands of educators related to professionals at schools, colleges, clinics, and professional conferences. Joan received her master's in reading education from Harvard University in 1980, her BA from Boston College in 1975, and from 1975 until 1988, or sorry, '98, Joan worked at the landmark school in Massachusetts, a pioneer school in development of reading and writing intervention programs. And Lon, she was a teacher supervisor of tutorials in which language arts fell in a chair and in high school principal, which was also founder and director of the landmark college preparation program and director of the landmark at Rik, Teacher Training Program. During that time, Joan had also conducted psychoeducational evaluations at the Children's Hospital in Boston. And that was such a mouthful, and I'm glad I've gotten through the summary of your bios. I had to really cut your bios short, and I apologize to that, but I also want the audience to know that you're all incredibly qualified people. And once again, I just want to say I'm very honored to have you all in this podcast stand. I feel very privileged. It's also slightly nerve-wracking to talk to so many people or much more knowledgeable myself at the same time. So without further ado, I'm going to get to the first question, which is, is there such thing as a science of writing? We've heard a lot lately about the science of reading, what about the science of writing? And this question is addressed to you, Steve. Yeah, I would say there's a science of writing. I'd also say that the science of reading sometimes has been too narrowly constructed or interpreted. I view any kind of scholarship around writing, the teaching of it, how it operates, how it develops, how we use it as contributing to that idea of a science of writing. If you wanted to look at it just in terms of thinking of science of writing in terms of effective instructional practices, our research is not as deep or as broad as the area of reading. But we have been able to identify a number of practices that are effective and have been consistently effective above that the elementary and the high school level. So I would say, yes, there's definitely a science of writing. Although those of us in writing don't often talk about it in the same way that folks in reading do. Is there anybody who wants to add on to that? Yeah, I guess I would say, I think a better term is evidence-based literacy instruction across the board, because reading and writing need to be combined. But if we do have to use that terminology science of something, I think science of literacy would help include. And then I'd also like to add is, yes, there's not as much, but we have a lot. And a lot of that thanks to Steve and many others who've done that work over the years. The trick is, how do we get what we've learned from that research to the practitioners in the field and the trenches? And there's not enough of that happening. Yeah, and I will-- Sorry. You go then. The other trick that I see it is it's very difficult to evaluate the strategic part of writing. So to see whether or not an approach has an outcome that is better than another approach, when we're talking about text generation, that's really difficult, because there's so much subjectivity. Whereas within reading, it's very easy to assess reading progress. I completely agree with that. I think one thing too that makes maybe the science of writing a little harder to uptake. I spent the last 10 years in Dallas, Texas before I moved here to Australia. And writing wasn't on the statewide assessments. So it was something that often got kind of pushed to the side by teachers, because they had to focus on reading in math to meet the accountability performance pay that was happening. So teachers often weren't taking up the things that have been shown in research simply because writing wasn't on that assessment at the end of the year. If only someone had done research showing there's a connection between writing outcomes and reading outcomes. I do want to say that it is true that there is less. But I kind of agree with everyone here, but there is something there for sure. I know I'm updating my second edition of the scientific principles of reading instruction right now and I have a section for writing. And it is quite a bit condensed, but there are several analyses been done. And immediately several have been done by some of the people in this podcast. So I'd like to move on to the next question, which is, many discuss the five pillars of literacy. However, these pillars that pillars don't actually include writing as usually written about, is writing simply a pillar of literacy, is writing a pillar of literacy on its own or visible long in one of the other pillars. And this question is for Joan. Yeah, it deserves its own. I often will look, the whole reason I put together the writing rope framework back in 2018-19 is that I have long felt we need something like that, a framework just to help teachers identify and be aware of all the skills and strategies and techniques, that a proficient writer needs and that they need to be integrated. For years, I used a wagon wheel metaphor that each one of these buckets, if you will, are component areas are like a wheel of spoken a wheel. And if some folks are missing, but back in 2018, that's when Scarborough's reading rope was gaining popularity, so I switched to that metaphor. What happens is, these days, if you go to most ELA teachers and certainly anybody in our field and you say, gee, what are all the components we need? They'll either draw on the National Reading Panel. They can name them all off for you, right? But if you say writing, often, it depends on their experience. So if it's a first grade teacher, they'll say, oh, it's spelling and handwriting. And if you talk to somebody in a state that has a heavy duty writing prompt where kids have to read multiple sources, extract information, they'll say that's what writing is. If you talk to somebody who knows a lot about syntactic awareness and its role in supporting comprehension as well as writing, they'll, oh, it's about sentence combining. So the point is, I do believe there are some components. You know my attempt was to take all the various skills and strategies that are identified in a lot of state literacy writing standards but also drawing on a lot of the research that folks you know like Steve have done and say all right there's so many recommendations and so many lists Steve I think about that that meta analysis that the Grand Paris Santangelo from 2015 and there's like you know 12 13 things it's like we need to come up well I think I hope I've come up with one that will help people to say there is it's a multi-componential thing to teach writing and we need to make sure that any writing curriculum or if we feel we need a writing program that is hitting all the strands in the rope. So I've got a follow question for you John just on that is it that writing is its own pillar or is it that we need the five pillars of writing. I think we need the I need we need pillars of writing otherwise you people just see it as one little thing you know as an example we just got finished creating 36 hours of online course work for a particular State Department of Ed and out of it only three hours is writing but they're calling it literacy so but but the problem with a separate right set of pillars or whatever you want to describe them as is then people don't realize how they overlap so if you want on top of the other or if you had old those old fashioned overlays and literally text structure sent I mean all so many of the strands in the