Read by Example

Where does literacy leadership intersect with the quest for educational justice? In this thought-provoking conversation, I am joined by Michele Caracappa (Reading to Lead) and Debra Crouch (Made for Learning) as we delve into this vital topic.

Michele, with her extensive background in education and leadership from New York City, shares insights from her journey of supporting literacy and educational justice. The conversation covers a range of subjects:

* The impact of policies on literacy instruction

* The importance of teacher empowerment

* Rethinking literacy through a justice-oriented lens

Whether you're an educator, leader, or simply passionate about educational equity, this episode offers valuable perspectives on creating conditions that foster success for all students. Dive into the discussion and discover actionable strategies to bridge the gap between literacy leadership and educational justice. Don't miss out on enriching your understanding and toolkit for change. Listen now and be part of the conversation towards a more equitable educational landscape.

Subscribe for more episodes on transforming education through leadership and literacy.

Beginning next month, we are reading How to Become a Better Writing Teacher by Carl Anderson and Matt Glover.

Share this episode with your network to spread the word about the importance of literacy leadership.

Continue the conversation here in the comments (full subscribers), or wait until the podcast version is posted.

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As the new year begins, Debra Crouch, Vivian Chen and I avoided the usual focus on resolutions in this professional conversation.

Instead, we emphasized good intentions in our professional practice.

Our discussion begins with a sharing of our current to-read lists, a mix of fiction and non-fiction books relevant to education, personal development, and broader societal issues.

We then delved into the concept of transforming lessons into recipes, exploring the nuances of teaching methods, the importance of adaptability in education, and the potential of professional development.

The conversation concludes with reflections on how these insights can be applied in our immediate professional contexts in ways that support teaching and learning.

Key Insights and Quotes:

Debra Crouch

* Insight: Emphasizes the balance between planning and responsiveness in teaching.

* Quote: "You could never plan some of those moments that were happening based on what kids were saying."

Vivian Chen:

* Insight: Points out the significance of collaborative learning and observing the impact of teaching practices.

* Quote: "I need somebody to be there to look for the kid's twinkle in their eyes, to see what it was (that led to student engagement and learning)."

Matt Renwick:

* Insight: Highlights the critical role of experience and reflection in developing teaching expertise.

* Quote: "When you cook for 20 years, you just develop a ‘with-it-ness’, a ‘I know I can substitute this for that.’"

Listeners will walk away with a greater understanding for the conditions that go into thoughtful and intentional education practices, as well as the importance of adaptability and continuous learning in our field.

Full subscribers can participate in these professional conversations via Zoom, as well as watch the video recordings. Join us!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

This is the first in a series of videos I am calling “Instructional Leadership Operating System”. The series will provide leaders in all positions with tutorials, strategies and processes that lead to improved focus, better prioritization, and positive school outcomes.

In this video, I present a practical approach to organizing events, appointments, and commitments using a whiteboard calendar.

* I emphasize importance of the calendar as a primary tool for capturing and planning activities on a daily basis.

* I demonstrate how using a whiteboard for scheduling offers visibility and flexibility, allowing for easy brainstorming and adjustments.

* I share my personal experiences, including managing professional site visits, personal errands, and family awareness of his schedule.

There are several benefits to a physical calendar, including how it complements digital tools by providing a quick, at-a-glance view during meetings and avoiding double bookings.

Additionally, I advocate for a weekly review practice to reflect on past activities and prepare for upcoming ones, stressing the significance of allocating time for professional development.

This approach balances the convenience of digital calendars with the tangibility and accessibility of a whiteboard, aiming for thoughtful and intentional time management.

Was this tutorial helpful? You can “like” this post below and please share it with colleagues!

I am happy to answer any follow up questions from full subscribers in the comments.

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On Monday, December 19, Debra Crouch and I spoke with Isobel Stevenson.

Isobel is the author of The Coaching Letter, a newsletter that is about “organizational culture and intelligent failure”. She is also the author of multiple books, including Making Coaching Matter: Leading Continuous Improvement in Schools, with Sarah Woulfin and Kerry Lord (Teachers College Press, 2023).

In our conversation we explored a number of questions around continuous school improvement, including:

* You promote “intelligent failure” as an organizational disposition, where teachers and leaders are intentionally making mistakes. This feels counter to most school cultures. What conditions need to exist for this to be a reality?

* Is a “culture of coaching” the answer to the problem of the status quo? If not, what else?

* If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about schools as they currently are, what would it be?

Listeners will walk away with a better appreciation for the complexities of school improvement, along with clear action steps for engaging in this work.

Take care,

Matt

What we are reading

* Isobel listed several favorite professional titles, including The Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson, Being Wrong by Kathryn Schultz, The Voltage Effect by John List, and Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales.

* Debra enjoyed The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. She shared the following quote from this novel: “Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives.”

* Matt is planning to start The Reformatory by Tananarive Due soon, a Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Best Horror (2023).

* Isobel just posted her December edition of her newsletter, in which she shares more about the instructional design practice of “co-developing recipes—which are NOT the same as checklists or scripts”.

* For more information on continuous school improvement, check out my conversation with Isobel’s co-author Sarah Woulfin along with Rachael Gabriel.

Take care,

Matt

P.S. No post/newsletter next week - 🎁enjoy the holiday break!🎄

P.P.S. In addition to live professional conversations with educational experts like Isobel, full subscribers also have access to the video archive of the Zoom chat plus the discussion guide. See below. You can use these resources to support professional learning in your context.

2023 Holiday Special: Become a paid subscriber today and take advantage of 15% off an annual plan (offer available until January 1, 2024).

You can also refer this space to colleagues and get a complimentary subscription.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

Ever since the advent of the Internet, professional development for educators has become more prominent online.

Teachers and school leaders found a home in Twitter. It’s been a source of knowledge and a facilitator of long-lasting connections, even friendships. How can educators use this platform today for professional learning, especially with its current challenges?

In my conversation with Dr. Mary Howard, author of RtI From All Sides and Good to Great Teaching (affiliate links), we talk about this social media platform, including:

* The upcoming #g2great discussion on Twitter around Regie Routman’s new book The Heart-Centered Teacher (affiliate link),

* How to engage in a Twitter chat, and

* What the future may hold for online professional learning.

Listeners will walk away with a greater appreciation for continuous improvement as literacy leaders.

Related #G2Great Resources

* Our #G2Great Wakelet Collections (Regie’s will be posted after the chat)

* 10-20-22 Blast From the Past: Literacy Essentials (Blog post)

* 1/11/18 Literacy Essentials (Blog post)

Looking for more learning?

Check out the video archive of my conversation with Mary.

You will find a brief guide for how to engage in a Twitter chat. In addition, I provided an original article on how to apply a modern framework for digital learning in classrooms and school for full subscribers. Sign up today!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

In this conversation with Regie Routman, we explore her writing process that led to her new book The Heart-Centered Teacher: Restoring Hope, Joy, and Possibility in Uncertain Times (Routledge, 2023).

I was interested in learning more about her purpose and intentions around this important book. Below are three questions I asked Regie.

* The cracked plate, beautifully depicted on your book cover in a painting by Toby Gordon, is a powerful metaphor for navigating uncertain times. What felt true to you as you connected this item to our lives?

* In the conversation you had with Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle, they shared that your book is unlike any other professional learning resource they read. You appreciated that comment. Was it your intention from the start to make this book at least part memoir? 

* Another concept that you speak to often is the power of story. In schools, teachers and leaders are often having their stories told for them only through test scores and media reports, often incorrectly. What are some of your favorite, practical ways for educators and students to better control their narratives?

Listeners will walk away with a greater understanding of the “why” behind this book. The ideas Regie shares with us can help any educator reclaim hope and joy in teaching and leading in uncertain times.

In addition to this audio, full subscribers have access to the video recording archive, along with a downloadable three question reflection protocol Regie and I workshopped to help students “restory” their lives.

This episode is also available on Apple and wherever else you listen to your podcasts. Let people know what you think with a rating and review.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

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For this article club, colleagues and I explored the following questions and more as we discussed Paul Emerich France’s article (ASCD Blog).

* How can schools balance instructional transparency with teacher empowerment?

* Is there a reasonable rationale for why principals can expect lesson plans to be submitted to them?

* If teachers are expected to be leaders, what are the conditions in which they can thrive?

