Subscribe now

I sat in the classroom next to other students. While they wrote in their journals, I wrote in my notebook. I would document comments they made to me or their peers, talking aloud about their writing ideas. If it was silent, I would notice the classroom and write a rich description of the experience, such as how the desks were positioned in small groups to encourage peer interactions.

I also noticed that the teacher would subtly follow me around the classroom. I would move to another pod and chat with kids, and she would follow suit, moving to a student closer to me to conduct a writing conference. I had to move around several times over multiple classroom visits to confirm that this was a pattern and intentional.

Why was this happening? What was the teacher worried about when I interacted with the students? I always shared a copy of my notes with her and commented on what I appreciated about her instruction. Was it me? It got to a point where I could feel a pit in my stomach anytime I entered this teacher’s classroom for my next informal visit.

This is a consistent experience for leaders. Both prior to publishing my book on leading like a coach and ever since, I have talked to many school leaders about this. I get a myriad of reasons why they don’t get into classrooms on a regular basis: they don’t feel they have enough time; they have too many traditional observations to complete; they believe they don’t know enough about a grade level or subject area.

When I posed this issue to readers in 2022, one person stated their concern succinctly:

“I feel unwelcome in classrooms.”

When I read and reread this comment, a flood of emotions surfaced. First, sadness for this leader who felt their presence was having a negative influence on someone else. Second, compassion in that, just like the teacher situation I just described, I knew exactly what they were talking about. Finally, curiosity. What were the root causes of this sense of unwelcomeness that we both felt?

In my situation, I took some time to reflect on where this anxiety demonstrated by this teacher was coming from. It didn’t take me long to remember that this school I was currently leading had six principals in the previous ten years I was there. Administrators come and go. Even though my family and I had bought a house in the city and I had made a verbal commitment to being in the building long term, it apparently wasn’t enough for this teacher.

But I also realized it wasn’t about me. She was responding to what she was used to: a revolving door of leadership that only sits in classrooms when it is the teacher’s summative evaluation year. This teacher was protecting a part of her that still wasn’t sure if I was showing up regularly with the best of intentions.

Following this conclusion, I realized what I had to do: keep showing up. Continue to ensure my visits were low stakes. Always hand over my notes and make at least one positive comment before I left the classroom. I had to teach her that I was safe and there first to celebrate her strengths before offering any feedback for improvement.

Over time, the teacher stopped trailing me in the classroom. Instead of constantly casting her eyes in my direction, she would bring over small groups to her table for guided reading while I hung out with the rest of the students. It eventually felt like we were co-teachers in the classroom. For example, I sat with one student she asked me to pay attention to during writing time. “Let me know what you think. I have concerns about him.” I agreed and sat down beside him while he scribbled in his notebook. As I watched, I observed him repeatedly averting his eyes from his paper and looking around the room. Any sound – a dropped pencil, quiet chatter between classmates -would redirect his attention away from his work. When I conferred with the teacher afterward, I asked if I could offer my assessment. “Please,” she said. “I think he may have ADHD. Inattentive more than hyperactive. Of course, I am not a clinician, but he really struggled to attend to his writing.” She sighed and offered a small smile. “Thank you for sharing that. I was having the same thought, but I was not sure how to bring it up with parents if I was the only one seeing it.” We agreed to meet later and develop a game plan for communicating our assessment with the student’s family.

These positive interactions eventually opened up the opportunity for me to communicate more critical feedback. I felt I had built up enough social capital that I could be candid with her about a concern I’ve held for a while: her classroom library. It was organized and managed by the teacher. She ran a tight ship during her literacy block, and maybe too tight. Students couldn’t become fully independent as readers and writers. They were too dependent on the teacher.

I finally mustered up the courage after one of my classroom visits. “May I offer some feedback?” I asked. She paused, not sure what to say, and then nodded. “You have a structured literacy block. Students are clear on what to do during reading and writing instruction. I am also noticing that they don’t seem to be becoming self-directed readers and writers. For example, you put in a lot of work organizing the classroom library for your kids. What are your thoughts on teaching the students how to do this work?” Her lips pursed while she stared at her shelves of student titles. “I am not doing that,” she said, voice low. I paused, not sure what to say. She didn’t say anything else. Instead of sitting with this uncomfortable silence, I quietly left the classroom.

When I came back to my office, I was mentally kicking myself. ‘Why didn’t I stay with the conversation?’ I was prioritizing my own need for peace. I avoided conflict when that could have been a breakthrough moment. But I also gave myself grace. ‘Look how far I’ve come with this teacher.’ I reminded myself that change is not a linear process; we are going to take two steps back for every three forward. Without conflict, there is no growth.

There was only one response: to keep showing up. And that’s what I did.

I was rewarded for my persistence on my very next visit. Before I took my usual spot sitting with a small group of students, the teacher walked up to me. “I thought about what you shared, and I have decided that I am going to allow the students to organize and manage one shelf of the classroom library. They can select books they want from the next book order, using points from their past purchases.” Before I could commend her on this choice, she turned around and went back to her guided reading table. I mentally raised my fist in the air in celebration, an extra lift in my step as I walked around the classroom.

How comfortable are you right now in sitting with discomfort?

Leave a comment

Enjoyed this post? Share it with colleagues and on social media.

Share

Printable version

👋 Hi, it’s Matt. I write a weekly about literacy and leadership. Last week, I wrote about what actual science looks like in reading instruction. This week, I reflect on the consequences of centering literacy instruction on programs and testing instead of on students. Subscribe today to receive all posts!

Subscribe now

My daughter texted me the following photo.

“Uhh…is that Millie and me?” I asked.

“Yup!” she replied.

The image is a picture she took from a coloring book created by a local artist. She illustrated various sites and businesses in our small city, including the independent bookstore I work in on Sundays. Our English cream golden retriever, Millie, is my assistant.

While we couldn’t confirm if the depiction is in fact the dog and me, you can find me in that position on a Sunday afternoon. (My wife can’t believe I get paid to do this work.)

It would be interesting to contrast this image with what one might observe in a typical K-12 classroom. Would we see something similar: students reading quietly in comfortable seating?

My own experience in visiting schools tells me this is uncommon. Even though we know that one of the best ways to get better at reading is to read, we have overstuffed our school days with literacy programs and reading-like activities. Hitting standards has become more important than hitting the books. Therapy dogs might be more common in schools than a robust classroom library.

So, it should come as no surprise that reading achievement scores continue to stagnate as a nation. These results run parallel to how students feel about reading in general. The typical student doesn’t see reading as a worthwhile activity. Although there are other factors contributing to this decline, including increased screen time and so many other opportunities pulling at kids’ attention, there appears to be a strong relationship between achievement and engagement.

I feel at a loss when schools want to improve their reading outcomes and don’t first look at their own instructional decisions before going on a hunt for a new program. The word “book” is rarely mentioned in these exchanges. I imagine a lot of educators feel similar frustration for what to do. They sense the pressure to improve test scores, so they lean in heavily on a program and teach it to “fidelity”. But in their commitment to a curriculum, they are also creating inequities. A foundation of effective instruction is a teacher’s ability to meet the individual needs of students. We cannot please two masters.

To be clear, I am not anti-program. As a principal, I helped lead a curriculum acquisition process for our school that led to the purchase of a program. However, we were clear that this was a resource to support excellent instruction, not the source for it. Positioned this way, a program can augment teaching and learning. But not the other way around.

The one thing K-12 schools have that no one else does is the ability to center students’ attention on what society seems to crave right now: a distraction-free space to read and talk about ideas that matter to them. Independent bookstores are thriving for the same reason; people want a third space to be with others in relation to each other, not just at a surface level. Schools can be that.

If we take a step back and look at the issue at hand – lack of time to read, too much teaching and not enough access to books – we shouldn’t be surprised that our students are not growing as readers. Decreasing engagement and achievement is a natural consequence when we don’t create the conditions that target these needs. Again, these two areas are highly correlated.

My intention here is not to blame or to wallow. It’s to develop awareness, as well as a pathway to creating the conditions where students value reading and identify as readers.

If I were back in the classroom, here’s what I imagine my instruction would look like to a visitor:

The room feels lived in. It has the students’ thumbprints all over it: the classroom libraries are organized and curated by the kids, student work takes up most of bulletin board real estate, and anchor charts for effective ledes or how to deliver a book blessing adorn the walls. Learning targets and success criteria include samples of the tasks co-created with the students during shared demonstrations.

If the visits were frequent, odds are you would not actually see me teaching to a whole group; students would be found reading or writing independently and in small peer groups. I would be meeting with students as needed, informed by multiple data points. Students are on task not because I drilled the expectations, but primarily because they want to be doing the work. They often have choice and agency in what to read or write. When the core resource is used, it’s a true resource: a guide on the side to support their journey to independence and excellence, for example, students walking out of the classroom with their nose in a book, not wanting to stop reading at the end of the day.

The natural consequences of these conditions aren’t something you can buy. It’s a product of an investment in teacher quality and respect for educators as professionals.

How are you centering your students in your instructional design, despite the possible constraints of mandates and testing?

Leave a comment

Did you enjoy this post? Share it with a colleague!

Share

Printable version

Learning more about the student’s background and interests, the teacher decided to place a venus flytrap in her room. She invited this student to feed the plant a dead fly every time they came to work with her. In addition, the teacher integrated texts around this and related topics.

The results after several weeks:

• a small pile of dead flies next to the venus flytrap (the student started bringing his own food supply, and the teacher limited how much they fed the plant), and

• a more engaged and competent reader.1

Subscribe now

Three Books for Engaging in Continuous Improvement

You won’t find this type of approach described as “aligned with the Science of Reading.” Not because it lacks evidence or effectiveness, but because the student’s success relied on something that can’t be packaged: teacher ingenuity, engagement and interest, and authentic relationships.

At the core of this teacher's work was a willingness to position herself as a learner. Next are three books that can support you on your own learning journey.

Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better2

Anthony Bryk, Louis M. Gomez, Alicia Grunow, and Paul G. LeMahieu (Harvard Education Press, 2015)

Adapting ideas from the healthcare industry, Bryk and colleagues offer six principles for educators to engage in short cycles of improvement work:

1. Make the work problem-specific and user-centered.

2. Variation in performance is the core problem to address.

3. See the system that produces the current outcomes.

4. We cannot improve at scale what we cannot measure.

5. Anchor practice improvement in disciplined inquiry.

6. Accelerate improvements through networked communities.

At the core of this work are rapid cycles of Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) to learn fast, fail fast, and improve quickly. “That failures may occur is not the problem; that we fail to learn from them is.”

I’ve seen tools like PDSAs a lot in educational resources, such as Solution Tree/PLC literature and on state department websites. What I haven’t seen a lot is an organization’s commitment to this work on a continuous basis. Districts tend to seek answers (what Bryk and colleagues refer to as “solutionitis”) instead of exploring questions. Learning to Improve can be a foundational text for professional learning. (For an example of improvement science in action, check out Jason Drysdale’s and Allyson Matczuk’s work that I profiled in Chapter 7 of my book Leading Like a C.O.A.C.H.)

Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation

Shane Safir & Jamila Dugan (Corwin/Learning Forward, 2021)

The authors present improvement science through the lens of an anti-racist/anti-bias perspective. It’s not enough to simply identify problems and experiment with responses. Educators have to center students at the margins in this work.

"Street data is the qualitative and experiential data that emerges at eye level and on lower frequencies when we train our brains to discern it. Street data is asset based... helping educators look for what's right in our students, schools, and communities instead of seeking out what's wrong."

The Reading Recovery teacher adopted this perspective in her improvement work. She noticed first the student’s strengths, for example his interest in carnivorous plants, as an entry point for building his skills and confidence.

