Episode 7: death to the spelling contract

15 September 2022

If you’re tired of spelling lists and stuck for ideas to support spelling in the primary years, discover the way forward without spelling contracts. Literacy coaches Ashlee and Daina share their practical advice about quality spelling instruction and resources available to teachers.

Show Notes

Transcript

Teach podcast: death to the spelling contract

Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders past, present and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello, and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from the South Australian Department for Education.

Georga Tyson: And I'm Georgia Tyson, Largs Bay school teacher. This episode is all about spelling. Our guests today are literacy coaches who are calling for the death of the spelling contract and have some ideas for practical activities to support quality spelling instruction.

Dale Atkinson: That does seem extreme. With us, Ashlee Dewet-Cowland and Daina Wilson. Welcome to you both.

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Thank you for having us.

Dale Atkinson: So first off, can you tell us a bit about who you are and what your roles are?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Sure. So this is Ashlee. I've been working with the Literacy Guarantee Unit now for a year and a half and I have to say it is the best job I have ever had. In fact, it's not a job. It's just me doing what I'm very passionate about every day. I've been a JP teacher for over 22 years in Victoria and South Australia. So it's just been a very long journey to get to this point.

Georga Tyson: And you are working in schools as well?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Yes. So, part of our role as literacy coaches, we work in identified sites and work towards building quality evidence-based literacy practices in the school, leading to greater literacy outcomes for our students.

Dale Atkinson: What about you, Daina? Where have you come from?

Daina Wilson: Very similar. It is absolutely the dream job. So lucky to be working with a group of like-minded people who are passionate, and we get to talk all day, literacy, all the time. JP background. So came a bit later to teaching in my more mature years. And so have been teaching for around 10 years and have then come into this position with literacy coaches.

So the same, we work with a wide range of teachers across many different sites and working with them to improve their knowledge and understanding about reading development.

Dale Atkinson: So, you operate in schools, but you also provide some guidance through the literacy guarantee conferences. Now, the name of your seminar was ‘Death to the spelling contract, the fundamentals of quality spelling instruction’. What are spelling contracts and why do they have to die?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Well, it comes back to the purpose really, of spelling activities. But I guess if you want to go a little bit deeper, it actually is about teacher knowledge of spelling. And what we've found is, and I am putting it out there, I have absolutely used spelling contracts. In fact, I brought some along today to show you both that I call them chewing gum for the brain, because really there's no purpose often to these activities. And the reason for that is that teachers use them in place of explicit instruction because many teachers don't really understand how to teach spelling.

Spelling is a linguistic skill. And we didn't learn this at university. I'm lucky I have a linguistics degree, so I have some knowledge or I had some knowledge of language before I started teaching. But spelling contracts really, they lack purpose. When it comes to teaching children about our language and spelling.

Georga Tyson: I think what you're saying is true, there is a lot of unknown for teachers about spelling and absolutely the title, ‘Death to the spelling contract’, definitely hooked us in. And that's why we're chatting with you today, but how do you think the teaching of spelling has changed?

Daina Wilson: Well, I think a lot of it, and Ashlee and I have had this discussion over the last few weeks leading up to our conference presentation, and I think this is the catalyst of some change, is this knowledge and understanding behind our language and the structures behind our language. I think in the past few years, we've had a lot of resources and development into our junior primary sort of sector around teaching phonics and that early reading development and what's happened is that it's then teachers are going “well, what do we do next? So where do we go from here?”. And so, I think a lot of it, it has been about teachers really wanting to implement strategies and practices that create impact and create that improvement for their students, but not quite sure about how to go about it.

Dale Atkinson: So, what is the key to quality instruction in this area?

Daina Wilson: A lot of it is about evidence, so we know so much more about how the brain learns. There’s so much out there, research and evidence across multiple countries, multiple languages about what happens in the brain when we learn to read. And obviously then when we learn to read and write. And so that has definitely increased, I suppose, the conversations that come about, about how we teach reading and then obviously, and spelling which is the focus of ours.