The following guests joined me for this enlightening discussion:

* Debra Crouch, Teaching Decisions

* Mary Howard, Literacy Lenses (Twitter)

* Don Marlett, Learning Focused (Twitter)

Listeners will walk away with a more nuanced understanding of effective vs. ineffective lesson planning, the conditions for teacher agency, and how to build a school culture based on trust.

(Go to the end of this post for the full transcript of our conversation.)

Additional Benefits for Full Subscribers

Full subscribers enjoy additional resources:

* The ability to comment on all posts.

* The opportunity to participate in these live conversations via Zoom.

* Access to the video recording archive of professional conversations, as well as a copy of the discussion guide which can be used to support similar continuous improvement efforts in your context.

Become a paid subscriber today to enjoy all of these community benefits.

Coming Up:

October & November Book Club, The Heart-Centered Teacher by Regie Routman

“How do we find hope and possibility in challenging times?”

In her latest book, Regie Routman offers all educators “a refreshing chance to pause, take a breath, and reflect on how you and your students can live more compassionate, generous, and authentic lives.” The Heart-Centered Teacher is about more than literacy; it’s about “developing, nurturing, and sustaining caring relationships - in our teaching lives, our home lives, and in the happy intersection of both.”

You are invited to join us this fall in an eight-week book club around this text. You can purchase Regie’s book at one of the links below.

Full subscribers can participate in two monthly conversations via Zoom around the book on the following dates:

RSVP here.

All subscribers will be able to post comments on discussion threads related to the book on the following dates:

* October 10th: Chapters 1-2

* October 24th: Chapters 3-5

* November 7th: Chapters 5-7

* November 21st: Chapters 8-10

We will be using the study guide and additional chapter resources to help support the discussion, found at the book’s companion site.

All of this is made possible through the generous support of full subscribers - thank you!

Full Transcript

(generated by Rev.com; the AI is to blame for all grammatical errors. :-)

Matt Renwick (00:02):

Welcome to Read by Example, where teachers are leaders and leaders know literacy. And I'm welcoming here again, Mary Howard, Debra Crouch, and Don Marlett. Mary, if you want to start, just share a little bit real quickly about yourself, what you do.

Mary Howard (00:18):

Sure. I'm a literacy consultant, still heavily engaged in education, living in Honolulu, Hawaii, and have been a teacher for 51 going on 52 years now.

Matt Renwick (00:33):

Deborah,

Debra Crouch (00:35):

I'm Debra Crouch. I, I'm also working as a literacy consultant these days and just was with second and fourth grade teachers today talking about the practices in their classrooms, and this was very applicable to some of the work that we were doing. So I'm excited about this conversation.

Matt Renwick (00:55):

Awesome. Yeah.

Don Marlett (00:58):

Hi, I am Don Marlett with Learning Focused. So I thought this would be a fun one to join. Alright. Specifically within an instructional framework is one of our focus areas,

Matt Renwick (01:15):

And I'm familiar with all of your work, either through reading or presenting. So this is a very knowledgeable group. I'm honored to be here. So today's topic, and again, the intention here is to just engage around a topic of interest that people are talking about. And this was something that was getting debated on Twitter, whether or not teachers should have to submit lesson plans and looking at the bigger topics of school-wide expectations, balancing that with teacher empowerment and the articles by Paul Emrich, France for ASCD blog. So the question I had just in mind was, should teachers be required to submit lesson plans or do we need to ask a better question? I get a sense there's more to the issue here at a deeper level than just lesson plans, but we can get into that. And the other purpose we record these conversations is just to demonstrate how to facilitate a professional conversation.

(02:14):

And this is the heart of professional learning. We don't talk about some of these big topics in schools because they could be too contentious. You're afraid it might spiral into an argument debate. And so hopefully through this process, through professionals such as ourselves that we can demonstrate that for our colleagues. So everyone gets this guide who is a full subscriber to the newsletter. So thank you to everyone who is a full subscriber, really important to have norms with some of these conversations. Working norms, agreements, I just use some from the Peloton group. A dialect should be a basic attitude. Create safe spaces, include all relevant parties in a dialogue. You listen, let everyone share their experiences, ask questions, talk about difficult topics and contribute to forgiveness and reconciliation. And one thing I've seen presenters do is to ask the audience each person to like, which one are you going to focus on to add during this time together? Which one do you want to really work on? So that's a strategy you might want to try. So just to kind kick things off, but what are you listening to right now? Just more of an inclusion activity. It doesn't have to be music, it could be a podcast, it could be anything nature.

(03:36):

I'll go first.

Don Marlett (03:38):

Go ahead Matt.

Matt Renwick (03:41):

I'll be the first to go here. I've been listening to a huberman Lab podcast. Andrew Huberman is a neurobiologist in California and he's a podcast and just talking to a psychiatrist in the East Coast, Paul Conti at Harvard Medical School about mental health and talks about the framework for mental health. So I found it very illuminating and I want to share it out at some point for all schools. I think the framework's very helpful in terms of how we can help kids and even adults. So that's what I'm listening to.

Don Marlett (04:18):

I just started listening to writing for Busy readers. I saw it, I follow Angela Duckworth and she posted it. And so it was a good book, but also because whenever we send emails from our company and all that stuff that everybody is busy. So how can we make it so that they can actually read them? Since we all know it's hard to read our own emails. It's very good so far.

Matt Renwick (04:47):

And it was a book or it was a podcast?

Don Marlett (04:50):

It's a book. So I'm just using reading the audible version, listening to the audible version of it. Cool.

Mary Howard (05:01):

Okay. Well, I'll go. I just finished listening to, I'm a big fan of Dr. Andy Johnson's the reading instruction show. What I love about Andy is how clear and strong he is in talking about some of the issues. And so I enjoy listening to that and I enjoy taking notes and just kind of thinking it through. He usually has a podcast maybe once every couple of weeks or so, and it's really very well done.

Matt Renwick (05:37):

Nice.

Debra Crouch (05:38):

Well, I'm going to fess up and be the one who says I am not good with podcasts because the podcasts that are professional, I want to be sitting and taking notes on. People will say, oh, listen to it while you walk. Doesn't work for me. I want to take notes. And I can't do that while I'm walking. So I haven't figured out really how to put podcasts. My life very well. I can listen to the Fluffy. I absolutely loved my brain. Just went absolutely did. On her name, Julia Louis Drive's podcast series. I don't know if you saw that, where she's talking to women older than her and she's like, what can I learn from you? So I listened to that podcast, but I was thinking about what am I listening to? And I was just listening in the car to this brilliant artist called Rianna Giddens. Do you know Rianna in her work?

(06:32):

How do you spell her name? Rianna? I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly. Nan like the Fleetwood Max song, Giddens, G I D D E N S. And saw Americana music. And I learned about her through a book that I was reading on creativity and they profiled her in this book. She's won a number of awards, but she decided that she didn't want to be on that I'm into the popular music and going on the tours and doing that sort of continuing to grow and be popular in that way. She decided to focus inward in her writing and in her songs and in her musical choices. She's one of the most glorious voices, I think. And that's the word I would use. It's a glorious voice. So that's who I've been listening to. But when you say that, I'm like, okay, I listen to music, not a podcast listener, really. So anyway, so that's what I've been listening to right now.

Matt Renwick (07:38):

Nice. I like Fluffy.

Don Marlett (07:42):

And Debra, I feel your pain. I never last very long. When I'm listening to audible books, my mind starts racing, so that's why it takes me. I go back and forth between that and Fluffy, so I'm like you, I can't just sit there and listen for the whole thing, which doesnt work when you're driving. So I can't listen to her for very long.

Mary Howard (08:04):

And sometimes when I'm walking and I'm starting to listen to a podcast, it's bad because I pull out a pen and I end up taking notes all the way down my arm and now sit at the, I try to just put a marker and then like you said, I need to write it down so I listen to the podcast at home and type out the important things. I like it, but yeah, it was bad on my skin.

Matt Renwick (08:30):

I heard that's the best way to do it, is to listen and then go home and then write down what you remember paraphrase. And that actually is the best way to synthesize, which I don't do. Of course I do it. I'll bring up Google keep notes and I will record myself and it will transcribe what I say. But yeah, I think that's the best way is just to listen and then write it later. Alright, so the article, thanks for sharing, I'll put those in the notes. The article again is why teachers shouldn't have to submit lesson plans. And this piqued my interest was posted on Twitter, and another pretty well-known educator, former principal had said, I just disagree with this whole thing. And I like that when there's disagreement, I think that's good. The principals, we can require to have lesson plans submitted to us, and I think that's important, and I think he would probably have some very good reasons.