Journey to Improvement: A Team Guide to Systems Change in Education, Health Care, and Social Welfare

Alicia Grunow, Sandra Park, & Brandon Bennett (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)

What these authors provide is a roadmap for engaging in improvement science, a methodology for teachers and leaders to rely on during the messiness of this work.

"The learn-in-practice phase is the heart of the improvement journey. No matter how diligently teams engage in the initial phases, the dynamism and complexity of systems mean that the initial assumptions about what change is needed will often be wrong and always incomplete."

I especially appreciate the phrase they echo from Learning to Improve: “probably wrong and definitely incomplete.” I have referred to this when interacting with a teacher or a leader having doubts about experimenting at the edges, for example, when I informed a school leadership team that following a literacy program like a script actually creates inequities.

How are you bridging reading instruction with actual scientific principles?

Leave a comment

Enjoyed this post? Share it online and with colleagues.

Share

Printable version

Interested in learning more about improvement science? Download my free tool, Five Prerequisites for Continuous Improvement Learning Progression. I also have availability to support leadership teams to begin engaging in this work. Learn more here.

Possible spoiler alert, if you plan to watch the show but haven’t yet…

In one of the most recent episodes. Nurse Dana (Katherine LaNasa) confronts Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) about why he hasn’t left yet. He is taking a three month motorcycle sabbatical to avoid burnout, yet is hanging around hours after his final shift leading the emergency department (ED).

At first, Dr. Robby states that he can’t trust that the emergency department is not going to fall apart. "I’m just making sure the handoff is clean. I don't want to come back to a mess I have to fix." Nurse Dana calls him out on this, noting that the ED is still running in between his shifts.

Dr. Robby later opens up to his motorcycle buddy, Duke. "I have purpose in there. I can be distracted in there.” By omission, he also admits that he has no purpose outside of his role leading the emergency department.

What makes this scene, and this show in general, so relatable is you don’t have to be in the medical profession to understand what Dr. Robby is going through. A dysfunctional system that asks so much of individuals at the expense of their own well-being is universal.

Recently, I came across a social media post from a classroom teacher. They shared their situation:

• 28 students, with over half of them having some level of social, emotional, and/or academic need beyond what universal instruction provides.

• Higher-than-average levels of poverty (50%-70%) represented in the classroom.

• Professional development that reminds teachers to see problematic behaviors through a trauma-informed lens, yet doesn’t provide adequate support.

I can remember similar experiences as a principal, for example arguing against reductions in support staff in my school while another school in the same district was making plans to renovate their athletic complex.

I don’t have great answers or solutions for these types of situations in education, just as Dr. Robby knows at some level that a motorcycle sabbatical is just a distraction from the bigger issues that will be there when he gets back. However, I do have some thoughts on how we might reclaim some of our humanity and identity outside of our profession. Sometimes, I even apply these ideas with consistency.

Ask: “What is good enough?”

As a principal, I put a lot of pressure on myself to have our school “look good”: high-quality student writing on the walls, clean floors, a well-curated selection of books in the school library. All these outcomes are important, but I also didn’t leave a lot of room for the process of learning. Mistakes weren’t always valued. The pressure I felt to perform, especially on standardized tests, translated to stress on the teachers.

A healthy question to ask ourselves when the pressure feels too high is “What is good enough?” Not in five years, but right now. This involves being aware of where our students and staff are at right now in terms of skills and level of commitment, and paying more attention to progress and effort toward our long-term goals.

When feeling stuck, move to action.

One of the many benefits of instructional walks as a principal was it gave me an excuse to get out of the office. I’d get off the phone with an upset parent, and I know I could leave right after I hung up to observe teaching and learning in action. I easily got 10,000 steps a day just by physically channeling any pent-up frustrations.

Acknowledge that our stories are probably wrong.

I spent the morning sitting with district leaders, learning about supporting neurodiversity. When an opportunity came up, I mentioned an upcoming MTSS training. No immediate takers.

It would be easy to call it a failure of a day. But I would be basing that one a single event, one moment in time. I cannot predict the future. I don’t know if an interaction that morning with a leader won’t pay off down the road.

Education is about playing the long game. Each lesson we deliver, each conversation we have with another has an influence on future events. To create a story that we failed based on a single data point is what we resist on behalf of our students. Like drawing a conclusion based only on a standardized test score, our simple stories are likely wrong.

Get someone else’s perspective.

For the last two years I was a principal, I hired a coach. This was in 2021-2023, coming out of the pandemic (and in some ways a harder time than the pandemic itself). Although my coach was a former principal, he had little idea what it was like to be a public educator while COVID-19 was still rampant.

What he did have was another perspective. It was a point of view outside of my current bubble I was living and working in. He could see things that I couldn’t. My emotions colored a lot of what I observed. His lens, communicated through active listening and thoughtful questions, helped ground me in objective reality. I didn’t have to take on all the responsibilities of the school when I was reminded that everyone was struggling at some level, and so much was beyond my control.

If a coach is not in the budget, consider therapy (I’ve taken advantage of this, too), or at least a regular meet up with a trusted, honest friend.

Write a personal bio.

This is an out-from-left-field exercise, but worth trying.

Pretend you are scheduled to give a short talk at a conference. They are asking for a short bio. Here’s the catch: you can’t share about our work. This is for a conference for…anything you feel halfway qualified to talk about outside of education. Gardening, pilates, whatever.

If you are struggling to write that bio, maybe it is a sign that your personal life needs more attention.

What I appreciated about Season 2 of The Pitt is how well-being and recovery are presented. Some of the healthiest individuals working in the emergency department have substance use disorders or PTSD. They aren’t perfect, but they are doing the work to take care of themselves. This self-care allows them to take care of others.

They are also models for others who aren’t taking advantage of the supports available. In one scene, a doctor just out of drug treatment confronts Dr. Robby and his need to create an idealized view of himself. “I met a lot of people in recovery who reminded me of you. The only difference between them and you is they are getting the help they need.”

I don’t like acknowledging this, but if our students are struggling (and we are struggling alongside them), then the instruction comes second.1 At least for a while. Maybe you can take a couple of days to rebuild community and relationships in the classroom. What if one half day a week is spent teaching others how to take on one of your leadership responsibilities?

We can't outwork a broken system. But we can decide how much of ourselves we give to it, and how we choose to work within it.

How do you retain your humanity in a dysfunctional system?

Leave a comment

Enjoyed this post? Share it with a colleague!

Share

Refer a friend

Printable version

👋 Hi, it’s Matt. Thanks for being a reader. I write about literacy and leadership, including my free guide, What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading. Last week, I published my conversation with Dr. Kelly Cartwright. This week, I write about what’s needed for schools to engage in continuous improvement. At the end is a link to a free one-page leadership team guide that complements this post.

What’s the problem your school has been working on this year? How do you know it’s actually a problem? What’s the evidence? Whose voices were invited to name and shape it? Whose voices weren’t?

If you answered I don’t know to any of those questions, you likely haven’t yet identified the actual problem you’re trying to solve. That’s not a judgment. In my experience working with school leadership teams, the presenting problem and the real problem are often meaningfully different.

That gap is what this article is about.

Three stages before improvement work takes hold

For school leadership teams to engage in continuous improvement — using tools like root cause analysis, driver diagrams, and PDSA cycles — they first need to reach a level of stability and shared understanding. In my experience working with teams, that readiness tends to develop across three stages.

In the build stage, leaders are asking for structures. They need a basic organizational framework to make sense of their current reality and hold different processes and initiatives together.

In the stabilize stage, those structures get reinforced. The leadership team develops shared agendas and communication routines. Grade-level and department teams start receiving clearer direction. Protocols for collaboration begin to take shape. One hand starts talking to the other.

Once infrastructure is built and stabilized, teams are ready to engage in improvement work: using data to test changes and learn from what happens.

This is not a linear model. A school with high leadership turnover may need to return to the build or stabilize stage before improvement work can take hold again, unless the previous team reached a level of sustainability deep enough to survive the transition.

In addition to these stages are five building blocks, or prerequisites, I see as essential conditions for supporting and sustaining continuous improvement.

Here are the five prerequisites in more detail.

1. Relational trust

This may be the most critical condition of all. Relational trust is present when educators can engage in open, honest dialogue without fear of negative reactions or damaged relationships. It shows up in how people talk to each other in meetings, how positional leaders respond to disagreement, and whether feedback flows in both directions.

Trust is built through clear norms, consistent follow-through, and frequent informal positive interaction. A ratio of roughly five positive interactions to every critical one is a good baseline for healthy professional relationships.

Positional leaders set the tone. When a principal openly asks for feedback about their own practice and responds with curiosity rather than defensiveness, it signals to the entire building that honest dialogue is safe here.

Bryk and Schneider’s Trust in Schools includes a practical survey for measuring relational trust at the building level. As a principal, I used it every year. It consistently showed me where I had room to grow and where the staff had real strengths to build on. (You can find the nine survey items in Devin Vodicka’s article The Four Elements of Trust.)

2. Shared leadership structures

One priority for better school support is helping bring together a functional leadership team. This typically includes a mix of positional and informal leaders: a principal, a coach, a specialist, and a handful of teachers. Keeping the team to eight or fewer members helps ensure everyone stays focused and the work gets done.

Within that team, clearly defined roles and responsibilities matter. One shift I’ve made in my own coaching is to assign someone else besides the principal as the team lead. I learned this the hard way. When I was a principal, I consistently led our leadership team discussions rather than empowering my instructional coach to take that role. When I had to be away from the building for a stretch, she stepped up and led the team beautifully, and eventually became a principal herself. My only regret is that I didn’t give her that opportunity sooner.

Beyond roles, communication processes need to be transparent and consistent. Agendas and minutes shared in a timely manner, with open invitations for feedback, signal that the leadership team’s work belongs to the whole building and not just the people in the room. As a principal, our leadership team meetings were open for anyone to observe and comment on, even if decision-making authority stayed with the team.

Clarity about who makes what decisions, and under what conditions, is essential. Some decisions rest with the administrator. Hiring, for example, ultimately belongs to the principal. Others, like a curriculum acquisition process, warrant full leadership team involvement. When those boundaries are unclear, trust erodes quickly.

3. Data literacy

It’s difficult to engage in continuous improvement if you’re not sure where you actually are. We can’t improve on nothing, but we also shouldn’t rely solely on standardized test scores to tell us what’s happening in our schools.

Data literacy means understanding different levels and types of data, and how they can work together to build a fuller picture. Safir and Dugan offer a helpful model in Street Data: satellite data, which captures systems-level measures like state assessments; map data, which includes screeners and common formative assessments used at the team level; and street data, the qualitative, real-time information that teachers and coaches gather directly from students.

Each level has strengths and limitations. Quantitative data offers a sense of certainty, but without context, it can flatten your understanding of what’s actually happening in a school. Qualitative data — empathy interviews, student surveys, classroom observations — tells the story behind the numbers. The two work best together.

As a principal, I made daily classroom visits and recorded what I observed in handwritten notes, describing the teaching and learning experience as specifically as I could. I’d share those notes with the teacher afterward, and we’d have a conversation around what I noticed. What struck me over time was how often those conversations led to genuine insight. Because we were both looking at the same descriptive data together, the dynamic shifted. We weren’t talking about performance or growth targets. We were inquiring together. The data gave us something to be curious about rather than defensive around.

Data literacy starts with the leadership team. When leaders model how to read and discuss data honestly, sitting with uncertainty and asking questions before drawing conclusions, that practice begins to spread into staff meetings and collaborative team time.

4. Psychological safety for collaborative inquiry

When relational trust is present, leadership structures are functioning, and the team has a basic understanding of data, something else becomes possible: genuine collaborative inquiry. But this doesn’t happen automatically. It has to be taught, modeled, and practiced before it becomes cultural.