writing rope are instructional practices that will at the same time support comprehension. The transcription strand should happen in a phonics lesson where we're doing decoding and encoding at the same time. I completely agree with that Dr. Graham. So I'm going to approach it in a slightly different way and actually two different ways one would be I would say that you know if we think about reading we shouldn't be thinking about reading without writing now it is possible to read without learning to write so that didn't want to be clear about that when we think about writing though it's not possible to learn to write without reading I mean that you know these two things are are very interconnected and I would argue for school age students that we should be talking about learning as well that these operate together reading and writing our tools for learning in school environments and so you know we could expand the way we conceptualize this in terms of thinking about if you have reading and writing together you know I know that we're kind of driven by the national reading panels you know by pillars but there's a slightly different way of looking at it must to look at the literature that takes a look at how you move for being a novice in an area to becoming competent eventually in some areas becoming an expertise and they often talk about three different kinds of catalyst and one is your knowledge and so like in any area where there's reading writing or the study of dinosaurs if you'd like you start with very little knowledge and over time that knowledge in that area becomes richer and more interconnected and that tends to be a catalyst that drives development that area your strategic prowess initially in reading or in writing you know if we're trying to comprehend something and we're in you know six years old or we're trying to write something our strategic approach is pretty you know it's pretty basic but as we become more mature it becomes much more sophisticated and that would include things like you know creating text with quality or reading comprehension also motivation which is often left out of this you know we have a variety of different motivational variables that can drive whether you engage in a task like writing or reading how much effort you put into it whether or not you persist in it and then I would have an area that I would call skills and those skills need to be mastered if either reading writing or learning are going to operate successfully and succinctly and effectively so it's a slightly different way of kind of you know posing that you know pillars but I'm sure there are other ways that other people could put forward too of doing that I think the main thing is we don't want to forget that these things are interconnected sometimes it is important to talk about writing separately so we make it clear that this is an important skill but on the other hand we've not done a great job of bringing these together and making the case that writing needs to be part of what we do in literacy just generally yeah I really agree with everything you all just said and I just want to add one thought and it's just something I've noticed within the science of reading movement is that sometimes we get focused on specific solutions to specific problems but that does lead people with the idea that instruction sort of always looks the same and I think what instruction is going to look like in different grades is going to be really different you know I have taught K to 12 and you know in secondary school I do use a lot of strategy instruction but I was quite resistant to strategy instruction when I was teaching primary and that's not to weigh in on strategy instruction this conversation it's just the point out that how we teach is going to definitely be dependent on the cohort in front of us okay my next question is for Amy and that is what type of instruction has the strongest research evidence when it comes to writing well that's a great question and I think a lot of them at analyses from Steve and some of his doc students including me show that direct explicit instruction in transcription is important early on but also that we need to make sure that even our older writers have strong writing typing spelling skills in order to be fluent and to kind of for taking this analogy of reading right the goal of reading is comprehension what's the goal of writing is meaning making an expression you've got a really free of space from being bogged down in in transcription so we want transcription to be taught explicitly lots of practice with handwriting spelling typing I talked my university students a lot about that I think we think that young learners come to school and they understand how to use technology but the reality is that a lot of them are still quite disfluent with typing so really supporting transcription skills so that then the focus can be on what we know about genre instruction what we know about strategy instruction what we know about teaching students about text structure using writing models has research behind it teaching students as the other members have said today to use writing across the curriculum because it does support learning it does support reading so I think we have a broad understanding of what works across both kind of these lower level writing skills as well as higher level writing processes does anybody want to add on to that I just I'll just say that I think it's funny that you're you're hitting on that word explicit and direct instruction I think that's just I'm doing several of these round tables on the signs of and I think that's going to be a theme in all of the students require some level of explicit instruction in all strands Steve you look like you want to respond to that statement yeah so I'm an explicit instruction supporter but I would also point out that there are things that are learned implicitly and that the more skilled you are as a writer the more implicit stuff may come into play and let me just give like two real simple examples if you take a look at spelling as an example you know typically if we taught spelling to kids in first grade to sixth grade the most words that you're going to do in that period of times about 3600 most people that are adults can spell 10 to 15,000 words so you learn how to spell an awful lot elsewhere and a lot of that probably comes from reading you know because you see the patterns in some comes from writing because you do it so it's meant in spelling I think that explicit instruction gives you the foundation to look for patterns and recognize patterns and words but also the fact that you read and write make a difference if you ask me you know the second point I'd like to make if you ask me well what if we just had a program where kids wrote or kids read I'd say to you that's probably not going to be enough for 99% of the kids I don't know what the percentage is I just made that up but we've got two new meta-analysis coming out now and basically we didn't find that increasing how much students wrote made any difference at the elementary level or at the secondary level but if you said to me would you have a program where kids don't write there's no chance that I would say to you that's a good idea yeah you know that's the game that's what we're helping students get prepared for is to participate in the game and they can participate along the way and a lot of the procedures that we've mentioned already like strategy and instruction kids are writing as they learn so I think that's the important part here is that that if you're learning something explicitly, you have to have a place to apply