(09:32):

But the reasons that Paul Emerich France listed were to not submit them is he started his first two weeks teaching and he's like, I wrote them all at length and after two weeks I was exhausted and I was constantly changing them because I was paying attention to my kids. I wasn't able to be responsive because my lesson plans were all planned out literally. So he just noted that first administrators don't have time, so they're not going to read hundreds of lessons every week, creates more paperwork. The second reason is traditional lesson planning is unsustainable. He likes five questions, which I thought were good, which is what should students know and be able to do by the end of the lesson? How will I know if they've learned? So it sounds like PLCs, how will I provoke curiosity and discussion? How will I orchestrate instruction? How will learners reflect on that lesson? So that's his framework he uses for lessons, a much abbreviated version. And the third reason is teachers feel micromanaged. So just thinking about those three reasons that France lists, what are just your initial thoughts on that?

Mary Howard (10:44):

Well, I'll just start by something that he said early on, and I thought it really kind of was a crux of the whole article. He said, plans change, they have to, teaching is unpredictable and uncertain, especially when 20 or more human beings are along or this ride we call learning, steering the ship with their questions, emotions and thoughts. Teaching cannot follow a script. And that's one of the problems that we're seeing right now with scripts and very controlled plans because it's in the moment teaching in my mind, there's nothing more important than that in the moment teaching. So having a plan is really important. I thought it would be very difficult to write plans with all five of those questions, but I was certainly really intrigued by them. But I think that really is the crux of the article for me, that if we don't leave room for that in the moment decision-making, that there's no way we could plan for it, then how are we really being responsive to children as opposed to being responsive to whatever it is that we're turning in.

Debra Crouch (12:05):

It was interesting because when I read this for the first time, I had a lot of different ways of thinking about this because I do a lot of this with teachers in my work where I'm planning with teachers and this work. And so one of the things that I wrote as a note was what does a lesson plan look like for this author? One of the questions that I had, because I've been in situations with teachers where I've gone in thinking, okay, we're going to do some planning, and I'm thinking bigger planning, like unit kind of planning or a series of lessons kind of planning, but the teachers think we're planning a lesson and that we're walking away with it. So we had to do a lot of clarifying of what we mean when we talk about planning. There's that the unit plan, the weekly plan, the daily plan.

(12:59):

And then one of the other layers that started popping in was the prep. What does it mean to prep a lesson, right? You have your lesson plan, but you still have preparation. You have to do kind of in that moment kind of thing. So I think that was a question that I had within this was like, okay, what exactly are you talking about when you talk about lesson plans and turning them in? Because I know when I was a teacher, we did turn in weekly lesson plans, and one of the things that I thought so much about was that as a new teacher, I didn't like doing it. So I could totally relate to his thing about teachers feeling controlled and micromanaged. But in hindsight now I can see that it forced me and pushed me to be prepared in a way that I probably would not have been had I not had to make sure at eight o'clock on Monday morning.

(13:51):

Those were in my box and I knew it was just more of they just wanted to make sure we were planned and they could come in at any moment. I may understood how they were working with it, but once I learned how to, in a way they didn't care how we turned it in, it didn't matter what it looked like, it was just that you had it in there. Everybody looked at different, everybody's looked different. But I felt like once I learned how to put it onto paper, then I felt like I actually knew what I was doing. It was more like a to-do list for myself, just with the notes and excel. Anyways, it was just an interesting, I'm talking too much, but it was an interesting way of looking because my first question was like, okay, what's he talking about when he talks about a lesson plan? What exactly would that look like?

Matt Renwick (14:36):

And Debra, you make a point here that France recommends in the end of the article that for new teachers, but I think any teachers would benefit from having their coach learn the art of planning and prepping and what's the difference in what you're talking about? I would just be really good practice for any teacher PLCs, but working with coaches like you, Deborah or Mary or Don, I think that would be just powerful professional learning for anyone. Don, what are your initial thoughts here?

Don Marlett (15:06):

Yeah, it's funny because that I follow a couple of Facebook principal groups and this always seems to be divided down the line. When a new administrator asked that question, I think I went back to what Mary and Debra were saying is depends on how you define the word plan. If you define it as a script, a hundred percent agree, scripts are not in my mind a plan. So one of the things that we do sometimes is just what do you define a plan? How do you define that? We do that in one of our trainings and the whole point of it is when we get to the end of that with teachers is that nobody ever says it's rigid or it's a script. It's always flexible, but having an outline, like writing an outline for an article or a book or anything like that without having an outline, it makes it harder to be more flexible in our view.

(16:00):

So that was one of my thoughts with that. And also the other half of that was the admin piece of it. And again, it depends on if you define admins, reviewing every single component of every single lesson plan versus pieces. This week I'm just going to look for how I'm going to launch my curiosity and discussion, and then next week or two weeks down the road, what does that look like? And the way that he defined it of every single teacher or every single week is not sustainable. Absolutely. It's not sustainable for admins to be able to do that. And if that's how you define it, then I could see why you would vote against it.

Matt Renwick (16:42):

And just coming out of 16 years as a building principal, I can vouch for there's zero time to viewing everyone's lessons. The only time where I would really find I would find the most valuable when I'm doing unannounced mini observations that were required to do, I would go when I would read the lesson and then observe just to see are their intentions, their actions aligned with their goals and what are the standards? And I always found that helpful to have the context, but oftentimes as many times it's not. I could figure that out just by observing the lesson. I didn't need to look at the lesson plan, especially if it was a very good lesson, it was very explicit. I would never even need to look. So good instruction.

(17:30):

The lesson plan is very visible, right? In the classroom, I guess I think of lessons kind of as a map. It's a set of directions. You don't necessarily have to go the route you necessarily plan for. You might go on a diversion. So I think France's ideas here of provoking curiosity, orchestrating instruction, like the term verb, orchestrate versus mandate or direct, I think you're orchestrating kids is learning, but you're trying to empower them at the same time. So the compass is the kids, right? And the learning that you're trying to accomplish and the lessons are more of the map. So Deborah kind of hinted at this, but the second question I was wondering, and feel free to pose your own questions, but just playing devil's advocate, what were some other reasons why you would require these and lessons?

Debra Crouch (18:26):

So I work in a school where the teacher teams plan certain parts of their days for each other, their dual language school. So someone's the planning, the s l A part, someone's planning the e l a part, someone's planning the science, the social studies, and they do a lot of sharing of that. And so one of the conversations that we're talking about is what would a teacher, how detailed do your plans need to be when you share them out with your team members, team members so that they're able to understand the focus of the work and what you're hoping to accomplish. So one of the things I'm planning to do is to share these five questions with them because I think that would be really a strong part of the conversation when you think about someone else taking your plan, which is always a little awkward for me, just that whole concept of trying to take someone's plan. So when he was talking about can you pull off a lesson plan? I was like, that whole in the moment, pull a lesson plan when you're in a pinch, you need a last minute lesson. And I was like, okay, what's that about?

(19:42):

But if you are sharing those things, that might be a reason why you're putting more information together on a plan. So that's not necessarily for an administrator, although administrators would maybe look at that, but if you're sharing with your colleagues on your grade teams and things, I was thinking about that in terms of when you might need to do more lesson planning in

Matt Renwick (20:05):

That way. We facilitate collaboration and communication, I think too, a grade level teachers, but also classroom and special education teachers, classroom and interventionists technically powerful. Yeah, that's a good point.

Mary Howard (20:21):

Yeah. And, you said at one point when you were talking earlier that teachers were encouraged to come up with lesson plans that work for them. And I think that's what gave me a little bit of pause when I looked at the five questions, which are perfect, but it's so easy to turn something into rigid by saying it has to look like this. The one that I've always used is just three columns, and the first one was what I know, meaning what do I know about these children? What do I know about this child? What do I know about this small group? So just what do I know? And that's the piece I think we often don't do. The second is what I think what I see is the lesson, but the third one for me was the most important at all. What did I change in the moment?

