Read by Example

“What is the goal of independent reading, and why does this goal so often get lost in instruction?”

We asked this and other questions of Hannah Schneewind. She is the author along with Jennifer Scoggin of Trusting Readers: Powerful Practices for Independent Reading (Heinemann, 2021).

We explored how to best use our limited classroom time, as well as how leaders can support this critical element of the literacy block.

You can purchase Hannah’s book here. For a full transcript of this conversation, see below or click here.

Full subscribers also have access to the video recording of this conversation, as well as the professional discussion guide for this conversation.

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Full Transcript

Matt Renwick (00:03):

Welcome to Read by Example, where teachers are leaders and leaders know literacy. That tagline is from Regie Routman's book, Read, Write, Lead, and I find that line especially appropriate for our conversation today. Our special guest is Hannah Schneewind, and she is the co-author, along with Jennifer Scoggin, of Trusting Readers: Powerful Practices for Independent Reading through Heinemann. Reading the bio in the back of the book, which is right here: Hannah Schneewind has been a teacher, staff developer, curriculum writer, keynote speaker, and national literacy consultant. Hannah's interest in student and teacher agency, and her belief in the power of books informs her work with schools. Together, Jen and Hannah are the co-creators of Trusting Readers, a group dedicated to collaborating with teachers to design literacy opportunities that invite all students to be engaged and thrive as readers and writers. Welcome, Hannah.

Hannah Schneewind (01:07):

Great. Thank you so much for having me. And I know that Jen is sorry that she's not here. She's traveling at the moment, so you'll have just me, I'm afraid.

Matt Renwick (01:17):

We are delighted to have you. And we have another guest with us, Mary Beth Nicholas, a Wisconsinite now living in Minnesota, working at an alternative school secondary level. She had been working with intervention students at the secondary level and brings a neat perspective as well to trusting readers, especially after that elementary experience. So, with that I have three questions I was going to pose to Hannah, but take the direction wherever you want it to go. And again, our intentions for this conversation are just to build knowledge and awareness around this topic, and to practice coaching skills while engaging in conversation around professional topics. So, really trying to serve as a model for any leader of any position, how you might, co-create knowledge together instead of living in sometimes these echo chambers we see in education. My first question is for Hannah: what is the goal of independent reading and why does this goal so often get lost in instruction?

Hannah Schneewind (02:26):

So the first thing I would say is that the goal of independent reading is for students to become really skilled and proficient readers. And being proficient includes being skillful with decoding, fluency, and comprehension. So the reason I think it's really important to start with that is that too often independent reading is seen as this kind of fluffy thing, or it's an add-on, or it's a thing that you do for 10 minutes at the end of the day if you have time. And so I just want to start by saying, no, this is a serious teaching and learning time. So I would say that's the big goal. And then within that goal, of course, we have lots of other things, right? We want kids to find joy in reading. We want them to have books that they connect with. We want them to find books where they can make meaning and then really are motivated to take some kind of action after they're reading.

(03:28):

I'll tell you though, I won't say that the goal of independent reading is to make students love reading, because I think when we say that, number one, we do ourselves a disservice as professionals because that seems kind of fluffy. And number two, I actually can't do that. That is to say, I can set up the condition, you know, I can give you lots of choice and I can give you the right feedback at the right time, and I can give you lots of time to read. I can set up the conditions for you to love reading, but I can't actually make you love reading. So I think, that's something I have thought a lot about. So I no longer say, the goal is for all them to love reading. They might or they might not. So, then in terms of why does it get lost?

(04:16):

I think it gets lost for a few reasons. I think it gets lost, number one, when it is not in fact the focus of reading instruction. When it becomes something to do at the end of the day or it sometimes gets lost because the teacher is trying to also work with small groups, let's say, and independent reading is something that the students can in fact do independently that she knows it's going to be really impactful. And so she ends up doing small group instruction during that time and does not confer with kids. And independent reading without conferring is not actually independent reading, such as giving kids books and letting them read. So I think those are two very different things.

Matt Renwick (05:03):

That's very helpful for me. Especially the comment about you cannot make kids love reading. It almost seems kind of refreshing that I can kind of take that part off of my responsibility, and not that I'm not responsible for the conditions, but puts more of the onus on that part of a reading right on the kids. And I think kids would rise to that trust, which comes back to your book title, Trusting Readers.

Hannah Schneewind (05:38):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for example, in high school, I became skillful at biology, right? I had a very good teacher. I did all my homework. I never loved biology. I did not decide to become a scientist. You know, so much as we hope that kids will love reading, I do think that we can separate,  being skilled at reading from necessarily the love of it. With one important caveat, which is, and Mary Beth, maybe you've seen this with older students, I have talked to older readers who are very proficient readers and actively hate reading. You know, there are kids who think reading is boring, I have to do it, my teacher makes me write a certain number of post-its, or I have to write in this reading log. So when I say we can't make kids love it, that's true. However, , we don't want to be setting them up to hate it either, which sometimes people inadvertently do.

Matt Renwick (06:46):

Well, that comes into the next question I had. You noted on page one, Hannah, that the number one obstacle for teachers trying to increase independent reading time to be able to confer with students to support them in being independent is the demands of the literacy curriculum. But then at the same time, you do share ways to prioritize independent reading that can exist alongside a curriculum resource. So, I guess the connection here is I've heard teachers say, I just don't have time to meet with all my kids, you know? And because of the resource, because of this, or because I can't meet with small groups, there's just too many things to do. What have you found that teachers have done to make better use of their time to increase independent reading? Because I do think there are opportunities that teachers don't always see, to be able to support kids at that level of independence.

Hannah Schneewind (07:50):

Absolutely. So I think there are two different scenarios. So I think one scenario is that I have a program that I have to follow and I'm not sure how to follow this program and still make time for independent reading. And then there's a second scenario, which is I have independent reading up and going, I have devoted time for it. My administrator's completely behind it. I have the books, I'm just not sure how to make it incredibly impactful. So I think those are two different scenarios. So I am actually currently working with some schools in Connecticut who, because of state legislation, will be using a reading program next year. And the district actually asked me to come in specifically to make sure that they can hold on to independent reading. It will be interesting, so I'll be able to tell you more about it in a few months.

(08:50):

We're just at the beginning of it. But one thing that we have thought is, even if you're within a reading program, right? Kids are reading, and once they are done doing whatever that kind of whole class basal type text is for the day, you're always going to have kids who are finishing at different times, and what better time for them to then go do that independent reading, and then you segue from that kind of whatever the whole class activity is into independent reading, and then you do your conferring. So that's one way that we're thinking about it is just kind of tucking it in to that. Another thing you can do, if you have to do this program for "x" number of minutes a day, I also go back to what Kelly Gallagher says in high school.

(09:45):

He teaches high school, he has kids for 50 minutes, and so the first 10 minutes of every single day is independent reading, and he can do two conferences in 10 minutes. So that means as an elementary teacher, my kids have gotten 50 minutes of independent reading over the week, and I've conferred over the course of two weeks, I've conferred with almost everyone in my class. So I think it's that when you talk about finding time, when you talk about finding time, the time is there. It's tricky. So as I said, that's kind of one scenario. The other scenario though is that I have independent reading up and running, but I don't feel as if it's going really well and I'm not sure what to do. So that's the work that Jen and I do a lot.

(10:38):

I will say the question that I get asked the most is, what do I confer about? Like, how's the conference supposed to go? You know? So I think that number one, just don't be afraid to confer, because people will often say, "Well, I walk around, I kind of check in with the kids." and I'll say, "You're already conferring, right?" And now what you have to do is take that kind of checking in and make it really intentional, because if you're already checking in, you could take that five minutes of a check-in and make it five really, really impactful minutes if you kind of follow this structure. And then that's life changing. You know, when teachers realize the importance of being really intentional in that how they spend their time during independent reading.

Matt Renwick (11:31):

So it sounds like just look for pockets and opportunities within your current schedule. Try not to fight it too much, but start really small, make it easy, make it really hard to not do it. Like the example of Kelly Gallagher and just, "Guys, we get 10 minutes to read when you come in." What a neat way to start the class. Just a nice soft landing to whatever chaos is happen in the hallways. You always know you have a quiet, safe spot, coming into Kelly's class.

Hannah Schneewind (12:03):

Yeah, absolutely. So I work with some teachers who also as a way of increasing the number of minute students are reading, we'll do that for like 10 minutes in the morning and then 10 minutes after lunch, because we all know, the beginning of kindergarten, first grade, five minutes is really all you might get, but if you do five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the afternoon and that turns to 10 and 10, then you have 20 minutes. So I also have learned myself to be really flexible in thinking about time. That is to say, ideally, yes, we have this beautiful hour block where we are all sitting there and kids are hunched over their books and working with partners. I mean, that's what I had the liberty to do in my own classroom. And that's the vision. However, you know, as I said, 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the afternoon adds up to 20 minutes every day. So yeah, whatever ways you can work it in, I think it's really important.

