The Principal's Handbook

Early Literacy Assessment Podcast with Karen Dudek Brennan

Well, welcome everyone to the podcast. Today I'm here with Karen Dudek Brennan and we are going to be talking about early literacy assessments and speed and how that relates to speech and language issues and just talking about different reading assessments that you can use with your students.
So I think it's going to be a great [00:01:00] conversation. I'm going to have Karen start out by just talking about her background and what she's been doing in education. I started off back in the early 2000s as a speech pathologist in the school system. So, I was in the public schools for about 14 years, was doing a lot of other stuff on the side, was getting my doctorate in special ed and my director of special ed credential and I got an assistive technology credential as well.

And was doing a lot of other things on the side, then kind of transitioned to training professionals. So I have some programs that center around language and literacy and, and metacognition and executive functioning where I support, initially started out supporting speech pathologists, but it branched out to the entire special ed and school team.

When I started off in the It was during the time when we were Like, RTI was kind of a new ish thing, No Child Left Behind had been [00:02:00] around for a little while, but we were trying to figure out how do we determine if a student has a learning disability or meet some other eligibility criteria in the schools, but We Don't rely on standardized testing, and we're not necessarily just using a test to identify if a student has learning a learning disability.

We're also using other data sources and doing intervention, offering multiple tiers of support before we decide that a student qualifies for special ed. I was on the team in my district that was trying to figure out how to implement this. And I think a lot of districts had this experience where it's if a student needs support.

There's not really this range. It's like either they're in general education or they're in special education and there's this huge gap. There's not really a continuum between those two. It's like either , we make the referral and then we sit there and wait [00:03:00] while the student is struggling. And it takes forever to do an evaluation.

The evaluation process , it takes a lot of time and effort on the team. So it's very labor intensive. And so again, there's just huge gaps. And then some kids, maybe they could have been. helped way before if they didn't have to wait so long. So yeah, I was, I was on the team that was, , involved in trying to figure out how we were going to implement that in my district and, , was able to figure out how that looked as far as my role as an SLP, but also was able to do some professional development with the teachers to get some supports in the classroom.

That really just kind of informed a lot of the work that I'm doing now because when you're in that role where when you're a support staff, you know that you should have a role in the process, but it's kind of hard to figure out where you fit.

And I think that In a lot of the work I do now, I encourage the people who are in that role, the related service [00:04:00] providers, to not just think of themselves as, I'm someone who pulls kids out of the classroom, but I only do this one on one , or, , what we sometimes refer to as the pull out model of therapy, where we're just pulling kids out, but, , being able to use your skills to help them.

Again, offer that continuum of support rather than just, you know, these huge siloed services. Yeah, and I loved what you said, which is going to lead perfectly into what we're talking about today. I think there is this gap you talked about, and I totally agree where you have a kid who's typical and you have a kid who's identified, , on an IEP, but there are kids who just struggle, right?

They struggle and things are harder for them, but they aren't necessarily special ed, you know, and so I always say as a principal, I take that very serious that it's a hard decision when kids go through that RTI process to decide , okay, at what point are we going to say that the student needs to [00:05:00] be put on an IEP?

And at what point are they just struggling? And maybe they're lacking skills because we've had kids move in that were doing online instruction and. You know, how much instruction were they really getting? , it could totally be a lack of instruction, or we've seen kids who have missed so much school.
So you have all these gray areas, right? It's never just black and white. So, with these kids who we see that are really struggling, and I'm using reading because that's typically what we see it in. When we identified kids when I was an elementary principal. I can't even give a percentage, but I would say the majority were reading.
And now that we're learning all this stuff about dyslexia, it makes so much sense, right? Because they're probably dyslexic. And we've had conversations too, that there's like this range of being dyslexic, just like there's a range of autism, right? Not everybody who's autistic is on an IEP. Right, I know, and that's surprising to some people, but [00:06:00] yeah, I knew a student who didn't even have, she didn't even have a 504, because she was able to, what she got in school , was sufficient, and she was doing well, and That was the right plan for her.

