Teaching Channel Talks Episode 108: Game-Based Learning for Literacy Success (w/Brandon Cardet-Hernandez, Mrs. Wordsmith)

Dr. Wendy Amato: Welcome to Teaching Channel Talks. I’m your host, Wendy Amato. And as often as I can, I jump into conversations about topics that matter in education. And I promise you there is very little that’s more important than literacy. It’s my pleasure to welcome Brandon Cardet Hernandez. Thank you for being my guest today.

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Let’s talk about literacy. Why is this topic important to you?

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: Oh, I don’t, where do you even start? I think, similar to you, I, literacy is everything. It’s, uh, one of the greatest predictors of our health outcomes, our economic outcomes, the life we live, the relationships we build, the way we know ourselves, and I’m, like you, I’m constantly thinking about where we’re at in our literacy journey, and that’s, you know, 67 percent of fourth graders are not reading proficiently in the United States.

69 percent of eighth graders are not reading proficiently. And then when we start looking at the impact on some of our most vulnerable kids, black and Latino students, um, these numbers are just like, you know, we’re in a real crisis. And so I’m thinking about it all the time.

Dr. Wendy Amato: The statistics that you’re sharing right now are not about first year students in school entering into the system.

How have we moved students into upper grades with outcomes like this? What’s, what’s not happening?

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: Yeah, I think we are afraid to do hard things, you know, and that’s, and that’s part of the problem. I think there’s the explicit instruction around phonics that is missing in the unnecessary debate around how to teach.

We have enough information around what’s the right way to teach kids to read, and we can see those outcomes globally. And the same is true about vocabulary. And then we also allow for kids to sort of move into grades with unfinished business. And we have to do the work to hold ourselves accountable as educators and also create the structures for kids to be successful by making sure that they have these foundational skills before they move into more complex content where being behind creates new challenges for them.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Let’s pause for a moment and talk about explicit instruction. What does it look like? Are there people who think they’re being explicit in their lessons and they’re not? What does explicit instruction mean when we’re talking literacy and vocabulary?

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: Yeah, I think it depends on the kid’s age, right, but I think a lot about the science of reading when we talk about the science of reading, we’re talking about phonemic awareness, we’re talking about phonics, we’re talking about fluency, we’re talking about vocabulary, all of that impacts reading comprehension, those early foundational skills around phonemic awareness and phonics, and then that really important part about reading aloud so you’re building that fluency as a reader, then the world that you live in sort of impacting your vocabulary, all of that requires explicit instruction.

Now, there is work that will happen by osmosis, just living in a rich world with tons of vocabulary, but there actually is direct work that needs to be done that allows a young person to practice those skills, that phonics and fluency work, um, that we have to bring into classrooms and we have to think about existing in a young person’s life outside of their classroom as well.

Dr. Wendy Amato: When we talk about growing vocabulary, does that come from enriching students lived experiences first?

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: I think both things can be true. I want a young person to be moving through the world with the richest experiences possible. Museums, and traveling, and, uh, consuming media that feels rich and, and, imaginative, but also rooted in reality.

Like, I want all of that for them. So yes, and at the same time, words are consumed, and sometimes words are just taught. And we have to know who our audience is. Listen, you know, there’s young folks who are living in that world every single day, and so their vocabulary acquisition is just very different than a young person who has a different experience in a different community where they have less access to words.

And then that requires, yes, Enriching the world around them and direct instruction to make sure that there are these key words that we know are going to set them up for success as they move forward.

Dr. Wendy Amato: You’re a former principal from the lowest income school in New York, and we’re talking about the Bronx.

What you’re talking about, uh, experience and growing vocabulary. You’ve been in environments where there’s been great challenge. How has that informed your thinking today?

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: Listen, I think about the most vulnerable people in everything I do. You know, I’m the son of Cuban immigrants and, um, and I grew up in a complex situation myself.

And then, you know, how lucky am I? I’ve been able to serve communities, um, in realizing greater access and opportunity. But it’s at its core of what I’m thinking about, mostly because there’s always a statistic that stays with me. 70 percent of all incarcerated adults cannot root at a fourth grade level.

And I always said I became a principal to close a prison. And so, for me, the school to prison pipeline is deeply connected and it’s deeply connected to sub literacy. And so, like, that is a driving force for me in the deepest way. Um, and it’s a scary thing to connect to because we’re talking about our earliest readers.

But I know what happens when a young person doesn’t build those foundational skills before fourth grade and what those skills are. Those economic and health outcomes lead to and we have enough information to show the trajectory of a young person’s life as a result. So it’s very much front of mind. And then there’s just this other piece.

Um, forget the sort of nape outcomes we were talking about, but like, we just know that to read, you need to know 95 to 98 percent of the words. in a text to comprehend it. And so I can use all the context clues in the world. I was a teacher who even gave kids that information because I knew they had struggling vocabulary.