A useful starting point is naming what collaboration is and what it isn’t. The Solution Tree literature around professional learning communities offers helpful frameworks for understanding the stages teams move through as they develop collective practice.

It also helps to make collaboration visible. A fishbowl demonstration at a staff meeting, where one team models their dialogue while others observe, gives educators a concrete picture to work toward. Educators can also be invited to observe a colleague team’s session, with a clear shared focus to keep the feedback productive rather than evaluative.

What I’ve found most effective is creating conditions where educators are doing inquiry work without initially labeling it as such. For example, I shared a profile/inventory with teachers for students with ADHD. They will first reflect on their own instructional environment and practices. Then they will ask the student for their perceptions of these same conditions. When we come together as a group to look at both sets of responses, teachers can offer and receive feedback, drawing on data and problem-solving together. These are the seeds of root cause analysis and PDSA thinking, planted quietly in the middle of work they already care about.

5. Organizational stability

Right now in Wisconsin, school districts are either celebrating a referendum that passed or absorbing the weight of one that didn’t. For those in the latter situation, and there are too many due to inadequate support from state legislators, asking them to engage in continuous improvement work may feel tone-deaf. What they need first might simply be acknowledgment and a genuine offer of support, whatever form that takes.

That said, if an entry point presents itself, for example, if a principal or coach says we still have to do this work because it matters for kids, there may be room for a small, contained inquiry cycle. One possibility: examining family and community engagement, and how the school might build stronger partnerships with parents and community members who need to see the good work their tax dollars are supporting. It’s outward-facing work that can generate goodwill while the harder internal work waits for steadier ground.

Improvement work requires sufficient organizational stability for people to think beyond immediate survival. When that stability is absent, the coaching move is to stay close, stay humble, and wait for the opening.1

Enjoyed this article? Share it on social media and with your colleagues.

Share

Full subscribers can extend upon the ideas shared here in the comments.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Printable version

Try it: Assess Your Organization’s Infrastructure

Download the one-page team progression tool below (or here). It supports a leadership team to examine their current reality and discuss potential areas for growth.2

Download tool

Dr. Kelly Cartwright, Spangler Distinguished Professor of Early Child Literacy at UNC Charlotte, has spent her career mapping the territory other reading models leave out — specifically, the role executive functions play in coordinating what skilled readers do.

In this conversation, Dr. Cartwright explains what executive functions (EF) actually are, why they matter for every reader and not just students with ADHD, and what her research reveals about the kind of EF interventions that actually move the needle on reading outcomes. She also makes the case that the field’s tendency toward dichotomous thinking — decoding over here, comprehension over there — may be leaving a large group of students without the support they need.

Share

Check out the video recording of this conversation below, available to full subscribers. Join the community today!

Subscribe now

Show Notes

Research and Articles

(links embedded in title)

• Duke, N. K., & Cartwright, K. B. (2021). The Science of Reading Progresses: Communicating Advances Beyond the Simple View of Reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25–S44.

• Cartwright, K. B., & Palian, S. R. (2024). Considering Roles of Executive Functions in the Science of Reading: A Meta-Analysis Highlighting Promises and Challenges of Reading-Specific Executive Functions. Educational Psychologist, 59(4), 263–290.

• Wagner, R. K., et al. (2021). A Model-Based Meta-Analytic Examination of Specific Reading Comprehension Deficit. Annals of Dyslexia, 71(2), 260–281.

• Austin, C. R., Vaughn, S., Clemens, N. H., Pustejovsky, J. E., & Boucher, A. N. (2022). The relative effects of instruction linking word reading and word meaning compared to word reading instruction alone on the accuracy, fluency, and word meaning knowledge of 4th-5th grade students with dyslexia. Scientific Studies of Reading, 26(3), 204-222.

• Chi, M. T. H. (1978). Knowledge structures and memory development. In R. S. Siegler (Ed.), Children’s thinking: What develops? (pp. 73–96). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Assessments Mentioned

• Graphophonological Semantic Flexibility (GSF) Assessment — freely accessible; measures cognitive flexibility in managing letter-sound and meaning features of words simultaneously (from Chapter 4 of Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension - see below)

Books Mentioned

(embedded Bookshop links are an affiliate account)

• Cartwright, K. B. (2023). Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension: A Guide for Educators (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. (Bookshop) (Guilford Press - download flyer for 25% discount)

• Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print. MIT Press. (Bookshop)

• Page, L. This Book Made Me Think of You (Bookshop) — recommended by Kelly Cartwright

• Weir, A. Project Hail Mary (Bookshop) — recommended by Matt Renwick

• Richtel, M. How We Grow Up (Bookshop) — recommended by Debra Crouch

Model Referenced

• The Active View of Reading (Duke & Cartwright, 2021) — diagram available via the Reading Research Quarterly article linked above (and below).

Full Transcript

Matt Renwick

Hi, I’m Matt. Welcome to Read by Example, where teachers are leaders, and leaders know literacy. I am excited to have someone that I’ve been reading about in a pretty specific, but I think important subject area. I’m joined by Kelly Cartwright. Dr. Cartwright is the Spangler Distinguished Professor of Early Child Literacy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She is the author of Executive Skills, Reading and Reading Comprehension, second edition through Guilford. Welcome, Kelly.

Kelly Cartwright

Thank you. I’m so excited to be here with you today.

Matt Renwick

And Debra Crouch, author and co-author of Made for Learning with Brian Camborne, is also here. Excited to see Debra again. Are you in the classroom still, Debra?

Debra Crouch

No, not right now. I’m actually supervising a couple of student teachers right now. That’s what I’m up to.

Matt Renwick

Alright, but you were teaching second grade, right?

Debra Crouch

Yes, second and third grade. Both grades.

Kelly Cartwright

And technically, you’re in classrooms, so…

Debra Crouch

Yes, always in classrooms.

Matt Renwick

Same here. Whenever I can get in, it’s a treat. So, Kelly, I want to start with curiosity. Executive functions have not been a prominent part of the conversation around reading instruction. What made you think they should be? What about this field captured your interest and focus for your research?

Kelly Cartwright

That’s a great question. I started out in psychology, but I was interested in how reading works — how reading works in the brain, how our cognitive processes support our ability to read. I was learning about executive functions, learning about the fact that kids, when they are young, are learning to be flexible in thinking about things. It occurred to me that reading is super complex, and it requires that we think about words in lots of ways. I was reading Marilyn Adams’ book, Beginning to Read, while in graduate school, and learning about all of these wonderful executive functions, and realizing that kids have to manage a ton. Grown-ups have to manage a ton of things in their heads, and I wondered about this connection. So, I started off my work in the area of looking at cognitive flexibility specific to reading — flexibility in thinking about words, sounds, and meanings — because kids have to think about words in a lot of ways to learn to be good readers, and we do it without thinking about it. Lots of people are looking at it now and realizing that being able to manage your thinking and manage your reading processes is a really important part of being a good reader.

Matt Renwick

Are you seeing more interest in this due to the world we currently live in, with constant connection and distraction? Do you see that contributing to this interest?

Kelly Cartwright

Maybe. I think that people are aware of executive functions in the context of special education, or when a child has ADHD in your classroom and the school psychologist has done assessments and says, “This child has a working memory problem,” or, “This child has an inhibition problem.” We’ve seen more and more diagnoses of executive skill difficulties, like ADHD, over the past few years. Is it connected to technology? I don’t have data on that. But I think the piece that we don’t always think about is that for a child who has executive skill difficulties, we see evidence that there’s a problem — but when everything’s going well, and your working memory and flexibility are supporting your reading processes, it’s invisible. We don’t see them. We see evidence for difficulty, not evidence for success. But being a successful reader means that you have those things in place.

Matt Renwick

ADHD has been referred to as an invisible disability — or difference, however you want to term it — and that resonates with me, because kids don’t always demonstrate it. It’s often an internal kind of thing.

Kelly Cartwright

Exactly.

Matt Renwick

You mentioned executive functions, and I think when people hear that, they sometimes just resort to ADHD as a rule of thumb. But they’re different. How would you describe executive functions in a way that’s separate from a diagnosis like ADHD, and connects it to what every reader is trying to do?

Kelly Cartwright

Executive functions, when you have difficulties with them, people see evidence of those things when you have a child who can’t focus, or can’t inhibit attention to all the things that are so interesting. But we recruit executive functions in all of our daily activities. Think about going to the supermarket. You need to keep your list of needed items in mind — you don’t want to get home without the noodles for the spaghetti — and that’s working memory, having to hold all that stuff in your head. You might make a list, but that kind of offloads the thinking onto a piece of paper. And you’re still going to have to use it in a flexible way: you’re looking at the shelf, you’re looking at the list, maybe they don’t have the brand you usually buy, or they’re out of the fruit you were going to buy, and you have to flex the week’s menu. You’re also having to use that list to inhibit your attention to the shiny Oreos on the end cap, and not buy the things that are not on the list. That working memory, that cognitive flexibility, that inhibition — they play out in everything we do.

In reading, we’re building a mental model of text meaning in our head. As I make my way through a text and learn about a new event, or a character does something unexpected, I’m updating my mental model of the text’s meaning as I go, while still hanging on to the things I’ve learned before. That’s working memory. While we’re doing that, we’re also decoding — shifting between word reading and meaning-making constantly. Even as adults, we process all the letters and sounds. If we come upon a multisyllabic word we haven’t seen, we’re totally using our decoding processes, but we’re doing those things under the level of conscious awareness and switching between them, and that takes flexibility. Or coming upon a word like “wind” — W-I-N-D — if you’re reading about a mechanical toy, it becomes “wind,” but if you’re reading about weather patterns, it’s “wind,” and knowing how to flex that vowel pronunciation is another instance of cognitive flexibility specific to reading.

Inhibition plays out in reading when you encounter words with multiple meanings, like “jam” and “traffic jam.” You can’t think about the sticky stuff you put on toast — you have to only think about the congested traffic. All of those things are happening for skilled readers automatically. We don’t notice them. But when children don’t have the working memory capacity, they’re not able to hold in mind the text pieces they need and supply their prior knowledge in order to make an inference. We can support that kind of thinking — put it on paper, use a graphic organizer like an inference map — but as skilled readers, we often expect kids to have the ability to do the things that we can do. Making inferences is so obvious to us, but it’s not obvious when you don’t have the ability to hold all the relevant pieces in your mind.

Matt Renwick

If I’m reading a novel and trying to keep track of all these characters, I’m not going to pull out a character map — maybe I might, if it’s a complex novel. But you’re right, we don’t reverse ourselves back to when we were learning to read when we teach. That’s where these external tools can be really helpful to support that cognition.

I personally have a hard time remembering all these different systems — it’s hard to visualize. When you teach this, do you use some kind of mental model, metaphor, or imagery to help teachers hold that idea in mind?

Kelly Cartwright

You’ve identified something the field probably needs. Models of reading are starting to incorporate executive functions. Nell Duke and I proposed the Active View of Reading — for those of you listening, maybe we can link this in the show notes. There’s a green bubble off to the left that has your executive function and self-regulation abilities, and they are helping drive your ability to recognize words, that word recognition piece, and that language comprehension piece, and your ability to put it all together in service of reading comprehension. That visual heuristic helps teachers to think about the fact that these invisible things actually undergird and support the processes we know readers need. But if I continue to try to teach inference-making in all the typical ways to a child who has working memory difficulties, without thinking about how working memory shows up within reading or how I can support and strengthen those reading-specific working memory skills, then the child may not make the progress I need them to.

For kids with ADHD, or adults with ADHD, all of these executive functions show up as difficulties in organization and planning. The child who comes with a backpack that isn’t as organized as we’d like — with an executive function difficulty, the organization isn’t there, and they may not be able to make that mental model of a text’s meaning without concrete support, or a story map, or explicit text structure instruction, so that they can use that heuristic — putting that thinking on the table — to support the working memory where they can’t do it all in their head.