And then some just need like some 504 accommodations. So that looks different. And I feel like that's what we're seeing with dyslexia too. We might see a student who is severe and we know their grade levels behind now they're in fourth or fifth grade. They're going to need this extra support. And then we have kids who, .
Could get caught up, we're really giving them that intense intervention. So I guess my question for you is what screeners would you give to those kids? , and how do you determine where to place them and what interventions to do when we're speaking about reading?
So are you thinking about universal screenings? Are you thinking about kids who need? More intensive supports, like I think it can be both evaluation. Yeah, so I'm thinking of a lot of different things right now. It probably would [00:07:00] be more helpful for me to send people to the places they can go to learn about the good resources for dyslexia and thinking about evaluations because.
I get that question all the time, like what screeners do I use? And what I was using in the schools, when I was in the schools, is different because it's updated all the time. So I think the main thing that you want to think about when you're thinking about dyslexia specifically, is just understanding what are the core features of dyslexia, and, , what, how does it present and yes there are different profiles and it's going to present differently in different students even if they do fit that profile but with dyslexia the one of the core features is that , it's An issue with word decoding.

So they have a really hard time, you know, at the word level, , what we sometimes would refer to as sounding out the words. That's a very [00:08:00] common Hallmark characteristic. And where it gets a little fuzzy is that with dyslexia, you can also have things that are It's reading, but it's not just reading.
Language can be impacted. Executive functioning can be impacted. You can have comorbidity. So I, what I would say is that when you're thinking about screening or evaluation, it's Like I always tell people this is for evaluation and screening. It's not a test. It's a process. So yes, you should have a solid protocol in place for screening all students that really gets at the , again, things like phonological awareness, and there's a lot of companies that have some good screeners out there.
So what I can do is link to some resources, and I also have a podcast episode that I did that was actually a Q& A for my, , my members group for my program where, , I can link people to a list of some different assessment tools , [00:09:00] for reading, , and then also for language and executive functioning.
So those would be the things that I would be thinking about if you have a student who is showing those signs. So if they are, again, not catching on to some of those phonological patterns, if you notice that they're not making progress in reading, and they're those kids who. Don't seem to be able to be catching on to their sight words.

And that's a whole conversation that we could go into the use of sight words and whether or not that's useful. And, , the way that we work on that. But again, if they're not, they're having a difficult time spelling and reading at the word level, then we definitely want to be looking at things like phonological awareness.
But we also want to understand that. Reading is this really big opportunity for us to notice those students who are struggling, but it's not. The only way and it's not the only signed. So that was kind of in my National Literacy [00:10:00] Month series that I did. We're like, we're talking about reading, but we're not just talking about reading.

This is one opportunity to identify students that are going to have other things going on. We also need to make sure that we're not just looking at this. We're also looking at language. We're looking at those students who, , for older students, the kids who are always goofing off in class. Is it because they're worried that they're going to get called on to read and they don't want to, you know, be embarrassed in front of their friends?

So that is also one of those red flags, especially in the older students. So I know I didn't give you a specific screener, but what I can do is I can link people to some resources that they can go. And my recommendation would be rather than saying , this is my screener, this is my test, go to the places where.
You can continue to stay updated on what good screeners and tests there are, , at my district that I was in, we used [00:11:00] aimsweb. We did a lot with Lexia, , Hegarty. So those are some companies that tend to make really good products. , 99 percent group, they have a good phonological awareness screener that the SLPs and I, , used to use because we had aimsweb, but we realized that they weren't really, it was really focused on, , Just the letter sounds, and there wasn't really a lot on phonological awareness, and so we needed something else to supplement what was already being done.

But all those companies, they're, they have just expanded since I've been in the school, so they have a lot of other products. So, I would be looking at some of those companies, and looking at some of the things that they offer as far as phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and vocabulary. Yeah, and we used Acadiance and we used Hagerty and 99 percent group.

So yeah, lots of great things, but I love that answer that there's so many ways to look at it and to give the resources that you can then go and research it yourself, see what works and see, like you said, how the [00:12:00] companies have expanded. So , I think that's a great way to look at it. But you mentioned, Older students well and even younger students with executive functioning.

I think that's so interesting. So talk to me a little bit about that and how you can notice some reading difficulties with that. Yeah. So, this is kind of a, it's like a chicken or egg thing. And we think about the science of reading. There are some, I guess there's some skepticism around it. Like people are worried on one hand that, If we are working on things like phonics, that it's going to be boring, that if we just expose kids to interesting books and make learning fun, that they're going to learn to read.