Dale Atkinson: Why do you think some teachers might be stuck with the teaching of spelling?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: I found it when I was starting this science of reading, science of learning journey quite a few years ago, it was really hard to find information. And I wasn't sure where to look. We asked children questions. Well, what do you think about this? Well, if they don't know anything about a subject, they don't know what questions to ask. All I knew was that my students spelling in their writing, wasn't reflecting what I was teaching them in my spelling lessons or phonics lessons. So, it made me wonder, what am I missing here? What do I know from my background? So, I would bring in lots of morphology and vocabulary into my lessons, but other teachers weren't. So, it really led me down a path. I discovered Lyn Stone. She was probably one of the first people I thought, oh, okay, now I'm getting it. So, it requires this deep knowledge of how the English language works. And when we understand that our English language is made up of many different languages, Anglo-Saxon, French, Greek and Latin words that allows us to understand why we have certain patterns in our spelling. And so, all of this started to come into make sense to me. And so, it just led me down this path of learning more.

I ended up doing a master’s in leadership, but it changed my direction and actually brought it back to, well, how do we improve literacy practices in schools through transformational instructional leadership? And it was down one of those rabbit holes where I found more knowledge to help me. So, I think teachers are stuck because they don't know where to look for help.

Georga Tyson: Of course. I agree with that.

Dale Atkinson: Can you tell us a bit more about Lyn Stone and what it was that gave you that ah-ha moment?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: It was when she was talking about orthographic mapping and how children transfer knowledge from their short-term memory, into their long-term memory. And we have this place in our brain where we store letter patterns. And when we've learned things explicitly and we've mastered these letter patterns, and we understand when we use 'ai' and when we use 'ay' and can differentiate between them and I'm telling you right now, reception children can do that. Then that helped me understand how to hook that learning into my student's brains. So orthographic mapping, and as soon as I had that word, I thought, right, I'm Googling this and off I went, I discovered Lyn Aierie, David Kilpatrick, Tessa Daffern who will be coming out in October to our LGU conference. There's a lot of rot out there. So, you do have to be a critical consumer of research and articles and products, but really our goal is to develop teacher knowledge so that you don't need products. You can teach from just using your explicit instructional routine. So, a really good bank of activities and making spelling fun.

Dale Atkinson: So, what are those practical activities and, and where can teachers find them?

Daina Wilson: There's lots of really good activities. And again, in our presentation, we talk about these spelling knowledges. So, we talk about four spelling knowledges. So, we look at the phenology. So, the sound of our language, the sound within words. We look at the orthography, so the spelling choices and the spelling patterns. We then look at that morphology, so our English language is a morpho phonemic language. So, it's made up of sounds, but it's also made up of meaningful parts. And so that's that next level. And then the final level is that etymology or that origin of language. So, when we have a look at our kids' spelling patterns, we need to really understand which component or what stage these students are in, so we can really target the activities to the needs of our students. For example, if we are looking at that phonological level, students will be missing out letters. For example, if they're writing jumped and they're writing ‘jupd’, so they're missing out a sound within that word. We know that we need to do phonological activities. We need to make sure that they're being able to segment and hear those individual sounds within words. So, things like oral activities, manipulation, word chaining, sound boxes, Elkonin boxes, which also helps with the next level of that orthographic. So, the actual spelling choices that we make and Elkonin boxes which are now a fairly common strategy that is, is out there is a really great, powerful, easy strategy to use to really map those sound letter correspondences in words.

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Um, and it's really important that everything we do in spelling, children are writing it, because the more repetitions you have with writing the more that learning is going into that letter box in their brain, holding that learning in their long-term memory.

Georga Tyson: And what, what other resources are available to teachers to help them with spelling instruction?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: The best advice on writing spelling came out. So, you can find that on EDi. There's lots of great advice there for number one, the theory behind spelling. So, they talk about the four knowledges of spelling, and you'll find practical ideas in there to help you reinvent your spelling journey, shall we say? So that's certainly where you could look and what the beauty of the science of reading community and science of learning community is there's a lot for free. So, there's great Facebook pages, and I'm sure people are already on them. Reading Science in Schools, Sharing best practice, Think Forward Educators, well I could go on all day. They are fabulous communities where you can go online, people share ideas, just put spelling into the file section. You'll find lots of great ideas on there.

Dale Atkinson: And we'll include some links in the show notes for listeners if they want to access those a bit later on.