Matt Renwick

I’ve used the Active View in presentations for school leaders on what they need to know about the science of reading. I’ll start with the Simple View, and then go to your Active View, just to show how complex reading really is. And I like where you positioned executive function — before word recognition and language comprehension. I assume that’s intentional. If you need executive functioning, you need strategic use of strategies. You can’t just teach phonics.

Kelly Cartwright

You have to know what to do with the phonics. The Simple View is amazing. It’s elegant. It’s 40 years old now, which is remarkable, and it has longevity in the field because it provides an amazing heuristic to help teachers understand that reading is more than just loving books. It came out at the height of the whole language movement, when phonics was not favored, and the Simple View does an excellent job of demonstrating that if our phonics knowledge — our ability to recognize words using that phonics knowledge systematically — if it’s not there, we are not going to understand what we read. You can’t understand what you read if you don’t pull the words off the page. But likewise, if you can’t understand what people say to you, you’re not going to understand what you read.

The Simple View does an excellent job with that. It’s a great place for teachers to begin to see how that complexity works. But what I’ve seen in practice is phonics instruction happening over here in this part of the day, and instruction in language comprehension happening over there in that other part of the day, and never the twain shall meet. But when I’m a skilled reader, I’m doing these at the same time, and I’m having to put it all together. The Simple View — and the rope model is similar — shows these two buckets of skills. The rope goes further to say we do weave them together, but it doesn’t say how. I think that’s where executive functions come in. Executive functions and self-regulation help you to strategically deploy that word recognition knowledge and that language comprehension knowledge and weave them together in service of comprehension — which is a piece that’s over and above each of those alone.

I like to use the analogy of that old pat-your-head, rub-your-tummy thing we used to do as kids. I can pat my head by itself, just like I can decode — when assessed independently I do well. I can rub my tummy, and I can do well when assessed on language comprehension independently. But if I have to put them together, it requires some third coordination ability that’s over and above the individual skills. That bridging or integration is represented in the Active View but isn’t represented in the Simple View. The Simple View initially alluded to this idea that kids decode and then comprehend — like a sequential thing — but it’s not. It’s very much an all-at-the-same-time kind of thing.

Matt Renwick

You’re multitasking in some ways. It’s why reading is so difficult for some kids.

Kelly Cartwright

And for grown-ups when we are tired.

Matt Renwick

Right — I’ve hit many mental roadblocks, and I’m like, I need a break, I need to go walk the dog. Movement helps me reset my thinking.

We see new resources that are still referring to the Simple View, still framing things as decoding over here, language comprehension over there. Why has this binary been so sticky? Why has the field not progressed to what you’re describing?

Kelly Cartwright

This is what happens in fields all over the place — it’s not just education. We like to group things. Cognitively, we like to sort things into groups. There’s the old nature-nurture debate from human development: is a particular trait caused by nature, or is it caused by nurture? People tend to think about that in a really dichotomous way, when the truth is very much intertwined. Even reading disabilities are a great example. Reading disabilities have a heritable component, but environment plays a role too. If you get explicit, systematic phonics instruction, that’s going to move the needle in a way that an environmental factor — not getting that instruction — won’t.

Another example: kids with lower socioeconomic resources tend to have more difficulty with reading, and with executive functions. Experience plays a role; heredity plays a role. It’s not a simple either-or. But when we’re thinking about doing something super complicated — Louisa Moats characterized teaching reading as rocket science — not only are we having to do all of those things at once as readers, but as an educator, you are having to help little people who have never understood how letters make words. You’ve got to help them decode, know what the words mean, know how to weave them into phrases and sentences and paragraphs, make mental pictures, make the inferences, deal with syntax and morphology. That’s a lot. And so, to be able to group the things that I need to do as an educator into two buckets simplifies things and helps us organize our day. But it may not always be beneficial for students, because we know that multi-component interventions help students learn to do that integration.

Matt Renwick

I wish we would pay teachers like rocket scientists.

Kelly Cartwright

Hear, hear. I agree.

Matt Renwick

In your meta-analysis, you were looking at executive function interventions isolated from reading instruction and then asking: what’s the effect? And you found that for EF interventions to be effective, they need to be embedded in reading instruction. You can’t do executive functioning interventions in isolation and then expect them to generalize into reading. Why is that, and why does that matter for educators?

Kelly Cartwright

There’s a super basic study in cognitive psychology called the chess study. What they did was compare children who were chess experts with adults who were chess novices on two tasks: memory for chessboard arrangements, and memory for strings of numbers. Both are memory tasks, but one is specific to an area the kids have experience with and the adults do not. What they found — and this was a big deal at the time — is that the children outperformed the adults on chessboard arrangements. Children are not supposed to have better memory than adults, but they did on chess-specific memory. And on memory for letter strings, the adults outperformed the kids, as we would expect. That illustrates this idea of domain-specific or task-specific cognition: the thinking within that task gets better. Over time, playing chess helped those kids get better and better at remembering chessboard arrangements. That doesn’t really relate to reading — I’m not saying go out and have people play chess — but within reading, it’s requiring you to do a lot of mental work, a lot of mental gymnastics. Being flexible about pronunciations of words — there’s something called “set for variability” — or being able to shift between thinking about words’ sounds and words’ meanings, or being able to hold aspects of text in mind and update them as you continue to make your way through. That’s reading-specific working memory.

So, if I’m doing an intervention that helps to strengthen the kinds of reading-specific executive skills, or the way executive skills show up within reading, that’s going to help the child’s reading — and also their executive skills within reading. But if I put a child over here on a working memory task that looks kind of like that Simon game we used to play as kids, where you’re pushing buttons to remember sequences of tones — that’s not going to help reading. It might help them remember sequences of colored buttons, but it’s not going to transfer. The field went for a while, when executive functions and reading were shown to be related, toward: let’s do executive function interventions, have them do computerized tasks, and it will transfer to reading. But we’re not seeing that happen, because the work was being done in separate areas. When educators can identify the ways that working memory shows up within reading — like inference-making, or the flexibility we’ve talked about, or inhibiting inappropriate word meanings for context — and then intervene in those things to strengthen both the executive skills and the reading skills, then both improve.

Matt Renwick

When you talk about that, what comes up for me is “neurons that fire together wire together.” Is that why we see that?

Kelly Cartwright

I don’t have all the data we need yet, but we know that reading interventions strengthen connectivity in the reading network. And we know that executive function networks help to connect up the hubs in the reading network in the brain. In a sense, yes, you’re having them fire together — just like an intervention for a child with dyslexia. They need more explicit, systematic phonics instruction to get that letter-word form area in the visual cortex — that part of the brain we repurposed to become reading brain — to build up. When we give them more practice, it improves the connections and the processing. Interventions change brains, yes. But we do need more work to really say definitively, here’s study after study. We don’t have all of that yet.

Matt Renwick

I’m thinking about kids who have gone through a very isolated phonics intervention and come out as good word callers, but their comprehension hasn’t kept up. It seems like a similar issue — we want the bridging processes, we want to bridge these activities so that kids are fully growing as readers.

Kelly Cartwright

That brings up something for me, just thinking about reading difficulties. Dyslexia is one — those kids have word-reading difficulties. But the kids we typically call “word callers,” where they sound like great readers and fly under the radar because they sound awesome — the teacher hears them and thinks everything’s going well, and then the end-of-grade assessment comes and they can’t comprehend, and you’re like, what’s going on? Those children are children where executive skills show up as a difficulty. Kids with dyslexia also have executive skill difficulties, in different ways.

A recent meta-analysis by Rick Wagner and colleagues at the Florida Center for Reading Research looked at kids with great word-reading ability but surprisingly poor comprehension. Using the Simple View framework, they examined how much word recognition and language comprehension contribute to reading comprehension for these kids. Those two buckets of skills explain about half of the variance in reading comprehension, and what they concluded was: there’s got to be something else. We know that these students have executive skill difficulties — study after study shows it. This work matters for educators because, historically, we haven’t known what to do with those children. You know what to do when they can’t read the words. But when they can read the words and comprehension just isn’t happening — executive skill-infused instruction helps these kids in ways that typical instruction sometimes does not.

Matt Renwick

And this is an equity issue. You mentioned that low socioeconomic status has an influence on executive functioning as well. I mean, I’m thinking about schools and their intervention banks — they’re almost 100% either language comprehension or word recognition interventions. We are really potentially missing a lot of kids if we’re not thinking about executive functioning.

Kelly Cartwright

And you said “either-or,” and that points to some new work that’s coming out. I’ll point to one particular study — Austin and colleagues out of University of Texas at Austin. They did an intervention study with 4th and 5th graders with dyslexia. One condition had 45-minute intensive phonics lessons — a series of lessons with multisyllabic words — and students learned to decode those words to fluency. The other group, randomly assigned, had 25 minutes of explicit phonics instruction for the same series of lessons, but also 20 minutes of meaning-focused instruction — so they learned what the words meant and were working with the meanings as well as the decoding. And as you might expect, the students with the multi-component intervention — dealing with both the sounds and the meanings of the words — actually outperformed their peers who received phonics alone. It’s important to give kids the opportunities to deal with both at the same time.

Matt Renwick

What steps could an interventionist, or a classroom teacher, take to start redesigning core instruction and interventions with executive functions in mind? What might be a first good step or two?

Kelly Cartwright

One way that we approach instruction is to put an anchor chart on the board or have an organizational tool for the child on the desk. There are certain graphic organizers that can help take cognitive load for students, and using them in that way — helping kids put the thinking on the table — really supports kids with working memory difficulties.

You can also assess cognitive flexibility. I have an assessment — a Graphophonological Semantic Flexibility Assessment — that measures flexibility in thinking about letter sounds and meanings. It shows how well someone can shift back and forth between the word recognition piece and the meaning-focused piece. Kids and adults who are more flexible in considering both sounds and meanings of words are better comprehenders. Word-calling types of kids, kids with dyslexia, are not good at managing both. It’s freely accessible, so that’s another thing to think about.

Fluency is another area. The way we operationalize and measure fluency — we’re looking at rate. Rate just means they can decode automatically. Rate doesn’t tell us whether they’re also managing meaning at the same time. But prosody, or expressiveness, is harder to measure. We don’t always measure it, but that’s an indicator that they’re weaving meaning together with their decoding. The old school thinking is: you get more automatic with word recognition, and it makes mental space for comprehension. But that doesn’t mean you fill that space with comprehension if you don’t know how.

Matt Renwick

So oral reading fluency by itself may not be enough. It’s a screener, but we want to investigate further — especially for our right-to-read states where reading fluency is the primary measure.

Kelly Cartwright

There are options for examining prosody and expressiveness, but we don’t always do that because it’s just harder to assess. When I’m talking to students, I’ll talk about it as expressiveness, or using your “movie star voices” and putting the feeling in — but you have to know what the text means to put the feeling in the right way.

Matt Renwick

Let’s talk about a harder part of this conversation. You’ve expressed your position on the popular science of reading discourse. You note in the Active View of Reading article that popular SoR discourse, as currently practiced, may actually be masking complexity in ways that can hurt kids — particularly kids whose reading difficulties don’t fit the decoding-or-comprehension frame. The walls come up, egos get hurt, resistance arises. How do you communicate these critiques effectively, so that people are actually hearing them and are willing to be responsive?

Kelly Cartwright

It’s difficult, because educators have put so, so much time and effort into retooling and learning and understanding. But the science — just like any science — is ever-evolving, and we continue to learn more so we can meet the needs of all learners. If we all share that goal, then we just have to keep working toward figuring out why all learners aren’t growing the way we expect them to.