it. And some incidental learning occurs there. And so I know that we're all on this kind of explicit bandwagon now, but I think it's important we don't forget that the implicit can be very important as well. - It's really fascinating. And it almost seems like a slight cognitive dissonance in the science and the writing more didn't improve writing outcomes. You would never think that. And it almost seems like you almost can't extrapolate that as a recommendation to teachers like, well, it doesn't matter how much you write, so don't worry about it. But I just one follow-up question for Steve. And if for anyone in the podcast, and this wasn't on our finalist of questions, but your comment about spelling just made me think, I constantly get this question sent to me in DMs. Should I still do my weekly spelling test? And I don't have a good answer, because I've never seen any convincing research specifically on that question. Now, I know you looked at some spelling in your men and alas, Steve. So you might be able to address that, but I know everyone here has some level of knowledge in that topic too, so I'd love to hear your inputs. - So I'll do this in two ways. When my daughter was in fifth grade, she went to a school, a Quaker school in Washington, do you see that emphasized a whole language approach? So there was very little instruction. And by fifth grade, a lot of the kids in the class have a lot of difficulty with spelling. And this isn't a wrap against the teacher, because she was one of the best teachers I've ever seen. But her teacher decided that every week, kids would have a spelling list, and they generated their own words. And as you might expect, they generated words that they would never use in their writing, because a peer had to test them, so they didn't want to look like they didn't know how to spell. So spelling lists can be used in ways that are not very helpful. And I don't think that was really helpful. But I do think if you have a spelling list that emphasizes, say like two or three patterns, that you're building off of through word source and learning like that, then you can learn about the underlying orthography, how letters and sounds are connected in English, which can be quite difficult. And that serves as a string board for recognizing those kind of patterns and words. So I think in those instances, it does make a difference. And we've never published this. We've got a meta-analysis of about 200 studies, and it would support that as well. If you break your word list up into patterns that are emphasized, and that's what your focus of, your spelling instruction is not just on the memorization of words, it can make a difference. God, why have you not published that? Because we never seem to finish the thing. We've been working on it for 12 years, and it's my fault because the person I'm working with, Daniel Sandelo gets everything coded, and then it takes me forever to get to something. And so we're like three years off of-- - When we did the last search. So we'll get there eventually, I hope. - Well, you know, you actually just shared me up a little, because I have format analysis I'm trying to get published right now, and I've been working on for about eight months. So your 12 years makes me feel better about my eight months. - Well, I'm still into good about it. - Makes me feel good. All right, Amy, Lynn, Joe, do you want to add to that? - Yeah, yeah, I want to come back to the explicit instruction and kind of build on something that two things that Steve meant or commented on. So on the explicit instruction, you know, a big part of that, we're all familiar, right, with the gradual release of responsibility. And the time to then give the kids the chance to do the writing and to practice and get guided practice is that sort of we do at stage. But what I see happening to up in is teachers grab the first part, the I do it, the explicit, they model, they explain. But then they don't provide enough time for practice. So that's one thing. I also want to though pick up on the word this sort of explicit versus implicit. And, you know, I do believe that sharing with students models of good writing, not just generic, here's a great book. Why don't you write a book like this, right? But really focusing in, if you're trying to teach kids how to use transition words or how to write a good topic sentence, show them some sample mentor models. But again, where I think we don't go far enough is we just show them to the kids. And then we figure out they're gonna, we think they're gonna analyze it and figure out how to emulate it. And it's that explicit time to say, all right, let's look at these models. Let's analyze it. What did that writer do? Now let's see if you can try it in your writing. So, but the fact of the matter is we all learn by emulating other people. And that's why the more we read the better we get at our writing. So you need that combination of exposure to see how others write, but also explicit instruction. That includes lots of practice to write. - I would add to that, I think this is one part of SRSD, the decades, the long research supported program that Stephen Karen have developed. But thinking aloud is a huge part of good writing instruction. And I often see teachers really struggle with that. In my university classes, I say, you need to stand in front of the mirror and practice this. And then we have students practicing in class. And it seems really hard for them to think aloud kind of those hidden things that are going on in the mind of a writer that students need to see actively modeled, scaffolded. So the things that writers do to get started, the things that writers do to draw on strategies, they know the things that writers do when they get stuck. And these are all things in SRSD, right? But they're very difficult. Teachers find that a little awkward, particularly I think novice teachers to do. And it's really important because like you were saying, Joan, if you kind of skip that stage of scaffolding, the writing process, you miss out on kind of the meat of where students can really learn to take it up on their own. Yeah. I completely agree. 100% with everything in one just out there. So I'm surprised Lynn doesn't want to have something to say about the spelling test. To be honest. I'll get my time. I'm sure you are. You're you're you have a question specifically for spelling. So you are coming up. So, okay. Despite the fact that Lynn is not yet spoken and she is coming up, the next question is for Joan, although I thought about giving those questions to Lynn too, to be honest. And that is what is the current state of writing instruction in schools? Is there anything you think that we really need to improve? We need to improve all of it. We need to have more of it. You know, I was very engaged when reading first came out. Was a lead trainer in our state. And while I think it's wonderful what came out of the national reading panel and all the efforts then and now I, one of the things that I saw happening is when, so what when I left my work at landmark school in 98, I've been going into schools and districts ever since. So I see a lot of this like in the trenches. And I think whatever writing, a lot of whatever writing was happening before 2000, a lot of it got thrown out because people were trying to find more time for a literacy block, but it was all about reading. Add to that that there's just, there's nobody's been aware of the research. So I think there's probably less writing going on than before. And much of what is going on is an approach that looks at writing as it's a natural thing if we just let kids write about