intro

Lori and Melissa, literacy educators, discuss their excitement about learning about literacy. They are joined by Meredith Levin and Sue Pimentel, who wrote a report on literacy standards. Sue led the development of the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy. Meredith has experience teaching in various settings and focuses on promoting equity and understanding the true meaning of the standards. They emphasize the importance of integrating reading, writing, speaking, and listening to create proficient readers. They also stress the need for a dynamic and supportive classroom where students can engage with each other and deepen their understanding. Welcome teacher friends. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two literacy educators in Baltimore. We want the best for all kids and we know you do too. Our district recently adopted a new literacy curriculum which meant a lot of change for everyone. Lori and I can't wait to keep learning about literacy with you today. Hi everyone, welcome to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. We are super pumped for today's guests. They are true literacy icons and we are so excited to talk to them. Melissa, how pumped up are you? Yeah, so excited. So we, I guess it was David's leave-in a while ago. I don't remember when, but a while ago. Before COVID. Way before COVID. Somewhere in the middle of that podcast, I had asked him a question about assessment and we were talking about standards and he was like, you guys need to read this text at the center report. And you know, eventually I finally did and then I became really obsessed with it and shared it with everybody that I possibly can. So I'm really excited to talk to Meredith Levin and Sue Pimentel today who wrote that about what's in there and a bunch of other stuff. So I'm really excited. So welcome to the podcast, gals. How are you doing? Good. Every day, you know, every day is like, whoa. Because I'm working with my grandkids on their work. So my heart goes out to all the teachers and the students and the parents because it's just a ton. And I don't see it stopping anytime soon. But other than that, it is a beautiful day here in New Hampshire. The sun is up and out and it's cool and crisp. So I can't complain. Awesome. Sue, can you tell a little bit about yourself? Sure. Well, I think probably for this conversation, one of the most important things to say is that I led the development of the Common Core State Standards in English Language, Arts and Literacy. Since that time, I've been with Student Achievement Partners. I'm called a founding partner. So I worked very closely with Meredith and David and the whole team on figuring out ways to implement the standards in ways that both the teachers can do and that teachers can learn what they need to learn. My prior life before that was working all over the country in districts that were trying to do better by their kids. So I understand the struggles and the challenges that districts face and that students face. So that's kind of me. That's amazing. Thank you for that. Meredith, welcome to the podcast. We want you to introduce yourself as well. But first, tell us a little bit about how you're hanging in COVID quarantine. Oh, man. I can't believe it's only mid-September. It feels like a universal time has gone by. Similarly, I was in the classroom until 10 years ago, which seems like an eternity. It's too long. My hats are off to everybody who's trying to practice on any level. Everybody's a teacher now. Parents, people who are helping support parents so they can go work, teachers, school leaders. The whole system is so challenging now. It's always challenging. It's one of the hardest jobs, but now, my goodness. So I agree with Sue. Hats off to everybody who has the energy to listen to this after they have wrestled with their educational challenges for the day or week or eternity, as it may be. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you all know we all are working with kids right now in some way, shape, or form, like grandkids or kids of our own, and it definitely is. I think it's almost confusing, challenging and confusing. What app do we use here? What website do we use there? So at the base of it all, though, if you have a great curriculum and that has high-quality text, that is going to really be helpful in this virtual space. Melissa, I'm going to let you ask the gals about the report that they wrote, which is incredible. I want Meredith to tell a little bit about herself, too. Oh, sorry, Meredith. I cut you off. I wanted to get to the report so badly. I'm so sorry. As do I. So I have taught in all kinds of different settings. I taught 19 years in East Harlem and Harlem and had the privilege of starting a school with David where we learned a lot of what we know about reading. Returned back to Vermont. My mom was getting extremely old. Luckily, she lived to be more than extremely old, so I got to hang out with her a lot at the end of her life. But I then taught in career and tech ed centers in Vermont. So I think of myself as a middle school teacher. I did for 12 years, but actually 13 other years were either high school or elementary. So I've run the spectrum. I feel like I inhabit teachers' point of view and then had the privilege of helping support most of the reading standards for the Common Core. And ever since then, I've been obsessed with what do they really mean? What are they at their core? How can they be used to promote equity and come alive for all students so they can realize the promise of them? And I guess I'm a spirit of the law kind of person always, and I worry about sometimes the letter of the law, misinterpretations of the standards where they're used more as a hammer than an inspiration or as a year-end target. So I'm very excited to be here and have the chance to talk with two of my social media heroes, heroines, you, Sue. So thanks for the opportunity. Yeah. Sue, when you were a teacher, what did you teach? I taught the little guys. Okay, okay. Yeah, so the little ones. So preschool all the way up to about grade 2, grade 3, decades ago. Although I want to say this, though, because I still know the names, you know, the last class I taught. I know what they did. I knew how they grew and things they said. I mean, that is the amazing thing about being a teacher is how kids get into you. And when you go home at the end of the day, they're like all like in good ways, all in your head and in your heart. Yeah. It's amazing because that was like, I mean, I'm talking like decades, decades ago. They stick with you, right? In really good ways. And sometimes when I was teaching tiring ways because I was worried about one or I didn't know or what was I going to do here or there. But mostly watching them be so hungry about learning, like learning about the world and how it worked and so excited. It's like you couldn't disappoint them with any of that. They just were, you know, like, like sponges wanting to know and unafraid to want to know. Yeah, I think you two make a great pair because you have the early childhood experience and Meredith, you kind of run the gamut. So you can see where they go once they leave that early childhood space and how they grow into mature readers and just bigger people who can think and critically think differently. So, Meredith, I think you actually already started where I wanted to start the conversation, which is around standards. So, you know, the Common Core standards, they've been around a while now, but, you know, they I think what we're going to talk about with you all, like who has been in it from the development of them. You know, what is what what are they really about, especially the ELA standards? And how are they how do you see them kind of playing out, which is sometimes maybe different than what was intended behind them? So that's where I wanted to start the conversation. Well, you want me to start a little bit and then say, so one of the big challenges when you're writing standards and here we were writing standards for English language arts literacy is that you you start to pull things apart. You pull reading apart into some component parts, you pull writing apart, you pull speaking and listening apart and