Episode Transcription

27: Using Sounds-Write in Your Tutoring Business with Jacinda Vaughan and Alison Perry

  
Hello, lovely lady. Welcome to Classroom to Business, the podcast designed specifically for teachers working to become successful business women and creating financial freedom and lifestyle flexibility. I'm Kirsty Gibbs, business coach and mentor for educators and teachers just like you who are ready to step away from the classroom and create something more.

The Classroom to Business podcast is committed to helping you grow your business, break down those barriers to success and replace your teaching salary without having to work more hours. It's time for you to find freedom and start being your own boss so you can once again enjoy what you do and wake up each morning loving life.

Let's get into it. Welcome today. We have a special guests, Jacinda Vaughn and Alison Perry. They are both amazing women doing amazing things in the field of educating children and intervention, both Sounds-Write trainers, and have given up their time to come today and talk to me about SoundsRight, how we can use it in our businesses, but also share a little bit of insight into their own businesses, dealing with children and literacy intervention.

So welcome ladies. It's so lovely to have you here. Lovely to be here. Thanks So, a lot of the ladies that I work with do use Sounds-Write in their tutoring businesses. But for those who haven't used it before, or maybe even heard of Sounds-Write, Alison, could you maybe give me a little bit of a rundown on exactly what it is?

Yeah, absolutely. So Sounds-Write is a phonics program. It's structured and systematic and cumulative and multisensory and is really founded in what we know about how students of any age learn best. That's not just in their reading and spelling, but general principles when it comes to learning. So it maximizes what we have and the best chance of giving kids, you know, that ability to read and spell accurately and fluently.

It is also a speech to print approach. So that means that we start with what children already have, which is the spoken sounds of their language. And we help them to map those sounds onto the letters or the spellings that write them down. And is it something that can be used sort of across all ages or is it specifically for certain age groups or levels?

Yeah, it is. It's actually designed as a whole class approach to teaching reading and spelling across the first three to four years of school, but is also really easily adapted to be used in intervention settings to teach students of any age. And we have a lot of people using it. In middle and upper primary into high school, even with adults.

I know someone who taught an 80 year old read and spell. Yeah. So she was working with the whole spectrum of population in terms of age. That's amazing. And isn't it amazing that someone can get to 80 years old and still need that? It's beautiful that that's happened, but it's also really terrifying that that has to happen.

So, just enough. I believe you have a degree in psychology and over 15 years of teaching experience. So what drew you to Sounds-Write? Like you said, is that background in psychology? So before that I was actually a sports therapist and had a bit of a car accident and had to retrain because it wasn't a viable option anymore.

So I guess through that study in psychology, the digging into cognitive psychology and neuropsychology, it really did put a different lens when I've always worked with children, you know, from early childhood, all the way through to the end of primary school. So when. I went into my education degree. I had a different lens of how I looked at teaching.

So I guess it made me see the programs and the pedagogy that I was using in my classroom and how children learn best. So knowing it from that cognitive psychology perspective, I was always looking at it through that lens. So that led me to finding the speech to print approach, which obviously led me to right.

So that was well over a decade ago. I started my Searching through looking for the best way to teach my children how to read and spell effectively in those early stages and then I supported my students in my own helped introduce it to my school and taught it in my classrooms from in year one for a few years and then I moved into the intervention space.

So then for the following six years, I use Sounds-Write in small group and one to one interventions there and then transitioned into private practice because. They are our happy place, aren't they? Helping children to effectively read and spell brings us great joy. And there's a great need for it in the community.

As you know. A hundred percent. I was actually going to ask you if you were in the classroom anymore, but I'm assuming not by the, from the sounds of that, at the moment, I am Australia's in house trainer for Sounds-Write. So I'm directly employed by Sounds-Write. So I work with people like Alison across Australia, but working.

to train people online and face to face, but I get it to go into schools and do school visits and they still say, could you show us what Sounds-Write looks like in the classroom? And I jump at any opportunity to stand in front of a class and teach. So I work still at one to one in my clinical settings, but lots and lots of experience in the classroom.

That's amazing. And something that you just said earlier was that you actually brought it into your school. I tried, not Sounds-Write, but years and years ago, I tried to push for something else in my school and it was so hard. And even now at my own daughter's school, which is an amazing school, we're still getting PMs, PM readers sent home.