If we’re teaching word recognition over here and language comprehension over there in different parts of the school day, and not giving students the opportunity to put them together — to bridge them, as we know skilled readers need to do — then that doesn’t help them do what they need to do as skilled readers. We’re not equipping them in the same way. Like the Austin intervention study with 4th and 5th grade students with dyslexia: the ones who had the opportunity to deal with explicit, systematic phonics instruction and meaning did better on all of the outcome measures than the students who got the explicit systematic phonics instruction alone. If we look at word recognition and language comprehension, we’d say, “Oh, those kids need word recognition!” But the word recognition alone didn’t lift them up as much as helping them learn to do that alongside other things. We have to look at the data on the kids and what they need, and try to avoid compartmentalized thinking. We need more work on multi-component interventions.

Matt Renwick

Sharing the research and being a learner yourself. I’ve found similar results where I’ve shared a study, and the response is usually not defensive — it’s more like, “Okay, I’ll think about it,” and then they circle back around and I do see change in their practice. They may not admit that what they did in the past was not as effective, but I would agree: just share the research and be a learner. So, fun question to close things out. What are you reading right now?

Kelly Cartwright

I always have a fiction book on my bedside table — that’s my break at the end of the day. I may only read two sentences and fall asleep, as we do sometimes. A literacy professor friend recommended a book titled This Book Made Me Think of You by Libby Page. It’s great — I highly recommend it. I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s a great book.

Matt Renwick

I’m writing that down. I am reading Project Hail Mary. It just came out as a movie — science fiction. It’s one of those “we gotta save the planet” kind of books. I always try to read the book before I see the movie, because once I see the movie, I picture that person as the character.

Kelly Cartwright

You want to develop your own visual imagery — yes.

Matt Renwick

Yes. Debra, what are you reading?

Debra Crouch

I am reading a book called How We Grow Up by Matt Richtel. It’s all about adolescence and all the science and research coming out now about the brain. He’s got some really interesting things to say, and he’s just a fabulous writer — it doesn’t matter what his topic is, I will always read him.

Matt Renwick

I’ll put them in the notes. Well, thank you, Kelly, for being here. This was really informative. You read what someone writes and studies, but to hear them explain it is super helpful. I’m imagining your students really appreciate your instruction. Thank you for being here.

Kelly Cartwright

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Dr. Kelly Cartwright, Spangler Distinguished Professor of Early Child Literacy at UNC Charlotte, has spent her career mapping the territory other reading models leave out — specifically, the role executive functions play in coordinating what skilled readers do.

In this conversation, Dr. Cartwright explains what executive functions (EF) actually are, why they matter for every reader and not just students with ADHD, and what her research reveals about the kind of EF interventions that actually move the needle on reading outcomes. She also makes the case that the field’s tendency toward dichotomous thinking — decoding over here, comprehension over there — may be leaving a large group of students without the support they need.

This is a recording of a virtual conversation a…

Read more

A few years ago, I overheard a 4th grader say something I haven't forgotten.

"We should purchase a couple of books on ADHD, so that I can share them with my friends and they can understand what it's like to be me."

This student wasn't responding to a teacher prompt. She wasn't completing an assignment. She was advocating for herself and for people she cared about, in a space where her voice mattered.

Shee was one of dozens of 4th and 5th graders who participated in our school library book budget project at Mineral Point Elementary. Students examined the current collection, surveyed their peers about what was missing, visited a local bookstore to learn how books get displayed, and ultimately made decisions about how to spend thousands of dollars on new titles.

What we noticed surprised us. Students who were typically disengaged as readers started coming to school early to unpack book deliveries. A student who didn't see himself as a reader was the first student to arrive for meetings, turning on computers and setting up tables. Circulation went up. How students started seeing themselves in relation to books and reading also changed for the better.

The data confirms what we observed. Students who participated scored higher on self-concept as a reader. They checked out roughly 17 more books than non-participants. Their reading growth over the school year was more than double that of students who didn't participate.

That's what the numbers showed. But the project changed something for the adults too. Most of us who work in schools are working very hard. We manage classroom libraries, curate book collections, make decisions about what students should read and when. We do this because we care. And in caring, we sometimes do for students what students could be doing for themselves.

What would change if we handed some of that over?

I'm building a small community of teachers and librarians who want to find out. Starting in fall 2026, a cohort of ten educators will run a book budget project in their own classrooms or school libraries, study what happens to their students, and learn together across the year.

If this opportunity resonates with you, I'd love to talk. I'm scheduling short discovery conversations over the next few weeks to learn about your context and share more about the project.

Sign up below. No commitment required, just a conversation.

https://calendar.app.google/CY1JbMUL8ChTo1aX6

Take care,

Matt

Watch this presentation in tandem with my free eBook What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading. Use these resources as a starting point for holding much-needed discussions in your school around effective literacy instruction. If you would like support with facilitating this type of conversation, don't hesitate to get in touch with me here.

Take care,

Matt

P.S. Join me for the next professional learning event: a conversation with Dr. Kelly Cartwright, author of Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension: A Guide for Educators.

RSVP today

Full Transcript

What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading

Transcript of a presentation based on the free ebook resource available to download.

About Me

Hi, I’m Matt Renwick. I’m sharing this presentation: What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading, based on the free ebook resource available to download.

A little bit about myself. I’m a father of two teens and a husband to Jodi, who is also a teacher. My son is currently in college — whenever I visit, I try to find something fun for us to do together. My daughter is a junior in high school. I’m also a very part-time bookseller at an independent bookstore in my hometown. This is our dog, Millie. She works Sundays with me and is excellent at her job. And one of the things I most enjoy is visiting national parks. My most recent trip was to the Rocky Mountains for a mountain biking trip — though I’ll admit I’m not a big fan of heights, so I drove the rest of the party up to the trailhead and cheered them on from there.

Starting With a Book

I want to begin by referencing a book — not reading it aloud, but using it as a frame. It’s called Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld. You may have seen it. It uses an optical illusion — is it a duck or a rabbit? One person sees a duck; another sees a rabbit.

I’ve found this book especially useful for lowering the emotional temperature when we start talking about the science of reading. After reading it aloud, I typically invite a group to pause and reflect on these three questions:

1. When we debate reading instruction, are we arguing about what’s best for kids — or about who’s right?

2. Where in your work do you notice people looking at the same data and seeing completely different things?

3. What would it take for you to genuinely consider a perspective on reading instruction that you’ve resisted?

If you’re watching this with a group, I’d encourage you to pause here and have a conversation.

How This Resource Got Started

The impetus for this presentation came from a colleague who was supporting a new administrator. This new administrator was already getting inundated with requests for evidence-based workbooks and heavily phonics-focused resources. She reached out and asked me to share my take on the science of reading with this administrator.

Here’s what I shared in an email:

First, reading instruction is complex. It’s not a simple equation you can plug resources into and expect to produce readers.

Second, science requires inquiry, not dogma. If a field is a true science, it will continue to conduct research, look at what’s working and what’s not, and reevaluate its philosophies in light of new evidence.

Third, multiple sciences of reading matter. We can’t just look at cognitive science. We also have to look at the science of engagement, the science of motivation, the science of efficacy, and the science of goal setting. These all matter.

Fourth, authentic texts should support skill development. A lot of resources strip away rich, relevant text in service of isolated skill practice — and we know that doesn’t work.

Fifth, programs do not equal responsive instruction. I’ve heard this called “solutionitis” — the idea that buying a program will automatically raise reading scores. We know that’s not the case.

I sent that email and waited a few weeks without hearing back. I eventually reached out to my colleague and learned the administrator had left the position. My first assumption was that the complexity of the topic had scared them off — but actually, they’d landed a dream job. Still, the experience got me thinking about all the new administrators coming into these roles without much background in this area. That’s what I want to address through both this presentation and the ebook.

My Beliefs — A Disclaimer

What follows is based on my current beliefs, grounded not just in my own experience but also in research and in conversations with colleagues who know more than I do in certain areas. These beliefs are evolving. I hold them with humility.

Belief 1: Teaching Reading Is Not Simple

There’s been a lot of conversation lately about the “simple view of reading.” I’d argue that teaching reading is anything but simple. It takes a long time to become highly skilled at teaching readers.

I recently came across a New York Times article titled “Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore — Even in English Class.” I found it striking because when I taught fifth and sixth graders 25 years ago, we were reading multiple novels a year as a class. Then we moved away from that — toward anthology series, excerpts, comprehension questions, skill packets. I’m not saying whole-class novel study is a best practice across the board. But it’s worth asking: we introduced all these programs, and the result is that kids aren’t reading books anymore. How do we find the balance — where resources support instruction without becoming the curriculum? As Peter Afflerbach likes to say: How do we teach readers, not just reading?

The Simple View of Reading — from Gough and Tunmer — reads like an equation: decoding + language comprehension = reading. There’s research that supports this. The problem is that it’s incomplete. It doesn’t account for all the other ways kids become readers.

One of the biggest promoters of this simplified narrative has been Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast. I counted the transcripts of the first eight episodes: phonics is mentioned 48 times, comprehension 10 times, and engagement 0 times. You can see how media shapes the public’s understanding of reading instruction — and how that narrative flows into legislation. Wisconsin’s Act 20, for example, is heavily phonics-focused. Some of the assessments it prioritizes, like oral reading fluency, can be useful indicators — but they don’t even measure comprehension.

An Active View of Reading — introduced by Duke and Cartwright — is what I promote instead. It still values word recognition and language comprehension, but adds important components: bridging processes (print concepts, fluency, vocabulary knowledge), and active self-regulation (motivation, engagement, executive functioning, strategy use). These aren’t extras — they’re prerequisites for students to become highly effective, engaged readers. Notably, this is a reader model, not a reading model. It recognizes that reading is also shaped by the texts we choose, the tasks we design, and sociocultural context — including diverse authorship, representation, and the absence of bias.

A practical implication: expand your assessments. As a principal and teacher, I learned that what we measure is what matters. Right-to-read legislation may mandate oral reading fluency screening, and that’s fine — but we can also look at attendance and behavior as root causes, consider whether language barriers rather than reading skill are the real challenge for some students, and include teacher observations and student voice. Think about what it means to take a fuller picture of a reader.

Belief 2: The Science Is Anything But Settled

I once posted this on Twitter:

“I don’t know who needs to hear this. Teaching a literacy curriculum program like a script, lesson by lesson, to all kids without considering their current interests, abilities, and needs is not scientific, drains the joy out of learning, and leads to inequities.”

It got significant engagement — many positive responses, but also real pushback. Someone at the higher ed level responded that teachers actually love the script because it gives them structure. I understand that perspective. But the insistence that the science is settled — and that it’s simply a matter of implementing the right program — is not only factually wrong; it’s intellectually closed.

Notice even the language: the science of reading. That definite article is essentialist, exclusive — like “the Olympic Games” or “The Ohio State University.” If you’re for the science of reading, you believe X. If you don’t, you’re outside the movement. People have been pushed to the margins of these communities simply for raising questions. That doesn’t feel very scientific.

Any professional field that considers itself a science goes through paradigm shifts — a concept introduced by Thomas Kuhn. Normal science gives way to anomalies, then to a model crisis, then to revolution, then to a new paradigm. Copernicus gave us one example. I believe reading instruction is stuck in the model crisis — cycling through the same debates without genuine revolution. We can’t change the whole profession, but we can make progress locally.

One approach I’ve found effective: use professional journal articles to facilitate conversation — not to prove a point, but to create space for educators to engage with ideas. Rachel Gabriel’s article “The Sciences of Reading Instruction” is a good one. It’s balanced, uses helpful metaphors, and raises productive questions.