language. So, and I know all teachers know you never just teach reading as a silo, right? You know, you can't teach reading. I mean, either students have to talk to you about them or talk to each other about them, or they have to write about them. And so there is this place where what happens with standards is that they get so pulled apart and teachers think or or administrators, I dare say, think you got to like, check things off. The whole point of the of the standards is to knit them back together and and and to make proficient readers. And and and if I could say for teachers out there or for administrators who may be listening to really pay attention to the shifts, because it's the shifts. It doesn't don't pay attention to the standards. There's some things to pay attention because there's a progression that happens. But it really is about the text students are reading. And then are they talking about and are they are they able to pull evidence out and are they able to learn and understand what it is they're reading? Because that's that's how their brains go. And that's what's exciting to them. So, I think there's this place where we got into sort of a checklist mentality. Maybe that came from how interims report out. I don't know. But that isn't what makes good instruction. And it isn't what is interesting to students. And when we get later on, I want Meredith to be able to speak to this one that we get later on. If I can do the standards over again, what I might do with the graphic. I want the graphic example, Meredith. And for me, I think I'm obsessed with the the interweave. I always think of English language arts and then the name, you know, the name that the standards assign to those annual year-end targets, which is what standards name. They don't name. They're not an action plan. They're end-of-year targets at every grade. So, the action plan for me is a constant interweaving of speaking, listening, reading, and writing in service of deepening understanding, creating passion, understanding who you are as a human, understanding your place in the world, understanding the world, understanding how to change the world, which we badly need right now. Brains who are confident they can grow up and do better than what we're giving them. So, it's that interweave. A dynamic classroom and a supportive classroom has students talking to each other, sharing revelations, pushing each other's thinking. And I think what I would love for people to understand is how human the standards are when they're taken as a whole that way. We all process orally. We rehearse. When we have something, a hard conversation to have, we tend to go to a trusted source and say, can you hear me before I do this, or will you read this before I send it to make sure it's not misunderstood and that I'm clear? That's what our classroom should be recreating is the actually deeply human elements of using language. Those things will help students who come in from another language base who are mastering English, too. They can understand and process with their peers and get better. And then those things carry into reading and, obviously, written expression. So, for me, it's about creating the holistic promise of using language and creating people who can use it nimbly in all its different facets. I'm not sure who's right about the teasing apart because they have to be codified, and then I get the pressure on assessment creators to itemize them. But that isn't the way they're taught. That isn't the way they're learned, and that's not the way they're exercised. Could I also just add, I think sometimes for not necessarily teachers, but for administrators and others, think that the ELA standards should be like the math standards, which is like this. You build on this, and then you learn this, and you learn how to add, and then you learn how to subtract, and then you learn how to multiply, and then you learn. That is not this. If you look at the standards, every year you're reading more complex text. You are drawing evidence. You're getting more sophisticated in your ability to draw evidence from text. You're learning more so you can read more and do more. If you look at the standards, I think one thing we did right in the standards is if you look at the standards, text appears in the reading standards. It also appears in the writing standards. You're writing about what you read. It also appears in the speaking and listening standards, which is so you're talking about just what Merith was saying. You're talking about what you're reading. Vocabulary, the importance of learning vocabulary, understanding vocabulary, which you get most from reading a volume of reading certainly. But that appears in all of the domains. And pulling evidence from text, being able to, as Merith has said so beautifully, being able to share what you're learning with one another. Again, yes, it's in the reading standards. It appears in the writing standards. It appears in the speaking and listening standards. So it's really important then to think about these coming together as sort of an interweave in the classroom. Yeah, that's a great point about the ELA versus the math standards. I think it's kind of two things that are important with misconceptions. One is that ELA and math are different. And folks try to lump them together like, oh, well, we'll just reteach the skill of finding the central message because then they'll be able to do that. Just like you do in math when you reteach the skill of, whatever, repeated addition. But then ELA is just different in and of itself because it's so interwoven. And I think that we forget that we can't isolate like we can from math. So, like, they're different and we can't isolate. So, like, it's kind of like a dual understanding. Am I hearing you all correctly? Absolutely. And Merith, you should speak to foundational skills because the one exception is, of course, foundational skills. Merith? Yeah, so foundational skills are somewhat akin in the Common Core or in probably any set of standards because the skills are named the way the math standards name the skills. And, therefore, the progression is actually, you know, it does staircase itself. So, foundational skills also name what the ingredients are of learning how to decode and then how to get to automatic word recognition and then how to do all that fluently. And those need to be mastered at some point, you know, ideally early on so that the years and years and years of school students can access text for themselves. But I think what's also important is, yes, they work that way, but they work in concert with the reading comprehension side, the ELA side of the standards. But even in kindergarten, it's mostly through oral comprehension, AUR, AL, comprehension to read aloud. Students get to grapple with complex ideas. And read aloud is another underutilized weapon or tool, better, if students aren't reading at grade level for whatever reason. There's been a mismatch of instruction to their needs. So, the ELA standards continue. They are always rich and complex. They are always at interplay. But foundational skills need to be solidified at some point, and they are much more linear. And it's never too late to do that work. It gets harder as students get older. But you don't withhold the good, rich stuff from older students or 5-year-olds. They get it through their ears, if no other means, or through that rich discussion and discourse. Because learning to read is a completely different part of the brain that's been co-opted far back in our human history. To decode and recognize an alphabetic system, that doesn't mean your brain can't think about really interesting ideas and contribute to rich discussions and solve problems and do everything else that a thinking brain can do, even if you're slower at decoding. Yeah, that oral comprehension. When does it level out? I'll take a guess. I have this image that is in my brain that I'm not sure that I can find ever again. But I saw it one time, and it was this beautiful progression. I think it's like 12 years old, like 6th grade-ish. Yeah, I think this is where I would run and get David to walk in the research. But I've read 5th grade, but I've also read during middle school is when the trajectories