So, I am the father of a reception age daughter and you mentioned earlier that even at that age, they have an ability to understand while the sound may be the same, the letters are different. How does that work with someone so tiny?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: When I work with schools, I talk about a roadmap. So, when they're planning for learning, think of your roadmap in your head. And number one, I talk about having a scope and sequence. So, there are scope and sequences out there. And coincidentally, the department has just released the R to 2 phonics and spelling scope and sequence, which you'll find on EDi and watch this space because the 3 to 6 spelling scope and sequence is in development as we speak. These scope and sequences are developed, according to research about the most common or most frequently seen graphemes in writing or in their writing, it's actually based on the work of Carnine he came up with the idea that, you know, you should introduce these letters in this order order.

So, you have a scope and sequence. You need some really good explicit instructional routines in your classroom. So, you need to ensure that every day you are doing a daily review. So, you are reviewing the learning from yesterday, from last week, from a month ago. You are being really explicit with your learning intention, you are guiding them through the learning in small steps.

So, here's our new grapheme, repeat after me. Let's sky write it. Sky writing is hugely helpful, especially for reception children and beyond. Are they reading words with that grapheme? Are they spelling words with that grapheme? Are they leading to hand write that grapheme and when you put this together in a routine, what you're doing is you are reducing the cognitive load for those students.

They know exactly what they're going to do at every point of the phonics lesson. And you are guiding them through the scope and sequence in a logical order. So, you can find advice online through EDi. We've got our LGU instructional routine lesson plan on there that you can look at, but even better, you can watch our online phonics lessons. So, Our Learning SA, just navigate to the primary resources, literacy phonics, and watch our coaches teaching reception, 1 and 2 lessons. So, with that in mind, that's the roadmap. And so, you know that you are guiding your students through their learning. Logically you are matching that learning with decodable readers. So, they're reading these graphemes, they're practicing these graphemes in connected text. So, it's all part of this wonderful phonics routine that we go into schools and ensure that schools are using them. Because the department have actually, we don't mandate much, but we've mandated that, in the early years, students and teachers are using an explicit instructional routine and synthetic phonics.

Dale Atkinson: And I think that really draws us neatly back to the original premise of this podcast, which is death of the spelling contract. Cause what you've described there is really conscientious, deliberate, structured, ordered approach to education, which really makes perfect sense from the outside. And it sounds like it makes all the difference when you're in the classroom

Daina Wilson: Yeah. And exactly that point is we know, and people like Lyn Stone, who we've spoken about earlier, talks about the fact that we want to ensure the activities or the strategies that we are using are actually developing and improving their ability to use those skills. So, in spelling, we want to ensure the activities that we are using are helping them to map those spelling patterns or those generalisations of our language.

And we know that our language English is complex, but it is actually quite logical when you know the history behind it and the reasons why words are spelled in certain ways, there are logical reasons behind it.

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Absolutely. I mean, I'm just looking at this spelling contract here that I just downloaded off the internet, “use Scrabble tiles to add up the value of each spelling word”. So that's ultimately, it's a maths activity when you scramble letters and have to put them back. And what word is going to magically appear when I unscramble these letters. But put yourself in the shoes of a child, living with dyslexia, they don't have this ability to do that. So, they need this explicit instruction and systematic instruction. So, if we are teaching everybody with explicit instruction, a systematic instruction, then no child, theoretically, should be left behind.

Dale Atkinson: And I'm assuming here that the experience for the child is actually a bit better too, that the engagement levels go up when you approach it in this way?

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Yeah, absolutely. Just if I can share a little story, I was running a presentation yesterday in one of my sites and one of the teachers said, “oh, can I just share a little story? One of my boys told me what a great job I'm doing now. He actually gets reading and spelling now. So, he congratulated me on my new informed practices.” And I actually started crying in this staff meeting because the impact we are having on children by making small tweaks, leading to big changes, that's all we're asking just to rethink, you know, the activities you're putting in front of your students think about it, is this relating to their phenology? Is it relating to helping them understand letter patterns and where they are in, in words? You know, there's some great textbooks out there to help teachers. One of the first books I recommend to my teachers is The Next Step by Anne Italiano. Really simple way of identifying when to use this letter pattern. Why we use this letter pattern and here's some words that contain this letter pattern. Lyn Stone, Spelling for Life, is a fantastic resource. It actually instructs you in how to do a spelling lesson.

Dale Atkinson: Alright well, I am entirely convinced I'm on-board death to the spelling contract. Ashlee, Daina, thank you very much for joining us.

Ashlee Dewet-Cowland: Thank you for having us for having us.

Georga Tyson: Catch you next time on Teach.

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