Literacy Leaders NH has a new website!

Most people who know me personally, know that I love music.  I love all kinds of music, but I particularly love musical theater.  There’s something about the ability to tell a story with music that is just spellbinding to me.  Two of my favorite song writers are Lin-Manuel Miranda and Steven Sondheim.  This past month I have been reminded of an interview I saw with both of them around the time that Miranda’s groundbreaking musical, Hamilton, was just making its debut on the Broadway stage.  Lin expressed a time in the creation of Hamilton when he felt that he was just drowning in research.  It almost made it impossible for him to sort through and move forward.  Sondheim and one of his collaborators, John Weidman, who wrote Assassins with him,  gave Miranda some wise advice.  At some point, they said, you had to just “just write the parts you think are a musical.” Simply put, sometimes you just need to move forward to get the work done.

This past month, as I’ve embarked on my sabbatical project, this advice has come to mind several times.  Like many of you, I often bookmark, save, and file new research about how our youngest students learn to read and write.  Maybe it’s the headline that grabs my eye.  Or maybe it’s the names involved in a research study that pique my interest.  But in the busy day to day life of an educator, there’s usually little time to read all of this information and so it starts to simply pile up on a wish list of professional development.  One of the great gifts of a sabbatical is the opportunity to go through all of these saved resources, which is exactly what I’ve been doing this month.

As I slowly made my way through the research studies, literacy symposiums, blogs, and articles I asked myself questions.  First, I thought about how relevant and reliable the information provided would be to educators on the front lines.  It was important to me to make information that’s relevant to everyday teaching available to teachers in an easily accessible way.  Second, I considered the sources.  Many programs, companies, and websites have jumped on the bandwagon and stamped “research based” or “evidence based” on their literacy curricula, but it’s important to carefully evaluate such claims.  Episode 125 of the podcast Melissa & Lori Love Literacy helped me with this process as they interviewed Andrew Watson, an educator and author, who spoke about how to best discern and distill this information.  He suggested using these three questions to help unpack the legitimacy of research and information:

• Determine if you trust the speaker or person presenting the information.  Ask yourself what is the best research you know of that supports that idea?

• Review the study or material.  Ask yourself if it is a good proxy for your students or scenario?

• Look for more research and consider which way does most of the research point you in?

And finally, I feel that it’s very important for information to be provided in a helpful and nonjudgmental way.  Reigniting the Reading Wars will not help teachers or students.  I look at this work for both myself and other educators as a collaborative process where we should be supporting and challenging each other, not vilifying each other.  Often the first way to achieve that is to provide the “why”, the research behind why we need to make instructional changes, to move forward together. This is why I consistently ground my own work in the quote “when you know better, you do better.”

All this leads me to share with you the website I have created to try to consolidate and centralize all of this information.  Literacy Leaders NH now has an official website where you can go to find Science of Reading research (the why) and information on best practices (the how).  This site is for all NH educators and my hope is that it will continue to grow and develop over the course of the year.  For now, it is a compilation of all that information I’ve been drowning in for the last year.  Much like Lin-Manuel Miranda had to “just write the parts he thought were a musical,” I wanted to just get the information I thought was most important for educators out to you as quickly as I could.  I hope you find it a valuable resource for your own teaching and for the educational systems you work within.  I look forward to hearing from you about what pieces work for you and what you’d like to see more of.  Together, as collaborative educators, we can better our own practices while supporting each other to help more of NH’s students achieve the literacy levels they deserve for a productive and successful life.

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The Road to Change

Do you have early memories of reading?  Are they positive or negative?  Do you remember learning to read in school?  What do you perceive your experience to be as an adult reader?

The answer to these questions can have a large impact on your thoughts and feelings about how to best teach reading.  Despite not being based in any scientific research or longitudinal studies, they are your own personal experience and can lead to confirmation bias as you encounter new information.  I know that this was certainly true of my own experience.  