what they like, you know, they'll magically figure out how to write. So I don't see enough writing going on either during the literacy block and not as well as in content classrooms. A lot of my work is an adolescent literacy and teachers just avoid writing. Some of it is the teachers are afraid to write themselves. So how could you teach something you, you don't like? They don't know how there is so little professional development. I stop, I'm seeing that start to change. And so there's not enough of it. What what there is is just very sketchy. People grab things that have been around forever. The sixth traits, this thing and it's like, yeah, the other thing I'd like to say is I believe, which is true as it relates to teaching comprehension. You know, I think when we teach phonics, yes, you do need programs because you need the materials, right? But if we're really going to teach comprehension and integrate it into subject area learning, then it's the teacher's knowledge about how to effectively teach strategies, let's say, or or show kids how to inference using the text, the reading in science and social studies in history. And I really feel like after grade three, a lot of the writing instruction needs to be integrated while we teach science and history and math and everything else. So and I don't see any of that. So what whatever little bit about writing is happening, it's just in the ELA class and I see people scrambling to find what's the best program that we should bring into the ELA block. And I don't think a program is a solution. I truly believe teachers need to have the background knowledge on how to integrate writing, writing about what you're reading, you know, writing, kind of even sentence work, you don't need a program with lessons that dictate what you should say to kids. Just learn how you sentence combining. It's such a simple thing and you can use it anywhere. So I'm kind of a little all over the place. place with this, but that's my initial reaction to your question. I'd love to hear what others have to say, what they're seeing in the schools as well. I have something on that. What I mean, I agree, of course, everything. I'm learning a lot, by the way, just listening to you all. But one thing I did want to touch on and what Joan was saying about the classroom, when I go into schools and coach schools and watch writing lessons, I do notice certain phenomena that are sort of across the board wherever I go. And I do travel the world and do this. One of them is that teachers don't model writing quite as often as they should. So there are lots of programs out there that will give you these resources and it's power points. And they're flashing up onto the screen and then students are supposed to write in response to that. My view, teachers actually writing, physically writing on a board in front of students is to writing development, what teachers reading to students is to reading development. You have a captive audience and you've got these children looking at this example of a fully developed lexicon and fully developed handwriting. You need to be looking at that all the time and watching a teacher write on the board. That's a tiny tweak that I think over time makes a big difference. And I say I think over time because I haven't seen any studies on that. But it's also my job to talk about tiny tweaks that are likely to get a better result and show up in your data. So yeah, more teacher writing, really, really important. The second thing about spelling lists and I think we've all been talking about that too, is one of the maximums I have is that the best spelling list is a book. So whatever book you're studying to do with the knowledge rich curriculum that I hope you're applying is the best spelling list. And that touches on Steve's catalyst, the first catalyst is knowledge. So yeah, that's what I've got just now. I just want to jump and say that I hear a lot of connection with what you're saying right now and what I heard in the round table I had on comprehension. And that I keep hearing people say the writing needs to fit the text that are being looked at in class, that it shouldn't be an isolated thing. For example, maybe I shouldn't be writing poems in my writing class and reading books about Norse mythology in my reading class. Well, you could write poems about Norse mythology. I mean, there are lots of ways to integrate knowledge. But I also talk about these things called orphan words, orphan sentences, orphan paragraphs. And they're orphans because they don't really have any family connections. And as we know, words exist in networks. And if you're writing about what you're learning, you're going to get a better deal on both sides in that you'll develop your writing and you'll develop your knowledge, your content knowledge. So orphan words, I used to do this in my own practice. When I talked to children and were trying to teach them to spell a word or write a sentence or do a paragraph, I would just do stuff about my dog because I like my dog, right? And he's great. And I like talking about him. But at some point I realized that this isn't building anything here. These are just orphans. So even that tweak of, if you're in your scope and sequence, you're doing CK and you're learning about words, maybe choose chick, over thick. And even that, just that little bit of consideration, I think it would be helpful for teachers. Okay, so my next question is for Steve. And this is his last question that's specific to him. Well, he's welcome to jump in on other people's points. And that's, does handwriting improve reading outcomes? And I must admit, I'm a little selfish in including this question because I get this question all the time in my DMs. And I think it's sort of an interesting question that we see coming up so often. So, without any further ado, what are your thoughts, Steve? Does handwriting improve reading outcomes? Well, I'm going to answer that in a, you know, I always go with the maximum answer to the question you want to answer, not the one that's posed. So I'm going to go a little bit broader. We did a survey, Ram Sample of Teachers a number of years ago in the US taking a look at handwriting instruction. And there's, there's a lot of kind of myth that circulates around handwriting and its effects. I mean, all the way from, if you teach handwriting, it makes you a smarter person through them or organized, but I mean, you know, it's really kind of interesting the things that have kind of popped up around that. And we asked teachers what they thought. And invariably teachers talked about the effects of handwriting on writing. You know, not on other things. And that included reading. Now, when we, we did a meta analysis a couple years ago and we really didn't find much evidence that would say that, you know, teaching handwriting made you a better reader in any way. There was a couple of studies back in the 1930s or 40s where teaching handwriting and manuscript versus cursive had a little bit of a positive transfer to reading, you know, print text. But it really wasn't that strong. Now, can handwriting help improve reading? Yeah. You know, just because there's not research saying this doesn't mean that it can't be done in a way in which the two can be reciprocal. So, you know, if I'm introducing a letter, I can also be introducing the letter sound at the same time. And we could say the letter, say the sound and write the letter. So I would see that as having a positive and interactive effect with reading. If you said, where are the studies that isolate that effect I can't give them to you. But if I was teaching, which I haven't