They're still testing with PMs. There's still so much whole language stuff and. I don't blame the teachers because I was there as well. I didn't know any better when I was, you know, first in the classroom. It really wasn't until I started, you know, looking at my own tutoring business and seeing what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do things and stumbled across different approaches that I thought, wow, I didn't even know this existed.

I thought this was how we were supposed to teach reading, but it's not. And then trying to take that to my principal and she is amazing, but it's. I think schools just look at it as such an expense, you know, to get decodable readers to go through all of that process. And also retraining staff. How did you effectively do it?

I mean, I, I have heard of it. It's so good. Like, any tips for anybody out there trying to get it into their schools? It really was a six year process. So you're right. I think that initially my principal had said to me, Oh, I'm looking at putting a new intervention in place. And she goes, I'm thinking because we use PMs.

How about we do font and subpanel? I just went, well, it's more of the same. So if we're realising that what we're doing in the classroom isn't quite effective for this group of students, then doing something that's quite similar to what you do in the classroom, when we're looking at the balanced literacy, whole language kind of world, and it's not working there either, because we've done reading recovery, children still were finding acquiring learning hard.

So I kind of said to her, why don't you look at Sounds-Write? Initially, I got the, oh, here we go again, it's phonics. And the cycle, the wheel turns again, and I said it's a little bit different. It's not phonics as she was thinking about it, and I explained to her the speech to print, and eventually she came round to it, but it really was quite a journey to get the school implementation.

Over time, we got the junior team. trained and then slowly but surely got the resources that supported that and each year we trained more people until we had the whole school and all of our classroom support trained which was a massive feat and it did take six years and each year when I was allowed to I bought another set of decodable text to be transitioned into the classroom and it took time.

And yes, it is money. It is time. It's constant training because teachers move, but it's certainly been a journey and we've grown and the confidence in teachers. So to teach with that pedagogy, that sound to print approach and those error corrections and minimizing the number of words that you use when you're error correcting makes a massive difference across the curriculum, not just in your reading and spelling instruction.

And I think as a young teacher, when I came across You know, speech to print, things like that. I was like, this just makes sense. But I'm excited to see more schools starting to do the switch. You know, they're starting to, you know, I don't understand how we can be put in a classroom and not have this knowledge and these skills.

Like, it just is ridiculous. And I think that's a huge part of why reading is so poor. Well, we've got 80 year olds who need reading intervention because we, as teachers, Aren't properly educated, we could totally go off on that all day and have a whinge about that. But so, Alison, you've also got your own business.

Do you work solely with teachers and parents and educators or are you doing some intervention with students as well? Yeah, I mean, I started my professional life as a speech pathologist, so you're very busy. Yeah, yeah. And worked in private practice for many years where I saw, you know, pediatrics and working with a child, you know, school aged kids mostly, and just always found myself drawn to supporting those kids who have literacy difficulties.

So when I did Sounds-Write 10 years ago now, first did my training, it was what you just said. It just makes sense, you know, as a speech pathologist with that foundation in linguistics and oral language, understanding that that is what comes first for children. And then you're mapping on the written language and how those two things go together, just made it really clear and is so effective for so many of the families we work with, where the children.

Sometimes I've had other methods at school that haven't been effective and they're getting to often grade two, grade three, still unable to read sometimes even at all or with any level of fluency and yeah, needing a lot of support to do your best to catch them up. So yeah, I've been a Sounds-Write trainer for.

Probably about nine, eight or nine years now. So I've taken a little bit of time off more recently to add to our family. We've got a now two year old, but Sounds-Write is primarily what I provide now. So online and face to face training and support to schools and individuals who are using it and implementing it as well.

I think maybe I'll just get both of you to like, just start bombarding a few schools up in this area. Have you heard about Sounds-Write? Have you heard about Sounds-Write? Oh, this is sort of results we're getting. That's the thing. It's a word of mouth. I mean, Sounds-Write hasn't had a marketing budget recently.

They've updated their website and, you know, put a bit into it, but. To try and say it, tell someone to come to a four day face to face course and invest the time, the energy, the finances to make that happen, you need to know what you're signing up for. So it really is overwhelmingly word of mouth that sells the course.

And that's why it's a training course. You talked about the importance of that. Teacher training, the understanding. And if you don't understand what to do and how to do it and why you're doing it, you know, otherwise it's just another book that gets shoved to the back cupboard and gets dusty. But yeah, I mean, we've got so many more schools.