Matt Renwick (13:06):

And I have a third question. This kind of transitions to more of a leadership perspective, and you did say in there in one example, you had leaders have you come in to preserve independent reading as they transition to a more commercialized resource. So that's one way as leaders is to make decisions about how resources are spent. But you make the point that teachers need to be trusted as well.

Hannah Schneewind (13:37):

Mm-hmm.

Matt Renwick (13:39):

What specific actions can leaders take to convey their trust, as well as to ensure every kid, every student's being trusted as readers in every classroom? Because not every teacher believes independent reading is important, even though that's the ultimate goal is we want them to transfer, we want them to pick up those identities as readers. So as leaders like myself - we're all leaders here- what can we do to trust teachers so they can trust students and ensure full school accountability?

Hannah Schneewind (14:10):

Absolutely. So I am not a principal and I've never been a principal, so, I would never say, "Well, let me give you some advice." But what I can tell you is what I have noticed or what has worked in the buildings where I work. So I think the first thing is that leaders do need to trust teachers to make their own schedules. And I know that might sound small, but that's actually pretty huge, because if teachers feel as if I must be doing reading from 10:02 to 10:31, and then I'm somehow going to be reprimanded if I'm not doing reading at 10:31, you know. That is not really setting up really great conditions for the teacher. Now, I understand that there have to be parameters, right? Everyone in first grade pretty much has to be doing reading at essentially the same time because we have pullout and we have all these other things.

(15:07):

So I totally get that. It doesn't need to be down to, you know, the minute. So I think that where you can, giving teachers some wiggle room in their schedules is really important. The other thing I would say that goes along with that is giving them flexibility to switch things around. That is to say, sometimes people will have a schedule where they always do reading in the morning and they always do writing in the afternoon, right? And what happens in the afternoon, we all know, right? Especially with the young kids. Afternoon, may not be so great at time. And then I'll have teachers say, "Oh, but I can't switch it. You know, the schedule is that way. I have to follow that." "Well, why?" you know, "why can't you switch it? You're getting to everything." So why not have writing in the morning some days and reading in the afternoon some days?

(16:01):

So I think that if leaders give teachers that kind of flexibility, I think that goes a long way. Then the other thing that I think is very difficult about being a principal, and even in my role, is that I think it's very tricky to balance curricular consistency with teacher autonomy. That is to say, yes, we need to have a consistent curriculum, right? We, our school has to have consistent values. We all think that kids need a long time to read. That has to be consistent. And at the same time, you can recognize that some teachers are going to do it differently, and it's not going to look exactly the same. So this is a silly example, but I love to sing. And so in first grade, independent reading was always preceded by shared singing of songs that were shared reading. That was me. My colleague next door is like, "I am not singing." She did lots of shared reading of big books, but we were both doing the same thing. We were both getting to all those skills and strategies. So I think that balance as yes, we need to be consistent and yes, where are places where we can give teachers autonomy.

Matt Renwick (17:22):

Yeah. I think you nailed it, Hannah, that's one of the biggest challenges of leadership, is balancing the curriculum coherence and teacher autonomy. And I'm glad you brought that up. I would hand the mic over, so to speak, to Mary Beth or Debra, if you have any thoughts on what Hannah shared here. I've been taking notes. This has been great.

Mary Beth Nicklaus (18:01):

I was thinking about what you were saying about teacher autonomy and letting teachers create their own schedules. Because when you're dealing, like with middle school, high school, and you have that 50 minute or 40 minute block or regular class period, skinny class period, depending on the chemistry of your class, this whole working with reading is not linear. You have your routine and you have your stations where I work on this, then I work on this, then I work on this. But when you're dealing with a certain chemistry of those older kids, especially if you're dealing with students who are maybe not your regular mainstream students, nothing is linear.

(19:07):

You plug them into those routines, but then you might suddenly break off into somebody has an idea that they want to write, like say a story based on...I had a student who really got into Gary Paulson and he was actually a foster student and he said, "You know, Gary Paulson writes about his life, and I have interesting life stories, so I would like to..." (He had already completed two or three books.) "I would like to write about some of my life stories." So he'd read some of the time, then he'd go off and start writing a story, and then other students started joining. Well, I have something I can write too. And you know what's really interesting? That year I got a grant through Encourage Foundation, and we put all our stories together in a book that's towards the end of the year.

(20:04):

And that really meant something to these kids, to the point that years later, I had gone into Lulu Publishing, and they each got a spiral bound last story book. I had a student come up to me and I didn't even recognize him at first because he was grown up now. And I think he was a senior in high school, and he said, "I still have my book on my dresser, and I look at it every day." So you find things, you know, the stuff that you're doing in elementary creates a foundation, especially if it's as strong as the kind of ideas that you have and what I'm seeing so far in your book. And then I get them, someone like me gets them, and you just keep that going. If there's anything I can stress, and you're talking about teacher autonomy is, realize that they're a professional, they know what to do with the chemistry of their students. And then within that framework you can usually end up getting something pretty interesting, I think.

Matt Renwick (21:16):

Thanks Mary Beth, I think that's a cool story. I know if I was walking through your classroom, I would think, "Hey, that's awesome. Keep doing that." I am wondering why some leaders don't do that. And I suspect it comes back to the initial line from Regie's Rotman's book: teachers need to be leaders and leaders need to know literacy. And I suspect that some leaders just don't know literacy. And that's why teacher autonomy falls apart. They don't know how to see different pathways to the same outcome. I would open up to Debra or Hannah because you work with different schools. Any words of wisdom, experiences here, where how a leader might build their literacy knowledge or practice, especially if they don't have a literacy background?

Debra Crouch (22:11):

Well, hopefully they're joining in any professional learning opportunities. I know that's made a huge difference in the schools I've worked with is, if principals believe enough in what the conversations are that you're having with teachers when you come in that they make the time to come in and be part of that conversation. I think a really just a critical piece, so that they're asking the questions and they're hearing the kinds of conversations that their teachers are engaged in. Within all of this, I was just thinking about as you were talking about teachers and principals, if they value and make sure that this is part of their day, that it's not the add-on, independent reading is not the extra thing that you're doing.

(23:20):

It's the thing that you're doing, right? It builds around it, sort of the same thing with writing. I'm in that same conversation with writing. It's like, this isn't an extra, you know, independent reading, independent writing is not the extra stuff. It's the reason you're doing what you do. I think that was just such a powerful message. As principals you don't want to require, but at the same time, how do you balance that conversation out of just making sure that that it is something that we recognize it has to be part of our day. So in the autonomy, part of me goes, as long as they understand it's so important that you have to have independent reading and writing every day. But that again, expectations and consistency and the ongoing conversations.

Hannah Schneewind (24:17):

Yeah, I agree with everything you said, and specifically having principals be part of the work with teachers, I think is key. When they do that, I treat the principal just the way I would treat another teacher. So if everyone is gonna go off and trying a conference, the principal's going to go off and try a conference. And if everyone is conferring with a partner and the partner's going to practice coaching in, then the principal is part of that. Because if they're not really doing it, how on earth are they actually going to be able to evaluate it? So another thing that I encourage principals to do is, if you are doing an evaluation - and again, I'm not a principal, I know nothing about evaluations - but when you are evaluating, please do not just watch the mini lesson and leave because then you only looking at 10 minutes of whole class instruction, and that actually is not the most impactful part.

(25:23):

Please sit down next to the teacher as she's doing a small group. Sit down next to her as she's doing a one-on-one conference. That's the time. Write down everything she says. That's actually what I think you could then evaluate and give really helpful feedback about. But so often, and I don't know if this happens to you, but often when I do come into a school for the first time, they just want to talk about mini lessons. And I actually have learned to say, "Actually, no, let's start with matching kids and books. Let's start with getting your classroom library together. Let's start with how do you say to a child, 'Hey, how's it going with your reading today?'" And then we can think about the mini lesson, because too often we just focus on, as I said, that whole class part. But really that's not where the magic happens. And so if you can get principals to confer and then to do their evaluations or observations while the teacher is doing that, I think those can be really helpful for leadership.

Matt Renwick (26:30):

That reminds me of beginning with the end in mind: we'll start with where we want to be, at the end. I know you're not a principal, Hannah, but I think you ideas are spot on. I've been guilty of that too, of just watching teaching, and I forget that teaching happens all day long, and it doesn't mean the teachers, you know, verbally giving instructions or are writing on the board. So much of good teaching happens in those quiet spaces. One thing I've tried to do to is to confer with readers myself, when I do visits in classrooms. I just did this with fifth grade group talking with a student about what he was reading: a baseball book. He had just tons of knowledge.