been a teacher for 40 something years, you can bet that if I was teaching handwriting, I'd be doing exactly what I just said. And without any benefit, those say over typing the letter and then saying what sound is that for the same handwriting? Oh, I didn't understand the question. So, oh, my apologies. Yeah, no, no, it's not your fault because I said I was going to answer the question I wanted to. You know, that data is all over the place. So I'm going to use another analogy here. So I went into the office today to copy a hundred pages of a material that I've been asked to look at by the college board for high school students. And I could have done that online, right? Most of my students today would have annotated online and done it like that. Not me. I have to have a type copy that I can write on and make notes on. I think this is a shifting target. I think it can be helpful like a note taking and other kinds of things. And I suspect that whatever evidence is collected on this will shift over time as one becomes more familiar with the newer tools for either reading or writing. And that's an area that's in complete flux on us right now. So what does the research say? I would say it's a bit all over the place. I think for remembering information from text, it might be helpful. But in terms of remembering individual words. It's from stand-of-its to burninger to other people. It's been all over the place. I don't think you can draw a conclusion that you feel comfortable with. I would say this when I'm asked that question by kindergarten first grade teachers who are beginning doing letter, letter sound correspondences. What I suggest is look, you have to teach the kids the letter formation anyway. You need to teach them the upper case, the lower case. What happens too often is they do the letter sound during one part of the day. And then later they grab some handwriting program and then they start practicing forming the letters. And while I hear you see that there might not be solid research that says no, do them at the same time, right? It like why not? Because there are several programs out there that are phonics programs that are really effective. And if you're forming those letters, you're going to attend to what they look like at which you're trying to associate the sound to what that letter looks like. So we don't disagree on that. Like I said, if I was teaching now, that's exactly what I would do. It makes the most logical sense. The question that I get a lot in you, Nate, and I'm sure all of us do is should we be teaching cursive or switching and spending that time to teaching typing. And the jury's out on that one. Yeah, and that was the question I was trying to pull was actually, should we basically, should we be teaching students to cursive write or print or type or some combination of the three. And realistically, I think Steve's work shows that cursive writing does show benefits for writing. And the question I always get is does that curse writing instruction? Is it particularly better for reading outcomes than typing or printing? Because that claim does seem to exist. And I'm going to throw a statement out and anyone's welcome to respond. I feel like there's almost a myth about cursive writing as if it has some neurological, magical benefit on students if we just cursively write as opposed to print or type. And I think ultimately if we all look at our subs as adult writers, we probably use some hybrid of print and cursive, right? When we're printing. And so from my perspective, and thinking about a teacher's perspective and also as a professor now. I think that the ultimate goal would be that we teach things and then our students can modify them in ways that work for them, right? And so you probably get a little faster with writing if you're using some hybrid of print and cursive. But what I hear everybody saying and what I would argue for is this integration, right? If we're integrating reading and writing, handwriting and phonics, we're not only emphasizing the connections between the skills, but we're also kind of giving teachers more instructional time because they don't have to teach everything separately. They don't have to teach writing and then phonics and then comprehension and then maths and then they can teach this combination. And so I say like it's more instructional bang for your butt because you can integrate these things in ways that make sense and that aligns what we know from research and support your students using writing across the day rather than in the 30 minute block with a particular program. Sounds kind of my take on it. Okay. Well, the next question is for Lynn and I think this is a passion area for her and that's how best do we teach spelling to students? Well, that's a tiny little question. So I'll answer that in one sentence. It depends on what you mean by spelling as well and whether we're talking about novices or people who have already started to build their lexicon. There's a use of the word spelling which I don't subscribe to and some people will call it encoding and I can understand why you would do that and that's transcription of sounds to symbols. So in an opaque orthography like the one that we have, it's a really really good starting point to make sure that their phonological awareness is sufficiently present so that they can segment words. That's great. It's good to have a working phonics inventory so that you can you know, you can you can start to write down the component sounds of words but none of those things are particularly what I would call spelling. So spelling is actually using knowledge about the system, the orthographic system to write familiar and unfamiliar regular and irregular words with the correct letter sequences and a lot of the time that's not really got a lot to do with sound. Once you've mastered that basic phonics code, you have to look at the other layers of the orthography and that will be orthographic expectancies like rules, the etymology which drives letter sequences as well and it will be morphology which is quite stable and transferable to lots and lots of other words that you haven't seen before so it incomes that big dirty secret in education. We learn most of earth, we build our lexicon implicitly you know, that's what we do. So how best to teach spelling make sure that children from the start understand that there are other layers not just sound to symbol and get them to practice that. The practice that I always strongly recommend is integrating. I think every single person here has said integration a few times and integrating those things throughout the day. The way I talk to teachers about that is I say there's a loop if you consider it a loop an receptive expressive loop. So if you're showing children a letter and you're saying to them this is a or a, yeah that's receptive and it's great but you can consolidate and help them to really form those structures that they're going to need foreign implicit learning and for instant recognition and instant retrieval hopefully if you get them to write that straight away right and what that takes is meta language for novices. It takes meta language it takes this is the line that you write on this is the highest point this is the middle and these are how you form the letters and that let meta language needs to be embedded within the students. That's how I would teach spelling. So so you can look at all of those pillars and apply them to writing and spelling is in every single part of that phonological awareness phonics fluency vocabulary and having people understand what you're writing their comprehension. I have a selfish