Pair it with shared agreements (I use: stay engaged, experience discomfort, speak your truth, expect and accept non-closure) and a dialogue protocol — like the 4As — to make sure all voices get space, not just the loudest ones.

Belief 3: Good Intentions Can Lead to Inequitable Outcomes

Wisconsin’s Act 20 — our right-to-read law — was written in July 2023. Like many state laws of its kind, its language has been heavily influenced by certain think tanks, commercial providers, and media figures. It requires science-based early reading instruction, mandates universal screening and intervention systems, restricts certain curriculum approaches (no three-cueing in core reading curriculum starting in 2024–25), and requires professional development around structured literacy for K–3 teachers, principals, and reading specialists.

There are also third-grade promotion policies. In some states — Ohio, Florida, Mississippi — students who are not deemed proficient can be retained. Up to a third of an entire third-grade cohort in some cases. The long-term effects of that are deeply concerning.

I share this because I do believe most people involved in this legislation want kids to perform better. But good intentions can produce inequitable outcomes when:

• Single scores become students’ identities

• A student who scored at the 24th percentile versus the 25th percentile on an ORF assessment receives a personal reading plan and a letter home — without anyone asking whether they had a rough night, or whether they still see themselves as a strong reader

• We do things to students rather than with them, stripping away agency and voice

What I’ve observed as this movement plays out in schools: more scripted curricula, limits on responsive instruction, isolated skill practice, decontextualized text, and assessments that measure only what’s easy to measure. The downstream effects include the removal of voice and choice, classroom and school libraries collecting dust, independent reading squeezed out, teacher professionalism diminished, and authentic tasks like project-based learning deprioritized.

One counter-move: empower students to curate and organize their classroom or school library. This can be an ongoing project — lay the books out, let students decide the organization, identify gaps, and bring in culturally relevant titles. Use book order points and let kids choose. You’ll see more engagement, more reading, and you’ll free up some of your own time in the process.

Belief 4: One Science Is Dependent on Another

I was recently working with a team discussing teacher beliefs and their role in effective reading instruction. I posed this question: Imagine your principal removed all the core ELA resources from every classroom. Could your teachers still teach their students?

After a pause, the group said — yeah, we could.

So what would that look like?

And that’s when the real conversation started.

I raise this because critics of the science of reading movement have pointed out that proponents often can’t articulate a coherent theory. “Sequential and explicit direct instruction” is a process, not a theory. What’s the actual theory of action for teaching readers? That question matters.

One answer is an instructional model that allows teachers to be responsive. I’ve used Regie Routman’s Optimal Learning Model from Literacy Essentials in two schools as a principal. What I like about it is the arrows going both directions — we move between whole-class demonstration, shared practice, guided reading, and independent reading based on real-time, informal assessment. If kids aren’t ready, we go back. This takes significant professional development to build capacity, but it also inoculates schools against scripted program dependency.

The larger point is this: teaching readers well requires holding multiple sciences in tension simultaneously. Cognitive science — comprehension, decoding, fluency. Affective science — motivation, engagement, identity. Metacognitive science — goal setting, self-efficacy, agency. These don’t operate in isolation. When you weave them together — for example, using a classroom library project that builds both reading identity and cognitive engagement — you see real growth.

How to build this knowledge in your staff: As a principal, I had to build my own curriculum. I subscribed to several journals — I didn’t read every article, but I’d browse the table of contents, pull one article, read it with margin notes, and then summarize it in my Friday staff newsletter, linking to the original. I became an information distiller. That made it possible to walk into a classroom and have a research-grounded conversation with a teacher who held strong views — not as an expert telling them what’s right, but as a colleague asking questions. What did you think about that article on Orton-Gillingham? It becomes a much more objective, productive exchange.

Belief 5: You Can’t Buy the Science of Reading

This became real to me as a principal when a reading recovery interventionist was trying to get a first-grade student to come to his sessions. Reading Recovery is a highly evidence-based intervention — but she couldn’t get him to come. We suspected executive functioning challenges and a history of reading struggle that made being singled out feel threatening.

So she brought in a Venus flytrap. She told the student: if you come to my room, you get to feed it one fly.

Eventually, I walked in, and there was a pile of dead flies next to the plant. This student had started bringing his own food supply. The teacher had to explain that they couldn’t overfeed it. What started as external motivation — a Venus flytrap — gradually shifted toward internal, identity-forming reinforcement. She had the student, after reaching a benchmark, choose a few books he actually wanted to read. That was the celebration.

You can’t legislate this. You can’t buy it. It’s built over time through teachers developing deep knowledge — not just of reading, but of kids, of pedagogy, of motivation and engagement, of executive function, of the ways all these strands weave together into a reader’s identity. It takes sustained investment in self-study and collective growth.

This shakes out in school-level data as well. As a principal, I used to look at statewide scores and identify schools similar to mine demographically — Title I schools — that were doing better. Then I’d cold-call their principals and reading specialists and ask: what are you doing?

Four themes emerged:

1. High expectations for every student. Inclusion was the default. Intervention was carefully integrated with Tier 1, not siloed.

2. Sustained investment in teachers. Not cutting PD days. Not just buying a program and saying good luck. Actually coaching and developing teachers over time.

3. Different programs, shared beliefs. Every school used something different — some used Units of Study, some used anthologies, one had developed their own materials. What they shared was a deep commitment to common beliefs and practices. One principal described respectfully but clearly inviting a teacher who wouldn’t get on board to find a better fit elsewhere.

4. No superheroes. No one teacher stood out as exceptional. What they had was a willingness to have hard conversations and an evolving, collective commitment to what they knew to be effective.

One practical strategy: develop shared beliefs as a staff. I used Regie Routman’s Read, Write, Lead, which includes over 20 belief statements. Each year I’d put them in a Google form — agree or disagree. The first year, we had two shared beliefs. We celebrated. The next year, we focused our professional development on the areas of disagreement. The year after that, we had five. And we kept growing.

As a principal, I could then walk into classrooms and reference those shared commitments — affirming what I saw that was aligned, and asking honest questions when something was missing. The expectations were clear. The conversations were respectful.

You can also do this as a whole-group activity: post belief statements on chart paper, give staff colored dots, and ask them to place their dots on a spectrum from agree to disagree. Then have them talk about why. This builds not just shared beliefs but perspective-taking — recognizing that most people sit somewhere in the middle, and that the goal is to move together toward greater alignment over time.

Closing

I want to close with a student I remember from third grade — a kid who by second grade saw reading as something you do in school, not something you love. A capable reader, but not a joyful one.

In third grade, his teacher read aloud Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume. He related to Peter Hatcher — oldest of three boys, with a younger sibling who was like Fudge. He read and re-read that book until the pages were falling out of his copy. He loved it so much that he wrote some not-so-great fan fiction trying to emulate Judy Blume.

If you look closely at the bottom left of the fan fiction — you can see my name there.

That’s how I became a reader. Not through a script. I’m sure I learned some skills in kindergarten and first grade. But what unlocked reading for me — what helped me see myself as a reader and to love it — was one read-aloud by one teacher who knew her students and knew what would turn them on to reading.

Closing question: How do you choose to see your readers? Take a moment to think about how you’re seeing them now — and how you might choose to see them a little differently tomorrow.

Thank you for watching What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading. Please reach out if you have any questions. And thank you for your work, your leadership, and your readership.

What does executive function have to do with reading comprehension? More than most reading programs account for.

In this live Q&A, I’m joined by Dr. Kelly Cartwright — researcher, author, and co-creator of the Active View of Reading — for a conversation about what the current Science of Reading debate often overlooks: why some students struggle to comprehend even with effective instruction, and the role cognitive flexibility, working memory, and self-regulation play in helping kids become not just skilled readers, but engaged ones.

​Bring your questions about readers who don’t fit the script. This is a small-group conversation.

​📅 Thursday, April 2, 2026 | 2:00pm CST | Full subscribers register below

Subscribe now

Read more

👋 Hi, it’s Matt. Thanks for being a reader. I write about literacy and leadership, including my free guide, What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading. Last week, I shared about how easy it is to forget about the basics of coaching. This week, I differentiate between teaching to texts and through texts.

Subscribe now

In a 2025 New York Times article, Dana Goldstein wonders whether “the age of the book may be fading.” The concern: kids rarely read entire books these days, averaging 1-2 per year, according to researchers and a survey this newspaper conducted. Potential root causes include social media and smartphones, scripted curricula, and pressure to perform well on state tests. Even Timothy Shanahan, noted literacy researcher, finds no reliable data supporting a positive correlation between reading whole books and reading achievement.

Before I question the debate itself, let me confess how I contributed to the problem.

In my early years as a 5th and 6th-grade teacher, my instruction was grounded in reading whole books. I integrated Hatchet1 within our social studies unit on Canada. The figurative language of Bridge to Terabithia was combined with a literal study of bridges within my math unit on geometry. I even had students create salt-dough landscapes from the novels to promote “visualization” as a reading strategy. (I was told by a colleague that “novel studies” is a calling card of 5th-grade teachers.)

This focus on novels has carried on for decades. As a principal, a teacher informed me that they “really teach Where the Red Fern Grows.” My pride would like me to say I had no idea what they were talking about. But I could imagine myself in their classroom, conjuring up activities that represent my excitement for the book without taking into account the interests and needs of my students.

Tricia Ebarvia, veteran teacher and author of Get Free: Antibias Literacy Instruction for Stronger Readers, Writers, and Thinkers (Corwin, 2024), believes that we don’t teach a text. We teach text sets, tensions, and essential questions. We use texts to build students’ capacity to construct meaning and be more critically conscious thinkers. There is a difference between teaching to the text and teaching through text toward bigger ideas.

For example, Tricia initially taught Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë to her secondary students. She loved that story growing up, connecting with the main character’s resilience and independence. But when she encountered Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Tricia found a counter-narrative that could lift a marginalized voice from Brontë’s classic. Bertha Mason, the “madwoman in the attic” in Jane Eyre, is Antoinette Cosway, a young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Themes of colonialism, patriarchy, and systemic oppression are illuminated.

Ebarvia’s example is the destination. Where might we begin? It’s tempting to start by simply persuading teachers to incorporate counter-narratives with current novels. For instance, Where the Red Fern Grows can be paired with the Indigenous picture book When We Were Alone to enrich the themes of loss and love, while also creating tension around rural life, landscapes, and ownership. The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera, read alongside Hatchet, can expand upon the survival genre through essential questions and student discussion, such as “What does it mean to survive, and what are we surviving for?”

It starts with modeling. I recently demonstrated this at the Illinois Reading Council Conference.

I started my session on what school leaders need to know about the science of reading by reading aloud a picture book: Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld. This smart, simple story uses an optical illusion to surface the tension related to different perspectives around effective reading instruction. After the read aloud, I invited small groups to discuss at least one of the following questions:

• When we debate reading instruction, are we arguing about what’s best for kids — or about who’s right?

• Where in your work do you notice people looking at the same data and seeing completely different things?

• What would it take for you to genuinely consider a perspective on reading instruction that you’ve resisted?

Then I recommended a transition to a professional article on the subject, for example, Rachael Gabriel’s The Sciences of Reading Instruction. The humor of Duck! Rabbit! can help lower the temperature that this topic sometimes induces.

Besides building a shared understanding around the science of reading, a paired reading like this during professional learning serves as a model for expanding our instruction beyond any one text. The discussion questions emerge from the text and create an opening for dialogue rather than confirming our biases.

What if we stopped debating about whole books versus excerpts, and started asking whether the texts we choose are expanding our students’ identities and abilities as readers?

