How to Support Upper Elementary Students in Reaching Grade-Level Literacy with Dr. Jan Hasbrouck

Sara
Hey there, teachers. Welcome back to the podcast. Today’s episode is such a treat because I got the chance to interview Dr. Jan Hasbrouck. She is a leading researcher, author, and consultant who has dedicated her career to helping teachers better understand reading fluency, assessment, and effective interventions. Her work has been widely published, and she’s the co-author of several books, curriculum materials, and assessment tools used in classrooms around the world. I got to hear her speak at the Reading League conference a few years ago, and she truly is incredible. Now, our friends at McGraw Hill helped connect us with Dr. Hasbrouck for this episode, and we are so grateful. They’ve also created an amazing science of literacy library that is full of free resources to help teachers deepen their understanding of evidence-based reading instruction. We’ll go ahead and link to that in the show notes in case you want to check it out after the episode. In today’s conversation, Jan and I really talk about how upper elementary teachers can support students who are still developing those foundational reading skills. She shares insights on how to identify what supports students need and has a lot of encouragement for teachers who might be feeling overwhelmed by helping their students come up to grade level. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Let’s go ahead and jump right in.

Hi Jan, welcome to the podcast. I am so excited you are joining me on the show today.

Jan
It’s lovely to be here, Sara, talking about my favorite topic—helping children learn to read.

Sara
Absolutely. So I have to tell you, I saw you speak at the Reading League conference two years ago when it was up in New York, and your session was one of my favorites. I left that thinking, “I want to be like Jan when I grow up,” because you are so fun, so engaging, so stylish, and so smart. I just love that you’re a voice in the field of literacy, because you make it seem like such a fun place to be.

Jan
I am so grateful that this is the career I’ve landed in. It is a wonderful, wonderful fit for me, and the opportunity to do this kind of important work continues to feed my soul. So it is a joy. It’s a joy to interact with so many other passionate educators who feel the same. So, yeah, it keeps me going.

Sara
Awesome. Well, I know today we have a lot to cover, so let’s go ahead and dig in. Now, I know in one of your articles, Foundational Skills for Grades K–5, you mentioned that 90 to 95% of students, including those with dyslexia and learning disabilities, can reach grade-level literacy with the right type of instruction. But I know as teachers are listening, they’re probably thinking, “90 to 95% of my students aren’t actually reading on grade level.” So can you help us understand, from your perspective, why do we have so many students in upper elementary who still really struggle to read?

Jan
Well, I think there’s a dual reality going on here. Those figures of 90 to 95% are something I’ve been questioning myself. When I first heard that, I questioned it deeply by looking at the evidence from research studies. And those numbers are the range that keeps coming up. So I know it can happen, at least theoretically, but that research is not theoretical. It’s research done sometimes on small groups of children under really controlled environments, but some of it has been done in real-world settings with schools. My thinking about that has evolved over time. As anyone who follows research knows, our thinking evolves because the research keeps coming in.

So the nuances of that, the dual reality: One is, how true is that statement? It continues to be something that I know is true. I have decades of evidence to show that. But we’re really often thinking about K, 1, and 2, when we’re using those figures. In those earliest stages of reading, what we call reading is a much simpler task. That’s where we know we can get kids—95%, really—that’s what the number keeps saying. That 5% of human beings, no matter what language, simply don’t have the cognitive capacity to learn to read. And that’s because it’s language that limits reading. But in those early grades, where reading is a much simpler task—figuring out what those words are, how to put them together in meaningful strings that remind your brain about the syntax and semantics of reading—it’s all pretty simple. And we should get 95% of kids at grade level by mid to end of second grade. After that, when reading becomes more complicated, we may not be able to keep all 95% of kids at grade level because of all kinds of other issues, generally language-based issues. But if we’ve done a really good job, those of us who work in that all-important K–2 launching phase, if they can accomplish that, then those teachers who work with grades 3–5 and above have a much greater chance of keeping those kids up.