follow up question but I'm going to let's see if anybody else has a response to you first. Okay well I do want to say first I and it's kind of shining through that I've been working on my book on this topic right around the time I'm doing this interview with everyone but I just was writing about spelling in my book. I refer to it as encoding so maybe I'll have to go back and think about whether I choose the term encoding for spelling in my in my book. Well I don't need to use it but if you are talking about the process of listening to the sounds in words and attaching graphines to those sounds then that that is encoding that's that's transcription of of speech sounds but we don't have a transparent orthography so spelling is more than transcription of speech sounds so spelling and encoding I think are different things so yeah Nate if you mean spelling in the way that you and I have talked about spelling it's probably the best to say spelling. Well admittedly I was talking about it in the idea that when we teach phonics rather in you know I often see phonics lessons that are like here's the letter here's the most commonly associated sound now let's practice blending these words or let's look at these words that use the sound and I was talking about well let's give them to be encoding practice at the same time and have them spell with it rather than just read with it that was the context I was using it but I do want to go back to the fact that English does not have a transparent orthography because you and I are both very familiar with Pete Bauer's work and he talks a lot about the importance of morphology was spelling and there was a meta-analysis on this topic by Gluscha in 2020 that that showed that morphology had the highest outcomes for spelling and I will admit as a teacher this year I really really try it as hard as I could to use as much morphology instruction specifically for the purpose of spelling in my class but I also want to admit and maybe this is because I've not taken your master class yet on morphology although I intend to it is difficult to to teach a large number of words morphologically in the classroom because there's just so many more themes out there and so much to learn as a teacher and I have to admit I'm finding it more useful to teach it from a bit of both to use both a phonics and a morphology approach to teaching spelling rather than relying on just one and I was curious about your thoughts. Sure I just want to I've got lots of thoughts on that just want to talk about coding and decoding and draw a line under that. If you have these two words end coding and decoding and you're not talking about the other parts of spelling like orthography morphology etymology then what you're stating is that encoding and decoding are reversible processes and they aren't in a transparent orthography they are in sorry in a no-pay cartography they're not reversible just because you can read a word doesn't necessarily mean that you can write it not in this orthography so when you're using encoding again I would urge caution to not get that mix up with spelling. To address the morphological statements that you made yeah I don't think it's a particularly good idea and I haven't seen a lot of I haven't seen any research to support the idea that start with morphology that I think would undo the good work and the highly successful approaches that have been developed over the last few decades regarding phonics. He really do have to teach default phoneme grapheme correspondences it's a very quick way to getting children into that self-teaching zone where they are getting implicitly learning however we've got a little bit of hyper correction in that as well where people are starting to embrace really in mass you know everywhere people are starting to embrace phonics and then going okay so every letter sequence that's got to be a spelling for a sound and that's where we start to get into trouble that's where morphology and etymology trumps that approach that's where you bring it in whenever there's a letter sequence that can't be explained unless you shoehorn a phoneme into a grapheme danger is there. Then I would add to that I agree completely about especially after third grade fourth grade where we're dealing with multicellable words what what I find from a practical point of view with teachers is most educators or teachers don't don't know enough about etymology don't yeah don't themselves know they know the obvious roots right you know spec and aqua and you know it's like they they know a handful but in order to really do some of this stuff that that that peep hours and company you know suggest you you have to know a lot of these the meanings of the roots and no large word families that connect and and and that's it's the practical application that I see a lot of teachers beyond grade three or four they struggle with that because they themselves don't know that or and it's not like you you know if you pick certain words as perfect examples of how that works in a workshop that's great But in the classroom, the words are going to come up in the text the kids are reading. And if the teacher doesn't know the historical background of the word or how, why it's pronounced differently now than it was in Old English, the whole system is practically difficult to apply, I would say. - Yeah, I absolutely agree. The alternative though to studying words like that. And this is before third grade as well. I mean, look at what wasn't said and all the question words and so on, right? The alternative is to just say, this letter sequence is a spelling for the sound blah. And that's a problem too. So what I try to give to teachers is this idea that firstly, there are really good examples and you can take the the, the, the Dolch list. And you could do that sort of list much better in grades one, two and three, just by grouping words in families. You don't have to even know the story. You can see where the, there's overlap between those families and teach them together. And the other thing is practice as well. You don't have to know the story to practice the word. So if you've got something like, you know, was, well, default graphing to phonemes, that's, woo, ah, s, so I can say it two ways in my spelling voice, and for an in my reading voice, I say was. That's really efficient. And I didn't have to know what the great vowel shift was or, you know, anything like that. I, you know, that, that's to me, logical and doesn't require too much of it, you know, Pete Byron's depth of knowledge. Yes, and that's, that, that's what I recommend. Otherwise, the alternative is every letter sequence is a spelling for a sound. And that, that creates phonetics bellers. And people who never, who never are able to come out of that. Yeah, I just want to add one final comment to that before I get to the last question to Amy, unless someone else wants to jump in. And I just want to make sure that no one thinks I'm, I'm criticizing Dr. Pete Byron's, right? I think Dr. Pete Byron's is a genius far brighter than myself. And while I have disagreements with Moan pedagogy, I would not pretend to be as smart as Dr. Pete Byron's. Not even close. So, Dr. Amy, would you be willing to share your perspective on how writing instruction should train the change sorry as students get older? Oh, well, I'm hoping everybody else here who has much more experience than me will also answer this. And I think that obviously we're expecting students typically to produce longer texts to develop voice and style as they grow older and become more, more proficient writers. But I would argue that a lot of the things that people