Not only does grounding have an impact in our life, grounding ourselves when it comes to reading instruction will have a profound impact on our professional careers and on the lives of students.  When you ground yourself, you will make decisions based on that grounding.

Dr. Molly Ness joins us this week to unpack what is meant by "Funds of Knowledge" in building students' language comprehension. She explains the differences between background knowledge, a term we are probably more familiar with, and funds of knowledge, and she explores how funds of knowledge relates to the Science of Reading.

Watch a webinar where Dr. Molly Ness dives in.  https://home.edweb.net/webinar/readers20230207/

This week we will be taking a journey through the history of Learning Ally to discover leadership moves that needed to be made to propel our organization to a multi-solution literacy provider.  You will learn about the rich history of the organization as well as how literacy leaders need to pull some levers while leaving other levers unmoved.

Literacy leaders need to create margins in their life. Just as a piece of notebook paper has margins and margins in a book are critical. This episode gives four guidelines on how to create margins in your life to create space for sustained thinking.

Dr. Molly Ness and Dr. Terrie Noland talk this week about some sobering statistics about access to books for our students. "What keeps me up at night is that the statistics are just sobering about access to books across our country. We know that 45% of our nation's kids live in neighborhoods that lack public libraries, bookstores or homes where there's a stock and flow of books. 67% of our schools in our nation's lowest income neighborhoods can't afford to buy books at retail prices. And so when you take that data, the overarching result is that 32 million American kids go without books." 

It's been said, "The more reflective you are, the more effective you are."  As literacy leaders we need to reflect on the past to prepare for the future. In this episode, Dr. Terrie Noland reflects on 2022 and pulls out 5 learnings and discusses how to apply them to the future.  Reflection is simple, the hard part is applying it to the future. 

In order to know where we're going, we have to understand where we've been. Over the course of the last year, the Learning Ally Educator Community has experienced monumental growth, grown closer than ever in our relationships and partnerships with educational stakeholders of all kinds - all in an effort to close an ever-widening literacy gap in education.

In this episode: we get to know the Learning Ally Educator Community Manager, Elizabeth Zwerg, a little better and learn about her journey to become a Community Manager. We celebrate accomplishments in the Community including events that deepen learning such as Spotlight on Dyslexia, take a look back at community-building events such our our "Share the love" Valentine's Day gathering that brought together our volunteer and educator communities, and we celebrate as the Learning Ally Educator Community was nominated for 3 CMX Community Industry Awards. We close the episode with many personal shout outs to those who have supported, believed in, and helped to grow our Community over the last year. You won't want to miss this last episode of the Literacy Leadership podcast for 2022.

We wish you and yours a very happy holiday season. 

With love and gratitude, 

-Terrie, Eleanor, Elizabeth

Learning Ally Thought Leadership & Community Team

Leadership looks different when you know what to consider.  With the surge of awareness and activity on social media lately around reading instruction, it is critical to remember what Literacy Leadership should look like. This episode showcases three aspects to consider that literacy leaders should do to build themselves and others as Literacy Leaders.  

Build: 

1. Knowledge 

2. People 

3. Bridges 

Join us at our Learning Ally Educator Community. 

There is an urgency in literacy and that's why I'm issuing an all-call on this podcast for individuals to step up into leadership and lead from where you are. You will know why we can't wait for perfection or wait until we've learned it all. You will learn about leading up, leading across leading down, and most importantly, leading you. The all-call is sounding and we need you and everyone you know to answer the call and lead from where you are. 

Sign up for the Spotlight on Literacy Leadership event for FREE and receive access to all of the recordings to hear how others are leading from where they are. 

Dr. Molly Ness, Vice-President of Academic Content at Learning Ally shares information about the current release of the NAEP Scores (National Assessment of Educational Progress).  Rather than looking at the NAEP scores as an alarm with doom and gloom outcomes, Dr. Ness reminds us that they should be merely used to understand the temperature of where we are as a nation and serve as a tool to help us march toward a clear vision of reading instruction for the future.