(27:17):

Peter Afflerback calls it "epistemic beliefs" or "epistemiology", right? Just a wide range of knowledge about baseball, about legends. He was able to say, "Aaron Judge wouldn't be in this book because he's a current player. In this book, it talks just about legends from like 1990 or previous." You know, just things I wouldn't know. But later on, I said to his teacher, "I don't know if the student would do so well on a typical assessment." She's like, "I know." I've had kind of a shared frustration there was not a solution, right? But at least we could talk about that at a very collegial level. And it did not feel like an evaluation. And I think that's what teachers really crave, is just conversation and not always solutions. But I appreciate this advice. We're already at 30 minutes and this has so far been a great conversation. I think what we could do is just kind of go around and, especially with Debra and Mary Beth, if you have any closing thoughts or questions for Hannah, I'll start with you, Mary Beth, if you have anything you'd like to close with.

Mary Beth Nicklaus (28:51):

As a teacher, I've seen it because I've been teaching long enough where I've had very supportive principals who I just feel they were kind of almost the backbone of what was going on in my classroom. Because as a teacher, you feel like the principal is good with what you're doing, it like gives you this exhilaration and this feeling like you can take chances and be happy taking chances and look at it as a challenge instead of a fear that you're going to get slapped down. So I agree with you that the principal is a very important part of that.

Matt Renwick (29:43):

Debra, any closing thoughts for you?

Debra Crouch (29:46):

Yeah, I was just so enjoying reading this, and I had actually pulled it out earlier. I was doing some work with some teachers on their classroom libraries, now thinking with a little bit of a future in mind and for the fall. So in Chapter 2, the thing that I thought was so just beautiful about the parts that we read for this notion of trust, I think is just so powerful. It speaks to the way that we view kids and the way that we view teachers,  as capable and of course they can do this, this kind of thinking work.

(30:45):

It's just such a critical part of relationships, as a condition of learning, and that principle of engagement that you have to have that trusting relationship. Without that nothing else goes. Mary Beth, the way you said that, if your principal's with you, you don't fear trying things out. You don't fear, you know, trying something and it's not going to work the way that we want it this time. And I think that's just such a critical piece that's sometimes missing in classrooms today. If teachers come to us and say, "How do you want it? What's the district want? What's the principal want?" How's it supposed to be that that's really a base of fear. Doesn't matter how good you are as a teacher, it's a base of fear that you're coming from. It doesn't have that sense of trust that you need to be the learner that you can be. So I'm just absolutely loving your book.

Hannah Schneewind (31:49):

Thank you. I'm glad it's really useful. I'd love to know what the teachers do with their classroom libraries.

Debra Crouch (31:56):

Oh my goodness, kindergarten, they were so adorable. So we were trying to put the books into understanding the notion that their books are categorized, right. You know, putting the books together. And I took your question. They're about, "Are the books together, you know, putting the books that are together, right. And this one little five year old who's next to me, he goes, "Wait, it's like garbage." And I'm thinking, "Huh?". And he goes, "You put the plastic together, and you put the paper together, and you put the..."

Hannah Schneewind (32:28):

Right?

Matt Renwick (32:32):

Yeah.

Hannah Schneewind (32:33):

Yeah. That's a perfect way of understanding it. Right? And that's such a great example of, it makes sense to kids and then however you set up that library will make sense to them.

Matt Renwick (32:45):

It's a classic student example too.

Hannah Schneewind (32:50):

Yeah. I might have to use that one.

Matt Renwick (32:59):

Hannah, any closing thoughts for you? I'll just say, I've used and read Chapter 2. I've read that chapter twice and even have recommended it to teachers in my building, especially if they've not been part of the culture very long. I'll say, "Read this chapter and this really gets to the heart of what we're trying to get to in our school." But terrific book. I agree with everyone. Any closing thoughts, Hannah?

Hannah Schneewind (33:27):

First of all, thank you for having me. And it just makes me so happy to hear that people are using it because really what more could you ask, right? It's like what, when we say to kids, you know, what action do you want to take after reading this book? The action might be, I wanna go find another book by this author. Or the action might be, I need to write a letter to my senator about greenhouse gases. But I'm so happy that our book can actually help people take some actions. I guess my closing thought would be about reading identity, which we did not have a chance to discuss. So one of the things that I find frustrating about some of the current narrative around the teaching of reading is that the role of engagement and motivation and the research on engagement and motivation is being completely ignored.

(34:20):

Students are at the center of this. That is as much a science of reading as is the science of decoding and what we need to know about phonics and phonemic awareness and phonological awareness. If you want to talk more about just that piece at some point, it's just so important. And if teachers don't yet feel comfortable conferring, everyone can sit down and do what we call a discovery conference, which is basically saying to the child, "Hey, tell me about yourself as a reader." That one question just gives you so much insight and also really shows that you are trusting the student. I really want to get to know you. So that's just something that I feel very passionately about is that student kind of being at the center of it and that reading identity and engagement motivation are a huge part of that. Thanks so much for hosting.

Matt Renwick (35:30):

Thank you, Hannah. Thank you Mary Beth. Thank you, Debra. Thank you. Great conversation. Please read Trusting Readers: Powerful Practices for Independent Reading by Jennifer Scoggin and Hannah Schneewind through Heinemann. Terrific book and terrific conversation. Thank you.

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, Mary Howard, Debra Crouch and I speak with professors Michiko Hikida and Leah Durán, authors of the article “Making sense of reading’s forever wars” (Phi Delta Kappan, 2022).

Leah Durán is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Michiko Hikida is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State University, Columbus. They wrote this article to make the information “accessible to a lot of readers in a way that most academic journals aren't.”

Our conversation was guided around three primary questions:

* Have we learned anything from our past debates, or are we just going in circles?

* What are your thought on the idea that these “wars” may be part of a thesis - antithesis - synthesis that we need to go through in order to move forward as a profession?

* Students need institutional changes, not just individual instructional change. What can K-12 practitioners do to support institutional change?

I hope you find this discussion as helpful as we did for better understanding the context and the conversation around the science of reading.

Full subscribers also have access to the following:

* Video recording of our conversation via Zoom

* Professional discussion guide (linked within the video recording post)

* Access to future disussion threads, ability to comment on posts, and join virtual conversations with esteemed literacy leaders (click here for upcoming schedule).

Full Transcript

Matt Renwick:

Hi. Want to welcome Michiko and Leah to our conversation. They wrote a wonderful article for Kappan Magazine of Phi Delta Kappan titled Making Sense of Reading’s Forever Wars. Subtitle is, “Adopting a new science-based methodology is not enough to address students' difficulties with reading.” And we were chatting prior just how much we appreciate how well you were succinct in your article, but yet covered so much ground. I'm going to share my screen here so we can all see it. And yeah, and I'm just going to scroll down here to your bylines and your well sourced cited article. So Leah is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural studies at the University of Arizona Tucson.

And Michiko is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. So welcome again. And yeah, I guess I'll start with the first question here. And it's actually your question, is have we learned anything from our past debates or are you just going in circles? And I'll open it up to Leah or Michiko first, but everyone else here feel free to chime in and offer your thoughts. And when you do, if you can introduce yourself when you speak. Michiko and Leah, we've already introduced you before. For our other guests here, just make sure you state your name.

Michiko Hikida:

Leah, do you want to take this or do you want me to give it a shot?

Leah Durán:

Yeah, yeah. I think that we have not learned as much as we should have from past debates, and I think that was part of the reason why Michiko and I really wanted to write this, is that it seemed like No Child Left Behind is very recent history. And at least the way that people are legislating science of reading, it is pretty much identical to scientifically based reading research, the term from the Bush era. It's still the big five from the report of the National Reading Panel.

So in some ways it seems like there's this real energy to do exactly what has already been done without really grappling with why that didn't lead to the transformative changes that people hoped it would. And I think it's very important that we do that, if we don't acknowledge the way that No Child Left Behind and Reading First really fell short of I think the big dreams that people had for it. And think about why. Then there's no chance of not doing that again. So I really hope that the article gives people a chance to think about what we've already tried and what that means about what we haven't tried, and should try, and do differently, in order to not just do the same old thing over and over again every 10 to 15 years.

Michiko Hikida:

I do want to add to that a little bit and say that from a research perspective, I do think that there has been some consensus. And that consensus is that phonics instruction is helpful as a part of a more robust literacy curriculum. I think a person would be hard pressed to find a researcher that is anti-phonics. But I reiterate what Leah's saying is that at a policy level that doesn't feel like how it's being taken up.

Matt Renwick:

Yeah, I won't put anyone on the spot here, but I think the “be reading by third grade” retention policies might be one where we're not really learning from the past and repeating some mistakes. Yeah. But yeah, to me it sounds like this article's intent was just to create a pause for us and just to take stock of where we've come from, where we're at, and how might we proceed forward. So yeah, that's how I read it too. And I'd just open it up to our guests here. We have Debra, Mary and Sonya. So any thoughts on this too? What have you've learned, if anything from past debates?