might say need to wait until students are older can be introduced when they're younger. So here in Australia, and I'm relatively new less than a year here. There's a lot of focus on genre, even with really young learners and the primary grades. And I think sometimes we think that young learners can't, can't learn to write a nonfiction text or can't be exposed to other genres, but besides narrative at a young age. You know, we have to wait until third grade until they can write a persuasive text. And I don't think that's the case. So I think even with young learners, we can think about genres. We can think about developing a style of voice of writing, teaching how to vary sentence structure. I know John mentioned sentence combining. We can do those things with young writers, but I think over time, obviously we're expecting that our students are going to be developing. I feel really strongly, as I said about once our students are fluent, they can focus more on the content that they're producing. They can produce longer texts. They can develop style. They can think about their audience and the messages that they're conveying, but I think authentic writing tasks, multiple genres, those things can be introduced to really young learners as well. Does anybody want to add to that? Yeah, I do. I want to piggyback on something that Amy said and also add a little bit of other thoughts to that. For a long time when we were doing strategy instruction in the US, with elementary grade students, you couldn't get in the door if you weren't doing stories or personal narratives. And that made no sense to me. Anybody who's ever had a kid who's four years old, five years old, six years old, their natural argument. They know how to put an argument forward. They also know how to explain quite well. And so, you know, we started like slowly, we did fourth grade with an opinion task. We moved to third grade, we moved to second grade. And we realized that in some ways, to me, a natural starting point was actually opinions versus stories. And kids knew quite a bit about both. So I think this idea that there's certain kinds of writing that are for a certain age. Those are kind of modes of thinking that we get stuck in. I'm not sure, I'm going to say something controversial now. I'm not sure that I see writing as a naturally developing skill. I don't think we know what students can do at different ages at this point. Or with, you know, within an age range, you know, kind of the variability that exists. We still have a lot to learn about that. In terms of moving forward, as you, your question was, to me, there's two things that are very important. One is flexibility. So, you know, if you take like the, you know, writer's workshop process approach, I want kids to be engaged in thinking and planning and evaluating and monitoring and reworking, etc. But I don't always want them to do that in a step by step fashion. You know, when you look at professional writers, they'll talk about doing different things on different types of writing tasks. We want kids to be more and more flexible in terms of the use of what their knowledge as they approach new tasks and old tasks as a mature. I'd also say another thing that I think is very important is we want them to become more medicognitive. And by that, I mean, we want them to be more thinking and thoughtful about what they're doing. And something as simple as grammar, you know, why am I using these particular, how do I use these particular grammar structures to enhance something that I want to say? So Debra Myhol's work in England would be a great example of this. And it can go all the way from kind of these, you know, skills of language to skills of thinking in terms of writing. And so I see those as very critical being more flexible and being more being more medicognitive as we mature as writers. Nate, I'm wondering if, if part of what you were trying to get out in your, in this question was what, what should be taught at each grade level? And I say this because I'm often getting emails from people. What's the scope and sequence for teaching writing? Do we teach sentences in kindergarten first and paragraphs in second and multi paragraphs and third? And I'd love to hear others on this. It's not a scope and sequence that you, you're done teaching something once and then you leave it. I mean, the whole idea of there's multi components, just like in reading, you know, you keep working on comprehension. You keep growing fluency. You keep growing vocabulary. And so I feel like a lot of the skills and strategies that I've tried to organize into the writing rope, they should be part of a writing curriculum in every grade. The difference is that based on that developmental level of the students and the complexity of what they're reading and are writing about is going to ramp it up. So yes, you're going to work on on sentence basic, just the notion that there's two parts to a sentence with kindergartners and first graders, but you might all the way up in the high school be working on sentence elaboration with kids who are really good writers, but, but need to ramp their sentence writing up. So I don't know if you all get that question, what's the scope? When do we teach paragraphs? When do we teach? And, and I think I'm still learning how to write better paragraphs and I'm an old adult now. So I'd love to hear what others think about that. I have some thoughts about that. It's the, it's the holy grail, isn't it? The scope and sequence, you know, it comes an idea and everyone's like, do you have a scope and sequence for that? And I think one of the answers is to make the distinction between constrained and unconstrained skills. So lots of people are very, very familiar with the reading rope and the fact that the top part of the reading rope is unconstrained. You continue to grow and develop your strategy till the day you die. I mean, I'm a different writer and reader from the one that I was 10 years ago. That will always always be developing and changing. And then there's the constrained skills, the lower part of the reading and writing rope, which is transcription and decoding. At some point, you are automatically at that in an ideal world. That's where you need to get to. Now, that auto-maticity, of course, and and and in generating that auto-maticity is the business of the first three years of school. That's what we want. That's where the instructional time and energy and practice needs to go, but that doesn't mean that we don't pay attention to the top part and increase that strategy as well. So making that distinction between constraint and unconstrained is really helpful. I, for me, and for the teachers that I work with when they say, what's the scope and sequence? Well, get those constrained skills done as quickly as possible, and then the rest of the time you're free in terms of cognitive load to look at the top parts of those models. Well, that brings me to my final question, which is just for everyone, and that's just, do you have any final thoughts or advice or tips you would like to give teachers? And that's open to anybody. Amy would like to start. Well, I just thought of something as we were all chatting, and it's been mentioned, but I think one thing we want to say, and if we're talking to teachers, is that I think there's a considerable amount of time spent facilitating students love for reading, right? Find topics they enjoy, expose them to a variety of literature. If you have a student who loves football, you know, bring 10 different books about football into your classroom. And I think one thing that will be important across the grades