We're both in Queensland, obviously, and so many more schools who are training. And Jacinda through training a school with 1900 kids. So, you know, that's sometimes, you know, they've just prioritised it, they've prioritised teacher knowledge and teacher training and they're going for it. But I love that. And again, it makes sense because that is our whole job is teaching these kids to, you know, reading is not, it is a skill for life.

It's not just something that you might use or. You know, depending what job you have, it is something that we need every single day. So, as I mentioned before, a lot of the ladies that I work with do use, Sounds-Write? But, when I talk to them about, because when you work one on one with a student, It's a business model that it's not flawed, but it's very much limited.

So, you know, you've only got so many hours in a day. There's only so many students that you can work with. So, you know, you've got kids on the wait list that you can't even help. And obviously then there's only so much revenue you can make. So we then look to creating groups and whether that's semi private with two students or small groups with, you know, four, five students, but.

A hesitation that I hear or some resistance is around AU Sounds-Write and I just don't know how to. you know, use it as groups or in groups. Do either of you have any ideas or tips or strategies around how we can use Sounds-Write right in groups, or do you think it's solely one on one type instruction? So for me, I've used it extensively as a small group in schools.

When I'm in my private practice, I am doing it one to one because that's the model that I chose. But within an intervention space within the school, in small groups, it works incredibly well. I run it like a small Class lesson, but I always connect it to a decodable text. So for me, my basis is that I have worked out my groups.

Those groups are flexible within a school setting because you can have, there's never any of these tidy homogenous groups in schools. You're kind of working with a wide range of children and you've got. The resources available, but within your setting where you've got a tutor who is using Sounds-Write in their small groups, they can group a little bit more effectively.

I always say it's like working within that zone of proximal development where you can have children that are very close because getting the perfect fit is the hardest bit, I think. And then children that might be just below that. or just above that, but remembering that everything within those Sounds-Write scripts are your scaffolds, so you're able to support that child that may be just on that edge of the zone of that small group.

I think that being flexible with those groups, so teaching them for a period of time at the level that you've chosen for them through your assessment and your formative, your monitoring and assessments, I think having a time period for that group and then being clear with your families that these groups can't always stay the same all the time because children won't always progress at the same level.

Some will move faster and some of those other children will no longer be within that zone of proximal development. So I would say to them that being clear with your families that yes, we're working in a group. However, we're going to in five weeks time. Monitor, stop and monitor, stop and check, or at the end of the term, stop and check, and then be flexible with those groupings because otherwise then you've got this gap forming within your own groups where not all children are being effectively supported within the units that you're working with.

So that would be my biggest thing when you're working with a group is that you're monitoring and that you're very clear with your families that Yes, we've got a group. However, we need to be flexible with making sure that everybody's getting the best out of that group all of the time. And I think just regular stop and checks and adapting is probably what I would suggest.

Yeah. Awesome. Cool. So we just mentioned before that. There are schools who haven't, you know, embraced anything like Sounds-Write at all. What are your thoughts on working with these students who are attending schools like that? So how do you approach these parents to make them, you know, aware that maybe we see an issue, you might not use those words, without it being unprofessional, you know, like you don't want to be bagging out of school and saying that they're doing the wrong things and blah, blah, blah.

But do you feel that you need to make parents aware or do you just let it slide and just focus on your thing? What's your approach there? Yeah. I mean, I think honesty above all, and as a parent myself, I want to know what the situation is from the expert that I'm talking to, I suppose, but that can really be done gently and respectfully.

And as you say, you know, people are doing the very best that they can with the knowledge they have. So when I have that conversation, it is about, you know, this is what we know about, you know, the research telling us about how, you know, we can maximize your child's learning here in this area. And it might not be the same as what's happening at school.

I make a decision about how much of the reason behind that, that I go into depending on the family I'm working with. You know, sometimes it's the parents or teachers themselves. So they're well aware of the system. But I think you have to be really careful not to undermine the family's relationship with that teacher.

And it's having that communication as well. So I most of the time would have communication with the student's teacher and just share a little bit about what we're doing. And I mean, the number of times I've had that teacher come back and say like, what are you doing? Can I find out a little bit more? I mean, to the point where I've had one entire school train because I was working with one family.

Wow. That's fantastic. The parent was in a leadership position at the school and she's like, we can't not do this. Like ethically, we have to be doing this for all the kids in our school. But I mean, that's obviously a, yeah, a nice story. Yeah, I think honesty and doing it respectfully, but you need to, you know, people need to know.