Mary Howard:

Well, one of the things, and I'm Mary, I'm been an educator 51 years and now living in Honolulu, and I'm connecting back to something that you said in your piece that I keeps capturing my a attention. Some have argued that a permanent sense of crisis in K-12 education has been manufactured by those who aim to undermine the institution of public schools and scapegoat educators as a way of diverting attention from America's deepening social problems. And I think for me, a lot of that is wanting a thing. And that's always been what I've seen in all of these years in education, but never so much as now when social media makes it so easy.

But wanting to blame all of these, we don't have enough programs, we don't have enough phonics, we don't have enough this, we don't have enough this and this is the way to fix it. And for anyone who's been in education longer than a day, the one thing that we know is that nothing is going to work all the time for every child. And it's certainly not going to work when we're fixated on that. So I just always keep coming back to that quote because the one thing we don't want to talk about is those deepening social problems. And so the article really meant a lot to me because you did that so beautifully.

Matt Renwick:

And Mary, if I can just then transition what you just said to maybe a question to Michiko and Leah is you mentioned that not one thing's going to work for everyone. And I appreciate you surfacing that because in the article too, you mentioned that students, they don't need individual instructional change, they need institutional change. And I think that's what Mary's pointing to here too is that's a big, big thing to take on. As practitioners, what are some ideas you might have for us to move on, a next step? That would probably might be helpful.

Michiko Hikida:

I have a couple of thoughts, and they are maybe outside of the classroom more than inside of the classroom because we are talking about institutional change. So I think a lot about teachers as public intellectuals. So when you've been teaching for 51 years like Mary has, you have a wealth of knowledge that you can stand on in a public context. So I think speaking publicly, posting on social media, having podcasts, those kinds of things, as well as organizing and doing things like voting.

Leah Durán:

Yeah, and I would say my answer is pretty similar in that I think maybe part of what we can do is redefine what counts as reading policy. Things that are about housing are also reading policy. Things that are about poverty are also reading policy. And I think that we sometimes compartmentalize them and think that those belong in a different arena or somebody else's expertise. But I think that they should be part of a conversation and part of our efforts around improving reading have to do with improving everything, even though that's a lot and hard to do, but it definitely won't happen if we don't try as part of it.

And the other piece that related to that I think is that one thing that has been hard for me about watching this current round of the reading wars is that there really is a tremendous amount of money being spent, but to my eyes, it's being spent on things that I wouldn't reasonably expect to cause huge changes based on the research. But there are other things that we're not spending money on because I think we don't categorize them as being about reading. So I think that's part of it too. People are willing to spend money. Millions of dollars of money, but maybe I think they, legislators need some push around what counts as doing something about reading.

Michiko Hikida:

And I would say that that comes back to this question of what have we learned? And I think there is some consensus in the field about the impact of poverty and trauma and housing insecurity on reading scores.

Matt Renwick:

Yeah, that's one of the few correlations I've seen is poverty and trauma and some of these challenges as a principal and as a former teacher, and that correlation with reading achievements. So I'm glad you pointed that out. We mentioned this latest round of the reading wars, we use these metaphors to try to describe it. But I also noted in there too, instead of the pendulum swinging, you talk about incremental progress as a better way to gauge growth as a profession with reading instruction. And what things have you seen now that you've studied this in terms of specifically around reading instruction, you mentioned that we know phonics does work as a instructional strategy, and other resources or practices that are promising and that you'd like to see. You mentioned we have all this money, what buckets would you want to put the money in? Certainly outside of education, poverty and those issues are super important. Within the school, where would you want to put some of those resources?

Leah Durán:

Well, one of the things that I think about in terms of what all schools need to do a good job is based on an experience I had when we were both doctoral students at UTS. And one of the pieces of our training there was to supervise student teachers. And so we did that in schools all across the Austin area, so in the urban core and the suburbs. And one of the things that has really stayed with me was how different, even within the same district, classrooms were and schools were in terms of resources, depending who was enrolled there. And so I think about one particular school where I sometimes supervise student teachers, that was just really lovely and I would want everyone to have that experience. The teachers there were terrific, really talented teachers. They had huge classroom libraries. And just a lot of care and expertise went into mediating kids', access to books, kids' instruction, and were very inclusive.

I remember seeing the whole classroom labeled in braille when there's a child who would benefit from them. So there's all these things. I think if you look at some of these schools that are already serving more affluent communities. I feel like everyone deserves that. And part of that is making it an attractive working condition. So one of the reasons I think that teachers like to work there and experience teachers that gravitated towards it was that they had money to pay for extra specialist teachers so that they got more planning periods. And I think that was part of what went into really thoughtful lessons. And they had tons and tons and tons of children's books. And I think that's an important piece that we should also take from the whole language side or the meaning focused side of these different pendulum swings, is that there's value in thinking about meaning and there's value in children's literature as a resource.

And that doesn't have to be opposed to teaching about phonics, teaching about the code. So I guess that's my answer is I think if you look at a really wonderful school in an affluent neighborhood and think about what are all the resources that they have right there, even just in the school, that's even leaving outside all of the different things that kids have access to. But I would want all children to get to go to a school that looks and feels like that one in terms of a good place to learn, a good place to work.

Matt Renwick:

Any thoughts from the rest of the group on what was shared there?

Debra Crouch:

So, hi, I'm Debra Crouch. I'm a literacy consultant, so I go in and support schools. I live in San Diego. And you're echoing a conversation I had with the principal this morning as we walked around and we were looking at classroom libraries specifically. And just thinking about what it looks like. And at one point I asked, so I said it's that getting that picture, what would an affluent school look like? Why can't we create spaces that feel like that? Because one of the things that we were noticing were some of the jumbles in classrooms storage. It's the classrooms got the classroom, but then it's also got storage stuff all over. And we were starting to brainstorm ways that we could even take some of that out. And is there a space in the building that we could use as a storage because another principal had shared that idea.

I think that envisioning, what are some of the possibilities that we could create around this, because I'm not absolutely positive that it is, like you were saying, it's like we have the money. So it's not like we don't have the money, it's the way that we're using it and the way that we're thinking about what happens at these schools. I go into classrooms sometimes and they've made black and white photocopies for the kids as opposed to giving them these really gorgeous books that they have access to. And for some reason they decide that a printed off black and white, and I keep saying to them, don't children deserve color in their books? Come on, this is not an acceptable way of treating the children. So maybe it is some of that conversation that we have around how we're using what we have and what those spaces could look like for kids. Yeah. So I so appreciated your article. Oh my goodness. This was brilliantly done. Yeah.

Michiko Hikida:

Thank you.

Debra Crouch:

You're welcome.

Matt Renwick:

You've already answered my last question, which was a colleague of mine, we were talking about science of reading, the reading wars, and he mentioned these things go on cycles. There's a thesis and then there's an antithesis, and then there's synthesis. And it goes back, goes around and around. And do you see that? I guess the question we had was, are these hard conversations of these issues necessary to go through in order to get to a better understanding of good reading instruction? I don't enjoy arguing about the science of reading, but is it also the obstacle is the way of thinking too?

Michiko Hikida:

My initial thought of that about that is it depends on who's having the conversation. So I think about the field of literacy research and how this conversation started in the 1960s. And in the field of literacy research, there has been a synthesis. And part of that synthesis is that, yes, phonics is an effective instructional tool, but it is not the entirety of a literacy curriculum. So within that field, I feel like there has been that thesis, antithesis and synthesis of this conversation. I think within the public sphere, the motivations for it are different. It's complicated, there's a lot of money involved, there's a lot of a lot of things involved. But I don't think that that conversation, the more public discourse on it is coming to it necessarily earnestly. And willing to engage with all of the research and evidence that we do have. So I think it depends on who's having the conversation and for what purpose.

Matt Renwick:

And then the context, it sounds like too, if you're debating stuff on Twitter, it's going to be a different conversation. [inaudible 00:19:08].

Michiko Hikida:

Or you know what? Policy makers like things that are very measurable and concrete and that I can legislate, and learning isn't really that clean. But gosh, that would be so much more convenient. [inaudible 00:19:25] with people and we're messy.

Matt Renwick:

Yeah, we can measure engagement, you can measure those more messier kinds of things, but not in the way you can measure some of the things that seem to get more of the attention. That's a great point.

Mary Howard:

And one thing that worries me in this day and age, and in my mind more so than ever it's been in history, is the level of mandating and the laws that are coming out from schools that are saying here are things that are not research based, like choice reading is not research based. We just shake our heads and go, "What?" So I think too, it's really important for us to be very cognizant that teachers are in schools where these horrifying mandates are being put in place. And so at the same time that we're thinking about all of the important things, I love the discussion of let's envision what is possible, and I know that teachers do that every day, but how do we help teachers to understand how to maneuver a school where there is a ball and chain attached to their arms and legs and persona, so to speak.

