But today I'll have to give you a bit of confidence going forward.

Yeah, exactly.

I think our heads were down a bit against Moldova and you could tell why we didn't have much confidence.

But as you said, hopefully this can kickstart something for us

To turn that around into a victory, that'll give you huge heart.

Yeah, and I think we were in games all year around that time with 10 to go and we just died off.

So it was massive, I thought, for us today just to kick on with 10 to go instead of dying away.

Would you give our listeners a general overview of your approach? And I'm sure this is going to come out of how you experience being a classroom teacher.

So the approach is to try to combine all these important components to the reading process into one well thought out lesson that there's really no minutes of like teachers saying, oh, this is just a waste of my time and the students time.

So I definitely put the word at the forefront.

With reading comprehension, students struggle in many occasions because they just don't know what one word means.

So when I think about a unit, the word is at the forefront.

So in a two-week unit, I would say there's about 40 vocabulary words that are taught, and either through morphology or explicit instruction.

So when I talk about the layers, the overview, I always start with the sound or sounds.

So I'd like you to get into that a little.

What made you think, like, there has to be a better way to

teach words? I think the research for vocabulary, there's just some amazing researchers, you know, like Isabel Beck, Margaret McCowan, you know, out of Pittsburgh, you know, you have...

Like they're kind of two of my go to, but you have all these researchers out there, they, they have kind of researched it, they're telling you what what is sort of best practice, but then trying to take it and put it all together because I think still vocabulary is kind of segmented like, oh, we can teach these words here.

Morphology sort of put in a different area.

Spelling always plays a role in that and sort of spelling sometimes as it's like on its own island.

So I would say I've always been big in teaching vocabulary since since like day one.

That was actually my observation to get my teaching job was a vocab lesson.

And I wonder about those results because you're in the classroom, you're working as a teacher and you're spending all your evenings and weekends, I'm sure like like with this word mapping project, how does it turn out in terms of the on the ground results in your classroom?

And so I wonder if you have any thoughts or suggestions for how families might suss that out in a conversation if they hear their child struggling or they notice their child struggling.

Yeah, that's what like with learning disabilities, it's hard because there's like no blood test.

You just can't go and you're diagnosed.

So, you know, when school psychologists or, you know, outside psychologists try to like tease that out, I think number one is how is my child doing compared to where they should be at at this point in time? So if they are behind, like how far behind are they? And like, I think that, that, that, that's, that's something number one that you have to, you have to find out from, from the teachers and from the staff at the school.

Second is, you know, having a discussion.

Well, what is the curriculum? Like what, what skills are being taught? Like, You know, if your child is struggling, say it's third grade and spelling and there's no spelling in the curriculum.

Well, then then we have an issue.

So what are the essential elements of this curriculum? And I'll just start there and ask you some follow-up questions.

And one of the things that I'm really interested in, especially, you know, hearing your background about being a school psych before you became a teacher, was what did you bring from the school psych life to becoming a teacher and now having a focus on vocabulary?

Yeah.

I think honestly, the word is research.

So, like, I think school- the schools of education versus school psych is, like, r- very much more research-oriented.

And when I was an undergrad, I, I was lucky enough to study under a big researcher, William Pelham.

He r- he researched students with ADHD, so I kind of learned, like, the research process and, you know, how, like, empirically validated treatments was kind of like the term used in psychology that we should be using treatments for students that had the best chance of working.

So that definitely came over into education.

When did you start putting things together that maybe, maybe part of this just had to do with instruction, that there really wasn't any sort of, you know, identifiable condition or disability or whatever word we're supposed to be using now?

So what should teachers be, if teachers had a choice, what should they do?

Yeah, so I think this is key.

I'm a big fan of screeners like Acadians.

So early on, kindergarten, first grade, assessing early literacy skills with phoneme segmentation fluency or even nonsense word to see if they're picking up the coding skill.

And then as you move along, oral reading fluencies, it's just so predictive of how kids are going to comprehend what they read.

I've actually had some data where in in my classroom over and this is just this isn't just one year but over a span of about four years kids who are below the 60th percentile on oral reading fluency like acadians or aimsweb i haven't had one student proficient on the ela assessment if they're below that and that's a pretty high like that's a like that's a so even if you're at the 50th percentile of fluency i still haven't had one student proficient on the state ela assessment and our ela assessment's pretty hard So, like, boy, is that a big indicator.

So I really like oral reading fluency measures.

Have you found comprehension diagnostic assessments that you like?