cross. Yeah. The reason it's probably a little slippery is because there's not one human locked in. Every brain is different, so I bet you it happens at different times for different students. Yeah. But access to text is paramount at all points. That is a right to have access to rich, complex text. Yeah. And I think it's not making this standard that wouldn't have even been appropriate, but I think it's not a do-over. But certainly text at the center is so – it's unnamed. But I think we really need – we're at a moment now, long overdue, of reckoning. Whose story is being told? Whose history are we exploring? So that text also has to be broadened out and tell everybody's story and everybody's history and teach and reach people and reflect people's reality that we have constantly underrepresented in our schools. So I think right now Sue and I have been spending a ton of time, hopefully everybody is, thinking about how to expand our definition of what rich and complex text is. Yeah. And I want to call out Standard 10, which is that access to complex text. Really important standard. Yes. Yes. But I think it's kind of like one where if you've read – I mean, you've been reading the standards for a really long time, you're like, oh, yeah, Standard 10. But, like, that's, like, the really important one. Yeah. And that's what I wanted to say, too, in any sort of a rewrite. I would pull Standard 10 right up and write with standard number one, which is pulling evidence from text. And what kind of text are you reading, this content-rich complex text? And, you know, I think, you know, it's interesting you bring this up because so much, way too much of what we've done in this country for decades and still doing, even with that complex text sitting there, is put students in level text and put students in below grade level text. And there are some reasons for it. You know, it kind of feels like, okay, it's your right level, so of course we wouldn't do more. But it also feels incredibly un-American to me. Can I say that? Because what we decided early on, and then we keep – we don't let you – we don't get out of it. Like, some kids are strong readers, you know, really easy, comes easy. Some kids – but many of us had to build our reading muscles, like, for a while before we could catch up. Well, the way you build your reading muscles is to be faced with content-rich complex text, I mean, grade appropriate, which is defined, and then get some support with it. And the fact is that there is study after study after study after study that shows that even students who are still building their muscles on reading – and so you might give them – you might assign them a below grade level reading level if they were just reading on their own. I want to say a little more about that in a second, too, because it drives me wild. But it says in those studies that when students are given content-rich complex text, their vocabulary grows, their knowledge grows, their fluency grows. If you hear about assessments, they do better on assessments. That's with students who actually came in, quote, unquote, below level. And so what are we doing? What are we doing to them? Because the fact of the matter is, if you look at what students get when they read these below level text, and they're getting that not just in one week, but week after week after week after week after week. What happens to them? You can't expect them to learn more than we're teaching them and allowing them to do. So I feel like this has just gotten stuck here in this country, and I don't know how to unstick people. And I would say here in Baltimore, we adopted Common Core right away. We were doing PDs. We created our own curriculum. Now we adopted it in Wisdom. I feel like we've taken really good steps in the right direction. And even when I was in the classroom and even now, I still see that it's still so driven by this standards and standards mastery, and the text still gets lost, even when we have good text. Yeah, mastery and isolation, yeah. Yeah, it's like the teachers are planning around the standards, and the objective is written for the day around the standards, and the check for assessment each day is around the standard, and the assessments at the end are for the standard, and the whole text just gets lost in that. I pulled out a quote from you guys that said, The standards themselves are not the goal of daily instruction. Understanding the text encountered and being able to express that understanding is. And that just really spoke to me, because I feel like that's what I feel like is still getting lost, even when we take all these steps in the right direction. Yeah. Well, Melissa, and I think, too, what I want to say, just for listeners to kind of keep in mind, too, is that Baltimore is in a second year of a high-quality curriculum adoption, where they are using, you know, complex text at the center of their teaching. And that, like, mindset shift is still, we're still working on it, right? And so it takes a lot of time and effort and energy to undo what decades have done. Right. And also, like. Because they'll see, Lori, where they'll say, okay, well, they can't read this text easily, so I'll find an easier one, and as long as they can master the standard with this easier text, then we can move on and we're good to go. Yeah. And that's what worries me. And I'm not saying every teacher does that. I'm not blaming teachers, but I think it is something we still see. Yeah. Right. And the fact is that, you know, both of you were raising, and Meredith said this as well around the text, is that we don't read a text to check on our skills and our comprehension strategies. Right. Like, boring. That's not useful, right? We read. And this is one thing that I think got lost in sort of decades of schooling, too, is that we thought that it was all about the skill or it was all about the comprehension strategy, which I know has research behind it, but not like ad nauseum. The point of reading is to learn from it. And then when you learn from one text on a particular topic, then you can read another one and you add to your knowledge on that. That's why we read. And, by the way, that is what is interesting to students is to hear what an author is saying. You might agree, you might disagree, you might be learning more. It might conflict with what you heard before or knew before, but that's what's interesting. It's not at the end. And I just want to say for everybody out there that reading Standards 2 through 9 are not meant to be taken in isolation. We never meant that. Remember I said I would start with Standard 1 and Standard 10? That 2 through 9 are ways to unpack a text. You don't use all of them all the time. It depends on if structure is really apparent in the text or if there's an argument that's going on, that the author is making a claim. That's when you pull them in. So it's really thinking about how to use those strategically, not to learn how to do the skill, but to learn how to unpack the knowledge that's in the text. Yeah. Meredith, will you share your – will you discuss your graphics since I know nobody can see you right now? So one of my favorite slides, because it's the first one I successfully animated years ago, not being a PowerPoint aficionado, but anyway, but my vision of the standards is a ladder. So the poles, the strength of it comes from one – on one pole, Standard 1, the evidence standard, and then the other pole is Standard 10, the text complexity standard. Those two rise up in complexity from K to 12. They are clearly yet more sophisticated. What you read gets more challenging and rich and complex, and then what you're expected to do with it, the evidence you're supposed to extract and then deploy in speaking or writing gets more demanding. 