Are your literacy lessons moving too fast, too slow, or you just don’t know? Part II

By Peggy Price, M.Ed., F/OGA, Director of the Stern Center Orton-Gillingham Institute and Leigh Buettler, M.Ed., Director of Professional Learning

In November, we wrote about the importance of clear mastery criteria and lesson pacing, and recently wrote about the instructional hierarchy, or the five stages of learning every educator should know. To help students generalize skills beyond individual and/or small group intervention, we need to clearly define lesson objectives, pace lessons effectively, and strategically incorporate meaningful practice opportunities.

The clearer our lesson objectives, the better. For example, instead of “review short vowels,” as the lesson objective, it’s more helpful to be specific: “review short vowels and b/p voiced/unvoiced consonant pairs.” This helps us ensure that we are laser-focused on what we want students to achieve in the lesson and address errors from previous lessons. Once we have a specific lesson objective, we should keep this objective in mind as we plan and teach each section of our lesson. Reflecting this best practice, our Orton-Gillingham (OG) lesson plan has a line listed under the lesson objective to note errors from the previous lesson.

It’s important to distinguish whether our students need to learn a new skill for the first time or if they need cumulative review and practice. In the OG world, we often refer to the initial acquisition of the new skill as “keeping it pure.” We describe cumulative review (also known as mixed practice or interleaving) as “spiraling back.”

Let’s explain the difference using the example of syllable division

(click here for a free set of syllable division cards!):

When introducing a new syllable division pattern VC/CCV (e.g., con/tract, gum/drop, in/trude), the Word Work and Words to Spell should be “kept pure” to focus on the new concept (i.e., only read and spell VCCCV words). The rationale is that the student is in the early acquisition phase of learning this syllable division pattern, so providing too much cumulative review in an introductory lesson creates an unnecessary cognitive load. Cognitive Load Theory refers to the limited amount of information our working memory can hold and manipulate at a time. To be able to generalize a new skill, students need frequent practice and review opportunities of learned concepts.

It is worth noting that many sections of the OG lesson will always provide cumulative review by design, such as phonogram drill or card deck, sound dictation, oral reading, and sentence dictation. In this newsletter, we are focused on the role of reading words in isolation and spelling words in isolation, as part of a unified lesson matched to a specific lesson objective.

Once the student meets mastery criteria at the “keep it pure” phase, the next lesson will provide more cumulative review or mixed practice. For example, the student may read and spell some words with VCCCV (gumdrop), VCCV (wombat), and some words that are base words with previously taught suffixes (stumped, bunches). Now the data can tell us how the student is generalizing the new skill (reading and spelling VCCCV words) with previously taught skills. The student has been prepared for this increased cognitive load based on the “keep it pure” lesson(s) provided earlier. When considering our pacing and when to introduce a new concept, let’s break down what works and what doesn’t.

What Works

We want to advance in a scope and sequence because:

1. We have gathered objective data at multiple points in the OG lesson plan.
2. We’ve provided sufficient practice so the student develops automaticity, which is necessary for fluency & comprehension.
3. The student’s rate of progress matches their learning profile and frequency of sessions.
4. We have created a well-designed lesson and our lesson plan (including Words to Read and Words to Spell) matches the lesson objective.
5. We have provided sufficient time for cumulative review, which requires diagnostic and prescriptive instruction.
6. We recommend a good battery of informal, criterion-based assessments (ideally three times a year) to help the teacher pinpoint which sound-symbol correspondences and word patterns students can read and spell. One example includes our Orton-Gillingham for the K-2 Classroom: Weekly Guide and Universal Assessment, Second Edition.

What to Avoid

Pitfalls in advancing too fast in a scope and sequence because:

1. We assume what a student can read or write based on a student’s age or grade level despite current data.
2. We hope moving to the next skill will increase student motivation despite current data. Motivation happens when we upsell a lesson based on the student’s intellect and interest through vocabulary, morphology, the history of English, learning cursive, connection to their interests, and more. For example, many Latin prefixes are simple closed syllables we might teach an older student while addressing basic sound-symbol correspondence (i.e., practice read dis, non versus cat, dog).

3. We know the student was taught XYZ skills last year or previous years despite current data showing they have not yet mastered XYZ skills. If the data show that the student needs more practice to master a concept, we need to provide that instruction and support.
4. We have a desire (or are told) to “keep pace” with colleagues, follow a predetermined schedule, or adhere to the calendar outlined in curriculum materials. Designing lessons should be flexible, responsive, and based on student needs – especially for those requiring targeted intervention.

 Advancing too slow in your scope and sequence because:

1. We do not allow students to read more advanced text once they can accurately and fluently read decodable text.
2. We have too many “keep it pure” lessons without enough cumulative/mixed review.
3. We are rigidly following the sequence in a program or pages in a program’s materials and ignoring student data.
4. We are only teaching one or two consonant blends at a time.
   1. Consonant blends are not new sound-symbol correspondences. Successfully reading and spelling words with consonant blends are reliant on phoneme awareness skills, such as the ability to blend, segment, delete, and substitute a word with four sounds (and five sounds). Our courses provide teachers with a detailed scope and sequence explaining how to efficiently group consonant blends.

Lastly, we want to avoid:

1. Vague error corrections (e.g., “try again”) that do not efficiently guide the student to fix their mistake.
2. Repeating the same few words throughout the lesson, inadvertently leading the student to memorize a handful of words but not master the concept.
3. Any lesson where the student has a high number of errors; we may be inadvertently practicing (or worse, ingraining) errors.  It may appear that the student is not responding to our instruction, when it may be that our instruction is not responding to student data.

To learn more about this topic, attend one of our OG courses or structured literacy workshops, including our upcoming summer courses, Intro OG: Classroom Educator K-2, OG for Intervention: Associate Level Course & Practicum, and Linking Assessment to Instruction using a Structured Literacy Approach.

Don’t forget to download our free resource Syllable Division Cards!

This article has been adapted from a presentation titled, Are your trainees’ OG lessons advancing too fast, too slow, or you just don’t know? on February 21, 2024, by Peggy Price for the Orton-Gillingham Academy (OGA) Fellows. OGA members can watch the recording in the member section of the OGA website. You can also find a longer version of this article in the upcoming Winter/Spring 2025 OGA News posted on their website here.