Use context clues. But at some point, if I’m reading something that I’m not accessing 95 percent of the words, I can’t access that text. And so the explicit instruction around vocabulary is so important. Um, and it matters to me and I think we have to do better at that. building a bridge to that type of teaching.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Talk to me about what a student’s experience may be if they were playing a game on Mrs. Wordsmith.

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: Yeah, so we have a game that I love called Word Tag. We have a bunch of games but one of them that I’ll talk about today is Word Tag. This one goes back to what we were talking about earlier. It’s, it’s a game that’s focused on explicit vocabulary and we use two things.

We use all the sort of traditional game based engineering tools and tricks, right? There’s a reward system that helps release dopamine in our brains, it makes us happy, we stay engaged, right? Uh, we know how to keep kids engaged in the video game by creating, it feels interactive, and the kids are using a scooter to run around and collect coins and jump and flip and do all the tricks that are really fun.

There’s customization, right? So that a kid can build their avatar so it feels like them and it feels personal and it feels culturally responsive and to who they are. And, we use space repetition, which is repeating content at gradual intervals. This is just good teaching and learning. Um, but we know that there’s a science behind space repetition.

And so we introduce a word through the video game in all of its form, then its context in sentences with the definition, you get to sort of see the word in multiple ways, which is how we learn vocabulary. And we do that. Three to six times, depending on where a student is progressing and understanding that word, through that spaced repetition.

So it becomes a word that a young person memorizes. You can do that at a cadence where I’m introducing a word, a few words every single day, but I’m deepening memorization around those words because I’ve allowed a student to engage with that word in different ways. And I’ve allowed that student to engage with with that word in an environment that feels safe, that feels fun, that feels affirming, where I’m opening myself up to learning, which is the power of great video games.

And now, Wendy, you know, not all video games are created equal. There are some great things, there are some mediocre things, there are some terrible things. But I think when we, I think about game based learning, and I think about the products that we’re building, like we can build something that’s really useful and is a great use of a young person’s time and can be so interactive, so visually stimulating, and so pedagogically sound that allows us to compete with the other distractions in a young person’s life at that moment in time.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Talk to me about game based learning when we’re at a moment in time where families and educators are really keeping track of screen time.

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: Yeah, I think we’re having a really healthy conversation around screen time and at the same time I worry that we’re distracted in the debate, mostly because we’re old and so we don’t really understand the use case.

I think all the conversations around social media, critical, important, good. I think our conversations around television consumption, critical, important, good. I think We also just have to recognize not all screen time is created equal. I say this all the time. And so I think there is an adult awareness around what a young person is doing on their screen that is like central to this conversation.

I also think really missing is that for a long time, and I’m a parent myself, so like, I’ve fallen victim to this. It’s like, I’m going to give you a screen to, so I can do something else, and so that you stay busy. And there’s a time and place, particularly if you know what you’re showing them. But there’s also this really beautiful experience in co viewing, co playing, that can actually build.

Connection. You know, there are multiplayer games, right, where you can play with your kid. So it becomes an activity that you know is high interest to them.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Brandon, if we do things right, we’re going to change language and people will stop saying limited screen time and they’ll start saying limited harmful screen time.

I love hearing you use the phrase spaced repetition. I’ve heard spaced retrieval, but I suspect that the distinction is whether it’s input or output. And we’re really talking about. The science of learning brain based strategies. Tell me more about how you have used your experience in the field to inform tools and resources that you’re making available to educators now.

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: I appreciate that. I think, you know, I spent, um, As you know, time in the classroom, and so I’m like always thinking about what I needed. And I think about classroom time as a principal and as a teacher in this really specific way. I think the most important thing I could do was deliver incredible pedagogy to have data on how my kids were doing so that I could celebrate when there were successes and also interrupt when there was confusion.

reinforce what needed to happen. But I also thought the most important thing I could do was build intimate relationships with young people so that they could take on the most vulnerable thing we all do, which is learning. I think the vulnerability of learning, we often, we, we don’t talk about enough. And I had to be able to do all of those.

I knew that as a teacher, There were moments for me to stand and deliver instruction. I know this is like a controversial piece in our world today, but like there was direct instruction that for me felt really important to sort of hold a space for, and that there was these small group moments that would allow me to work shoulder to shoulder with a kid.

And build that intimacy that would allow them to take more intellectual risk. And when I build, when we’re building products at Mrs. Wordsmith for classrooms, I’m thinking about the dance between both of those spaces. I think video games in classrooms offers that like if I create a video game and we have one, an early phonics video game called ridiculous, that does like some of those early skills phonics and phonemic awareness and fluency.

If I can build a video game that I know a kid and I think about screen time in this way because this is we’re talking about three to seven year olds, that’s about 15 minutes of play because that’s all I want for them on a screen at that time, but I need them to have that dosage. I can create 15 minutes of play for this.

group over here, and then I have 15 minutes of small group interaction with this other group. Maybe I’m doing a read aloud, maybe I’m doing, right, but I’m doing something over here that creates a closeness that, given budgetary constraints and all the things you and I want for every school, just may not be the reality.