2 through 9 are the rungs. They walk – you stand on them while you're accessing evidence in text. They serve those master poles, and they do increase in complexity, and when you read them, they're a little bit more demanding. But essentially, Standard 4 is always dealing with vocabulary. That vocabulary is getting more challenging and interesting because of the text complexity, not because Standard 4 in fourth grade is radically different than Standard 4 in eighth. There is nuance, yes, but it's the complexity of the text that leads the demand. So if you don't concentrate on the text itself and the complexity it's offering you to read and understand and learn from, you are – the whole ladder collapses because you're trying to make the rungs into the whole point, and they're just where you stand for the moment so you can climb higher on text complexity. So I do like that ladder metaphor. Yeah, sometimes this whole conversation reminds me of my favorite Billy Collins poem. I think it may be called How to Read a Poem, but he talks about tying what we do to poems. We tie them to chairs and beat them to make them tell us, reveal their meaning, instead of reading them and living within them, and it's a gorgeous little poem. But it feels like we do that to text. We beat them to make them reveal their structure, whether their structure is a big deal or not. And we get kids stuck on structure because it's structure week or authors' purpose week. And instead of saying, we're reading an editorial, it really matters what the author's purpose is, so let's look at that. The text demands what attention we pay to it, not the inverse. We can't beat the text to make it squish into whatever standard we want to be talking about. And that's just – it is horribly deadly. It's really – it's no wonder to me that most children, you know, most students in America don't like to read. Either they haven't been taught because they've been stuck in level text, or they've been taught with complex text, but they've been, like, just asked to think about main purpose or making a prediction instead of understanding the actual – what that writer, you know, left his heart on the page to reveal to us. We don't get to – we don't show that to kids enough. So let them play with it and revel in it. Yeah. I remember when I taught second grade pre-common core, I remember distinctly, like you said, that week was cause and effect week, and I had it up on my bulletin board. And, you know, as we were looking for cause and effect in all the texts that we were reading, I remember planning for the next day and thinking, I've run out of texts that show cause and effect. What the hell am I going to do now? And I couldn't, like – I was, like, oh, my God. So I'm, like, frantically searching for – and then I was, like, this is so stupid. I'm just going to teach them, like, good text. And, I mean, but I didn't have a high-quality curriculum, you know, and I was doing it on my own. But I remember that moment standing there being, like, I've run out of texts. And it was, like, my second-year teaching, right? Like, what – and I'm supposed to be teaching cause and effect, and now I don't have any more cause and effect texts because we've read them all. What do I do? Like, that's not the practice we want. No, it's not. I'm wondering, you guys talked in the report about teachers spending a majority of their time planning with the text. I thought that was interesting. And I think, you know, if there is no curriculum, I think, like, Lori, right, you'd have to spend time with your text to see, is this cause and effect or is it not? And I'm wondering if that also applies if we have, like we do, have Witten Wisdom, a high-quality curriculum, if you still would recommend the majority of the teachers planning time being spent with the text and how that would look. Absolutely. And one of the beauties of a Witten Wisdom or other knowledge-based curriculum, I would say, is that you really – there is an attention to the text. And if you don't have that, as you were saying, Lori, or if you're in one that sort of moves through the standards and says today you're doing structure and cause and effect or this week and next week you're doing all this, perfect, is that you don't – what happens is that you stop focusing on the text itself and what it means and what it will mean to the students who will be reading it, what they will be learning, what they will learn from the text. So there is no doubt that also, you know, and I'm not sure about this, but if you have Witten Wisdom and you might be able to tell me this, Meredith, but, you know, you have these rich texts and they talk about – they show you what to focus on, but then as the teacher in the classroom, it's right there with your students, right? So it depends on, like, what are your students' reactions to this? What are your students' questions about this? What do I want to ask more about? Because either it's really interesting to my students or it's a place where they're grappling, and they're not quite sure they get it or that. So really – and being able – I think one thing that we can do for students is when we revel in the text, when we model – and I think there's actually research about this, Meredith. When we model that, when we're excited about reading this text, when we really know the text, then it models that for students about there's something here that you're going to really – in one way or another – enjoy. You're going to enjoy the challenge of it or you're going to enjoy the ideas in it. There's something here for you because there was something here for me in it. So, you know, the one good thing about the – like a wit and wisdom is that it helps to unpack what's in the text for the teacher. He doesn't have to do it all by himself or herself, which is a tall task, but still to really read it and understand it so that you can – when you're then faced with your students, you can get what they're getting. Yeah, I – more pragmatically, wit and wisdom does a lot of the thinking about those key ideas and offers up support questions and discussion points for a teacher. But some – I don't know if wit and wisdom's great minds calls it intellectual preparation. I know match education has a – in their preplanning it's called intellectual preparation and some of the higher quality, you know, evidence-based curricula that promote knowledge building do. It's just like you have to think about this yourself because the access – so there's a flip here too. If we're not leveling text, we still need to give all our students access, and our students are uneven in how confident they are as readers and how firm their foundational skills is, et cetera. So the task – the other aspect of intellectual preparation and reading and studying a text is to figure out how, as the instructor, knowing your students, you are going to provide access to that text. You're not going to go abandon it and run get a simpler – you know, go somewhere and get a simpler version of that same thing so your students can, like, lose all the syntax and all the vitality of that text. You're going to bring them to that text, but it's your job to make sure they do have access. And to me, that often – again, the hint to do that is through discussion, through reading and through elevating students doing the work of talking and listening to one another, you know, and learning from one another. I think that's another one of our mantras at Student Achievement Partners is that question of who's doing the work. Is the teacher working harder than her students? That's a problem. Teachers are supposed to be going home really tired, brain tired, at the end of who's whom by the end of the day. The teachers, you know, shouldn't be leaving it all on the floor, and the students are sitting there half dead because of boredom and lack of exertion. Can I also just say one thing? Because the flip side of, like, a Witten Wisdom or L Education or some of these others is a level text system where you've got your students reading all – you've got a class of 30 kids, and they could be reading 30 different books. I mean, maybe not that much. Maybe it's 15, maybe it's 10. But imagine if you do not – you've not read those texts. Because that's a lot. That's, like, a lot of text to read. And then you want to have a conversation with students about that text, even if it's in a small group or a small reading group. Well, my goodness. Like, what – you don't know anything about the text. Then you ask these sort of generic, what did you think, what's the – you have no idea about what's the – So, I mean, so the preparation, when you're not dealing with one or the other one that sort of center around an anchor text