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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