is to develop students who love writing and see themselves as writers. So this idea of letting students write for fun, write for pleasure, use invented spelling, if they don't know how to spell something yet. See writing is something enjoyable, so they don't get to, you know, upper primary, secondary grades and really have a dislike of it. I think developing students who enjoy writing and see it as something fun, exciting, engaging to do is really important across, across grade levels. Do you mind if I add two things quickly? Yeah, absolutely. One of those is, I think, for those of us who are engaged in thinking about writing from whether we're talking about teachers or we're talking about academics or we're talking about people who do professional developmental work with teachers. It's to keep an open mind and give an example of this. We just published a study in Norway that was two years in duration. And we were actually hoping that we'd get effects. It was an incidental approach to teaching writing. And so we develop lessons, not lessons completely because Norway, you just don't hand a lesson to a teacher. You basically have something that they work around and they look to implement. It's a little different than doing a study in the US in some ways. But very interesting and I think engaging kinds of activities that kids could be involved in writing over a two-year period, we got no effect whatsoever. Nothing. You know, basically, compared to business as usual. So it was, you know, it was based on a naturalistic learning approach. We, you know, I wouldn't do anything if I didn't think we'd get some effects. So I was stunned when we got nothing out of this. And my colleague from Norway was here two weeks ago. And I ask him how the study was being, you know, taken in Norway. And he said, "Well, all I've been told was it was a lousy study." And I said, you know, it's randomized control trials, 2000 kids. We had good fidelity. I said, "Well, why? Why did people say that?" And he said, "Nobody's telling me that there's a problem in the study. It's a matter of your mindset." You know, basically, they, you know, his colleagues all believe that a naturalistic approach will work. So it doesn't matter what the data says, it works. And I think that the trap we have to watch ourselves, I think you can go both ways on this. So I want to be quite frank about that. The second thing is I had a conversation day with my university, in terms of the writing center, which we have 100 and some thousand students. So we're a large place. And they're getting ready to revamp. And they're working with a group called Grammarly. And it's, there's going to be a lot of stuff around AI. And as we talked about this, I thought, you know, we're going to a really changing world here in terms of what this technology is going to mean for writing and how writers perceive. And so whatever I say today, five years from now, we're looking at a completely different landscape. And it's a landscape that, you know, if you're a teacher like yourself, or if you're an academic like me or somebody working with teachers, it's, I think, is exciting, but it's also a little bit scary in some ways as well. And it's going to, I'm going to be interested to see where we end up on this. You know, I think the future of writing is machine and man or man and machine or person and machine, woman and machine, however you want to, want to say that. I'm just hoping it's not machined by itself. I actually tend to agree with you that I think we're going to see more integration. And I will admit, I played with CHJPT a lot. And it's incredibly fun to play, but what it does so far is for the most part, pretty terrible, but I imagine that as it gets better, people won't integrate it more if they're writing, but I still kind of have the inkling that people are going to always have to edit whatever CHJPT or whatever AI gives them because it's just oftentimes it's not convincing. It's full of errors because it's really, it's a play-dress machine. Yeah, that's not the part I'm worried about. I'm worried about if it's machine does the work. What's important about writing is a thinking that goes on. And so if it takes that out of our hands, then the learning that can occur as a result of writing is minimized or disappears. You know, I do believe that these machines will get better. I've been talking with teachers and others that have been using this and they've been using it in very innovative ways both for designing lessons and for what their students do. And it will get better. But I'm afraid, you know, like I said, it takes away the thinking part of writing. We lost something. Well, I think then that also echoes Amy's point about making sure that writing is an enjoyable task so that we don't defer to machines. So it takes the schlepper of the boring parts of writing, you know, like doing marketing emails, which is just for me a horrible thing that CHJPT has taken care of now. But in terms of my enjoyment of writing, if we instill or find better ways to instill that early, hopefully our robot overlords won't take that task away from us. I'm going to admit one, one shameful thing. I tried to use CHJPT to write a marketing email for me and it was so braggadocious that I could not possibly bring myself to click send on that and I had to just delete the entire thing and find something for scratch. But Nate, didn't you just say, okay, stop making it so braggadocious? I mean, they do listen, right? I do think of that. I just read this incredibly braggadocious, like this is the best thing you've ever written. I'm like, well, I'm talking to her, but you can't see that. Oh, you have to do is why the prompt to turn the volume down on the braggadociousness. I sure will understand. So Nate, I think you asked us, were there any like final sort of comments and what I'm going to do is just run through what I say at the end of every keynote address address at a conference, right? Number one, integrate reading and writing. Number two, don't make any assumptions about the skills that our students have. In fact, the older they get, the more we do that and we can't assume that a 15-year-old can write a good sentence. Number three, writing is multi-componential and don't focus on just one or two things because that's what you know or love. But we've got to integrate all of these skills and strategies and techniques into a writing curriculum. And then finally, every teacher can and should play a role in teaching writing. It is not just the responsibility of the English teacher. So those are the four things that whenever I'm asked that kind of question, that's what I say. I got a memorize. Well, I think that's great. My big takeaway from everyone was definitely that writing and reading instruction should be integrated together. I'd like to say that a big takeaway from us for me is there's definitely a science of writing and that we need to be making sure that when we're planning our literacy block, we're devoting an equal amount of time or at least a comparable amount of time for both writing and reading. And if anyone wants to disagree with me, feel free to speak. Awesome. You're going to get an agreement from this group on that. Nailed it. I'm so happy about that. I was secretly slightly worried that someone would be like, "Ah, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard." Okay. Well, on that awesome note, I'd like to end this podcast and thank our wonderful panelists for joining us today. I had an absolute blast talking to you all and it was a pleasure to learn from each and every one of you. Thank you for inviting us. Thanks, Nate.