and then have other texts around, it's like the load that teachers have to carry there is immense. And I fear most don't have time to do it. Yeah. That's exactly – I had jotted down while Meredith was talking that very similar along those lines of what you just shared. But I was thinking, like, this is really the first time – at least, you know, I've been in education for 17 years. This is the first time that I've been here, and teachers are being asked to do so much preparation work beforehand that's really just intellectual, challenging, different work than what we've known before. And then coming into the classroom and saying, okay, now I'm going to let the students do the work in this space, right, because I've prepared. I know the stuff so deeply. But it's so different than that level text model because when you did the level text, you really were becoming an expert on the strategy, which I still don't know what that means, and I'll be honest about that. Like, I don't know what it means to be an expert on cause and effect. Nor do I. I was with my kids who were reading 20 different books, right? And, you know, I will say I've done guided reading. I didn't ask the best questions. I could only prepare so much because I had 10 different things going on. So this is the first time, I think, in education where we're asking teachers to do really different, more intellectual, harder work that they most likely were not prepared for at the collegiate level and most likely continue to not be prepared for. I mean, I've got my master's, like probably some of you listening, because I know we're all required to do so within a certain number of years. And then, you know, I got my admin one when Presley was three. So that was five years ago. And there was no, you know, mention of high-quality instructional materials in my leadership course. So we are asking people to do something just completely like, hey, this is new. This is the right thing to do. But you've probably never heard of it before. You know, that may not be as well. It is hard work, but, yeah, it is hard work, but it's also really, I mean, it is what a lot of teachers went into teaching. You know, they love literature. They love reading. They love thinking about books. So it does invite that again. I think the other crazy irony here is that this approach, the intellectual preparation and then turning it over to your students, so it's truly a student-centered and student-driven learning with teachers facilitating, is actually the goal and dream of a Reader's Workshop approach, right, putting students at the center and teachers being the coach, the guide. This actually holds the promise of that. I know they must exist. They just must with teachers tooling themselves to do so, because I'm also Reader's and Writers' Workshop trained, and I have as much energy as anybody I've almost ever met. And I could not, at least Harlem, with 70 students a day, I could not pull it off. You know, having 70 different personal biographies of, you know, whoever they were writing about, I could not do enough mini lessons. I was running as hard as I could. So I never – it wasn't ever a unified, rich, student-driven classroom. It was always me staggering home at the end of the night trying to tear my hair out. But this actually holds the promise of text, centering text, and then helping the students access that text is kind of the promise of truly workshopping a text together, which was the sort of goal, you know, the love of literature, love of learning, love of reading goal behind the workshop approach. But it's just – it hasn't been successfully actualized, and it also defaulted to standards and teaching skills in a really pernicious way, I feel like. So, yeah, we all have to unlearn it, and hardly anybody is helping show us the way. It's all a lot of people doing a lot of self-study, and that's why I really appreciate chances like this where you all are talking about this week after week after week. It's hard. It's hard work. Yeah, it's all right. I didn't mean to interrupt you. So, and Mary talked a lot about this, about how learning is social. I mean, it's one of the hard things now, this online virtual learning thing where kids are so siloed. But there's this place where I've heard teachers talk about, okay, I'm just going to try this. I'm just like going to – like I'm not going to – I'm going to leave the level text thing behind, and I'm just going to teach an anchor text. And realizing that all students in the class, whether they were the strongest readers or, you know, they're still building their muscles and, you know, that assignment of a level reader thing sort of hangs, they all had something to share. They all helped one another with their perspectives, which was interesting for teachers to see that it wasn't just based on what we would call, you know, a student's reading ability. And I think that's so important, too, as we think about when we get kids into twos and threes, they don't get the sense of the class and the richness of what those discussions can be because they aren't hearing from their peers. That might come out of text completely differently than another student. So, I think that's another thing that gets lost when we start to section kids off the way we do. That's a really good point. So, I want to jump into a little deeper into something we brought up a couple times, but around assessment. So, another, you know, habit or not habit, but things we learned in grad school, things that are good strategies is data-driven instruction. And I remember my first year of teaching where, you know, I had to track who mastered which standard. And from the first year, it was like, this doesn't feel right. Like, I don't know that they've mastered, like, how do you master some of these things? It didn't seem right. It's like, I don't know. But that's what we were doing, and I think we're still doing. So, just wanted to get, you know, you guys talked about, you know, isolating the standards and all of this really rich, like, discussion-based and hearing from students. But how do we marry that with the push for data-driven instruction that often falls into isolating standards and assessing them and maybe re-teaching them? And isolation. We have to stop that. Stop it. I understand the desire to and the need for teachers to check and have a good understanding about where their students are or are not. It's complicated in reading because when a student takes a test and they answer a question, there's a hundred reasons why they might be getting it wrong, or maybe not that many, but at least about 20. Their fluency with this particular topic is not good, so that's happening. The vocabulary then, they're having a problem with, they've never read about this stuff. There's so many different things. Probably the last thing it is is because they didn't know how to identify the structure or they didn't know how to identify the author's purpose. That's likely not happening because when you're reading the text, all of this stuff is coming together. I can understand, you know, if there are such things, and maybe they're getting to be built here. I know Louisiana has done a little bit of this, where you actually have an interim that matches the curriculum. So what you've actually been studying and what you've been learning and what you've been reading about actually then gets reflected on whatever test there is. But we are way behind. Way behind in our assessments. We're still at that, you know, this is an item that tests central idea. Did you get it right? Did you get it wrong? How did you do it? I do think there is new conversations coming up about, one, checking the student's fluency to begin with on this grade-level text and seeing if fluency is an issue or if there's some other foundational skill issue going on for the student if you find fluency is not good. And then thinking about ways to bundle the standards. You know, we think about the qualitative characteristics of text, you know, as you're thinking about the complexity of the text, and thinking about ways to bundle them and how are students doing in those bundling. Also thinking about, you know, we hear that, you know, usually literature is easier for students than