I've had that similar situation, is that you're obviously working, the majority of my children are from schools that are not Sounds-Write schools or speech to print schools and that relationship, what Alison was saying, is so important for families because they're with that teacher and that teacher is.

Doing a great job, but they're doing the best that they have with what they've got. And I also have been in that situation where as an outside tutor, building that relationship with that teacher, letting them know that you're here to communicate that you're here to support them. And then inevitably I've had the exact same thing where they go, so what are you doing and having those conversations and saying, Oh, well, and then you get to, you know, be the excited geek that we are and talk about Sounds-Write and how wonderful it is.

So I think respectful relationships, but for me also it was the parent education. When I stepped out into the private world of tutoring, I thought it was really important that parents are educated and are very much part of the process. I know that Alison's the same as me. It's very much a mentoring role, so I don't get to work with my children in the dosage that I do in a school setting, whether it's in small groups or one to one.

So I help my families feel confident to effectively help their children at home. So that's not bagging out any other system or any other way that we're teaching. I'm just focusing on is that this is how we build words. This is how we read and write words. This is how we manage reading in a text or writing a sentence.

I'm focusing on the skill and building their confidence to be able to engage positively and effectively without crying. So that's where I approach my parents is through education, little workshops, little conversations, but generally that mentoring through a session that they're actively engaged and I'm just teaching them the skills that work best for their child, that they're going to enjoy reading rather than that, you know, the reading wars and the tears at nighttime, the avoidance and all of the different things that happen.

We want to minimize that because effectively the goal was to teach children how to read and enjoy it. Yeah. I love that. And I love that. Yeah. It's like you're taking the parents on the journey as well. It's not just, and this is the beauty of having a tutoring business in that you can set your business up to be any.

You can set it up any way you want. Do you want the parents in the sessions? Do you want the parents to drop and go? Do you want to provide, you know, homework or extra things, or are you just, the parents are saying here, help them do their homework, you know, you get to choose, but I think it's really great that when you're doing something like this, it's such a deep level of intervention that you empower and educate the parents, because that's only going to increase.

Those results, you know, tenfold because they're getting more consolidation. They're getting more support at home. It is really, really cool. Really important. So there are obviously things like Sounds-Write. Becoming more popular and rightly so. Do you think this is enough? I know that I've thrown you a curve ball here because we do have.

Obviously, a lot of students who can't read and who are struggling with reading and spelling and writing. Do you think there's anything else that could be helping, so, you know, our tutors using Sounds-Write approach, for example, just to, you know, is there anything else that you have thought about before you're like, this would be amazing if our kids could do this or if the schools did this or if our parents or our tutors or, yeah, I know I'm throwing you a curveball here.

Yeah. I think that's a really important question, though, because. Sounds-Write is a phonics program. So it uses, you know, recognizes the importance of the phonemic awareness skills of blending and segmenting and manipulating phonemes and the phonics approach of matching those sounds to spellings and, you know, obviously in a very systematic way.

But when you talk about literacy, and I mean, language is an even bigger component. There are so many other parts to that. So phonics is about reading and spelling accuracy to a point, but there are many other layers and areas that we will often need to support our students in as well. Whether that's their vocabulary and how that ties into their reading comprehension, their written expression, their handwriting, their grammar, you know, there's so much more to it and ensuring that children are.

Engaging in some way, it's usually reading to them really quality literature, like beautiful stories so that they're hearing the language that is often in written texts that we don't use in spoken language. So how are these children engaging in and relating with written text beyond what they can read themselves.

So yeah, that's the little bubble and I think what's tricky with a, in a tutoring setup. where you're often seeing them once a week for a period of time is deciding on what your priorities are. So for those families I've worked with where there are multiple goals, I find that you really need to prioritize and do a block at a time.

Otherwise you end up diluting all the bits that you can and, you know, talking about that importance of parent engagement and parent involvement. If you're setting too many tasks within one week, instead of. You know, everything just starts falling off the table, right? And it just becomes overwhelming. So, yeah, trying to manage that is important.

I'm along the same lines as that. Setting priorities absolutely sounds right as a part of that reading rope. If you're aware of that analogy, it's that bottom component where we're lifting the words off the page. And then there's all of the other parts that you've just named. And I think that from Where I come from, and I'm not a speech therapist, so I'm coming from the helping children lift the words off the page effectively, from that sounds right perspective, but absolutely sounds right, is not the whole picture.