The reality that many of us face in those upper grades is intervention. The kids don’t come at grade level. We have to figure out intervention. But across all of that, the second reality is—so one reality is, yes, we can do that. We have the knowledge about the sequence of skills. There’s not just one, but an optimal way of approaching that, what good, explicit, systematic instruction looks like, and how to dose it correctly. Because some kids—kids with dyslexia, kids with developmental language disorders—need a much greater dosage of that kind of instruction. Some students need a moderate amount. Some students need very little. And we’ve got to figure that out. But we do know pretty much how to do that.

So the second reality, though, is the real world in which we work, and the systems and structures that my colleagues, particularly in that field, use those two terms. And that’s not on the back of teachers. That is the responsibility of our school leaders, who have limited resources, limited money, and always limited time—lots of challenges. But it’s their job to figure out how to use those always-limited resources optimally to support teachers. How can we get the right materials, curricula, support, and intervention materials? And I mean, the four-letter word— I always hesitate to say this—but the four-letter word of our field is time, and that is the responsibility of our system and structure leaders. We’ve got how many hours in the day? We’ve got to feed these kids, let them go to the bathroom, let them have fun, enjoy, and run outside in the sunshine. All of that is important, but literacy takes time. Literacy instruction takes time. So how do we create a system and structure for the schedule, the right people, people with the right training, the curriculum is there, and time for collaboration? Because there’s not a third-grade teacher in the world… I mean, maybe there are some, but it shouldn’t be third-grade teachers being responsible for 20 to 30 third graders with a huge range of abilities. So we’ve got to figure that out too. We need to work together. We need to collaborate. We need to provide coaching. So it’s seriously complicated, but the other answer is: not only does the research tell us we can do this, but schools are doing this. Schools that have the right leadership committed to doing this—often not the richest ones. Money helps, but money is not the answer. It’s a vision about how to do this and the absolute belief that every single kid needs the best opportunity to become a reader and writer. So we all need to be working together on that. And it does pain me when teachers are feeling the responsibility for their students and saying, “I’m not reaching 95% of my students.” It’s not their responsibility to do that. That’s probably not even achievable by just each teacher trying to do it on their own.

Sara
Thank you so much for explaining all of those nuances, because literacy instruction is always so nuanced, and I think we are always so tempted to keep it kind of like this black-and-white issue, right? We hear these statistics and think, “Okay, that’s what I need to be achieving.” And I know that teachers often get so much unnecessary pressure from administrators and the structures and systems, like you talked about. So hopefully the teachers who are listening feel encouraged in a couple of ways: One, like you said, it is achievable. It is possible. We know that the research tells us students can be on grade level, so if that’s not your reality, that’s not to say that it won’t be someday. But then, hopefully, teachers feel a little less pressure knowing that it’s not their solo responsibility. It really needs to be a building collaboration, a big community effort. And so, hopefully, teachers who are maybe feeling that pressure can say, “Okay, you know what, I’m going to do my best,” and know that my leader is responsible for some of these things that are outside of my control.

So, talking specifically about upper elementary, what would you say are some of the biggest misconceptions that schools and teachers often have when it comes to why their third, fourth, or fifth-grade students are behind in reading?

Jan
Well, I would say probably the first misconception, the one that I hear most often, is that there’s something wrong with these students’ comprehension. They focus in on that, which is understandable because that is the outcome of reading. That’s why we teach all the components of reading. It’s why each of those individual things that we so often talk about—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary—all of those are important only because they support comprehension. Then we get a student in third, fourth, or fifth grade who isn’t reading well, and they’re not able to read and comprehend what’s presented to them in text. So the teachers label that as a comprehension problem, which it is. However, treating the intervention as, “Let’s fix the comprehension” without realizing that there could be an underlying issue is, perhaps, analogous to the idea that if a person has a fever, and you say, “Well, their problem is that they have a fever,” it’s absolutely true. That’s true. But simply trying to bring their body temperature down—by, I don’t know, putting them in a cold pack or cold bath or something—could physically bring their body temperature down, but that’s not going to fix the underlying problem. In that world, it becomes a complicated problem: Is it because of an infection? Is it a viral illness? Is it a bacterial illness? What’s going on? Physicians need to figure that out.