informational text. So kind of checking that a little bit, too, if you have enough text. The problem is that in a lot of what is out there now in interims, a child's getting, like, two different texts. That's it. And by the way, if they don't know anything about that subject area, then they may do badly, but not because they can't read. It's because they don't know anything. This topic is totally new to them, so of course they're going to struggle through it more, and we want them to be able to struggle through it more. So we have a long way to go to make any interim worthwhile, and worth the money, by the way, worth the money. And time. And time. And then ask teachers to then look at how the results come in, where they then feel, I don't know, under pressure, forced to, oh, this is the skill, you know, a lot of your kids in the class never got. I could see, you know, if you're seeing something consistent, and as you check with your kids on, if you're allowed to take a look at, you know, how they did and ask them questions about it. But, I mean, there could be a place where you could go, oh, gosh, you know, a lot of the texts I've used over the year haven't done as much on structure. So that's, you know, so okay, so we can, you know, now take some texts and take a look at that, you know, that are cohesive in some fashion. So I'm not saying that one would never look at that, but the way we do it now, no. Yeah, when you were talking about that, too, I think it's interesting. I don't know that I've never seen, but maybe it has happened where teachers are looking at the text for assessment. You know, we look, I think we skipped right to the data reports and how did they get it, yes or no, but we never look at that. Like, well, what was in the text that they read? And that needs to be done. Assessment folks have to be, anyway, Meredith, go. But assessment folks have to be able to put those out so you can actually see. Yeah. I remember reading years ago in France, you know, high-stakes tests, and we have nothing on European high-stakes tests, but in France the national test is published in the newspaper and families routinely sit down and, like, go over it with their kids and talk about, like, oh, how did you do? What do you think? And the texts are released every year. So we need models where not only the items, but the passages are released every year, and the banks are so robust that that doesn't matter. And there are solutions to how to make those permissions affordable. The assessment companies know what those solutions are, and some of them have gotten them. I also think the other huge problem, as Sue definitely pointed toward this too, is the assessments are not yet reporting why your student got an item wrong. Yeah. There are so many reasons why really low down on the list is that they don't understand the concept of main idea. We're pretty much hardwired to understand the point, the main idea. That is very rarely why a student got a main idea question wrong or whatever. And we are hardwired to make inferences. So there is something else breaking down in the interims and the summatives. None of them tell us what is breaking down for that student in that moment. Is it vocabulary? Is it a decoding problem? Are they exhausted because they're not fluent enough to sort of easily keep up when this is a fixed passage? Now, again, teachers with Herculean effort could do that for themselves and know their students to that degree. But what if the company started to provide that kind of information? Or we used AI, we used personalized learning to actually interrogate the kid and say, what were you thinking when you did this? Like where did your thinking pattern go wrong? And those were the really interesting conversations we were having, non-defensive, non-judgmental, just like, I'm really interested in your thinking. You got the answer wrong, but I'm really curious what you were thinking or what happened when you chose this other alternative answer. Those are the assessments worth taking and worth spending time on. And you would actually learn actionable and helpful data to have data parties around if you had that kind of conversation. So right now it feels like incredible misallocation of resources and teacher time and energy, student and parent angst, and money. And money is so scarce and it's going to be scarce for a while in schools with the holes we've dug ourselves into. So why? Why are we doing these things to ourselves and most importantly to our students? Yeah. And I'm assuming that there's not an assessment out there right now that performs these magical powers of being able to give the diagnosis. But I always thought when I was a teacher that listening to a student read and was like the most intimate experience you could have because even your best readers who could attack any text when you gave them a more challenging text, you could hear where their miscues were going to be and where they struggled or where they really excelled. And so I feel like that old practice is still really relevant in that. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why. And there are – so I love the idea of a teacher listening to each one of her students doing that and, you know, in some private time. There's also a lot of AI now where this can happen. And by the way, the fluency piece, sometimes we think, oh, it stops at third grade or it stops at fifth grade. Like it doesn't stop once the text gets more complex. And so to be able to check on, as you've just suggested, Laurie, the miscues that might be happening, the fact that after the child gets done plowing through the words, do they know – do they have any sense about what they just read about? I mean, just some simple, like, questions. And there's a lot that we can take off of teachers, but it doesn't take away from a teacher listening to a student. I don't want to say that. But there are things that adolescents can do where a child can read into a, you know, into a computer, and the teacher can get some really good information there. And I think it's getting better and better, by the way. I think that technology is getting better and better on that. So what if – We can automate everything but prosody, you know, the actual expressiveness. And there's good research that prosody corresponds tightly to comprehension. You can't say it with the proper expression if you didn't understand what you were reading. So talk about a cheaper alternative and less taxing to reading comprehension tests. Yeah. Just listening to a student's prosody and querying them about what they think they read. Laurie, can I just also say – because this was my experience with my granddaughter on fluency. So every week she'd bring home a passage on fluency, and she was supposed to be timed. And, you know, which I – and I know there are, you know, there are measures about whether you're fluent or not. But her whole point was to beat her time. So she would be like – it was – I remember there was one on elephants, and it was like, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom. How did I do, Jane? You know. I mean, and if you – you know, so it's really important, as Meredith said about this prosody thing about, are you reading it so that the person who's listening to you – You're not speed reading, right? I made that mistake as a teacher. Everyone had their little timers, and they were just all speed reading, and I was like, this is not what I was hoping for. No, you know what? You know what I think is also another to add to the fluency conversation? When kids are asked comprehension questions about Nat and Pat, you know, sat on a mat. What happened to Nat? I'm like, are you kidding? Come on. Nothing really of importance happened to Nat, so can we stop talking about it? Very good. Sometimes I think we have to turn these assessments back on ourselves and try to see, well, what the heck would we do? And then we're saying, oh, yeah, kind of hard to say what we would do. When folks are still using, like, an old method of assessment, but, you know, let's pretend like it's folks at the top who are making decisions. They're the decision makers. How do we shift mindset? How do we support and help in understanding that, you know, this practice is not