(21:11):

And I use different colors and I say to teachers, we have to understand that a really good lesson plan is going to change based on you can't anticipate what children say or do. And I think sometimes we dishonor that. So I always would have teachers put in a different color, these are the things that changed and that became the professional conversation. Why did I take more time here? Or why did I have children generate their own? What are you thinking about or what are you wondering? And it's really important to me not just to have, here's the plan, even though those are five great things. Here's the plan and here's five things. I want them to create their own structure. But I also want to, even if you don't have a column, say now go back at your lesson plan after the fact and just jot down in color, these are some things that I changed or I added a question, or children generated this question and we spent a little time there.

Matt Renwick (22:21):

Mary, is that resource you mentioned, is that available anywhere? Is it in one of your books or,

Mary Howard (22:28):

I feel like I talked about it in good to great teaching because good to Great teaching was a lot of different forms that teachers would teach and look at. And that probably would be the book where we talked about it the most. And one of the things I actually did in that book is that I would come in and observe a lesson of their whatever they wanted. We'd have a conversation about it. We talked about what might they have done differently, and then either with that group or another group, they redid that lesson with the changes based on our conversation. So it probably would come from good to great teaching.

Matt Renwick (23:08):

I think that'd be, if you find time, I think that'd be a powerful article somewhere with a template LinkedIn, like Paul has in his article, he has that link in the article. But I think that would be really helpful resource.

Debra Crouch (23:22):

I always try and think about that. The purpose of the plan is to help you envision, to me, I always say to teachers, the reason that I even craft this detailed plan is that I'm envisioning what happens or possibly could happen. Because when you think about sitting in front of kids and being responsive to kids and knowing your learners and how you put that into practice is I've got to think about, okay, we might go here, we might go here. I know this kid, I know we're probably going to go here and you're envisioning. And for me, it's thinking about, okay, what might I say in the moment? Because I think sometimes we think responsive means off the cuff, and to me, being responsive means I've anticipated some of the kinds of things that could happen based on the kids and based on the text and what I know.

(24:14):

So his question about facilitation I think is really an important piece, but it's like if you get to the place where you think that planning just means I'm envisioning it happening, and then I can reflect back on it afterwards and say, okay, well this part, ooh, didn't see that one coming. You always have those moments where you think this was going to happen or this is going to be the word that the kids are going to get stuck on. And then there's like, they didn't have that problem, but it was this problem and you didn't see that. I said, children always teach you about teaching. They'll always teach you about what the issues are in the book if you just are a good listener, what they talk about.

Matt Renwick (24:51):

I like that. Don, any thoughts here?

Don Marlett (24:53):

Yeah, I think in our experience, we work with a lot of schools that want to increase the use of specific high yield strategies, maybe collaborative pairs, something like that. And so a lot of times the teachers will be given the professional development. And what we all know now is that professional development doesn't really change necessarily behavior of teachers in a large quantity. So you have to of course monitor that in a couple of different ways. And so in our experience, the more that they've planned them and put them into their lesson plans, the more likely they are to incorporate them into their classrooms. So that would be something if I want a higher percentage of collaborative pairs and specific type of collaborative pairs within my school, and that's what my goal is for increasing student engagement, that would be something that I would monitor inside of a lesson plan that at least they're planning them out to see if when they're going to use them. And our experience is that similar to what you just said, Deborah, which is the higher level of collaboration, requires quite a bit of planning, a simple collaboration of just simply talk to somebody in your group doesn't really require any planning. And so that's why we see, at least in my experience, a large percentage of that version of collaboration, which is not necessarily the biggest impact. It just happens better than of course, no collaboration. But there's different levels that just seem to have require more planning with inside of that.

Matt Renwick (26:28):

Don. That's where my brain was going too, is to use that information in the lesson plans as an administrator or an instructional coach to see how our teacher's doing with, like you said, high yield strategies, or are they just go to page 1 29 and answer these questions, which isn't a lesson plan, it's just a to-do list, or are they more so to where Francis' questions are around is what do they want them to know, be able to learn? I appreciate Mary and Deborah's point of looking at the kids first and then thinking about the content. So think these all make sense. The third question I had is could we be asking a better question, not why teachers should or shouldn't have to submit lesson plans? What is this really about? And I'll just note that I circled the third reason why we shouldn't require lesson plans submitted is micromanaged and to the point of where teachers are feeling disempowered.

(27:30):

And what that leads to is a lack of agency in teachers feeling like they're not trusted, feeling like they can't be trusted to deliver the curriculum. And there might be situations where there's a teacher to where they aren't doing what they should be doing, they're not even writing lessons for not requiring, they're just flipping to the next page. And there's no reflection. There's no using a formative assessments to guide the day-to-day instruction. So I understand why it's much easier just to say everyone, you're doing lesson plans and then you can use that, like Don was saying, and you all were saying is really just looking at teachers thinking their decision making and from a day-to-day perspective. But yeah, what is this really about? Is power or what are your thoughts on that?

Debra Crouch (28:23):

Well, I always think if your teachers are asking or saying things like, am I doing this right? That's when you see you've created that. They're thinking about how do I please or how do I perform in a certain way in that micromanaged kind of way. So I always think those are signals for us as leaders, if we're relying too heavily on maybe templates or here's a lesson plan format we want you to follow things like that. But I hear what you're saying. It's at some point we do need to know as leaders, okay, where are you going with that? What were your intentions? So it's like how do you balance that out? So I don't know. I was thinking, I was jotting down, I think you actually said this a minute ago, how do we support our teachers to be planned and prepared? So it's kind of that question, how can we do that? And does it have to be the same for everybody?

Matt Renwick (29:23):

Yeah, you don't want it to be compliance. And I've fallen into that trap myself as a leader. I've required things just because it's easier for me, but not necessarily responsive for them. So guilty as charged for sure.

Mary Howard (29:37):

And I wonder if we make teachers a part of that discussion more at the end. He said, when kids have teachers who feel heard and valued, those teachers will be more likely to exercise their agency to reach as many kids as possible in creative and innovative ways, whether that's a coach like you all of you are doing, or whether that's coming together and talking about what that might look like, not what that will look like, but what that might look like and bringing yourself to the table. And I think that when teachers feel agency, they pass that agency along to their children and they recognize that none of us want to feel micromanaged. And hopefully that's going to be a trickle down effect to children.

Don Marlett (30:29):

And for me, I think the micromanaged gets into feedback, get our given to principal, I mean by principals on lesson plans with that. If I might give feedback on a specific activity that they've chosen and say, oh, I think here this is a better activity, I think that's where they get lost in the micromanaging pieces versus giving feedback on high strategy or even the standard levels because everyone in that same state has the same expectations. And if I'm not using those to develop my plan, then that might be an area where you have to address inside of feedback. And to me, that's good micromanaging because a fantastic level, that's a fantastic lesson that's not on grade level is great lesson, but it also is not going to get the kids where they need to be. So that's part of it. Again, the micromanage, I think goes into the communication and how lesson planning, turning in lesson plans is communicated to the purpose of what they're doing. If it's never communicated, then I'm just going to fill in my own story and just call it micromanage. Yeah,

Mary Howard (31:39):

That's fair. Good point. Yeah,

Matt Renwick (31:43):

It could be as simple as just a thoughtful question in your lesson, this was your objective. How do you feel like the students met that objective and why do you think that happened? And just be very open-ended and not judgmental or trying to control the situation, but really trying to be more reflective, which can then be an entry point to what you're saying, Don, we're all saying here is having a conversation around is this at a high expectation level or not? And well, this has been a great conversation and I appreciate everyone being here. Any key takeaways? Again, I think in professional conversations it's good too. If I had a, we were in person, I'd have some kind of anchor chart in the back, everyone's key takeaways, but I think we got it recorded here. So anything you wanted to pull, what value was added to your practice after today's conversation?

Mary Howard (32:44):

Well, I think you said it in the beginning, the importance of conversations. And we never seem to have time to do that in schools. I mean, to be able to sit with the three of you to, hard to say the four of you, but I'm one of them to be able to sit with the three of you and just no agenda, but just have a conversation about what we're thinking, a really good, respectful, important conversation. That's what we don't leave room for in school. And that's why coaches and all of the things that you're doing are so incredibly

Matt Renwick (33:19):

Important. Thanks, Mary.