Debra Crouch:

See, a lot of it comes to leadership. It's the leadership in the schools. Because you can have that legislation piece, but it's interpreted so much by the school leadership. So that piece is so powerful and important in school leadership.

Matt Renwick:

Yeah. Leah or Michiko, did you see when you were visiting these schools during your dissertation, your studies, did you see a correlation with leadership? And you mentioned affluence, did you see a leadership factor there with supporting teachers?

Michiko Hikida:

I'll actually talk out of my teaching experience. So I taught third, fourth, and fifth in Texas. So they were all testing grades. And we had a remarkable principal and she protected us from the district. So when the district would say every elementary school in the city has to do this professional development, she would appeal to them and say, "Hey, I would love to do this with professional development with my teachers instead." So absolutely, and this was a title one school. I think 97% of our kids were on free and reduced price lunch. More than half of our kids were bi or multilingual.

This was a school that I think people would think of as low performing, and it wasn't. And it was a joyful place to work as a teacher. I felt like I had a lot of autonomy. I felt like I had a ton of administrative support. And because of that, our students performed very well on high stakes testing and enjoyed reading. So I think that in my own experience, having a supportive administrator willing to go to bat for us made all the difference in the world.

Matt Renwick:

Well, that's great. We're running close to our time here together and I want to be respectful of that. Any closing thoughts that you might have, Leah or Michiko? If not, you can also share what you're reading right now. That's an option. But yeah, just any closing thoughts as we close our time together?

Leah Durán:

Yeah, I mean, one thing that I've been thinking about, and it was part of the reason why we wanted to write specifically in Phi Delta Kappan, is a place that's accessible to a lot of readers in a way that most academic journals aren't. I think that the state of the field is a very difficult thing to know. It requires a lot of time devoted to reading, to get a sense of what's going on in the field, what does the research say, what are points of contention? And I do feel like as people who have institutional access to all of these scholarly journals and that time is part of our jobs is to be current, that that's an important thing that I want to do is try and translate that or make more accessible the complexity or the synthesis that the field has arrived at in ways that I think are not always very easy to see if you can't get access to a lot of scholarly journals or go to AERA or any of these other conferences.

Michiko Hikida:

I'll just add a couple of things. So first thank you for having us. It's fun for Leah and me to talk about this. This was an important piece for us. But second, there is a piece that was just published in one of those journals that of course is behind the paywall that I would be happy to share with you about this that was written by David Reinking, and just came out in January, called Legislating Phonics. And he and a couple of others go through the history of this and challenge some of the arguments that phonics only people are making, which I thought was really helpful. The second thing I thought about is a book called Rocking the Boat, How Tempered Radicals affect Change.

So when thinking about what teachers can do in their classrooms, when we know that there are some institutional constraints and some other challenges that they face, that's what comes to mind to me. So if I can share my screen for a quick second, I can just show you the cover.

Matt Renwick:

Yeah, I don't mind.

Michiko Hikida:

And as a classroom teacher, this is how I felt. I felt like I was a tempered radical. I, of course, had to operate within the constraints of the school and what I was expected to do. And I really worked to try to find those spaces where I could do something else. So that I would just share.

Leah Durán:

Oops. I wasn't fast enough.

Michiko Hikida:

Oh, sorry.

Leah Durán:

It's all right.

Michiko Hikida:

There you go.

Leah Durán:

Thank you. Let me do a quick screen-

Matt Renwick:

Rocking the Boat. How tempered Radicals Affect Change Without Making Trouble. Okay.

Leah Durán:

Oh, I love that title.

Matt Renwick:

[inaudible 00:26:27].

Michiko Hikida:

It really resonated for me as a teacher where we do operate with systems and how we might be able to make change from the inside without just burning it all apart.

Leah Durán:

Wow.

Matt Renwick:

And still be able to teach and lead and study and do research. And this has been great. We really appreciate you all being here, and we look forward to reading more from you. So thank you.

Mary Howard:

Thank you so much for the invitation. It was really great to get to talk.

Leah Durán:

Thank you.

Debra Crouch:

Thank you.

Mary Howard:

That was wonderful.

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 month’s podcast, I spoke with Terry Underwood about portfolio assessment in the context of literacy instruction.

Terry is a former classroom teacher and a university professor. He is the author of Portfolio Practices: Lessons from Schools, District, and States with Sandra Murphy, and The Portfolio Project: A Study of Assessment, Instruction, and Middle School Reform. Terry writes frequently at Learning to Read, Reading to Learn, an online journal where he shares his current thinking on literacy instruction today.

The full transcript of our conversation below is made possible due to the generosity of our full subscribers. Consider becoming one today. Full subscribers have access to additional community benefits, including live conversations with literacy experts, leadership guides, and discussion threads.

Full Transcript

Matt Renwick (00:03): 

This is Matt, and I'm joined by Terry Underwood, a literacy professor and author on a couple of books on portfolio assessment. And I asked Terry to come on. He's got a great newsletter, Learning to Read, Reading to Learn. Did I say that right? 

Terry Underwood (00:23): 

That's exactly right. 

Matt Renwick (00:25): 

He's got a great newsletter. I think everyone should subscribe to it. He had an interesting comment about failure and how the culture very much can drive that, either way for better or worse. And I just said, we got to talk about this if you get some time. And also talk about your work with portfolios, which I think I get a sense are starting to come back a little bit. I wrote a book on portfolios in 2017, and it didn't sell that well, but it seems I'm getting more questions about it now than I did in 2017. I'm curious as to maybe why. Terry, do you want to share just about your books some of that context? 

Terry Underwood (01:09): 

Yeah, absolutely. Matt. Hey, thanks for asking me to talk about this. This is really up my alley, more or less. The whole notion of fear, of sharing and fear of disclosing, I think is not just a problem for professional development of teachers. It's a problem for shining a light on pedagogy generally. And the fear is real. I mean, there there's a lot of teacher bashing out in the wild, you know, in the communities. And then when you add to that the fact that we have a model of schooling that is really grounded in a factory model where you have managers and workers, it's pretty ugly. I think that that's the bottom line. 

(02:09): 

And in the worst case, you get a kind of a surveillance of teachers, which will tend to make people fearful and drive them in into the shadows a little bit. I want to pivot a little bit and go back to where I started, my interest in portfolios. I didn't know that this was happening, but I've thought about this a lot of times. The last day of school when I was in high school. You know, everybody would leave the school building. It was a big school. We had about 2200 students all together. It was a township school in Illinois, and we had a lot of kids from rural areas that were bused in together into this high school. It sat right across from the Fox River in Illinois, and there was a bridge across the river. 

(03:08): 

And we had to, when we left school, almost everybody would walk across that bridge and go down Main Street to the west side of Chicago, Ottawa, where a lot of people lived. And what would happen, people would line up on the bridge and they would open their notebooks, and they would throw all of their papers into the river. And the river looked like it was just absolutely white with paper totally covered from shore to shore. And I always had a little bit of a problem every year with throwing my stuff away. A lot of it I didn't really care. But ever since I was in fourth grade, I started saving. I started writing stories in fourth grade, and I started saving some of my stories. And it just became kind of a habit. 

(04:01): 

And even to this day, I have rubber tubs full of papers from way back. I don't even know what's back there. My garage is just stuffed with this. But really, over the years I started to appreciate the value of collecting things that were of interest to me, and that I thought might show up. I found that I could never really predict when something would be useful to me. And so if I didn't have it, I didn't have it. I couldn't go back to it, which is part of the problem, you have a tendency to hoard there. 

Matt Renwick (04:43): 

You're collecting your knowledge. You had a value on what you created and sounds like you valued it more than some of your peers. 

Terry Underwood (04:56): 

Yeah, I never really advertised it or thought much about it until a lot later when I started looking back at this stuff. And I'm really glad I kept stuff from fourth grade. I still have some of my really early writings. Maybe 10, 12 years ago, I came upon, found out that the state of Minnesota...do you know anything about eFolio Minnesota? 

Matt Renwick (05:26): 

No. 

Terry Underwood (05:27): 

The state of Minnesota decided that every child born in the state would be given a portfolio site. And they developed this, they call it eFolio, Minnesota. I think that's the name of it. But anyway, if you were born in Minnesota, when you were born, you'd get a portfolio and they would give you a place to collect your stuff, and it's free, and any anybody else could buy a site from them, I think $19.99 a year. I started using that site in my teaching at Sacramento State. And prior to that, years before that, probably the early eighties, I was teaching composition at community colleges in California. 

(06:23): 

And I started to get wind of this portfolio movement that had been catching fire at least since the 1960s. And it essentially was rooted in this idea that if we don't attend to what we've done, regardless - you could call it a failure, you could call it a success, whatever it is - but we have done it. And if we don't look at it and examine it in relation to where we are now and where we would like to be, then we're sort of adrift. And it becomes very difficult to kind of make adjustments that may not be comfortable, but you can see you're convinced to take action. And I think there's a cognitive value that you have this intention that as you move forward, you're going to do things and you're going to pay attention to what you're doing because you know there's going to come a time when you're going to look back at it. 