We live in a complex world too. Literacy is a complex outcome of all these different components, so those third graders and up who are not thriving, not comprehending, and not enjoying and loving what they’re reading—it’s our job to be a bit of a detective and try to figure out what is causing the problems with their comprehension. I would say that’s the biggest misconception.

Sara
I see that a lot too. A lot of times when we’re talking with teachers, they say, “My students have a reading issue—it’s comprehension; they can’t comprehend.” And it’s like, true. Okay, so now let’s figure out why they aren’t comprehending. So, what would you say are some of those foundational skills that upper elementary teachers really need to be paying attention to if their students might be struggling with comprehension? What are some underlying issues that might be contributing to that?

Jan
Well, often it comes down to one of two issues, or a combination of both. Reading is the process of turning some kind of code into language. For most of us, we speak English, so we have a printed alphabetic code that does a halfway decent job of representing our language. But no matter what language you’re reading—whether it’s an orthographic, alphabetic code, a different kind of code, or if you’re blind and use Braille—the whole process of reading is turning somebody else’s language. Somebody put their language into a code, and then our job as readers is to decode that language and turn it back into language that our brain understands.

So if a student’s having problems figuring out how to do that, this print doesn’t translate back into language that my brain understands. It’s one of two issues, or a combination. One is they have the skills to figure out what those words mean, and they do it with sufficient fluency so it supports their brain. But they don’t have the language. They don’t have the vocabulary or the background knowledge. They may have a developmental language disorder, which Tiffany Hogan and researchers who look into that specifically say is a much larger issue than is currently recognized in schools. So their brain may be able to figure out the decoding part if they’ve had good teachers who’ve taught them, but it doesn’t make sense in their brain because of a disconnect with language.

The other broad issue is they may have the language necessary. They speak the same language that the code is written in. They don’t have a developmental language disorder. The problem, then, comes on the other side: the decoding part, which we can lump, especially in grades 3 and above, into a fluency concern. Their problem is they cannot read the text with sufficient fluency, and then fluency needs to be broken down. Fluency is often interpreted as rate—”Oh, Jan is saying they don’t read fast enough.” But no, no, no. Fluency has three components, and the most important component of fluency is accuracy. Accuracy in word recognition, which is phonemic awareness, phonics, and vocabulary. Accuracy means I can recognize the word, and I know what it means.

So a fluent reader has sufficient accuracy—they can figure out, or even better, instantly recognize the words, and they know what they mean. Then there’s the rate piece. We, in research, much prefer to talk about rate in combination with accuracy, because rate alone just means speed and has no relationship to fluent reading. When we talk about rate, we always combine it with accuracy. And when you combine rate and accuracy together, you get a new concept: automaticity. So fluency is accuracy, and we can separate out accuracy and automaticity. Then there’s a third component: prosody.

In terms of kids in grades 3 and above who really struggle with comprehension, prosody is very rarely the key issue. It’s an adjunct issue. It’s not totally irrelevant; we need to pay attention to it. Researchers who look at prosody—or expression—say that good expression is more of an outcome of comprehension rather than a contributor to comprehension. So, those first two things—accuracy and automaticity—directly contribute to comprehension.

If you think about the expression piece, when I first read that, I really had to think a lot about it. But some of us, myself as an example, have attempted nearly my entire life to become somewhat proficient in a second language. Spanish is mine, and I’m pretty good at it at this point. But if I read something written in a sophisticated level of Spanish, I could maybe read all those words if I read slowly enough, but I don’t know. I don’t know what expression I should be using: my “Oh, I’m scared” voice, or should I be using my “Oh, rapturous” voice? I mean, I don’t know, because I don’t know what the words mean. Expression is an outcome of comprehension, or our ability to use proper expression.