Debra Crouch (33:21):

I think for me, just thinking about how important those conversations are to help us clarify that what we mean by a lot of these terms that we use in education, like what we said, a lesson plan, because I think everybody sitting at the table will have a different vision of what that is. And as I was going into Coach with a Grade team, and it took me a couple times to really come back to that at the beginning of the year with them last year, and that I needed to make sure that we were all talking about the same thing of what we were going to walk away with. Because just as these questions can be used for lesson planning, they can also be used when you think about your professional development, what do I hope if I'm leading in professional development, what do I hope the teachers will leave knowing and being able to do? And how will I know if they're feeling confident and comfortable with that? And those same questions apply when we put that up to the adults that we support as well. So I think that's just a great way of thinking about that. This is not just about the kids, but it's also about our adults as well in the building.

Don Marlett (34:39):

I think my big takeaway is around the definition piece, even in when we're working with teachers of what those expectations are, but primarily because I do most of my individual work with principals and school leaders of making sure that they have clearly communicated what they define as a lesson plan and some of these questions that he's bringing up, and making sure that the leaders have an answer for those one way or the other of why they're not doing it or why they are doing it.

Matt Renwick (35:16):

I'll just say my takeaway is hopefully this is a model, especially for new leaders, whether principals, instructional coaches that are in charge of pd. You don't have to plan a lot. Mary said there wasn't much of an agenda, which is I think, a good thing. You can just come in with a provocative article or around a topic that's relevant to your school and provide a couple questions and just give teachers a safe space to talk and that's what they crave. And then just pulling a few outcomes out of it like we are now and thinking about maybe a few actions if we were a faculty in school, like, okay, we're going to have some intentions around some PD related to lesson planning, and we're not going to dictate one thing. We're going to include you. But that's all there is to this. I don't have to be a lesson plan expert as a new school leader to facilitate professional learning. That's powerful. So hopefully this is a model that can work you for anyone. Well, thanks again everyone for being here, and I enjoyed it. As always,

Mary Howard (36:19):

Thanks for hosting us, Matt. Yeah, thanks

Matt Renwick (36:21):

For hosting Matt. Yeah, my pleasure. Have a great night.

Mary Howard (36:25):

Okay, you too. Thank you. Good to meet you, Don. Nice to meet you too. Bye-bye. Bye.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

What book would you consider to be essential reading for new school leaders?

In this episode, Mary Howard (@DrMaryHoward), Debra Crouch (teachingdecisions.com) and I share some of our favorite books for principals, literacy specialists, and any teacher leader in a position of authority.

Debra’s Recommendations

* Opening Minds by Peter Johnston (also Choice Words by the same author)

* To Sell is Human by Daniel Pink

* The Best Strangers in the World by Ari Shapiro

Mary’s Recommendations

* How Education Policy Shapes Literacy Instruction by Rachael Gabriel

* The Heart-Centered Teacher by Regie Routman (also Literacy Essentials by the same author)

Matt’s Recommendations

* Having Hard Conversations by Jennifer Abrams

* Getting Things Done by David Allen

In the previous discussion thread, Ellie Olson (LinkedIn) recommended Leader Credibility: The Essential Traits of Those Who Engage, Inspire, and Transform by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, Cathy Lassiter, and Dominique Smith.

Know any new school leaders? You now have a short list of recommended resources to give them a head start on their new career!

Take care,

Matt

Full subscribers have access to all resources on this site, include video archives of our exclusive monthly conversations.

Give the gift of becoming a literacy leader!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Gen Arcovio, Debra Crouch and I share what we are reading this summer for pleasure.

* Gen Acorvio is a literacy trainer at the Lesley Reading Recovery & Literacy Collaborative (@Lesley_CRRLC). She is also the co-contributor for

@LiteracyPages at https://literacypages.wordpress.com/.

* Debra Crouch works nationally as an independent literacy consultant, collaborating with districts and schools in designing professional learning opportunities. She can be reached at https://www.teachingdecisions.com/.

Here are the titles that we are reading:

What Debra is reading

* The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

* Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffith

* Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man by Dale Peterson, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times by Jane Goodall

What Gen is reading

* The Cabinet of Dr. Leng by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

* The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

* Front Desk by Kelly Yang

What Matt is reading

* Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

* The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier

* Simon Sort of Says by Erin Bow

We concluded our conversation by sharing what we know about ourselves as readers.

The following questions helped guide our conversation:

* Why are you reading what you are reading?

* What has resonated with you so far?

* What have you learned about yourself as a reader?

These questions can also serve to support engagement, understanding, and identity.

Subscribe today to receive future litercy and leadership resources.

Take care,

Matt

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit readbyexample.substack.com/subscribe

How long have “the reading wars” been a part of the national education discourse? What are the recurring themes? What can 4K-12 practitioners do to engage in a dialogue that leads to a better understanding of effective literacy instruction?

In this episode, Paul Thomas shares his findings about the science of reading movement and how educators can navigate this conversation.

Paul, a professor at Furman University, is the author of the policy brief The Science of Reading Movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction (NEPC, 2022). He also wrote How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP, 2020). Paul is a frequent writer at his blog, Radical Scholarship and on Twitter at @plthomasEdD.

Special thanks to Mary Howard, Joy La Vay Taylor, Debra Crouch, and Mary Beth Nicklaus for engaging in and elevating this conversation.

Full subscribers can join these conversations in real time. They also have access to the video archive and professional discussion guide here. Sign up today to fully engage in this community.

Know someone who would benefit from Read by Example? Refer them to this space - see button below. Complimentary subscriptions can be earned with sign ups.

Full Transcript

Matt Renwick (00:03):

Welcome to Read by Example, where teachers are leaders and leaders know literacy. We are joined today by Dr. Paul Thomas. Paul is a professor of education at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is a former column editor for English Journal, National Council Teachers of English, current series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres and author of Teaching Writing as a Journey, Not a Destination: Essays Exploring What Teaching Writing Means, and the book, which I believe is in its second edition now, How to End the Reading Wars and Serve the Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policymakers, and People Who Care. NCTE named Paul the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. He co-edited the award-winning volume, Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America. You can follow Paul's work at on Twitter at @plthomasedd and at Radical Scholarship at radicalscholarship.wordpress.com. Welcome, Paul.

(01:26):

Thank you very much. Nice to be here.

(01:29):

And we have a few who could join, if they could share too. Who you are, briefly just what you do. We'll start with Mary.

Mary Howard (01:39):

I am a literacy consultant and now doing Zoom, because I'm in Honolulu and I'd rather not get on a plane. This is year 51.

Matt Renwick (01:57):

Joy.

Joy La Vay Taylor (01:59):

Hi, I'm Joy La Vay Taylor, and I work for James Madison University with student teachers. Before that, I was literacy coach, reading recovery teacher and reading specialist.

Matt Renwick (02:15):

Deborah.

Debra Crouch (02:17):

Hi, I'm Deborah Crouch. I'm a literacy consultant as well and a co-author of Made For Learning with Brian Cambourne.

Mary Beth Nicklaus (02:30):

Hi, I'm Mary Beth Nicklaus, and I am with Eastern Harbor County Schools in Minnesota. And I'm a secondary level reading specialist. This is my 34th year.

Matt Renwick (02:48):

Welcome everyone. And I have a few questions for Paul, but we'll definitely save time for any questions that you might have. The first one for Paul is, you are consistently on point in your policy brief, which we will link in the newsletter, the Science of Reading Movement, which is a condensed version of your book on the topic. It’s a nice summary, as well as what you post online on Twitter and on your blog. What motivates you to keep coming back to this topic of the science of reading movement?

Paul Thomas (03:27):

Oh, that's a really good question because most of my career, I'm really a composition writing person. And when I discovered Emily Hanford's Hard Words, early 2018, it really struck a chord, but I had no idea that it would get the momentum that it did. So I've always been a holistic literacy person, and I've always been skeptical of over focusing on things like grammar and phonics. And although I taught high school English at Furman, I have taught master's literacy program. So I've been working with early literacy teachers who are getting graduate degrees. And a former colleague of mine, Nita Schmidt, who moved from Furman to Iowa and now she's retired, she's brilliant, she was an early literacy people, and she, she brought me in at N C T E.

(04:33):

And so I had had this kind of transition to being, what I would say, a literacy generalist where I understand kind of K-16 literacy, or birth to grave literacy. My focus I feel like is public work. Like, how do I talk to the public? How do I help people understand education? And this movement just kind of intersected with that public work. And throughout 2018, 2019, I found myself blogging maybe too much, but I had quite a number of blogs on this, and I said, "I've got enough for a book. I did see how it was developing in a direction that regretfully has come true. That early kind of messaging has now become policy. So in the last, I guess that's what, five years now, I have shifted very much into being a policy person, which I think was the rightful place for me to go.