Reading came rather naturally to me.  I was lucky to be raised in a house surrounded by books, with a family who encouraged reading and read to me regularly.  Some of my fondest childhood memories are of weekly visits to the library.  And after I took to reading rather quickly in the elementary grades, I developed a love for books and found a favorite series in the Ramona Quimby books by Beverly Cleary.

As I grew, I knew that my love for books and writing were going to be part of my life and career.  I started my undergraduate degree as an English major thinking that perhaps I would teach high school English.  I love The Catcher in the Rye and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and could see myself sharing these novels with teenagers in the classroom.  But by the time I was nearing the end of my sophomore year, my interest had shifted to how kids learned to read and what language development in general entailed.

This was the late 1990s and it was only during my graduate work in 2000-2001 that the National Reading Panel report was published.  As a result, a lot of my coursework focused on surrounding children with high quality literature and helping them to develop a love of reading.  Given my own experience with learning to read as a child, this made perfect sense to me and connected with my own experience learning to read.  I went into teaching wanting to give all my students the wonderful and magical experience with books that I had.

It was not until around 2016 that I really started to wonder about some of my long held beliefs about teaching reading.  At the time I had been working as a Literacy Interventionist for about six years and was deeply rooted in the balanced reading method of teaching.  But it was also around this time that my school implemented Fundations and my own son started to show some struggles with learning to read in his early elementary years.  A combination of professional development around Fundations and experience as a parent led me down the road of wanting to learn more about what happens in the brain when we learn to read and how we can better help struggling students.

One of the first things I learned to both make me start to question my own practice and become more interested in diving deeper into the research, was that spoken language comes naturally.  Our brains are hardwired to pick up the languages that are spoken around us.  However, learning to read is not a natural process for the brain and must be taught.  From this comes the idea of a phoneme to grapheme approach to teaching best explained by Dr. Loisa Moats in her book, Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers. 
The amount of direct instruction required to learn can vary from student to student, but it is not something that happens naturally.  Now, it is true that some students will learn to read easily no matter what method is used for instruction. However, many will not.  Dr. Reid Lyon found in his research that:

• 5% of students learn to read effortlessly (these are often the students who come to us already reading when they start kindergarten)

• 20%-30% learn to read easily with most methods 

• 30%-50% find learning to read difficult and need systematic explicit instruction

• 5%-20% find reading one of the most difficult tasks that they will have to master throughout their schooling (often students with dyslexia)

Take just a minute to soak this in.  Where would you have landed as a student?  My guess is that I would have been in one of those first two categories.  But look at the potential number of students that fall into the second two categories.  I wholeheartedly believe that learning to reading is civil right (for more on this, check out the Right to Read project), and knew that I needed to start doing the hard work of reflecting on my own teaching and educating myself about how I could better meet both the needs of my intervention students and the needs of all students in our tier 1 setting. 

Sometimes this reflection was difficult.  It could lead to feelings of guilt for past students that I realized I could have taught more effectively.  Or sometimes I encountered new research that was difficult for me to accept as it seemed unfamiliar to my personal recollections of learning to read.  But  time and time again I came back to the words of the late and wise Dr. Maya Angelou who famously said, "Do the best you can until you know better.  Then when you know better, do better."  This quote now guides my professional practice and has led me down many varied paths in the past six years to grow my own professional knowledge and share that knowledge with others.  This journey is what ultimately led me to apply for the 2022-23 Christa McAuliffe sabbatical with a project based around the Science of Reading (SOR) and how to support NH teachers with learning about the SOR and putting this research into practice.

So, I invite you to subscribe to my blog (leave your email in the subscribe box below) and follow me on the journey this year.  I hope to write about the research, its implications for our instructions, my time in NH schools, and also my experiences and wonders as the year unfolds.  Ultimately, I hope this and my social media feeds can be a place for NH teachers to connect, learn, and support one another.  We have all been "doing the best we can until we know better" and now it's time for us to "know better and do better."