Ignite Literacy Services

Lessons learned from Bath and Body Works and Jan Hasbrouck

Like every basic white girl, I enjoy a good sale at Bath and Body Works. So when I stumbled across one in early December I loaded up on happies for myself, friends, and my daughter’s teachers.

I bought this new lotion to try. It’s in a soft pink bottle labeled “Sensitive Skin: Colloidal Oatmeal.” Not super sure what colloidal oatmeal is but it sounded like it could get me through the winter.

Unfortunately, it made my skin dry, itchy, and irritated. This was not what I expected. Surely something was wrong with it. Or with me? Wintertime? Aging?

Yesterday I pulled it out again to give it one last try, and the tiny label caught my eye. Underneath the title and scent descriptions, it said: body wash.

Y’all. For the past month I have been using body wash like it was lotion. 😂

I was getting poor results because I wasn’t using it as intended.

This reminded me of the time I got to hear Jan Hasbrouck give a mini-rant about oral reading fluency.

We are misunderstanding ORF charts

Several years ago I was fortunate enough to go to the Plain Talk about Literacy and Learning conference in New Orleans and attend a session by Dr. Jan Hasbrouck, a leading literacy expert who specializes in reading fluency.

She told a room full of teachers from across the nation that she was tired of people misinterpreting aspects of oral reading fluency.

She said that oral reading fluency assessments are a screener, like taking your temperature. Taking your temperature can tell you if you are in a normal range, or if something is wrong.

It doesn’t tell you what is wrong.

Similarly, oral reading fluency scores can tell you if a student is on track, or if they need some support.

Just like retaking your temperature over and over doesn’t cure an illness, giving ORF assessments over and over won’t close the gap for students who are behind.

You have to keep working to figure out what is wrong. A student with a low fluency score may need more work with phonemic awareness, phonics, comprehension, fluency, or vocabulary. A low ORF score simply means there are gaps, and it’s a starting point for teachers to dig deeper.

Students who are on track with ORF need to be given an ORF assessment just three times a year. Students who are behind can benefit from more as a way of progress monitoring, but not as the intervention.

Additionally, just like you don’t want your temperature to be too high or too low, you don’t want students reading too fast or too slow. Dr. Hasbrouck has found that comprehension is best served when students are reading within the range between the 50th and 75th percentiles.

When I was teaching kindergarten we were told that they expected students to be reading close to the 75th percentile range, thinking the higher the better. This led to practices that encouraged students to read too fast and without prosody, quick word calling that actually lowered comprehension. (Remember, comprehension is the singular point of all reading instruction.)

Unlike most percentage tables, you want ORF to fall in the middle. Students at the bottom and top of the percentiles probably need instructional support.

As the body wash reminded me, when we deviate from the intended use of things, we won’t get the results we want.

---

Want to learn more about what Dr. Hasbrouck has to say about fluency? Here’s a great webinar by Dr. Jan Hasbrouck herself, recorded in April 2023.

---

Subscribe below to receive emails about literacy:

---