What’s one text you currently use or did use that could be paired with a counter-narrative? What tension might that pairing surface for students?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Printable version

What I’m Reading: Bottlenecks in Education

Isobel Stevenson connects the recent closure of the Strait of Hormuz with the theory of constraints. She makes the point that “you can make improvements in all kinds of places in the system, but if you are not addressing a bottleneck—the one place in the system that is holding back the rest of the system—then you are not improving the system overall.” It got me thinking how just about anything in education, even books, can become a barrier to student learning if we are not intentional in our instruction.

The Coaching Letter

Coaching Letter #228

Friends, thank you for subscribing to the Coaching Letter—you rock. I’ve been working for a long time on a Coaching Letter to do with education and the theory of constraints—it’s taken me a long time because simultaneously we’ve been working on a book project and a couple of articles and I also have a day job. Last Coaching Letter…

Read more

2 months ago · 87 likes · 1 comment · Isobel Stevenson

Quotable

👋 Hi, it’s Matt. Thanks for being a reader. I write about literacy and leadership, including my free guide, What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading. Last week, I shared how I use AI to support my coaching practice. This week, I talk about how easy it is to forget about the basics of coaching.

Subscribe now

Coaching has a strange irony: the people who need support most aren’t always looking for it. Unlike a principal, whose door people knock on, a coach has to seek out educators and earn the right to help.

For example, I recently participated in a workshop on AI policy and intention. The room was full. The speakers were well prepared and gave leadership teams time to think, talk with each other, and make plans. During team time, I walked around the room and listened in on their conversations.

As an MTSS coach, I feel I know what teams need: someone to help them build systems of support, such as co-creating an instructional framework that spells out effective vs. ineffective AI use. So I stopped by a few tables, politely interrupted their conversations, and handed out a flyer for an upcoming training. “Bring a team to this event, and it will unlock coaching from me. We can build this work out together.” A few nods and a “thank you” were the response. It was awkward.

With one team, however, I knew the principal well. We had worked together previously on reducing negative behaviors, with noticeable and sustained success. Now they wanted to learn how to use AI to generate ideas for reading intervention.

Resisting the urge to help them address this issue, and because I genuinely wanted to connect with this principal again, I asked how they were feeling about the information shared so far. (We had just heard the AI policy speaker explain the legal ramifications of sharing personally identifiable information.) “Like I don’t want to use it!” I laughed. “That was the feeling I was beginning to have,” I affirmed. I then asked how they were using AI so far. For the most part, it was typing prompts into the chat and hoping for a helpful response.

Sensing a genuine opening, I asked if they were familiar with Gems in Google Gemini. They weren’t. “Gems are like projects in ChatGPT or Claude. You can guide them to focus on a certain topic or domain, such as reading interventions. Name it, type in some directions on how you want AI to respond, and upload PDFs and other relevant files to its knowledge base, for example, your current MTSS handbook.” I walked them through the process. Their superintendent came over and watched, curious. I closed the conversation with a no-pressure invitation to reach out if they wanted to continue to work on this together.

I don’t know whether the principal or their district leadership team will contact me to request more support. But if I were a betting man, I'd put my money on this team over the others.

• I connected with them personally. I wasn’t trying to sell them anything. I just took time to see how they were doing, out of genuine care and interest.

• I acknowledged and validated their current reality. People want to feel seen, as fully human. I recall reading that the number one thing teachers want from their supervisor is recognition for their work.

• I earned the right to pose questions. Connecting personally and acknowledging their reality built enough trust that curiosity felt like care and not interrogation.

• I gave them a sample of how I can support them. I didn’t solve their problem, but I did give them a peek into what I could provide.

Three years into this work, and I can still walk into a room and forget everything I know about coaching. I handed out flyers. I interrupted conversations. I promoted a service. And it fell flat. Of course it did. The things that actually open doors aren’t new techniques or better positioning. They’re the basics: show up curious, ask how someone’s doing, and listen like you mean it. Apparently, I occasionally need the reminder.

Enjoyed this post? Let me know what resonated with you in the comments, or reply to this article via email. You can also restack this post, print it, and share it with colleagues online.

Leave a comment

Share

Printable version

What I’m Reading

Why Do We Keep Saying ‘Struggling Student’? (Substack)

The author, Colleen Cruz, regrets using the term "struggling student" in a previous book she wrote. This term identifies students by their struggle instead of seeing their potential. Calling students "struggling" can also lower teacher expectations and hide learning disabilities. Instead, Colleen recommends teachers stay curious and investigate deeper to better support each student's needs.

From the article:

⁠Many schools and districts have clear and robust procedures for Child Find. They use screeners to identify students early and offer professional development to general and special education faculty on common signs of disability. They have explicit guidelines for MTSS and ensure that students who are not helped by Tier 3 are moved through to the evaluation process. These are all great systems that help a lot of students get the support they need.

Yet, in spite of those systems there is one area I believe is worth deeper reflection: the effect of casually labeling students as struggling might render them invisible to those systems. (my emphasis)

Quotable

👋 Hi, it’s Matt. Thanks for being a reader. I post about literacy and leadership.

• If you are interested in more opportunities to learn, check out my upcoming webinar on March 5th, available to full subscribers. It’s based on my free guide, What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading.

• I also offer support on creating effective workflows for busy educators, including how to build an AI thought partner, the subject of today’s post.

Subscribe now

A teacher recently sent me an email that made me pause.

She was reflecting on questions I’d raised during a previous coaching session: How do we manage all of these tasks and processes? How do we organize all of these disparate docs and spreadsheets?

Her response was honest and insightful: “All the varying methods for managing data and information have unintentionally created other situations that then need managing. The system is complex.”

I’ve heard and observed versions of this in nearly every district I support. For example, a district requires all interventions to be administered with at least 80% fidelity. This is appropriate. But what happens to that student who is chronically absent due to factors outside the school walls? What kind of support will they receive if they have a genuine disability but their interventions don’t “count”? What process needs to be in place for those situations?

As a systems coach for an educational service agency, my job isn’t just to help schools implement systems of support; it’s to help them coordinate that work across teams, roles, and competing priorities. The technical side of MTSS is complicated enough. But the implementation work — tracking who owns what, where the data lives, how decisions get made — is often where schools become overwhelmed and quietly stop the process. This seems particularly challenging in rural schools, where a reading specialist or director of pupil services becomes the de facto MTSS coordinator with no additional time to do the work.

So when that email showed up in my inbox, I didn’t just write back. I started by thinking it through with AI.

AI as a Thought Partner

It’s tempting to just dive right into AI and ask it to solve a problem for us. For example, I could have asked Claude (my preferred AI tool) to build a collaborative hub for districts to manage their MTSS work. But it wouldn’t know their context or any frustrations staff are feeling.

Instead, I use AI as a smart colleague, someone I can think out loud with as I start building.

What makes this work is context. Next is how I set up this workflow.

A project in Claude is similar to a CustomGPT in ChatGPT or a Gem in Google Gemini.

I’ve set up a project in Claude specifically for my district coaching work. I gave it a description of what I do and how I think about systems. I uploaded relevant frameworks and deliverables — the actual literature that grounds my practice, including key passages I’ve captured from professional books I return to regularly. So when I bring a problem to Claude, I am not starting from zero with a generic tool. I am working with something that understands the work.

To help ensure Claude’s responses emulate a smart colleague, I write instructions for how I want it to behave. I update these instructions as needed, for example, to fine-tune them when I think Claude is pushing back too much.

I uploaded my notes with personal identifying information (PII) removed. From there, it is a conversation, not a delegation to do work on my behalf.

For example, I uploaded my coaching notes from the previously mentioned educator’s expressed frustration around the complexity of MTSS work. Then I asked Claude what some root causes of these challenges are. Was it a lack of communication between different levels of teams? Did they need a meeting protocol or template?

Claude could see I was heading toward “fix it” mode, thanks to the knowledge I previously uploaded about effective systems coaching. It pushed back (as instructed) and helped me to rethink the situation.

“This isn’t a technical problem. This is a shared mental model problem.”

My initial reaction to this response was defensiveness. I felt my idea of adding a communication protocol was excellent! But I saw my feelings for what they were - just feelings - and what it might be saying about my mindset. Was I operating as a coach or a consultant? Recognizing this dilemma, I continued reading its response.

“So before you design anything for them, I’d wonder: what would it look like to ask them to draw a map? Put a blank org chart in front of them and say, ‘Show me how your problem-solving teams connect.’ Their drawing will tell you more than any tool you could build.”

Claude was guiding me to remain in “learning” mode, to continue to be curious and seek to understand at a deeper level what was happening. Through this mapping activity, I can envision leaders seeing how a decision at one level might create new challenges downstream. This could lead to analyzing other areas of their organization through a more critical lens.

Why This Matters for Literacy Leadership Work

In the world of implementation and improvement science, I see many posts about this work from a technical perspective. Evaluate your systems, analyze the root cause, and conduct a plan-do-study-act. Great tools and processes, but they can act like a veneer that covers the humanness that needs to be acknowledged and understood for the work to move forward.

We also talk a lot about AI as a productivity tool. Type a prompt, get a product. But that framing misses something important, especially for coaches and specialists doing complex, relationship-based work: AI can become just another tool that doesn’t consider the perspectives of the people we support. It shuts down our humility and curiosity in favor of solutions.

The most useful thing AI has done for me isn’t saving time or doing work I’d rather not. It’s helped me slow down and think more clearly before I act, which is exactly what I’m trying to help the districts I support do too.

If you’re a coach, a reading specialist, or an MTSS coordinator drowning in disparate systems, the question isn’t whether AI can give you a solution. Does this tool actually help you think about your work more carefully and provide better support for teachers, leaders, and students?

By setting up AI to be a thought partner and smart colleague before using it, the answer is yes.

Enjoyed this post? Let me know what resonated with you in the comments, or simply reply to this article via email. You can also restack this post, print it, and share it with colleagues online.

Leave a comment

Share

Printable version

What I’m Reading: How Data Happened

I am reading this book as part of a data management course I am currently taking. The history on this topic, from the birth of statistics to the present day debates about social media, is more interesting than I predicted (no pun intended :-). Reading it now feels especially relevant with the advent of AI in our lives.

A favorite quote:

👋 Hi, it’s Matt. Thank you for being a reader. I post weekly about literacy and leadership. If you are interested in more opportunities to learn, check out my upcoming webinar on March 5th, available to full subscribers. It’s based on my free guide, What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading.

Subscribe now

I recently asked readers what was getting in their way of achieving their literacy leadership goals.

Here are the results:

My prediction was wrong. I thought a lack of time along with leadership confidence would be the top factors. That mandates from above, resistance from within, and time to lead were the biggest obstacles that had me examining my original assumption.

Here’s my revised thinking: The obstacle is cultural as much as technical. Both areas have to be attended to when leading a literacy initiative. For example, one reader replied back to the poll by noting that “there is so much information and so many directives that it is hard to know who to listen to or what to do.”

I see this in my work as a systems coach. Supporting one school in an ELA curriculum acquisition process has been as much about pausing the conversation, asking questions, and examining the information about the resource as it has been about setting up a pilot. Questions we’ve considered include:

• How will students perceive the resource?

• Are we selecting a program that will motivate students to love reading and writing, to see themselves as readers, writers, and critical thinkers?

• How will this resource help teachers reach all students so they get what they need when they need it?

This reader also shared that “we need time”, but not as we might initially think. “We always seem to miss the mark when it comes to monitoring progress, providing quality feedback, coaching, etc.” In my experience, change at the systems level takes a minimum of 5 years. This is a tough sell when the next expectation for change is just around the corner.

Complex Problems, Simple Solutions

Schoolwide change at both the technical and cultural levels are intertwined. Examining what we do (technical) reveals what we believe (cultural). Conversely, reflecting on what we believe helps us understand our behaviors and hopefully leads to improved practice. This takes time and patience.