(07:32): 

And so that got me really interested in portfolios. And when I taught fourth grade for three years in the late 1980s, I used portfolios pretty much exclusively. I mean, those kids were saving everything, and I actually would give them prompts and have them write in response to reflective prompts. When I entered a doctoral program in 1991, I knew that I wanted to do something along these lines. I was able to get positioned to study a formal portfolio system in English language arts in a middle school where I was teaching at the time. And that became the basis for my dissertation. I think the bottom line, Matt, is for me, portfolios are a way of thinking, of connecting the surface of our behavior with the deep structures that we are building in long-term memory. 

(08:50): 

And just as writing on paper as a mnemonic, when we're reading or writing, it allows us to manipulate furniture and long-term memory and build expertise through that manipulation. Portfolios are a sort of an extension of writing. And the one difference, when you write a text and you're going to send it out into the world, there's a kind of a boundary around it, and you hope that it will hold up all by itself with portfolios. You often don't know what you don't know, what the reader is going to make of what you put in. And so there isn't that kind of unity and coherence and organization that you find in a text, but it is a form of a text, especially when it's aimed at an audience. 

(09:45): 

At some point somebody's going to look at it. I think there's a lot of sort of romanticism around portfolios where it's all like joy and celebration and that is absolutely a part of it. I've thought about the idea of portfolio carnivals and portfolio reviews, portfolio showcases where we really are celebrating, and we're looking at accomplishments and taking stock of what we've done, that’s what it's about. We want, we have to have those as human beings. But there's also portfolio ethnography. I think of portfolio ethnography as opposed to portfolio assessment, where the purpose of the ethnography is to uncover values and patterns of behavior and understand, to be able to explain what the cultural factors are that are creating the motivating sort of behavior. 

(10:55): 

So the word portfolio is nothing more than a collection of artifacts. And it takes on meaning and significance when you have that other word portfolio: carnival portfolio, review portfolio. When you add the term assessment, you really throw a monkey wrench into the whole process because at at bottom there's an antagonism between assessment and portfolio. If I'm just curating my artifacts and presenting them, what's in it for me to present them to you? So you can assess them? And a lot of times what happens when assessment gets tacked on, you really sort of disenfranchise the person who's creating the portfolio. And so that's the part that really has to be sorted out even before you begin to think about designing a portfolio. 

(12:07): 

It's one thing to do it in your own classroom because you, as the teacher, you have pretty much control over how you're going to design it, and you can really lessen the impact of assessment and use it more as a celebratory kind of a tool. But when you begin to talk about assessment, which is serious business, you teach without assessment. There's no way that you can organize a school without assessment. It's absolutely necessary. And so it has to be dealt with, and I have a couple of stories about the beginnings of large portfolio systems that I want to talk about. 

Matt Renwick (12:59): 

Yeah I just wanted to note this it's more than a collection of artifacts. It can be more than an assessment. You talk about ethnography; it certainly communicates what a child values. But you're starting to talk about school-wide or district-wide. I have to think it starts as you look at portfolios across different, several kids. It's going to start to convey the values of a school or a district as well. 

Terry Underwood (13:36): 

Yes, it absolutely does. In 1989 in the state of Kentucky, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled that the entire state school system was unconstitutional and had to be redone. And they didn't specify a remedy, but turned it back to the legislature, and the legislature came up with a law. The legislation decided that they were going to use a portfolio as a reform tool. By the way, the reason it was unconstitutional: there were 66 rural counties in Kentucky that filed a suit. Those schools were just so seriously under-resourced that, I mean, there were stories that were sort of legendary. 

(14:46): 

But the school finance cases had been coming up since the sixties. There was a 30 year backlog of cases where they were decided. Usually it was just a matter of the state legislature coming up with some kind of law about how we're going to finance the schools so that we don't have such unequal funding. But in this case in Kentucky, they decided that they were going to use a portfolio assessment as a reform tool. And this was in the legislation. So they came up with an advisory committee for developing the portfolio system. And essentially it, you know the requirement in the Common Core that LEAs have formative assessments where you pool the data and you're able to look at trends and that sort of thing? 

(15:45): 

It was on steroids in Kentucky. The teachers had to make assignments pretty much across the state that were at least commendable in intent. And so the long arm of the state was reaching into the classroom, and teachers were giving assignments to kids based on specifications from afar, and kids were writing and putting those papers in their portfolios, and they were going out for moderation to make sure that they were being reliably scored and all that. And they had to be reliably scored because school funding was dependent on this index. It was sort of like in California: we have the A.P.I: the average performance index or something per school. Well, in Kentucky, 14 of their score on that index was determined by portfolios. 

Matt Renwick (16:49): 

A standardized assessment, essentially. 

Terry Underwood (16:52): 

Extremely standard. The difference is it didn't have any standardized tests. Just imagine if every day when you went in to teach, you had to give a standardized, multiple choice test. It would be equivalent to that, except it wasn't multiple choice. I think there was flexibility in the prompts, but essentially the kids hated it. The teachers were in many cases resentful. It's interesting that there's evidence that it actually improved. 

Matt Renwick (17:33): 

I was gonna say, yeah. I mean, just having the kids write every day. There's got to be some growth there. 

Terry Underwood (17:40): 

Yeah. They did. When I was preparing for this, I remembered that the Kentucky Writing Advisory Committee created a writing portfolio assessment system. And that system had to embrace writing with a purpose, which means that it's more than spelling, it's more than generating paragraphs. There has to be a purpose to the writing. Writing is a process that we don't just think about and create a text, that there are stages that you go through to create a text writing for an audience: who you're writing for (and) who you can conceive of as the reader impacts both your purpose and your process. And then use that writing for a direct assessment to figure out what is going on in the classroom. 

Matt Renwick (18:52): 

Well, when you first mentioned this project, it sounded pretty good. I mean, there was good purpose and audience. That's great stuff. But you were mentioning that the teachers and the students were not appreciative of it, because it was kind of top down mandate. 

Terry Underwood (19:16): 

Well, it took all agency from them. I think part of the problem is in the rural schools, it may have been seen as a blessing compared to what they were getting before. But in the more affluent areas where kids were probably getting fairly good instruction anyway, it was an add-on. It was a chore, it was an intrusion. And so when you stop to think about, "How do you create a portfolio assessment system?", the first thing you have to ask is, "Why do I want a portfolio system?" And who is going to be involved in it? And if you forget that the primary participants are the students... 

Matt Renwick (20:04): 

Mm-hmm. 

Terry Underwood (20:05): 

and their teachers, then you're gonna fail. There's no sense even beginning. And that's what happened, I think, in Kentucky. They forgot that they're dealing with teachers and learners. David Pearson makes a case for what he calls "teacher prerogative". Professionals in other areas like medicine and law have what's called prerogative. And what that means is that research is research, but it is the practitioner's prerogative to use that research as they see it useful in their own practice. And it is an individual prerogative. Unless you're an MD and I get you from malpractice or whatever, I'm not going to be able to put you on remote control and tell you what to do. 

(21:05): 

Now, in an ideal world, we would have that in teacher practice. Now that might generate fear, but it's going to be a different kind of fear. Rather than fear, that I'm gonna be found out that I'm not really as good as I appear or whatever. It's fear that I might be wrong, that my kids aren't going to do very well. Even though there might be an activity that I'm thinking about doing in a classroom, even though I don't like it, I don't think it's going be very much fun, I'm going to have to work at it myself. I'm going to do it because I have a fear that if I don't do it, things aren't going to work as well. An, I'd be definitely willing to talk about that with other teachers in public. 

(22:02): 

The contrasting case here in 1990, 1991, the state of Vermont, I think it may have been the first state to voluntarily decide to do a portfolio assessment system. And how they went about it - I also wrote a chapter on Vermont in that book - was trying to get ahead of the fear that schools would get destroyed in the coming onslaught of standardized tests. So who is creating the portfolio system? The state of Vermont. And why are they doing it? In Kentucky, they were doing it to reform. So it had a political purpose in Vermont. They were actually acting out of fear that what was going on in the schools was going to be hyper standardized and pretty much controlled. 

(23:00): 

And they wanted to get ahead of that. This book, by the way, is designed for anybody who wants to create a portfolio system. You need this book, because what we do is we examine nine different portfolio systems from the level of the classroom to the school, to the district, to the state, to the nation. And we talk about their strategies for collection. How do they collect? What do they recommend people do to collect material in the portfolio, their strategies for selection? At some point in the portfolio process, learners have to select. The whole question of who selects the material, does the teacher, or does the kid? Well, that has to be negotiated as part of the design process. And then, reflection...some will argue me, among them, that you can't call it a portfolio if there is not a structured way. 