And that is just, that statement is just not backed by research. And if we think about reading that way, we're going to miss a lot of kids because we can, it needs to be structured and explicit. And yes, some kids are going to learn implicitly, [00:13:00] but a lot of students just Aren't going to. I think that we need to understand that and be very wary about some of these ideas that get promoted by journalists and popular news articles that You know, want to, you know, talk bad about education just because it's something that sells a lot of books.

I'll, I guess I'll say that, but as far as the thinking about executive functioning, we've got all these different strands of the reading rope. We have the word decoding. , if you. Are resorting and using so many resources, , focused on sounding out words at the word level, or if you don't have a solid sense of sentence structure, and it takes so much work for you to process one sentence because you don't really understand complex sentences and conjunctions.

Then you're not going to have a lot of bandwidth left for comprehension. So a lot of those [00:14:00] phonics skills, because it helps us build automaticity, helps to free up cognitive resources for that high level processing that we often think of as the end goal. I mean, I've heard a lot of people say , why are we working on phonics when Really, the end goal is comprehension.

Why don't we just work on comprehension? And a lot of the SLPs that I work with, , they are getting these referrals and they're thinking language processing. They're working on, like, stating the main idea and inferences and, you know, problem solving statement and more strategic high level things, which is really important.

Are all good things that we should be working on, but if you can't read the words, you're not going to be able to state the main idea. Or again, if you can't process the language, which is tied in with reading as well, it's a part of reading comprehension. So all of those skills have to be woven together.

And if you don't have them, then there's going to be a breakdown. So when [00:15:00] we think about executive functioning, , a lot of those language skills, those reading skills are going to support what we often think of as reading executive functioning, where it's what's my strategy? Can I create a picture in my head of?

What's this scene that's being created? Can I think back on something that I read and explain something and problem solve? So a lot of those skills , and with executive functioning, it's , way bigger than just that, but there are a lot of those skills. Again, , the ability to Just stop yourself and pause and ask yourself, do I actually understand what I'm reading?

But we do need to build those foundational skills to support those executive functioning skills. We need to build those language skills because part of executive functioning is just thinking and talking to yourself in your head. To self regulate and if you don't have [00:16:00] language to do that, you like you need to be able to formulate the sentences to be able to talk to yourself in your head.

So they, these are like, you know, it's these skills that support each other. It's this bidirectional relationship. So in the early years. I think , if we just forget about all of these foundational skills, we're actually not going to support those high level skills. And yes, kids should have a lot of other experiences outside of reading, like play and, you know, opportunities to problem solve in other ways to support that cognitive development, but they also need to have this balance of, you know, unstructured play and.
Engaging activities that don't have to do with academic tasks, but then also they do need that specific. Academic instruction so those skills can support each other if that makes sense. Yeah, so one thing I love about what I've learned over time with the science of reading is the assessment practices that have come [00:17:00] with it.

As a teacher, I taught third grade and I would give kids an assessment and I'd be like, okay, they can't comprehend this. , but now, our district had made what we call decision rules and it broke down. Okay. If I'm a third grade teacher and they're not on level with their Acadians, like Here's kind of the levels to go.
Like you said, you have to start with those foundational skills, make sure they have those and move on to the next thing. What would you tell principals who are struggling getting their teachers to understand, because I've seen this when. You're in third grade and up right and they're starting to get to reading to learn and they should have their basic foundational skills.

I know some schools teach third grade phonics, which is definitely a good thing. But some teachers have the mindset they should be reading. They should be good. Now we're focusing on comprehension and they feel like the phonics and stuff doesn't pertain to them. , what advice would you give to principals on how to work in those situations or work with those situations?

Yeah, [00:18:00] that is, that's a tricky one. , I would say one of the biggest things that , is on my radar as far as advocacy is, that a lot of , the people who are doing special ed services that are providing those support services, the speech and language or the reading. I mean, and I felt like this too, when I was in the schools where it was kind of like, there's certain parts of the day that are untouchable.