really relevant? It was never relevant, but just like leveled reading, we might have gotten into some habits that were off course, and we're trying to rechart our course. Do you ladies have any suggestions for that? I think it's so hard. Meredith, do you have good ideas? I mean, part of it is to have frank discussions as a group. In other words, I think a teacher individually, it's really tough. I think I would probably move up the chain, which I'd get my teachers together and my coaches together and then go see the principal and pound on the desk and hope that the principal could understand and see, and so that you can have advocates talk about it. I think it's really tough. You know, the other thing to do, which is not great, is just like, okay, give the ding dong thing and then ignore the results and move on with your good formative understanding about where your kids are and what they need. I think it's a real tough one, Lori. I'm hoping some, and this is what we listen to. I know they come at it from a different place, but if it's really not showing you what the kids can do and not do, it's really not showing you that your students are gaining in their reading, then don't do it. I'll say just one other thing, one other idea that's come up, which I think is rather interesting, which is to think about not an interim as an isolated event. So if you're determined to give them, but to look at how the students have done over time so that there's some sort of a reading inventory on their complexity, because maybe the complexity is up and down depending upon what they're actually reading or not reading or, you know, what the topic is or not. So that there are, I think there are other ways to do it. And I would just say, you know, that administrators here have a ton of power with the vendors that they are working with. They can say what we have, I'm hearing from our teachers, this isn't helping. You need to give us something that's better, that reports out in a way that we can actually use the results. And again, this whole notion, Lori, about how they report out in reading the same way they report out in math. Doesn't work. Yeah. And so, but I don't know, Meredith, you know, it's a tough one. It is a tough one. I also think it's a place where there's just myriad unintended consequences, like the whole teacher accountability thing, you know, on an equity level, you know, black and brown children cannot wait for teachers to get all the education they need, you know, and all the, you know, we can't keep asking students to wait for us all to know better. So I get, you know, coupling assessment to teacher accountability. I get the reasoning behind that, but I think that led to a lot of unintended consequences. I also think those very principles are going back to our earlier conversation coming in with the checklist. So the standards, they don't know better. That's what they don't have a deep under, they can't have a deep understanding of everything. So they go to a checklist kind of place. And then the teachers are, you know, down at triple. So there's an enormous need for education. I mean, part of me just wants to say, could we call a moratorium until we have some better answers? And I know, you know, there can be screams for that stamp. That's not a very, you know, acceptable and there's contracts and there's legislation and read by three. I feel like it's a house of cards that if we suspended for a little while until we did know better and could do better, it might be a great service. But I know that sounds so sane, but I know it turned out, and that's a very radical proposition. I'm aware maybe right now, you know, with this whole COVID and at home and going to school a couple of days or whatever else it is where there's one, there's so much money needing to go to keep it safe. And, and so many different ways that, that students are getting instructed that maybe, maybe, maybe a moratorium is the wisest thing to do right now. It gives us an opportunity. And if administrators and others are looking for an excuse, a good excuse to step back and say, we need to rethink this whole enterprise here. COVID gives us an opportunity to do that. And actually necessitates what's, I mean, what's fair for students. How are you going to give like interims on a, you know, when a student's sitting at home? And, and so let's, let's, we've got lots of reasons not to do it. So let's not do it. Step back. I think the moratorium is a great thing. And I think that parents and teachers would love it and we could do better by our students. So that's the comprehension side of the house that we're talking about. Again, the exception is foundational skills. We do need not on a quarterly basis, on a weekly basis to know what our students know about learning how to read so that we can intervene at the right grain size. So that's where grain size matters and timeliness matters. And teachers should, you know, again, doing it at home when first grade are you trying to learn in a room box is crazy making to me. So I don't, I, I have, you know, nothing but sympathy and questions. I don't have solutions, but I do know that foundational skills are the exception to this, that we can't stop assessing and teachers knowing and then reacting to what they know and making sure they're providing students with missing pieces so that students do learn to read and have the access, you know, to all these riches we've been talking about. So that's, I do want to draw a very bright line between foundational skills assessing and reading comprehension assessing, which is what it should be. It shouldn't be standards. It shouldn't be assessing reading comprehension and the standards are named. Therefore it would all come together once we figure it out. And while we're blowing through barriers and sacred cows, I do think that the whole COVID era is forcing a reckoning on what should our school days look like. And I'm really talking more about secondary school for students. You know, I'd like to think, I'm not at all sure, you know, you don't know until you're walking there, but if I were teaching, still teaching high school and middle school, I'd be thinking to myself, you know, what can my students do now that we can't do inside the four walls? Like what's different now? Are there any opportunities here or are there just obstacles? I kind of feel like we need a, we need a radical reset of what school looks like for our older students because it's not working. Seven period day isn't working. De facto tracking isn't working for, you know, nothing there is working. We need more humane approaches, more flexing. We're developing a model who David and I are called the humanities accelerator course for ninth or sixth graders that we are really excited about. We actually think Baltimore should be really excited about it and other places we're in conversations, but that it would be a radical redesign of the school day for middle or high school students. Heterogeneous model with no apologies so that students are together, respecting each other's talents and what everybody brings to the table and kids are getting through what they need through highly personalized, you know, part of the day would be highly personalized and, you know, sort of the anonymity of technology, giving students what they need or, but everybody getting the good stuff and everybody getting their needs met in a much more humane, holistic way where adults are sort of have their hands around the kids much more like elementary school where there's a few trusted adults with adolescents who need time to develop. Anyway, I think there's lots of opportunity here for redesign and, and radical overhaul and resetting of a system that's badly broken, you know, in terms of how, you know, how racist these institutions are. They're systemically not healthy for, for any kids, specifically black and brown, but they are, have not been good for our white students either a few thrive. And, and, but even those students, I think have things that they aren't learning well in schools as they are. And if I could just add one thing, that's the end of my end of my radical. I'm right there with you. What, what, what, when Meredith talked about the seven periods you know, it's so disjointed and in, and in as you know, a humanities accelerated course allows that could take many different forms by the way, but allows students to go deep, go deep, both in they're building their knowledge around certain topics that could be really fascinating and interesting, but also to go deep. So they can extend their learning through research and additional reading that they want to do on the topic so that they're, they're sort of, they're participants in, in, in the decision-making about all that they're going to learn and what they're going to do. And I want to say, you know, one thing that we've done a lot of talking about content rich complex text. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. The one thing that, that is nuanced and sometimes hard to keep both in our hand, you know, both as we're talking about it is students volume of reading on a topic that can be at a range of complexity. So it isn't like you have to stop your classroom or only allow your students to read like a grade level complex text. If it's an area they don't know a lot about or they're really interested in it, they can start with, with, with easier checks and move and, and move on up, if you will, on that particular topic. It's a hard thing to keep. It's different than leveling students and saying, this is your, you're relegated to this level. That's where you are and you can't get out of it. It's like a prison. You can't do that. It's different than saying no. And to build your knowledge, like there are some things like, oh my goodness, give me a, give me something on physics. And you know, I'm like, well, I got to go back to like the basics before I understand the black hole and what they're trying to tell us they just found out. But I, you know, I'm a really good reader, but those that I don't know as much about that topic as maybe I should or whatever. But I, so I've got to start with much easier texts and then, and then move on up. So I want to say that there's a volume of text reading that can be at many levels. And then there is your complex content, which, you know, complex text, which is sort of anchors, anchors maybe your other reading in that, in that, I just want to make that point because sometimes people come away thinking, oh my gosh, it's complex or nothing. Yeah. I also want to want to say that when, when you're talking about texts I'm I think it's important to recognize it doesn't just have to be a book or an article. I mean, if I'm starting to learn about something, you know, I've made, I'm making something like a dish I've never made before for dinner, I might watch a video or, or listen to a podcast on whatever it might be. And again, that visual comprehension that or that auditory comprehension, I'm able to take that in in a different way than I would text. So it's just multiple access points. So, you know, just keeping that multimedia in the spirit of texts is important to consider in this conversation as well. But yeah, I mean, how, how appropriate and how impactful for our secondary students, for all students, but especially the secondary learners who could really drive and make choices in their learning in that way with a, with the choice in how they're building their knowledge. I think that would be so empowering and impactful. Amen. Bravo, bravo on the visuals because yeah, it's a wonderful way to get access immediately to all students, but it's certainly our English learners as well, to be able to see it and hear it is different than seeing the words on the page. So, and it can drive interest as, as well. And then you feel like you have a modicum of, of understanding to be able to dig in in other ways. So bravo on that. I like to think about it when, how when I put my first piece of Ikea furniture together, the little packet that they gave me really was not helpful. The picture packet. So I had to go to YouTube and watch that video a hundred times. And four hours later, I was finally a master reader. That was a good analogy. The little stick figures don't do it. Oh no. Another thing we're excited. Yeah. Maybe it works. I don't know, but it doesn't work for me. So another thing we're doing, speaking of different media is we have commissioned the center of cartoon studies to write a graphic guide to reading. So that is coming for the next school by next summer, I think it'll be done and it is student facing, but it will be very educative for secondary teachers as well. It talks about how the brain learns to read and how things can go sideways and what to do about it to a certain extent. So it is, it's actually, we're commissioning it thinking that the psychology of reading would be part of what students would all study in a humanities accelerator course. So they all understand they're either lucky or unlucky, but there's work they can do to make sure that reading their brain processes are reading more effectively and efficiently for them. So because that's the other thing is the sense of advocacy around reading is something that can get shipped away at, and we need to rebuild that. Those affective things matter greatly for student confidence and belief. And it matters, you know, so students can identify one of their, one of the ways they identify is as a student, as a learner, as a reader, those worlds are open and not closed. So very excited about that and where that might go to. So come back around in a while and we'll get that out to all your listeners. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So exciting. Well, you two are just so busy and we're, we're grateful that you took the time to come on today. We always ask all of our guests to leave our listeners with one final piece of advice before, before they go. So in the spirit of the conversation today we've talked about a whole lot of things. COVID, learning this COVID era, we've talked about text at the center. We've talked about, you know, our, even our secondary students and, and what works best for them. Some, some data driven instructional practices that may or may not be effective, may not. If there's any piece of advice that you'd like to leave our listeners with we would love to hear it. So I'll, I'll start. I think, and I'm saying this to myself as I say it to all the listeners is this is a time to be gentle with ourselves and with one another. And, and in that vein, I think what I would say is this is the time to focus and to do less really is to do more and to do better and not try to stuff everything in that, that, and I think that that can be really a good thing for us so that as we think about what we're really need to focus on, which we've talked about here, which is the text, which is content, access to content, rich, complex text, drawing evidence from that text, learning, writing about, you know, talk, the discussion bar is a little hard on this if you're doing the virtual piece, but I think it's focus, do less to do more and to do better. Focus, do less to do more and to do better. And I think when we do that and figure out what really matters, I think that can lend into when, when we're all finally back together in classrooms to continue that. So that's what I would say. So we didn't rehearse this, so part of my answer, which was to be gentle with yourselves, but also, which I think is really important and came up with it independently, but also dream big. Like what can the world look like after this? Maybe find some peace in dreaming big about other ways of thinking. And then my last one is even more, if you're in a remote or a hybrid setting, relationships matter. You know, your students need you to know them as people. And I think the secret to all that assessment stuff, too, is to know your students as people and as readers. You know, what do they individually need help with and what do they need pushing on? That's all about relationship and knowing. And then dream big for what schooling could look like after this. I love that. Yeah, me too. Well, thank you both. I'm so excited that we got to talk to you, and I hope we can have you back at some point, because I feel like we could have many more conversations. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you so much. We are so appreciative. You all make it fun. You all make it really fun, yeah.