Sara
I’ve never heard that before, and I love that. That totally makes sense, right? It’s like we’re able to have that expression when we understand what we’re reading, as opposed to expression leading to comprehension. I love when I hear things like that. It really just makes me think—like, I taught fluency for years and never had that connection before.

Jan
Tim Rozinski has done some work with that. He wrote an article that I quote a lot about one aspect of expression, which is emphasis. He chose a sentence like, “Robert borrowed my new bicycle.” He says, “Which word should you emphasize?” Well, you need context. For example: “Robert borrowed my bicycle, not Bobby.” “Robert borrowed my bicycle; he didn’t steal it.” “Robert borrowed my bicycle, not yours.” On and on. He explains that. So, you need to know what, not just the words in that sentence, but the context around it, in order to use correct expression.

Sara
Oh, I love that. I’m going to hold on to that one.

Jan
Good, good, good. Well, you can thank Tim Rozinski and others who look into that—Paula Schwan and Flugel, and others who really study comprehension—Melanie Kuhn. But going back to, you know, what do we do when kids can’t comprehend? You do need to look at their language. If you read that text aloud to them, can they understand it? And then the second is, if they are struggling with that, that’s an intervention in itself. And then the other is, can they decode the words with sufficient fluency, which means accuracy and automaticity, particularly. Can they do that so their brain recognizes it and can make sense of that language? And it’s that area, the lack of fluency, where most of our third through fifth graders struggle—although for many students, it is a combination of both. They may be multilingual learners, and their level of English may not be the same as what’s represented in the text they’re using. It’s not as academic or as complex. Written language is more complex than spoken language, and certainly, by third grade, it definitely gets that way. So, understanding the complexity of the text they’re reading in terms of its linguistic structure, semantics, syntax, and all of that, plus vocabulary and background knowledge, that’s one. Then there’s the fluent reading—not fast reading, but fluent reading.

Sara
Yeah, so I know you mentioned that an easy way for teachers to figure this out is through this sort of test: if you read the text aloud, can a student comprehend it? As opposed to if they’re reading it on their own, are they struggling to read the words? Is that the best way for teachers to diagnose these comprehension issues, or do they need to give a screener or an assessment? I know many teachers in upper elementary feel kind of ill-equipped to figure out how to support their struggling readers. So, what is the best way for them to identify what type of challenge it is?

Jan
Well, the little assessment of oral reading fluency—those one-minute assessments that so many people are doing nowadays—are a great tool. One-on-one assessments that seem so strange, where we get anything of value from a one-minute assessment…

Sara
I appreciate you saying that.

Jan
I know! It still boggles my mind, because I learned about those ORF assessments in a university class way back in the mid-’80s, just after they’d been invented. I remember sitting there, and I had a master’s degree in reading. I’d been teaching for about 10 years or so—yeah, a little over 10 years. This new assessment was presented to me—a 60-second assessment that would tell you so much about the kids. I did not buy it at all. So, I do understand people’s skepticism, but that was decades ago, and the research continues to say that that little… In fact, I read one just the other day. It wasn’t brand new, it wasn’t a brand new study, but people keep studying that assessment. I think because it’s so strange, like, really? But this really works. That study I was just recently reading, I think from 2022, assessed the kids using oral reading fluency back in first grade, then again in second grade, and then in third grade. At the end of third grade, they gave them their state assessment and found that oral reading fluency best predicted how those kids were going to do on the third grade assessment, better than anything else. And it took one minute, basically.

Sara
Kind of wild, right? Just thinking about how that even works.