(24:09): 

Kids are gonna reflect on their work periodically in a formal public thoughtful way with their teachers and with their peers. So you have the collection part of it, the selection part of it, the reflection part of it, how are they going to do that? And then the publication part of it. At that point, you really begin to get it. You have to be very careful about who owns this work? What work is going to be made public and why is it gonna be made public? And that's where really I think if the public purpose is for an assessment, that it has to be really carefully controlled because you run the risk of disclosing all kinds of stuff. People will destroy the portfolio system. 

(25:05): 

If that's not the purpose, then it probably should be celebratory or showcase, or some sort of a portfolio review. Then it provides the same incentive that kids need to write, that somebody's going to read this stuff, and we're going to look at it for positive purposes. In this book, after each chapter we have a section called Opportunities for Discussion. Inquiry #1: the Kentucky system asks students to write for real world audiences during their classroom instruction, while simultaneously asking students to write for an examiner audience. That is for the individuals who review and score portfolios. What influence might this complex relationship have on students' writing processes? One time I was working with a local school, an elementary school, and they were interested in school-wide writing assessment. 

(26:07): 

And we designed some assessments. A couple years later, I went back to the school and I talked to a teacher that I had talked to before. I found out that some of the 3rd grade teachers were beginning to score higher on the writing assessment then the teachers who had been sort of writing gurus After I checked into it, I found out that the formula was if you wanted to score higher in third grade, for every noun, get your kids to write three adjectives so that you get this kind of sparkly, popping kind of writing. Now a good writing teacher will say, pay more attention to your nouns because the nouns carry the substance. And sure enough, when I looked at these papers, these kids were three adjectives per noun. I remember this one paper, "My best friend Kyle has short, dark, light hair." 

Matt Renwick (27:23): 

 

Terry Underwood (27:24): 

You know, the attention is on the adjectives. So what's going to happen if you have the kids writing for real purposes at the same time, we're going to take that for an examiner audience. And it kind of creates a schizoid writing environment. "Kentucky's system was developed under the assumption that instruction would not change unless teachers were given financial incentives. Do you believe that this assumption is true?" So this portfolio system...you can see there's a lot of kind of strings attached to it that will distort what you really want. You want to get kids who, when they crossed that bridge after graduating from high school, they're not going to throw their stuff in a river. In my case, it was just accidental. I mean, I happen to have a fourth grade teacher who's like, my stories. 

Matt Renwick (28:27): 

There you go. 

Terry Underwood (28:29): 

Yeah. And how do we get that in some sort of systematic way? 

Matt Renwick (28:39): 

I'm thinking about today, why any district or school or even teacher would want to start portfolios. One thing that's starting to come up, I'm seeing more of is related to the test or to assessment like you're talking about here, Terry, not to circumvent them or to avoid over-standardization or to reform, but to compliment. So for example, English learners, some of these students are not doing well on ACCESS tests when I've worked with another district or two. And so they see the portfolio as another way to kind of create a richer picture of this kid. And maybe they're not doing well on the standardized test, but this portfolio can serve as assessment and, you know, it can also be gamed as you were saying with the three adjectives. It sounds like kind of a theme though, is they have very good intentions, and then when we put into practice, things get complex and complicated and messy. 

Terry Underwood (29:58): 

Yeah. And I really think that's the heart of it: the degree to which the student is legitimately involved and seen as a real active participant in it. And not just someone that we're trying to help or we're trying to make sure that that this person can grow up and function in this society, but actually an agent who we hope at some point is going to be self-actualized and would be able to self-assess. In an ideal world, what I would like to see is when we assess kids, let's see how well they self-assess, how well they know what they're up to and how clearly do they have a sense of where they're going. 

(30:59): 

I don't know if you are familiar with John Downing? John Downing was a researcher from the seventies, and he died young, but he had this theory of cognitive confusion that the problem with kids learning, especially in in literacy, is that they don't understand why they're doing this. They don't understand what the point is. I wrote a story where Mr. Bubbles goes out to talk to a first grade kid who's been this second grade kid. His teacher thinks he has dyslexia, and Bubbles talks to him and asks him, 'Well, what do you think is going on in people's minds when they're reading? Have you ever ever watched anybody read?" 

(31:51): 

"Yeah, watched my dad. My dad sits there. "Well, what's your dad doing?" "Well, he's pretty much just like real quiet, and he has the newspaper in front of his face and he's doing something, and I know he's doing something, but I know that he gets really mad if I bug him. But, you know, he wants to, he wants to read this paper." But he doesn't know what's going on. And then he goes to school and the first thing he finds out is, when you sit down at your desk, you see a letter and the letter goes B, but the kid knows that's not what my dad is doing, you know, and for four or five months, this is what he gets. And so eventually he just says, "You know, I'm confused and I'm never...this is not, this is not for me." 

(32:41): 

"I don't understand what's going on here, and I'm just going to tell me what to do because I have to." And so that early on, if we get comfortable with confusion and we start to think that we have to look elsewhere, or we have to capitulate and stop looking and just do what we're supposed to do. My own daughter, she's in a doctoral program, and she was telling me just a couple weeks ago that she had no idea how deeply she had internalized that. And it's only now that she's thinking about, "What am I going to do my dissertation on?" And she has to come up with it. It's got to be something she really deeply cares about. 

(33:32): 

All of that external guidance is by the wayside. Could you imagine if we start that in kindergarten? Yeah. And portfolios will allow you to do that. If you think about a writing prompt...if I give you the writing prompt, if you are supposed to write every day, and I'm telling you what to write about, right at that point, you are walled off from the activity. When I taught fourth grade, I taught my kids to write prompts. And what goes into a prompt? And when we did writing workshop, they had to tell me who you're writing this, what is the content, what's the substance going to be? How do you think that starting this with a narrative is gonna be a good idea? What makes you think that? That became their job. Then I had something when I conference with them. I would be able to go back and reference that. 

Matt Renwick (34:50): 

Whenever you hear, "Teach the reader and the reading," you know, or "Teach the writer and the writing," I think this is what you're talking about. You're teaching readers and writers while you're teaching reading and writing. And it's so much about shifting the responsibility and feeling the trust and the confidence in kids to not just teach them writing today, but to be a writer and a reader tomorrow. This has been great. I wanna keep talking with you, Terry, but I'm gonna pause the recording here and just want to say thanks for joining me. 

Terry Underwood (35:25): 

 Alright, Matt. Hey, take care of yourself. 

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Several esteemed colleagues and I engaged in a question-and-answer session with Maren Aukerman around her three articles for the Literacy Research Association:

* Part 1: The Science of Reading and the Media: Is Reporting Biased?

* Part 2: The Science of Reading and the Media: Does the Media Draw on High-Quality Reading Research?

* Part 3: The Science of Reading and the Media:  How Do Current Reporting Patterns Cause Damage?

Featured Guest Bio

Dr. Maren Aukerman is a Werklund Research Professor at the University of Calgary who focuses on literacy education and democratic citizenship. She studies educational ethics, how youth engage with information in the media, and the preparation of students for responsible citizenship and democratic dialogue, particularly in the context of literacy education. Previously, Maren taught in an elementary classroom and has a background in bilingual education.

Esteemed Colleagues Who Joined Us

* Debra Crouch

* Mary Howard

* Kim Marshall

* Hannah Schneewind

* Danny Stone

Key Questions + Time Stamps

* Are you receiving pushback on your articles? If so, what's been a main critique or two? (6:59)

* What other ways can we be open-minded about this topic and to help others be the same? (13:16)

* How do we stop that (SoR) movement, from an idea into our schools changing overnight? (21:03)

* Where is the role of engagement, and motivation, and attribution theory, all these other things that we know? (29:58)

* We want to promote all voices and appreciate the nuances, and a truly research-based view of learning to read, and teaching reading. Where can we find that? (41:45)

You are receiving the free version of this post. Full subscribers receive additional resources, including:

* Video recording of this conversation

* Full transcript of this conversation

* Professional learning toolkit & template used to organize this month’s study (which leaders can apply to their context)

* Ability to comment on discussion threads and in Chat

Become a full subscriber today to build your capacity as a literacy leader and engage more deeply in this community.

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When it comes to the science of reading, asking who is right or who is wrong seems...wrong.

A better question: "What do I believe, and how might I be wrong?"

This is a response four educators and I considered as we discussed Maren Aukerman's article, "The Science of Reading and the Media: Is Reporting Biased?" (Literacy Research Association, 2022). Journalists who offer "simple stories" about how kids become readers can evoke strong feelings about the issue. Emotions such as anger or frustration can help us focus our efforts on what we believe to be true. But they can also cloud our judgment and decrease our ability to think logically and reasonably.

Listen to our conversation. Take action and begin to engage in dialogue with others.