(05:44):

I do think trying to work on public narratives, how we talk about critical discourse analysis is a big thing for me. It's a central part of my upper level reading and writing course. At Furman, that's a requirement at Furman, they have to have an upper level writing and research course. So I think it was just kind of a perfect storm for me because I do feel like it's really important for scholarly work to have a real world place. And this felt way more engaging. It felt way more productive than my composition work. Although my book before this was on writing. I'm still, I teach first year writing. I care very much about writing. But reading is very central to sort of how we think about education in the United States. So it seemed like kind of a natural development for me.

Matt Renwick (06:47):

Yeah, your policy brief is very practical, very useful. It was easy to read, but you covered the, the essential topics of it and really gave, for me anyway, it gave me some nice talking points. Right now in Wisconsin, we're dealing with it, right this very week, up for discussion, so to speak. How might educators and parents best use this resource to effectively advocate for more reasonable policies? What can we do with this to, to make some kind of a difference, or at least try to influence policymakers?

Paul Thomas (07:29):

So first I would like to say I really am very proud of the policy brief. And I think a huge part of that was the N E P C staff itself. They did not make this easy . I had to a 6,000 word policy brief. I probably wrote 15 to 20,000 words and three or four drafts, and I was kind of taken to task three or four or five times before it even went to peer review. And I think they should be commended for that. The editorial group at N E P C weren't literacy people, so they were constantly going, "What do you mean by this? Uh, is this real?" And the the fun part was being challenged on using the simple view of reading.

(08:22):

One person said to me, "Paul, nobody uses that. That's silly. That's a silly term." And I had to say, "No, it's a technical term. It's a real term." So I do appreciate that opportunity, and I will say any PC believes in practical. So it had to build to what do people do. I do feel really good about the policy implications at the end. I've been working indirectly with Diane Stephens, who is Professor Emeritus from the University of South Carolina. She taught several other places. Diane has really perfected taking actual legislation and copy editing it, . It's amazing, "Here is where you're off base, but here is how to reform that." So I think what we have to do is, it kind of parallels the book banning and the anti C R T movement.

(09:23):

It seems almost silly to have to argue for access to books. It seems silly to have to say you shouldn't ban books. So I think it seems kind of pointless for a lot of reasonable people to argue for teacher autonomy and serving the needs of all students. And very simply put, that's kind of what the policy brief boiled down to. We really targeted, "there's no such thing as one size fits all instructional practices." So there should not be any one size fits all mandates in policy and legislation. We really kind of honed in on, "it's not the place of legislators to ban or mandate anything that goes against what is a reasonable approach to day-to-day classroom practices." So I think what can people do is I think is, kind of target these simple messages.

(10:37):

I've been trying to work better about clarifying that I'm advocating for teacher autonomy. I'm advocating for meeting the needs of every individual child. I am not an advocate for reading recovery. I'm not an advocate for balanced literacy. I'm not an advocate for National Council Teachers of English. I'm not an advocate for International Literacy Association. I'm not being trivial here. I don't advocate for labels and organizations, even though I love N C T E, for example. It's been my home for a long time, and I respect N C T E, but I think what we have to advocate for are key principles. And I've called this challenge out many times, you know, on social media. If someone says they don't agree with me or that I'm wrong, I say, so you're saying that there should not be teacher autonomy, so you're saying we shouldn't serve the individual needs of every student, and I really think we have to call people on the carpet about that.

(11:47):

I also think it's really important, and it might be too much for most people, I just don't believe in misinformation. I get called out that I'm advocating for X when I simply say Y isn't true . This is a really good example to me, is the attack on Lucy Calkins, I think is just unfair. It's not accurate. Lucy Calkins Units of Study and Fountas and Pinnell work are in one in four schools in the country. It's 25% of the reading programs, I just tweeted out today. You know, their programs are not the dominant programs in New Mexico. And New Mexico has the lowest NAEP fourth grade reading scores and the highest percentage of children below basic. So creating a bad guy is a trick of storytelling.

(13:00):

And regretfully the science of reading movement, I mean, Sold a Story. I mean, it's about storytelling, and they're manufacturing the crisis. They're manufacturing the bad guy. I really just don't like misinformation. And again, I don't like the way balance literacy is defined. It doesn't mean that I endorse balanced literacy, even though I don't have any actual problem with the concept of balanced literacy. I'm really a critical literacy person. Do I like whole language people and their philosophies? Yes, there are a lot of my friends. Do I find balanced literacy ideas compelling? Yes, of course I do. I am a holistic person. So I think we have to, I have to keep sort of simple messaging on the key concepts that we support.

(13:55):

But we also have to say, actually what you're saying isn't true. Your definition isn't true. Your cause of the problem isn't true. Your solution isn't true. Over and over the national reading panel is just misrepresented. I use Diane Stephen's work. The National Reading Panel found that systematic phonics was no more effective than balanced literacy or whole language. Almost every single credible study says the exact same thing. The major study out of England said systematic phonics no more effective than balanced literacy. We need balance in England, over and over. That's the truth. And then you've got the science of rooting people saying, it's the Emily Hanford mantra, that it's simple and it's settled, and neither one of those are true.

Matt Renwick (14:48):

That leads into my next question, Paul, is this towards, especially phonics instructions, kind of this reason why kids are failing to read because they don't have enough of it, or we need more of it to ensure that they can read. And then picking on some of these targets, whether it's a person or it's a program or approach, are these strawmen for maybe avoiding bigger issues that we do need to address, such as poverty or teaching and learning conditions? Or is there some reasonableness to what some people might be advocating for in the sor movement? Where do you see that falling?

Paul Thomas (15:33):

Really nice job there. I appreciate that. Because that's two other kind of key points that we need to hit on. So, the part of my book and the policy brief that I'm most proud of is the historical perspective. In the 1940s, draftees performed very poorly on literacy tests, and Eleanor Roosevelt and the government shouted reading crisis. And John Dewey in progressivism was blamed. The woman I did my dissertation on, Lula Brandt ,did an analysis and found out that most draftees went to traditional schools and had traditional instruction, like phonics instruction, had skills instruction. And there's Elementary English, which became Language Arts, had a special issue on it, very similar to Reading Research Quarterly, having two special issues on it in the 2020s.

(16:33):

There was one article, , and they literally say this false attack on progressivism is to avoid the truth. The problem with literacy in the United States is poverty. You know, that was the 1940s. Then it recurs, the Johnny Can't Read in the fifties and sixties, same thing. It's phonics, it's lack of phonics. And people are like, "no, the people who are doing poorly are impoverished." And then it recycles into the sixties, into the 1990s, and then around No Child Left Behind is this same thing. So I think two other messages that we really have to make sure we make clear is, and I refer to Martin Luther King toward the end of his life in 1967, he said, "We would find that instead of reforming education to erase poverty, that if we erase poverty, education would improve."

(17:30):

And there is nothing truer. If children had universal healthcare, if they had no food deserts, if they had steady homes, if their parents had steady well-paying jobs, if there were books in their homes, the NAEP scores would go up. And that's doing nothing in the schools. Now, I'm not saying don't do anything in schools. I actually think this is the other thing that drives me crazy. I've been accused of being a protector of the status quo. And people who know me would laugh, they should talk to some of the people I've worked for. I think I entered education in 1984. I start year 40 in the fall. And when I started education, I was a reformer.

(18:23):

That's why I want, I wanted to do school better than it had been done to me. And then when I was in my doctoral program in the 1990s, I found out there were the reconstructionist. There was a whole movement in the early 20th century to reform schools. And so I want things to be different. I want school to be different. And you said it just a second ago. So we've got to address the lives, the homes, and the communities of children. I mean, we have to do that. And this constantly pointing at teachers and saying they don't know what they're doing and that schools are failing is a distraction. But simultaneous to that teaching and learning conditions, I just cannot say that often enough. There's been research for decades that marginalized students are more likely to have beginning and uncertified teachers.