Getting children effectively doing that for me in my context is my main priority, and I put that into the context of using decodable text to get them reading more fluently. However, like you were saying, is that what can parents be doing, what can schools be doing? I also do the follow up activities that support children and families at home.

So I've written a simple program that they take home, that they can, they've got all the resources that they need to do those activities, all the books that they need to practice reading in those connected texts so they can build that fluency and to attain that comprehension, but also that confidence that they need.

To then transfer those skills into books that are not decodable. So follow up programs that parents can effectively use when they go home and the things that they need. There's heaps and heaps of resources that I think people need to be aware of that are free. If you're sounds right trained, you've got the portal, which has all of the decodable texts in there, or the dictation sentences that you might need that if you want to put a program together for your families, that's spelled South Australia spelled SA has.

They're beautiful decodable texts that are Sounds-Write aligned for the initial code. And so accessing those things that are free, that are aligned to your practice, you can kind of point your parents and your teachers in the direction that they can very easily access those things. I think. I have little packs for each of the decodable texts, which is the units of sounds that we're working on.

And parents take that home. They do it as homework, but they also send it into school and the schools have communicated with me and they do the same thing. So I've had little meetings with them and we've done Zooms and I've talked about word building and the resources that they're holding, the word reading, the writing and all the rest of it.

So, and how to effectively use a decodable. So I think it's that. communication across everyone, linking them up with quality resources that support them. UK Phonic Books aligns with Sounds-Write as well. They're brilliant stories. Yeah, so I think the follow up is really building a sustainable way of communicating with a range of different people.

And it's sustainable because obviously there's a lot that goes into it. And you just made me think of something as well. It's almost like you're advocating as well, because by providing all of this for the child to take to use at home and then to take to school, you are advocating for that student to learn in the way that.

They need, and I'm learning this as a mom, being on the other side of things now, is that, you know, sometimes you don't want to say anything because you don't want to step on toes. You don't want to offend people. You don't want people to think, Oh, well, she just thinks she knows everything because she, you know, she was a teacher.

But if you don't stand up for your child or the student that you're working with. Then I do believe that you're doing them a disservice. And the thing is, if you don't stand up for them, then who will, and again, it's no disrespect to anyone. It's just in a classroom, we've got 25 plus students that you're trying to work with and a very fast pace, you know, overflowing curriculum that you're trying to follow.

And so. If that teacher can be supported by something that you're providing as an intervention therapist or specialist or tutor or speechy, you know, whatever, then I think that goes a long way in helping, like you said, more than just the student in your session. So I really love that. I really, really love that.

Thank you so much ladies for your time today. It's been really, really wonderful chatting to you. If people want to learn a little more, Alison, about you and what you do, I'll start with you first. Where can they find out more about you? Thank you. So my business is called Soundality, and at the moment, yeah, I primarily offer Sounds-Write training online and face to face in the Brisbane region.

And I also sell all the Sounds-Write resources and yeah, I've got a YouTube channel and I share all sorts of little video snippets for, I don't know, yeah, just different things, little gems that pop up that I hope can help make people's lives a bit easier when they're helping a kid to learn to read and spell.

Awesome. Thank you. And Jacinda, what about you? I'm an in house trainer, so I work directly with Sounds-Write, so I can be contacted through my email address, which I think you're going to share with everybody. So I'll share your email address, and I'll share the links to the Sounds-Write website, so you can go and you can check out a little bit more about both Alison and Jacinda.

Thank you so much, ladies, for your time, for your honesty, you know, just for coming on here and talking about something that is close to so many of our hearts, something that we're all very, very passionate about. And hopefully, if people haven't heard of Sounds-Write before, or, you know, maybe they want to actually take the step and dive in, maybe this was just a little bit of an extra encouragement to go and check it out.

And for those ladies who are using it, maybe they've got a little bit of extra insight on how they can put it into their groups and. Communicate with their schools and their parents effectively. So really, really appreciate your time today. It's been fantastic having you on. Thank you for having. Thanks so much, Kirsty.

If you enjoyed this episode today, I would absolutely love for you to leave a review. It only takes a minute, and if you haven't yet subscribed, make sure you do to ensure that you never miss an episode. Finally, if you want to know more about what we do, head over to the website, kirstygibbs. com or check out the link in the show notes below.

Thanks for listening. It's so great to have you here.