Special thanks to the following guests:

* Debra Crouch, co-author of Made for Learning (with Brian Cambourne)

* Jane Delcore, Director of Teaching and Learning, Howard Suamico School District (Wisconsin)

* Don Marlett, COO of Learning-Focused

* Hannah Schneewind, co-author of Trusting Readers (with Jen Scoggin)

Resources Referenced

* Discussion thread (including link to article)

* Video: Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: The Mindtrap of Simple Stories by Jennifer Garvey Berger

* Podcast: What Kids Offer to Use: A Conversation with Debra Crouch and Brian Cambourne, authors of Made for Learning

Thanks for listening! Future articles studies, including asynchronous chats and live conversations (Zoom), will be available for full subscribers. See upcoming texts below.

Join today to engage in these professional discussions and build your capacity as a literacy leader!

Take care,

Matt

P.S. If you cannot make a future Zoom discussion, the video will be recorded and posted for full subscribers. See below for this study’s video archive.

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This podcast episode is an audio recording from a recent conversation with Peter Afflerbach, author of Teaching Readers (Not Reading): Moving Beyond Skills and Strategies to Reader-Focused Instruction (Guilford, 2022).

Several community members were able to join us and ask questions of Peter. We discussed a variety of topics related to his book, including:

* Peter’s influences as a reader, teacher, and researcher

* Paying attention to and appreciating the different factors for teaching readers

* Beginning with the affective and conative resources when teaching readers

* The importance of administrative support for teachers to have time to collaborate

* What writers such as Emily Hanford and Natalie Wexler get wrong in their reporting

A closing post to this study will be shared soon; subscribe today to receive it and future posts.

Time stamps for prepared questions

* 0:30 - Peter’s bio

* 2:15 - Q1: “Which individuals influenced you as a researcher and as a teacher?”

* 7:00 - Q2: “From your book, what do you regard as the most important professional contribution of yours or colleagues to the field of literacy instruction?”

* 10:00 - Q3: “Have you always prioritized teaching readers over teaching reading? Or has this been a change for you over the years - an evolution?”

* 12:00 - Q4: “Any factors that a teacher might consider focusing on first when shifting toward teaching readers?”

* 16:20 - Q5: “What are some important trends occurring in education that we should be paying attention to?”

* 18:00 - Open Q & A with attendees begins.

Key quotes

“The best classrooms are the ones where we pay attention to individual differences.”

“Literacy is important but it is not the end point; it’s the tool that kids use.”

“Science revolves around demonstrable findings and replicating them.”

Recommended people and resources

* Paul Thomas (@plthomasEdD)

* Maren Aukerman, Literacy Research Association (https://literacyresearchassociation.org)

* Peter’s Recommendations for Revision of The Reading Framework for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

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 special podcast for the Teaching Readers (Not Reading) book study, I discussed the first five chapters with literacy educators Belinda Whyte and Sally Rowlands.

* Belinda is a resource teacher of literacy in Aotearoa, New Zealand. (twitter)

* Sally is a retired teacher and works at the Department of Education in Tasmania.

Three questions that guided our discussion:

* How have you successfully integrated the different sciences when teaching readers?

* ​What is it about the science of reading movement that has captured people's attention? What's "true" within SoR and its narrow definition?

* ​What have you found effective for discussing these topics with colleagues that leads to productive conversations?

Subscribe today to receive future posts for this study and other literacy leadership topics.

Memorable quotes:

“It would be a rare child that didn’t become a better reader without engagement or building identity.”

- Belinda

“It depends on what you think reading is.”

- Sally

“Be open about what you used to know, how you changed your mind, and what you believe now.”

- Matt

After reading the first five chapters of Teaching Readers (Not Reading), as well as thinking about our questions plus the recorded conversation, what has resonated with you so far?

From November 7 through December 16, we are reading Teaching Readers (Not Reading) by Peter Afflerbach (Guilford, 2022).

In this book study, you will develop a deeper understanding of the science(s) of reading and build greater confidence in conversing about literacy instruction with teachers and other colleagues.

You can purchase the book on the publisher's website, Amazon, or wherever it is sold.

To participate, watch this space for future responses to the book. Read along, leave a comment on a future thread, and respond to others’ comments when something resonates.

Here is the suggested schedule for reading together:

* November 7 - 11: Introduction, Chapters 1-3

* November 14 - 18: Chapters 4-5

* November 21 - 25: Chapter 6

* November 28 - December 2: Chapters 7-8

* December 5 - 9: Chapters 9-10

* December 12 - 16: Chapter 11, Conclusion

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 special episode/post, I was joined by Sandy Brumbaum, Reading Recovery teacher leader and consultant, and Denise Johnson, a literacy professor at William & Mary, to kick off the book study for Teaching Readers (Not Reading): Moving Beyond Skills and Strategies to Reader-Focused Instruction by Peter Afflerbach (Guilford, 2022).

In our conversation, we responded to and discussed three questions:

* What are your greatest concerns about current trends and programs with teaching readers and literacy instruction in general?

* Consider examples of effective reading instruction you've observed or participated in. What are the essential components of such instruction?

* We agree with Afflerbach that schools need to teach readers more than skills and strategies. But what about reading?

A key takeaway from our conversation is, just as we cannot separate the reader from reading instruction, one science of reading is dependent on its integration with another.

Ryanne Deschane, also a teacher of readers and was not able to join us virtually, shared the following written response:

Key components of effective literacy instruction include knowledgeable teachers who have a multitude of literacy resources, instructional strategies, and tools in their professional toolkit. These teachers can sit with a child, listen and engage immediately in responsive practices that address the specific learning needs of each child in their care. They honor each child in their unique learning needs and seek out resources and tools to support those needs.

“In the most successful classrooms, teachers have long understood that effective reading instruction must be partnered with student awareness, enthusiasm, and a belief in self.”

- Peter Afflerbach

From November 7 through December 16, I will be responding to Teaching Readers (Not Reading) by Peter Afflerbach (Guilford, 2022) and inviting readers to join me.

In this book study, you will develop a deeper understanding of the science(s) of reading and build greater confidence in conversing about literacy instruction with teachers and other colleagues.

To participate:

* Purchase the book on the publisher's website, Amazon, or wherever it is sold.

* Subscribe to this space (if you haven’t already) for future responses to the book.

* Become a regular and active reader, such as posting your thinking around the text or linking to a response you wrote elsewhere in the comments.

Here is the suggested schedule for (re)reading together:

* November 7 - 11: Introduction, Chapters 1-3

* November 14 - 18: Chapters 4-5

* November 21 - 25: Chapter 6

* November 28 - December 2: Chapters 7-8

* December 5 - 9: Chapters 9-10

* December 12 - 16: Chapter 11, Conclusion

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 recorded conversation with Regie Routman and esteemed colleagues, we discussed:

* Why trust is so important for schoolwide improvement

* Why it is critical that leaders know literacy

* How leaders can communicate feedback that is kind and useful

This also closes out the four-week email course on instructional walks.

Being a literacy leader has always been challenging. That’s why it’s important to come together as colleagues, to share, listen, and connect. We hope you find this discussion helpful in supporting your important work.

Recommended resources

* Invitations (book)

* Read, Write, Lead (book)

* Literacy Essentials (book)

* “Good is Good Enough” (podcast)

* Transforming Your Teaching (professional learning)

* Nurturing Writers through Poetry (video series)

Key insights from the conversation

“Start with wins.”

- Jamie Cicconetti, Lessons Learned

“The principal is the first teacher.”

- Jason Drysdale, @jason_drysdale

“To be an effective leader or teacher, live an interesting life.”

- Debbie Stewart, @DebbieAStewart

“It’s important to have a vision.”

- Helen Proulx, @HelenProulx2

“Progress moves at the speed of trust.”

- Regie Routman, @regieroutman

“Great to see this professional collaboration.”

- Gail Boushey, Teach Daily

New community for engaged readers

For engaged readers/subscribers of this newsletter, look for an email from me in the near future on a new community.

For example, in October I’ll be sharing more ideas and resources in this space for:

* structuring coaching and reflection in online and in-person spaces,

* applying key coaching strategies that support teachers’ thinking, and

* additional ways to be more productive and efficient within our limited time.

It’s a free, invitation-only space for leaders at every level who want to continue trying and applying literacy leadership practices with me to build a thriving school culture.

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

A couple of months ago, I was diagnosed with ADHD.

Having some time to reflect on this change, I wanted to share a little bit from my experience, including:

* How I was initially prompted to get an assessment,

* Why I waited until I was 45 to do this, and

* What I’ve learned so far.

This is not a literacy or leadership post. But I do see ADHD impacting many kids and adults, which has an impact downstream on both areas.

You can read what I shared in this audio on my website.

Unrelated, you’ll start seeing some emails this week to help get you ready for the upcoming email course on getting into classrooms. It begins September 4th.

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