(19:25):

That's a simple thing to address. We should guarantee that no child who is performing below what we believe they should be, instead of using third grade test scores to retain students, why don't we use third grade test scores to ensure children to have experienced certified teachers and low student-teacher ratios in fourth grade? That's a much better policy. And I would 100% endorse the use of standardized testing for that. But we are not going to do those things. I mean that's what's kind of criminal about this. Special needs children...we're overly concerned about dyslexic students. I am not saying that we should not be, absolutely, we should be concerned with dyslexic students. But special needs students are really highly likely to have beginning and new teachers, special needs students are really highly likely to have uncertified teachers.

(20:31):

Those are things that could be addressed. Now I think that would solve a lot of problems, systemic forces outside of the school. And then, I agree, this is a national education policy center thing. Instead of accountability reform, we need equity reform. So inside schools, I would say no grade retention. We should not be stratifying students. We should not be gatekeeping students into courses. But the biggest thing to me in school is a teacher assignment. The dirty little secret about education, nobody wants to talk about...if you teach long enough when someone retires, you get the good kids. And I think that's one of those little dirty secrets that we don't talk about. Beginning teachers too often... administration sits down, the remaining teachers get to pick their courses for next year, and the leftovers go to the new person. That is a terrible policy. It's a terrible way to treat children. And these are things we could address. We never talk about them, and we don't do them. So I think as you were implying, I think a lot of this is about ways to avoid doing the hard stuff.

Matt Renwick (21:53):

Yeah, for sure. You hit on a lot of topics there with that. There were couple of questions and, and I won't bring it up here just because it could, who knows where it would to go. But the money aspect too. You noted on Twitter, that a lot of these arguments and blaming are actually creating a space, a void, in which then certain individuals, publishers, organizations can sell their programs, trainings to solve the problem that they created in the first place. But that's a whole nother topic almost, I think.

Paul Thomas (22:38):

I could interject there real quick. Sure. I think people don't understand. I just had a conversation with a producer of a major news series yesterday morning. Instead of chasing the right reading program, we should reevaluate that. We use reading programs. It's much simpler than that. At W S R A, I think it was 2019, it was right before covid, teachers taught me a lesson. The problem that they had with units of study was not units of study, it was how it was implemented. And we too often hold teachers accountable for implementing a program instead of serving the needs of students. And I think that's a really important distinction. And it would also, I think it would address the money issue. We do, I think we do spend too much money on educational materials, and then we feel obligated to holding teachers accountable because of that investment.

Matt Renwick (23:41):

Yeah. Too much money and resources is not enough. And the ultimate research, which is teachers and students as well is, how can we structure students to be resources for each other? I'd like to open it up to other people who have questions here, or Paul, if you have anything you'd like to share that to come to mind. I'll open the floor up.

Mary Howard (24:06):

Okay. I was just gonna come back to, and I appreciate this so much because it led me back to what you wrote. One of the best things about this is that it's so specific to suggestions for decision makers and policy makers. And so one of the, and I loved every one of them, but one of the things that I kept coming back to is at the very end, two that really keep, are really in my head. One is be wary of overstatements and oversimplifications within media and public advocacy. Acknowledging concerns raised but remaining skeptical of simplistic claims about causes and solutions. And one of the challenges is that there are so many, the policy makers, the people who are making these decisions, they want oversimplification. They want to know, all I have to do is write a check and there's nothing else I have to do.

(25:11):

And if, because they don't have a background in education, that sounds really, really compelling. And then the other one is just a couple down from that, which is so important. Recognize student-centered as an important, research supported guiding principle, but also acknowledge the reality that translating research-based principles into classroom practices is challenging. So not only do they want those over simplifications, but they want to be able to take the research and say, here's what the research says, which is complicated research. And so we're gonna do this. You know, it brings me back to RtI where the solution was the walk-to-intervention model. So they know the importance of supporting children, but they're going to find the easiest possible, not just the one that they can write a check for, but the one that's going to be the easiest possible to implement.

(26:09):

So, you know, those just loom really large in my mind, and I don't know how we undo. Let me just say one more thing. I remember so many times walking out of a session where someone, usually someone with a really big name, said something really absurdly ridiculous. Like, time for reading, independent reading doesn't matter. And does it in such a compelling way that people I really admire walk out of that session and say, "Oh my God, I never thought about that before." And that's been happening with the science of reading too. "Oh my God, I never knew that." And so it's really smart, lovely, wonderful people. But for some reason, , it's coming across not as what is being said. I don't know. It's a really weird thing to me.

Paul Thomas (27:11):

Yeah. One advantage of my career being pretty eclectic is I've taught some graduate level leadership courses, and I used to use Howard Gardner's book Leading Minds. He's known for multiple intelligences, but I don't think that's his best work actually. In Leading Minds, he directly says all the research shows that leadership functions on black and white statements. And there's very little you can do about that. So there's an ethical obligation if you're going to compel the public, you're going to have to be relatively simple. So to me, I think the line is between simple and simplistic. And the challenge we have, and again, the conversation I had yesterday morning, really, really drove this home to me, is we're in a bind because our message is not simple. And the sor people are, it's become a cult of personality because they're doing the simple and settled.

(28:12):

And it is very compelling. I, like you Mary, know some very lovely people who have bought it. I knew some, and I still know, I know some lovely people, bright, who bought Teach for America. I know some lovely and bright people who bought charter schools. And those have now passed, and we know they didn't work. Teach for America has really dramatically fallen off. And some of the best people I know in education went through Teach for America. So it's not the people. The simplistic message, that you just had to demand more of students, it's that soft bigotry of low expectations. And if you just demand more, and if you just work harder, these kids will succeed. And then those poor people who did that, and those children didn't succeed. They were devastated.

(29:07):

So we do have a problem. Our message is not simple. But that's the only message that works. And also I think, another point of yours Mary, is the idea of evidence. I think I said this the other day, but the most important evidence is the child in front of you. The first five or 10 years of my teaching, the best thing that happened to me was humility. I had missionary zeal. I came in thinking I knew what I was doing. I kind of had my butt kicked at the National Writing Project. I'll shout out to Brenda Davenport. She almost literally kicked my butt. She saw something in me. She did respect me, but she took me in a room and she let me have it. And it was an awakening for me.

(30:00):

I softened, I backed up off of my certainty, and I learned to work from the ground up. Research and theory... I love theory. I love philosophy. These things are important, but they're for you back here. I mean, they sit somewhere back here. But it's the actual child in front of you. So I've learned, Furman has really taught me a lesson too. I mean, for the last 21 years, my college first year writing students are a different type of human than what I taught in rural South Carolina in high school. So I try to work from the student and instead of imposing Paul's beliefs about writing, Paul's beliefs about learning. You know, one simple thing is we we're always told that, that you have to give students credit for class participation.

(31:04):

I know a lot of professors still put that on their syllabus, and there's a percentage for it. Well, Furman has taught me that students can participate by being completely quiet in the room. And I had to listen to that, which is kind of ironic. And , I don't say that anymore. I don't say, "You have to speak in class, you have to participate this specific way." So I think one of our messages, I think has to be that, evidence is not simplistic. And the most important piece of evidence is the child in front of you.

Matt Renwick (31:41):

Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Mary.

Debra Crouch (31:45):

Can I ask a question, Paul? How do you simplify in a way, I guess, how do you talk to student-centered in a way that keeps it understandable for people who don't come at this from "Look at the child and recognize what children are bringing" and that sort of thing. How do we talk to that? Because I agree with you. I think that piece is huge.

Paul Thomas (32:12):

Yeah. And teacher education, that's one thing I do is I talk about artifacts of learning. I talk about things like, I really think music teachers, art teachers, coaches, that I think the average person understands that. So, there was a piece in Phi Delta Kappan many, many years ago, somewhere in the 1990s. And the guy said, what if we had two football teams line up every Friday night and take a multiple choice test to decide the football game? Parents would revolt, my hometown, the entire town would revolt. So, you know, in art class, we have a child actually draw an artifact of learning, and then we work from there. Until the child does a drawing or a clay sculpture, we don't have any way to teach them. We have children play instruments, we have children sing, we have children play the sport.

(33:13):

So I think putting it in terms of behaviors, having students do the thing, and I think that's where my holistic urge is. I was a soccer coach, I coached for quite a few years. And I love scrimmage. I was a big fan of scrimmaging. So you could end the moment, you could teach, of course we did some skills, but to be perfectly honest, that's not that effective. If people practice the same thing over and over incorrectly, they're not actually learning. They're getting worse. They're building the wrong tools. So, the joke of my teaching high school was I graded about 4,000 essays a year for 18 years. Wow. And I graded about 6,000 journals on top of that. So my joke was, it was volume, volume, volume.

