Gay su pinnell and irene fountas

Every child is different. Gay and Irene consider The Literacy Continuum to be a lighthouse—guiding educators from observation to decision making during reading and writing instruction. In this special podcast conversation, Irene and Gay share their story of The Literacy Continuum and how it evolved into the indispensable tool educators know and use today.

Irene Fountas: To this date, people are fascinated by how children, and I'll use Marie Clay's phrase, "Take different paths to common outcomes. Gay su pinnell and irene fountas we are big advocates of teachers learning how to be astute observers and how to be able to use their observations to inform their teaching decisions.

I think that Gay and I, over time in our publications, have tried to write more and more that would help teachers have this way of thinking about teaching and learning; meaning, moving from observation to decision-making, always with the lens of what would proficient reading look like at this point in time, and teaching towards that.

And that's really what The Literacy Continuum is. We see it almost as a lighthouse, meaning we help teachers understand that they need to observe children's strengths and build on them, teaching towards the behaviors and understandings that are so precisely described in The Literacy Continuum over time, not only by levels A to Z for Guided Reading.

But we have also described thinking within, beyond, and about the text for a variety of instructional contexts such as interactive read aloud in book discussion, shared reading, so that teachers will be able to see how they can observe the way children think and work on text in a variety of contexts.

And that informs their understanding of development both when children are developing well and when children are going off track as what the phrase that Marie Clay would use. Brett: When you first published Guided Reading inthere was just one continua at that time and now we have eight continua of for all of the Continuum.

How did it grow from one continua in in Guided Reading to what we now know was The Continuum with eight continua within it? How did that evolve? How did it grow? Irene Fountas: Talk about those bullets. Remember it had the bullets in the chapter where we described the gradient and we have level A and B and we had a few bullets about what were important behaviors and then B and then C?

And remember how people kept saying to us, "Those bullets are so helpful to us. Irene Fountas: And they were just a few for each level. Those were the first bullets of The Literacy Continuum. Weren't they? We started with those.

On the Podcast: Getting to Know The Literacy Continuum with Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell

Gay Su Pinnell: They were and we got Well, everything we have done I think has come out of our interactions with teachers around our current work, what they're finding in it, what they're missing, what they want more of, what they need. And that is certainly classic example because time after time they would say, "These bullets are helping me so much.

They're helping guide by observation. I can see evidence of learning because I have these very descriptive phrases in the head. And that of course grew out of this, sitting down with the books every night and saying, "What will it take to read these books that are the same level of challenge?

And we worked on that and then we said, "We're not leaving out the wonderful, engaging literature quality texts. We're reading those aloud every day and we really ought to group those in a much more organic way. And so we started grouping those texts loosely as being more developmentally appropriate because the children may not be able to read the books, but they can think and talk and discuss and enjoy language in those books.

So we're doing that and we thought, "We could do some bullets of thinking within, beyond and about the text for every grade level. What does it take to listen to this book and talk about it and understand it and write about it and draw about it?