I can do this really interesting dance of direct instruction, intimate relationship building for, to create that safety and vulnerability, and then flip the room around, right? That’s what I’m thinking about as we’re building products. And then I’m thinking about, is this artistically interesting for a young person?

Does it feel like it infantilizes them? Or does it feel like it gets them excited about the world and the, and the learning that’s about to take shape? I think we’re really good at that at Mrs. Wordsmith. I think about the pedagogy, and do I have the right team around us to build that? Build the tools that are going to drive the results that you and I both want to see happen.

And then it’s really becomes on a bigger level, like, do people know that this is out there? And how do we make sure people know there’s enough noise? I was, you know, as a system leader and a teacher and a school principal, I know this there’s so much noise. It’s like, how do you make sure people know, um, where the quality is and that they can access it and then they can deploy it in their classrooms.

Dr. Wendy Amato: One of the things I love about game based learning is the data that we can capture and not only capture the data, but then the subsequent recommendations that come out of what is surfacing. Talk to me about opportunities that you have in your program for that, for data.

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: You know, I just think about the use and I think about this with AI and in the world that we live in and as a, as a real I know there are concerns around the sort of bias that can be embedded in AI and I often am thinking about the, the way that we can interrupt bias.

That happens on a human level, and it can become a great equalizer for us. And so, you can think about this, like, I can use AI for a young person to practice reading, and I can give them feedback on that fluency. That one to one interaction is hard, Wendy. You know that. For a teacher to listen, and then, rate fluency, and there may be bias in that reading, but I can, I can do that.

We have a game, Ridiculous, that uses that. We have a speech recognition tool that can measure down to, you know, a phoneme and allows us to measure how a student is progressing in their ability to pronounce, uh, and then speak that sound. And listen, it’s a technology, and it will have failures, right? There may be an accent, there may, and we have to be mindful of all of that in this, but it’s just more support for us on the ground to do good work.

I think the same with the data on the vocabulary piece in, in WordTag. Um, I can see where a student is struggling on the definition of a word. And I can get this report through our teacher dashboard, which then tells me green, right? Got it right eight times, this is a word that they know. And then also tells me these are red words, like that a student is struggling with, individual student, or even your whole class is struggling.

And then I, as an educator, have this data that I can either explicitly reinforce it through an instructional activity, or, back to what we were talking about earlier, I can just use it. more in the classroom. And then I need to be able to feed you some tips and tricks to be like, okay, what do you do with this data?

Now, you’re going to have better ideas. And I actually need the feedback from you on like, what are you actually doing? But like, some of that just like helping you helping inspire some of that creativity that educators have naturally, and that they’re using every single day just to build that a little bit further.

Dr. Wendy Amato: I firmly that professional learning should be about those practices, the applications of knowledge that change the way we teach. Professional learning should not be generating data analysts. That’s just not right.

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: No, no, we should be building the data tools so that they can do the practice.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Brandon, the United States is not leading in literacy.

What does that mean?

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: Oh my gosh, this is a whole nother conversation. I think it means I think we should be worried. I think it means, you know, all the things we know, the economic outcomes for individuals who are impacted by sub literacy, the generational realities of sub literacy, um, You know, this is multi generational, uh, realities for a lot of Americans who have experienced sub literacy, the health outcomes that we’ve talked about, and then I think there’s a larger conversation around what it means for jobs in this country.

We are really struggling to produce solid readers, and we’re struggling to do that across racial lines and across economic lines. And I think we have to have a really sober conversation around the crisis that we’re in around literacy, and then the ways that we can increase dosage to help catch people up and promote the science backed pedagogy that we know helps deliver outcomes faster.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Let me ask you to be operational about that and maybe prescriptive a little bit, what would you like to see the education community do as a whole? Where do we come together to make improvements in literacy in our schools across the country?

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: I think we need phonics backed curriculum. I think we need training in that curriculum to make sure people feel really confident to deliver that instruction.

I think we need tools that we send home with families so that they can further support the dosage. And I think we need to be mindful of what we were talking about earlier, that sometimes sub literacy is generational. And so those tools have to be able to be deployed in a home and not to, you know, Uh, produce shame for a parent who is struggling with their own literacy skills, and that’s what I love about game based learning.

And then I also think we have to think, and I think Mississippi is an interesting example here, we have to think about social promotion in a very different way, and allowing us to move a kid forward grade by grade when they are ready to access that grade level content, and I think that accountability can really change outcomes globally.

for us as a country.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Let’s change the outcomes. I’m with you. Let’s do it, Brandon.

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: Yes.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Thank you for this conversation.

Brandon Cardet-Hernandez: I have loved it, Wendy. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Wendy Amato: Thank you to the educators who have shared this discussion with us and for prioritizing literacy throughout our schools. If you’d like to explore the topics that Brandon and I discussed today, please check out the show notes at teachingchannel.

com slash podcast and be sure to subscribe on whatever listening app you use. It will help others to find us. And that means they’ll be able to help more students, especially with literacy. I’ll see you again soon for another episode. Thanks for listening.