Literacy Lass 💗📚

Day 5 of teaching with a script for the first time. Today’s script was my first attempt at using a traditional Engelmann-style Direct Instruction lesson. The structure followed a familiar DI progression: teacher modeling, guided practice with choral responses, individual turns, immediate feedback and error correction, increasingly challenging examples requiring discrimination, and a final check for independent application. I used it to introduce students to the geographic concepts of site and situation as part of our primate city case study on Istanbul. The script moved students through a carefully sequenced progression. We started by establishing the definitions of site and situation, then practiced identifying examples of each concept separately before moving to mixed examples that required students to distinguish between the two. Students eventually applied those distinctions to the geographic features of Istanbul and considered why its location made it valuable to three successive empires. Two observations from today: 1. An Engelmann-style script can make the sequence of instruction and practice much more deliberate. The script broke the learning into small steps, with each task building on the previous one. Teacher modeling, choral responses, individual turns, checks for understanding, and correction procedures were all planned in advance. I didn’t have to decide what question to ask next or how to respond when a student made an error. I could focus on delivering each step clearly and monitoring whether students were making the distinctions I wanted them to make. I especially appreciated how the script moved students from isolated examples to mixed examples, where they had to actually discriminate between site and situation rather than rely on a predictable sequence. 2. The precision of the script can make instruction feel mechanical. The repeated response routines and tightly controlled sequence serve a purpose, particularly when introducing new concepts and building accurate discrimination. But they can also leave less room for spontaneous discussion, student questions, and following an unexpected but productive line of thinking. I don’t want the efficiency of the script to come at the expense of opportunities for students to explain their reasoning, make connections, or explore ideas beyond the planned sequence. The challenge is knowing when to stay with the script and when to step outside it. As this lovely little experiment comes to an end, I view scripts less as something to teach from word for word and more as a way to think through the instructional decisions I want to make before students walk into the room. I expect to keep using them, particularly for modeling, think-alouds, introducing new concepts, and lessons that require carefully sequenced practice. I also want to get better at recognizing which parts of a lesson benefit from that level of preparation and which parts require me to be more responsive to students in the moment. My goal never has been and never will be to script every lesson. It’s to use scripting where it can make my instruction clearer, more deliberate, and more effective while preserving the professional judgment and flexibility that teaching requires. A more in-depth Substack piece is in the works. Until then, thanks for following along.

💜 Dyslexia for Dummies starts shipping next week... and will be sold in select Barnes & Noble stores! 💜 Designed to be a clear, practical guide for families of struggling readers 💜 Dedicated to Penelope, my brilliant student who has testified on Capitol Hill about the power of early reading intervention #DyslexiaAwarenessMonth

Adult GED and literacy students working on Word Mapping Project… We turned fragments into full sentences (which contained our vocabulary words), adding “when”, “where”, and “what”. So a fragment like “received great acclaim” could turn into “Ella received great acclaim last night when she won the award for her role in the play on Broadway.” These were the longest sentences many of them have ever written, and they knocked them out! Student asked: “So if a word ends with -ion that means it’s a noun?” (Me:😭) They also spelled words in dictation like accomplished, acclaim, exclude, include... They mostly spelled these words easily. A new favorite word for many: erroneous. In tonight’s class, this was a new word for all. As has happened so often, I don’t regret starting at the beginning. This curriculum is so rich. @smorrisey🔥

If I seem grumpy lately it's because I'm reading piles of recent national surveys about why parents don't read to their kids for my dissertation and... Y'all. 😐 "My child prefers screentime." "I find it boring." "It's useless."

ALL school districts need to embrace the one or two really nerdy teachers that read 50 educational books a year or listen to podcasts on a daily or weekly basis. The ones with really good outcomes with their students year after year. I've heard too many stories from teachers on here that they are basically deemed the "difficult" teacher or are just sidelined in their district. Not all schools/districts do this, but far too many. This is a call to admin. It is perfectly fine if a teacher knows far more than you. Listen to them. Learn from them. Appreciate them. Put them in positions to help improve your district. Admin that do this are truly the best. It is about the kids. That is what we are all here for.