And if you have a student who needs services, you can't take them out. Like I would be taking kids out of music and PE. And , there's Yeah, there's a lot, a lot to that. But if these students are struggling and they're, it's across the day, and then the people who are supposed to provide those supports can't provide the services that are going to help with that root cause, it's going to persist.

So I think it's, there really needs to be a push for those service providers to continue to [00:19:00] be able to deliver those services and for the schedule. And this is more of a systems issue, but the schedule has to be able to support that service delivery. And so, it's kind of tricky because sometimes it's, do you need a small tweak or do you need a full overhaul because you're trying to just.

Cram things in and I can give. An example at the high school level, I had a student who probably needed some more intensive language therapy, but I could only work with him 20 minutes every other week. So, I mean, what am I really going to do in that time? And that's, there's a lot of students where their teachers keep reporting, like they're not turning in their assignments or not engaged in class.

And it's like, well, if. Everything is going so fast and they're not processing, then they're not going to be engaged. Like we disengage if something is so overwhelming that we can't pay attention to it. We're not going to be [00:20:00] engaged in the learning because we're you just shut off.

So I mean, that it's not really an easy answer there. But I think that. Especially high school language therapy is definitely on my radar, but we can't just say, , these students, it's high school. So you don't get speech anymore. Maybe you don't need speech anymore. So I think looking at scheduling and structure to put things in place to make it easier or more feasible for people, because a lot of times people have the intention of if I think about teachers like there were many of them where I had my idea about what was the issue like I knew that they were not understanding the directions they were goofing off during reading because.

They were struggling and the teacher is saying this is just a behavior problem. He's just not motivated when really this student probably needs some intervention so that they can experience some success. And yes, it doesn't mean that you [00:21:00] accept things that are, not appropriate in the classroom or anything like that, but you can't punish a student into having skills.

You have to teach them the skills. Maybe they also have consequences for their behaviors, but you have to give them . Those supports. So I'm really interested in and things like block scheduling and just really relooking at how we think about homework and how useful it is and like how we prepare students for the life after school, because I think that sometimes people are resistant because they can't see how it fits in with, , some of the pain points that they're having.

Or just how it would fit within their schedule. So I think the system has to be in place for to be able to collaborate to be able to pull students out or, go into classrooms to provide those services. But then also, we need to think about, , some of that [00:22:00] collaboration could help someone who is a related service provider to draw those connections and those parallels for a teacher.

And that's what I encourage my related service providers to do, where it's like, Alright, you know it's a language processing issue, you're not going to go in there and lecture the teacher about, This is a language processing issue. You need to do X, Y, Z, figure out what the teacher , is struggling with, figure out what their pain points are.

If they think it's a behavior issue, then okay, say, all right, we're going to address this behavior issue and you're going to work with that teacher and you're going to put some supports in place and you're going to get the buy in that way once they experience some wins. Then you can start introducing some of those things that maybe you know, is the issue, but maybe they're not there yet.

, like I said, there's these. Those small wins like I just described with that one teacher and that one therapist and then there's the big things to like, do we completely overhaul our schedule and do a block schedule or, you know, take [00:23:00] out certain subjects during the day and repurpose time blocks.
So I think it has to go both ways. It has to be macro and micro at the same time. Yeah, I love what you're saying. And I also think that's so great to , direct the service providers to, you know, encourage those teachers because like you said, once they get those small wins. Then that's where you get the buy in like you're doing the behind the scene thing that's helping with the problem that they see.

And then over time they'll get the buy in and see , the thing that student needed, because, and I also love what you're saying too, you know, we have our screeners, we have our assessments for reading, which I always say it's great when kids are little, because, you know, there's less skills, there's less that they're missing when you're able to do those, but when kids get older.

There can be so many gaps in it. , I was just talking to a middle school principal about RTI. It's really hard when they're older because there's so many skills that they could be missing at that point. So RTI is not the same [00:24:00] at even third grade enough. I say, as it is in K one and two, when they're little.
And you've still got those foundational skills. So I think looking at other things as part of that assessment data, like you said, the executive functioning, the behaviors coming out, how are they comprehending? What is their language? , I think those are all great things to look at. Yeah.