(34:07):

Until a kid wrote a paper, I did not know what they needed, Until a player lined up as a centerback and played and played a soccer match, I did not know what he needed. So I do think we have to talk in terms of sort of holistic behaviors that we're trying to teach children to do. And then our job to me is mentoring. It is coaching. I love the word coach. I think the right kind of coaching, not the stereotypical United States coach that screams and cusses, but the kind of coach that goes, "Look, you did it this way, now do it this way." Like, here is why. One thing I loved about soccer is it's conceptual. You don't run plays and it's not very structured, the type the clock runs, and it's these concepts. So it's these holistic behaviors at the conceptual level, what should you be doing? But the key element is why are you doing this? I hope that answered your question, I feel like I did.

Matt Renwick (35:12):

Yeah. Thanks Deborah. Thanks, Paul. Joy, did you want to throw that question out of how did we engage in this? I think Paul spoke to that previously. Was there anything else that you wanted to follow up on though, Joy regarding how to engage in conversation around this time?

Joy La Vay Taylor (35:35):

The article that you put out, Paul, was really helpful, Mary and I will follow it a little bit better.

Paul Thomas (35:51):

A lot of this movement is public, so I think a lot of it is on social media. And there is a problem. I do think Twitter is not a good place for discussion. I haven't had good luck with it. I've had a few people try to. I had one person a couple times lately, very kindly say, would you mind, you know, let's have a discussion about this blog post. I don't. There's just not enough room. There is no chance for nuance. I joke and say the best way to deal with social media discussions is don't do it. But a more practical one is, are you dealing with a serious person? So probably six months ago, a woman who is an s o r person engaged with me.

(36:42):

She was patient, she was kind, she was clear. I did two or three tweets with her. I realized she was a serious person. We had a very long Twitter discussion. She didn't change her mind. I did not mute her. I did not block her. Everything was fine. The key was not that we agreed with each other. The key was that she was a serious person. And that's the hard part. I often check the Twitter bios. If there's four followers, probably not serious. If they've got the little hashtag, #amplify, probably not serious. Way too much of the science of reading movement is driven by the exact thing that Hanford is attacking. If it is in fact a problem that Lucy Caulkins has made money, which is an odd thing to accuse somebody of in the United States, then the science of reading, people who are driven by market intentions are just as guilty.

(37:56):

My home state and the most recent budget, 15 million for LETRS training, were a very small state. Can you imagine how much state money, tax money is being earmarked for LETRS training? I don't trust advocates of LETRS anymore than I trust anyone. I mean, we learned that the tobacco industry said cigarettes were okay. They had a market interest. So I do think we have to navigate public discussions with serious people. I do not mute people instantly. I generally give everybody one or two tweets. I give you a chance. Then it's it, and it's just little things, right? Are they selling something? Do they have almost no followers? I've got people out there. I know I muted them, so I didn't block them, but they can still do it. They say, don't listen to Paul Thomas. He works for reading recovery. That's just a blatant lie. There was an organization that blogged and said, don't listen to me because I'm not a teacher. I start year 40 in the fall. I've been a literacy teacher for 40 years, over five decades since the eighties. It's just a blatant lie. So lying means you're not a serious person. If if you're trying to sell something, you're probably not a serious person. So I just think navigating that space, we're looking for serious people and then we can engage.

Matt Renwick (39:34):

I had the pleasure of watching Paul have a panel discussion with other serious people. It was a research panel at the Wisconsin State Reading Association Conference. He was talking with a researcher at UW-Madison, a principal out of California, and they did not all agree. I think we talked about this later, Paul. You did not all agree on the same issues, but you all were respectful the way you talked. "I hear what you're saying. Here's where I'm coming from." It was very, it was just a good conversation. And I learned a lot. And I think, I thought it was a really good model for, for what this could be, but unfortunately, often is not.

Paul Thomas (40:16):

Right. And I really don't think we have to all agree. Like, there are people I love that I don't agree with everything about them. And that's not what we're looking for.

Mary Howard (40:29):

Yeah. And in a conversation like that, you have the opportunity to have a fluid coming back and forth. That's impossible. But one of the things that I looked for on Twitter, and I've only been recently really trying to dig into it, there are just certain catchphrases that people use over and over. And that to me is a dead giveaway because it's almost like they came out with a s o r attack list of these are the things you want to say. It really is problematic that you can't. There's a big difference to being able to look at someone in the face, for example, and listen to what they're saying and then come back and respond to that than it is. It's almost like the Twitter social media is a ping pong ball, and it's really easy to get caught up in it, you know, especially when emotions are involved.

Paul Thomas (41:32):

That's why I say the, the s o r movement is too similar to the anti CRT movement. They're both too often ideological. So when you're ideological it's very simplistic and narrow. So you do have recurring things to say that are just, they're just imposed onto the situation. They're not drawn from the situation. Someone I blocked, I mean, I muted. I didn't see them, but I saw the response. And apparently somebody on Twitter just in the last couple of days, said that they listened to Emily Hanford. Cause she's an expert. I'm not. And the interesting thing there is not only have I taught literacy for 40 years, I taught journalism for 13 years, and I've published journalism for the last 20. I have a level of expertise in both journalism and education. That's where you can tell somebody's not serious. This is not a serious comment. That is just a blanket imposed statement. And so I think that is the ideological problem. It's not everybody who's in the science of reading movement by any stretch. But there is a faction that is just, it's just an ideologue. And it's the same thing. You know, woke , woke by DeSantis, woke by too many Republicans, uh, c r t, these have just been catchphrases. They're not, again, they're not serious people. They're not credible people.

Matt Renwick (43:00):

This conversation's been great as always. Any closing thoughts or takeaways from anyone in the group that you'd wanna share out before we close things out?

Joy La Vay Taylor (43:15):

I'm such a novice, I feel like, at Twitter for sure. I was so focused on being in the classroom, working with teachers that I was so shocked when this whole s o r thing just seemed to slam in. And I hadn't, I didn't have time to be on Twitter. I shouldn't say I have time now, but I thank you so much all for all this information that you put out. And Mary, I love Mary and Matt is great. I don't know you too, but I'm sure you two are great too. .

(44:15):

Because I thought that all the information that you gave about politics and the movement of reading was so helpful for me. It just gave me a background. I kind of came in with balanced literacy when it was just kind of called balanced literacy. So all of that was helpful. But is is then, if we think about the purpose of being on Twitter to share information like you do, so is that the best way to think about it as a vehicle for getting truth out there?

Paul Thomas (45:00):

Yeah. I would say, I would say two things. One historically we have told teachers not to be political, which is a political demand, by the way. And we also keep classroom teachers way too busy. If you keep people with their head down, they don't see what's happening to them. So I do not expect teachers to sacrifice themselves. I don't expect K-12 teachers to speak out. Absolutely, that is not an expectation. If you do find the opportunity, I think you said it perfectly. Most of my work that I do on social media is to teach, it's an extension of my teaching. I cite, my blogs are heavily cited. I cite, I link to peer review journal articles on Twitter. So I think you have to perform on social media, not to change people's minds that you're speaking to, but to leave a trail for other people to learn.

(46:03):

I am rarely actually speaking to the individual I'm responding to. I am leaving a trail for other people to learn from. Nobody's asking K-12 teachers to sacrifice themselves. Nobody's asking K-12 teachers to lose their jobs. As a matter of fact, I don't want you to lose your job. I'm relatively safe. I'm even at a private university. If I were in Florida and I was at a public university, I would be toast. But my university is incredibly supportive. I'm a white guy, I'm tenured, I'm old. Let us do it, you know, let us take the brunt of the damage. But if you do engage, it's not to change people's minds, it's to teach.

Matt Renwick (46:54):

Well said Paul. And your policy brief, half the brief is citations. I mean, it's just so well resourced. And I remember Peter Aach speaking about your work too, and just said you were meticulous. I think that's one of the first people he brought up about how to be become more knowledgeable about this topic and stay engaged. So thank you Paul Thomas. Thank you everyone for being here. This has been great. We wish you all a good rest of the year if you're still going. Otherwise, we hope you are enjoying your summer break. Thank you.

Paul Thomas (47:27):

Thank you. A pleasure.

Matt Renwick (47:28):

Thank you.

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