Jan
It’s crazy. It’s crazy, but the way it works is because the ability to read text with reasonable accuracy and automaticity— which is what that measures—measures oral reading fluency. Those 60-second assessments measure words correct per minute, accuracy per minute, rate, and automaticity. The ability to read words with accuracy and automaticity is, especially up through fifth grade, hugely what reading is. You’re not going to reach the benchmarks that have been set if you’re not understanding what you’ve read, because if you’re just treating this as reading one word after another without any connection or meaning, you’re not going to get anywhere near the benchmark. The ability to read with reasonable accuracy and automaticity is dependent on your ability to recognize the syntax and semantics. You may not know all the words, but to get to the benchmark, you need to have a whole lot of that. So, it is an amazing assessment, and it doesn’t tell us everything, but it tells us a whole lot. So, I would start with that. If I were a third, fourth, or fifth-grade teacher, or above, and I suspected my student was struggling, I would pick a sample of my classroom text—whether you’re using DIBELS, AIMSweb, Acadians, easyCBM, FastBridge, or any of those. Those are fine, but those are the three times-a-year kinds of assessments. So, like, if I’m wondering about this child, I’d pick a piece of text from your classroom, from your core reading program, or from your social studies text, or whatever you’re using, have them read it aloud to you, one-on-one, for a minute. Score it for words correct per minute, and you can compare their score to the norms that Jerry Tyndall and I created—those Hasbrouck and Tyndall norms. And if the student is more than 10 words below the 50th percentile— and some of the students you’re talking about, Sara, are way below the 50th percentile— that’s a red flag that it’s not all coming together for them. Then, if you want to separate out if it’s a fluency problem, a complex like we talked about—accuracy, automaticity—or a language issue, you might want to do a little bit more assessing on the language piece. And if they’re doing a read-aloud with the student and/or if you’re just observing from that student that they don’t seem to have a level of competence in English, or they’re having some issues with understanding or expressing language, hopefully there would be somebody like a speech-language pathologist available who could do a little bit deeper dive. They would be needed for diagnosing something like a developmental language disorder, or something along those lines. But those two simple things: an ORF (Oral Reading Fluency) test on grade-level material and some conversations with students, along with a read-aloud where you discuss, will tell you a whole lot about a student.

Sara
I love those suggestions because they’re so simple and so accessible for teachers. You know, again, I think sometimes teachers just feel overwhelmed when it’s like, “I have this student. Where do I even begin? How do I even find the materials to figure out if they have an issue?” And it’s like, to your point, have a read-aloud with them. Have a conversation. Have them read grade-level material. That’s the best starting point, and then from there, you sort of figure out the next steps.

So let’s say, hypothetically, a teacher has some students and they’re like, “Okay, they’re struggling with the accuracy component of it, the fluency component of it, the decoding side of things.” Should teachers be addressing that in their classroom? Is that something that only interventionists should be dealing with? Is this a daily thing? How do teachers go about beginning to fill in these gaps that they might notice exist?

Jan
Well, here’s where I would hope that the teacher is not working in an isolated bubble, that they work within a system that has structures where there’s some support. At minimum, you know, I taught at my first school where we didn’t have kindergarten. I taught in Oregon, and way back then, we didn’t have public kindergarten. So it was a grade one through six school with one classroom at each grade level. So, there really wasn’t a colleague. Who’s the other second-grade teacher? Well, there wasn’t another second-grade teacher. Yeah, you’re on your own. You’d come talk to me. I was the reading specialist there. But in most cases, you would have other colleagues at your grade level, you would hope, and more. At minimum, talking to your colleagues, because what you’re asking, you know, what should I do with my student or students who are struggling with these things? If another teacher also has students who are struggling with these things, it may be that restructuring some of your reading instruction so that one teacher can take the kids who are struggling and then devote more time to them, while the other teacher could take the students who are on or above grade level and do some more things like that. I think just how we organize our basic instruction is one way to do it. Another system or structure that many schools are putting in place is some kind of MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Support) structure, where, on a regular basis, hopefully teachers are provided the support to examine good progress monitoring and screening data to flag kids. And then the system or structure has something in place to do something about third graders who are still reading at more like first-grade level. What are some of the things that we should do, or can do, so it’s not left to each individual teacher discovering who those students are and then trying to figure out a solution for them? But at the end of the day, what’s going to need to happen for those older students is we do need to sort of wind the clock back. Those skills are called foundational skills for very important reasons. Somebody didn’t just make that up. They are foundational for further success. So, if there are gaps and holes in the foundation of your home, where you live, you’re going to want to fix that before you put a second story on your house. So, same thing with those foundational skills. They’re called foundational because they are, in fact, foundational, and we can’t keep building the structure of literacy on top of a weak foundation. So that’s hard. I mean, prevention is much better, much more effective, far easier, easier on the children, easier on everybody. But the reality is, we’ve got to figure out how to do that when we’ve got third graders still reading at the first-grade level, we’ve got fifth graders who are reading at the second-grade level. Those children exist. There are good intervention materials. There’s not one program. “Oh, everybody go out and buy this program and do it,” but they all focus on the component pieces of continuing to develop those students’ language and going back and shoring up that decoding for accuracy and fluency.