The language is huge too, because in one of my conversations that I had recently, I was talking with, , this Dr. Carla McGregor, who's been really big with the, Advocacy about developmental language disorder. So dyslexia advocacy is also something that's really important. , but I think that most people have at least heard of dyslexia.

Not as many people have heard of developmental language disorder. And so some of the, I think that , the DLD, the mandates are sort of following the template that was laid relating to dyslexia, for example, there's , some talk about like, how do we use these terms in the schools? Because people were.
I would say teachers, administrators, [00:25:00] therapists, we're kind of like, I'm not supposed to say dyslexia in the schools, but that's not true. You can say it. It's maybe , the box that you check on the IEP is different, but we can use those words. We can plan specific programming with those terms in mind.
And most importantly, we can say those words when we're talking to parents and students, if a student is, Fitting those profiles and design services accordingly, so yeah, and I love, , what's coming up with the science of reading and this push of teaching about dyslexia and I shared in another podcast episode teaching first grade.

I had one year, like half my class was on speech. IEPs and I was a new teacher. Yeah, and I had no idea the connection of how that impacted everything I was doing, you know, teaching these kids to read. I knew they were struggling readers. I knew their levels, all that kind of stuff. But I wish I had the knowledge now that I do with the science of reading.

And I feel like now the collaboration between [00:26:00] speech pathologist and reading teachers is so much more, or at least that's what I've seen in some of the districts I've been working with is. There's more collaboration, which is huge. Mm hmm. I mean, yeah, that that's huge. And with special ed teachers as well, because , the other thing is going back to how important it is for districts to put The structure in place for teams to collaborate because a lot of those problems that we were talking about with buy in, , it's sometimes because we're siloed and you think, oh, this person, like you don't really understand the value that the other person provides.

I had this one teacher that, I would say, like she was amazing , at really pushing students who were, , like gifted and that probably needed more enrichment activities, but wasn't quite as comfortable with the students that needed some more, you know, foundational, you know, again, some [00:27:00] of those students that maybe they didn't need to be pulled out into special ed for their entire day.

They just needed something in the classroom. And, , there's a lot of teachers that are just like, this is special ed, get them out of my room. This isn't my job, which , isn't how we want people to think. And this person, , was not super open to those kinds of things, but , I won't get into too many details because I don't want to, give identifying information, but a person close to this teacher, , was an SLP, , or became an SLP and she learned what all the things that we did and just, I just saw , this change, , and I think a lot of times it's, you don't really understand the value of the other people on your team.

And I would say. Obviously, I'm focusing on SLPs because that's my discipline, and so I have a lot of examples pertaining to that, but this is everybody, and I encourage SLPs to do this as well because they also have those ideas [00:28:00] about teachers, or their psychologist, or the OT, or the reading teacher, and so really just making sure that people have time to collaborate because that's going to help us to come up with How do we provide those supports in the classroom?

Or how do we come up with these things together? Because if you don't have time to have those conversations, then the collaboration is not going to happen. So the structure has to be. In the school day with students, but it also has to be in the behind the scenes, , time , with teachers, , with the staff to figure out how are we delivering these services.

And for principals, I will share, , we had one time at a PD day where, we had two elementary schools, two SLPs, and they got together and presented to the elementary teachers about some of the strategies that they're using with kids and speech. And that was so powerful, even for me as the school leader, to see that.

See exactly what they're doing, [00:29:00] exactly what they're teaching. And then I think the teachers got on board that like, Oh, what we do does overlap. I see that we can really work together. I think that's another great way to do it is have them share some of those strategies so that people can see, , cause they don't always have that big picture.

Yeah. As school leaders, as principals, we have that big picture. And so it's easy to get frustrated when somebody doesn't understand something. Yeah, I always have to remind myself that everybody's kind of in their own little world. Yeah, they really are. Yeah, we've got to get that big picture thinking and then that helps others, kind of see what the vision is, what the big goal is for these kids over time, not just within one year in somebody's classroom.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Karen, thanks so much for being on today. This was great. I think a lot of great information here, a lot of takeaways on ways to assess kids, ways to look at kids, how they're struggling with readers and then collaboration in the school. So I appreciate you coming on [00:30:00] the podcast today.

Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.
Mhm. Mhm.