My guest today is literacy expert, Stephanie Stollar. Stephanie is one of my go-to sources for science of reading insights because of her ability to break down technical and complex topics and turn them into actionable steps for practitioners. I will be talking with Stephanie about the misconceptions that surround MTSS, or the multi-tiered system of supports framework, and how to problem solve as a school to ensure that all students receive the dosage of high-quality instruction that they need.
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Before we head over to Stephanie, I wanted to ask if you’d do me a favor. Are you a fan of this show and wish that more of your colleagues could access this sort of content? I provide training and consulting services to schools around the science of learning and explicit instruction. All you have to do is send your principal or PD person my training page, and we can plan professional development around cognitive load theory, retrieval practice, and all the rest of the ingredients of effective teaching. Please see the show notes for more information.
This podcast is brought to you by John Catt Educational, which publishes some of the best books in education. I am going to do one last plug, here, for their online Cognitive Science Conference on May 8th, 2024. I will be there presenting on “The Art and Science of Explaining Stuff”, so come say hi and listen to me rant in what might be the last chance to hear this popular presentation. Tickets are still available, so check out the show notes for more details.
Now, without further ado, let’s roll the tape of my interview with Dr. Stephanie Stollar.
Join Stephanie Stollar’s Reading Science Academy:
https://www.readingscienceacademy.com/
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Education Rickshaw 
I love this plain talk about scheduling, grouping, and how to meet the learning needs of students. We first have to see what the needs are and start from there! Also, yes, it’s all about prevention. I had the privilege (which I now recognize as very rare) of having a principal who walked the talk about preventing reading problems.
She assigned almost every building para into kindergarten and first grade during our 60 minute reading blocks. We used ReadWell, a brilliant program which makes it very easy to assess and group kids according to their needs. For several years we were actually able to do 9 first grade reading groups during that hour (I was teaching first grade). We did a “Walk to Read”. The medium/high readers had 20 minutes of reading group with a teacher, 20 minutes of relevant seatwork, and 20 minutes of silent reading. The lower groups had various combos: one had a full hour with a trained para using ReadWell and getting lots of guided practice. The lowest two groups split an hour with a teacher and the reading specialist. So between 3 paras, 3 teachers, and a reading specialist we could meet the exact needs of 75 students. We met regularly to look at data and move kids from one group to another if needed. It was a smooth running operation.
Even though ReadWell was our curriculum, one of the 20/20/20 groups was beyond ReadWell and was reading chapter books in the small teacher group. We made sure those skilled students got their needs met too. I can’t imagine trying to teach reading with the old model of a self-contained classroom with three reading groups and the rest of the kids “keeping busy” although that still seems to be widespread, from the posts I see on Science of Reading websites. And I can’t imagine doing whole group reading lessons for an hour.
So thanks Stephanie for clarifying that Tier 1 doesn’t mean that everyone gets the same thing. Tier 1 is about everyone getting what they need. And then some kids get extra at another time during the day.
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