Sara
Yeah, I love the emphasis on, let’s begin with collaboration. This is not an individual teacher’s problem to solve. Collaborating with their grade-level team, collaborating with the building—I think, if anything, that can help just teachers feel like they’re not alone trying to solve this challenge that can feel so heavy and overwhelming at times. So, I just appreciate that encouragement and reminder that it’s like, no, you’re not in this alone. This is not just your problem to solve. It’s a team effort here.

Well, Jan, I could listen to you talk all day long. You’re just such a wealth of knowledge, and I love your perspective on things. Can I ask that you leave teachers with one final bit of encouragement? If a teacher is feeling overwhelmed with this idea of having to provide students with foundational support, and that’s something that maybe they’re unfamiliar with and lack confidence in, what is just one bit of encouragement that you could offer to them?

Jan
Well, first of all, if I were talking to this teacher, I would thank them and probably ask if I could give them a big hug, because they are in a profession that is tremendously challenging and tremendously undervalued and under-resourced. And I am grateful for every single person who chooses this pathway for their life. What they’re doing is so, so important, and acknowledging that it is hard and complicated. So, I would say—different from when I started teaching—is this ability to resource collaboration, not just from the teacher next door, but from the online community of people who are definitely out there and willing to help each other. The Reading League is another group that offers free membership. They offer a journal if you pay a little bit more. But their entire reason for being is to get good information about reading instruction into the hands of teachers. I think there’s a branch of the Reading League in every state now, so connect with those people because those people are teachers, administrators, researchers, and others—they’re educators who care deeply about getting this right, learning about the complexity, and trying to figure it out together. The Facebook page I was on today has about 300,000 members. It can get a little overwhelming, so I dabble in that every once in a while. I read something today where somebody asked a really good question, a moderator—a volunteer moderator—answered it and gave a really good response. I put a little “like” underneath it, that it was good, and then the moderator said, “Oh, okay, Jan Hasbrouck says I gave the right idea.” But I think those are ways… It’s very expensive and time-consuming to go to conferences, and it’s a wonderful thing to do, because you’re in rooms of people who are there for the same reason you are. But if you can’t do that, you can get on the internet and start asking those questions and asking for support. There are people eager to provide that.

Sara
Yeah, I always think about, because similarly, when I started— I mean, the internet existed, but these Facebook groups didn’t exist and these communities— and I just love how accessible information is for teachers. Whether it’s the Facebook groups or the conferences, it’s so easy for teachers, if they’re in a building where they feel alone or maybe the entire campus is not on board with effective practices, to find spaces on the internet where they can connect with like-minded educators.

So, Jan, again, thank you so much for joining us today. Like I said, you’re just a wealth of knowledge, and I’m so grateful that you’re willing to share some of it with my audience.

Jan
Thank you for the invitation, Sara. It was a delight.