Because of this complexity, along with the pressure to increase test scores, schools often opt for a simple solution: buying a curriculum program without evaluating whether it’s a good fit. No multi-year implementation plan. No investment in ongoing professional learning, including coaching. They expect the program to just work, as if they bought a refrigerator off the store floor and all they need to do is plug in the appliance.

When some teachers eventually struggle with implementation or resist the resource, administration may push back with mandates to follow the script. This can go to the extreme. For instance, an educator shared with me that a principal in one school requires teachers to get prior permission for the books they choose to read aloud to their students.

Anthony Bryk and colleagues refer to this phenomenon as solutionitis.1

“Solutionitis is the propensity to jump quickly on a solution before fully understanding the exact problem to be solved. It is a form of groupthink in which a set of shared beliefs results in an incomplete analysis of the problem to be addressed and fuller consideration of potential problem-solving alternatives. When decision makers see complex matters through a narrow lens, solutionitis lures them into unproductive strategies.” (p. 24)

One unproductive strategy that is common in education is “to formulate a solution based on their past experience, professional knowledge, and beliefs about what seems appropriate.” (p. 24) When I step back and examine this approach objectively, I can see how illogical it is. If we believe we need to improve our schoolwide literacy instruction, then why would we rely solely on what we currently know, believe, and have done in the past? What got us to today isn’t going to get us to tomorrow.

The Cure for Solutionitis

How do leaders navigate all this complexity and resist the simple solutions offered by educational companies? To be clear, I am not anti-resource. As a principal, I co-lead a curriculum acquisition process in my last school and selected a resource with a team of teacher leaders. Rather, I am pro-learning.

Next is a practical step for engaging in professional learning that attends to cultural change, not just a technical solution. It can help corral all this complexity and make the improvement process a better experience.

Identify Your Shared Beliefs and Values

Most school districts have a mission and vision. It’s usually boilerplate language, e.g. “preparing our children for a global and changing world”. How does this translate to the team and the individual level?

Shared beliefs and values put into words how we want to act and make decisions collectively. They serve as guiding principles when simple solutions rear their head.

One way to surface educators’ beliefs and values is by asking them what’s bothering them in their work. For example, I invited the ELA team mentioned previously to share what emotions and feelings came up for them as they examined their current student assessment data. Here is what they shared:

• “Isolated”

• “Disappointed”

• “Anger”

• “Defeated”

• “Confusion”

• “Frustation”

• “Defensive”

This activity does two things. First, it normalizes what people are feeling in the group. Shame declines. Openness to new ways of thinking and acting increases. Second, whatever emotions and feelings come up can be mapped to the values educators hold. As Julia Cameron notes:

With the ELA team, I once again invited them to share what values might be showing up in their expressed emotions and feelings. Here is their list:

• “Balance”

• “High expectations”

• “Support”

• “Caring”

• “Cooperation”

• “Development”

• “Contribution”

These are noble values. Channelled through a process like this, they can become the guiding principles by which they view any decision they make on behalf of their students - not just a curriculum acquisition, but their day-to-day actions. We can now begin to craft belief statements based on these values. For example, “When students struggle, it’s our responsibility to examine our instruction first, not the student’s motivation or effort.” We stop trying to fix kids and start looking at our practices.

Cultural Work as a Bridge to the Technical Work

As previously shared, cultural work — surfacing emotions, naming values, building shared beliefs — isn’t separate from the technical work of improving literacy instruction. It’s the foundation that makes the technical work sustainable.

When the ELA team paused to examine what they felt and valued before they considered a program, they began building the conditions for implementation instead of compliance. Teachers who named their values around “caring” and “support” will ask different questions about a curriculum resource than teachers who are simply told to follow a scope and sequence.

But beliefs alone don’t change practice. Schools need technical tools to test whether their shared values actually translate into better outcomes for students.

This is where improvement science provides a practical methodology. For example, instead of buying a program and praying it works, teams can use plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycles to test small changes that align with their stated values.

Consider:

• If a team values balance, they might test: What happens when we reduce intervention time and increase independent reading time by 10 minutes daily for six weeks? Measure: student self-reported engagement scores and average books completed per week.

• If a team values high expectations, they might ask: What happens when we remove leveled library bins and let students choose any book to read for three weeks? Measure: percentage of students selecting books beyond their assessed level and number of pages read per week.

• If a team values support, they might explore: What happens when we add 15 minutes of co-planning time weekly between classroom and intervention teachers? Measure: percentage of students receiving appropriate support and teacher-reported confidence in meeting individual student needs.

The discipline of improvement science — specific aims, measurable outcomes, rapid cycles of learning — keeps the cultural work honest. It prevents “we believe in student choice” from becoming empty rhetoric while also preventing “implement with fidelity” from becoming oppressive mandates.

Cultural work creates permission to be humble and curious. The technical work creates the structure for continuous learning. Together, they can help schools resist solutionitis and build systems of support that actually serve students.

As you head into next week, here is a question for you: When you think about your current challenges, what feelings/emotions come up, and what values do they represent? Full subscribers can post their thinking in the community comments, and anyone can hit reply to this email. I read all responses and reply as time allows.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Did you find this post useful? Restack it and share it with a colleague.

Share

Printable version

What I’m Reading: AI and Anxiety

I recently paired this blog post by Matt Shumer on how he sees AI disrupting work and society with Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter article on putting all this felt urgency around AI in perspective.

It’s easy to get caught up in predictions about these recent technology shifts. While I explore these new tools and consider how they might be value-added in my life, I also do my best to attend to my beliefs and values around a fulfilling and balanced life.

On Thursday, March 5th starting at 5:30pm CST, I am hosting a one hour webinar in which I share my five beliefs related to the Science of Reading movement.

Each belief is supported by both research and experience in actual classrooms. This presentation is based on my free eBook, What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading. Participants will walk away with more confidence to engage in conversations with colleagues on this topic.

Full subscribers can RSVP for the event below. The webinar will be recorded and available for you to watch later if you cannot join us.

Subscribe now

Read more

To help me better understand your work and how I can be useful, please complete the following two polls.

If an option is missing, you can leave a comment (or reply to this post via email).

Leave a comment

Thank you for your readership and leadership!

Take care,

Matt

“I’m ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Last week, I shared how I use a top-down writing approach to examine beliefs I already hold. I start with what I know (in this case, about the Science of Reading), organize the ideas into an outline, and support my position with research and stories. It works well when I know what I want to say.

But what if I don’t yet know what I believe?

This happens more than I’d like to admit. Systems coaching is complex: supporting school leaders and teachers in improvement work while they also drive a bus, coach basketball, and lead musical rehearsals. I am weaving this work with going back to graduate /school. The books I read and the conversations I have with peers can sometimes collide with the reality of public education in rural communities.

To remain open to both worlds and allow new questions to blossom, I need a different process. One that starts with observation rather than conclusion. I want to let belief form from what I discover rather than what I want to see and hear.

In February, I committed to a 28-day experiment using a method called Zettelkasten, a German word meaning “slip box.” The original idea comes from sociologist Niklas Luhmann. He built a knowledge base of 90,000 handwritten index cards over his lifetime and used it to write dozens of books and articles.

I have been trying out a modern version of the notecard system, using the software Obsidian, to capture my ideas about the questions that I am asking in class and in my work. It’s a personal Wikipedia. The rest of this article shares my process so far. You may find it applicable to your own writing and learning.

Writing as Discovery

The Zettelkasten method uses three types of notes.

• Fleeting notes are quick observations from your daily work, the kind of thing you might write in a margin of a journal or notes you take during a coaching conversation.

• Reference notes document ideas from books and sources that resonate and support your thinking.

• Permanent (or main) notes are where the work happens. These are your insights, synthesized from your observations and reading, written in your own words.1

A permanent note is organized in relation to other permanent notes. For example, in the screenshot below, you can see that my note “2.3 Looking for simple causes leads to poor conclusions” is placed after “2.2 More data doesn’t lead to better decisions”. 2.3 explains in further detail the case I am making in 2.2.

For me, creating and organizing permanent notes is the hardest part of this bottom-up approach to research and writing. I want the order to exist already. Creating order out of chaos takes more out of me than working from an outline does. Part of my mental resistance may be due to the templates, literal and figurative, that have been imposed in my previous learning and work experiences.

Here’s an example from my own experiment. On February 4th, I was reflecting after a coaching visit to a school district. I wrote a fleeting note about what I had observed: a team that had made commitments they weren’t completing, a leader unsure of the next move, a pattern of avoidance that felt familiar. It was honest and unpolished, the kind of writing I wouldn’t publish.

Buried in this fleeting note was something worth keeping: the observation that districts don’t stall because they lack information. They stall because change requires letting go of identity, not just adopting new practices.

That observation became a permanent note: “Even when we know what to change, we struggle to let go.”

At the bottom of the permanent note, I link this thinking to the knowledge source, including the original fleeting note, a reference note of a book I read, and other notes in my Zettelkasten.

I didn’t plan that insight. I discovered it by writing.

Even as I write this post and reflect on my thinking, I realize that there is another reference I could make to a related book. So I will create a new reference note that can link to and support this note. It makes my position even stronger. Yet at some point the notes have to become something.

Research as Productivity or Procrastination

I realize that I could easily slip into simply reading, taking notes, and admiring my ever-expanding list of ideas. But an idea not shared benefits no one but myself. I eventually need to put what I am learning out into the world.

A cue for me to move from researching to writing and publishing is when I have a string of notes that seem to make a solid case on their own. This is what I am starting to see in a series of ideas around “challenges with MLSS implementation”. To summarize this thinking, I created a hub note (2.0) that captures this line of thinking.

I now have an outline for a possible article. I can test my new knowledge through writing on this newsletter or somewhere else. Further, I can come back to what I know and believe here for future writing, mixing and reshaping ideas based on new ways of thinking that emerge.

Try It and Apply It: Begin Building Your Knowledge Base

For one week, while reading professionally and interacting with other educators, keep a notebook nearby during your daily work. Digital or analog, doesn’t matter. When something resonates with you or challenges your thinking, write it down. Don’t organize it or judge it. Just capture it.

At the end of the week, read back through what you wrote. Look for insights, those bigger ideas that show up in different ways. Craft at least one permanent note. Write a paragraph about it in your own words. Below is the template I use in Obsidian:

One clear idea, explained in your own words.

A quote or reference from where the idea came from.

References/Links

• Source: where this idea came from

• Previous: connected note

• See: related note

If you want to go deeper, I share more about building your own professional knowledge base in my free eBook What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading. This isn’t about collecting more information. It’s developing beliefs that help guide your decision-making and not relying on others to tell you what to believe.

The goal isn’t to maintain a system. It's the process itself: engaging in a practice of reading professionally and paying attention until you build what you actually believe.

How do you build your knowledge base and know what you believe?

Leave a comment

What I’m Reading

I recently reread 1984 by George Orwell. It’s a classic that holds up well in these troubling times. The recent events in Minnesota along with the lies told to us by the current administration about what happened echo eerily with what Orwell was warning us about.

Somewhat related, here is one quote I highlighted from the novel that feels particularly relevant to the ongoing debate around reading instruction.

“Julia, in any case, seldom had an evening completely free. She spent an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and demonstrations, distributing literature for the Junior AntiSex League, preparing banners for Hate Week, making collections for the savings campaign, and such like activities. It paid, she said; it was camouflage. If you kept the small rules you could break the big ones.” (p. 129, my emphasis)

How can we wisely resist unproductive and even harmful mandates in our classrooms, libraries, and schools? Who can we connect with so we aren’t doing this work alone?

One great way to resist: keep reading!

Enjoyed this post? Restack it and share it with your colleagues!

Share

Printable version

I wasn’t very articulate in my response. I do worry about blowback. What I tried to convey is that I try to channel any anxiety into ensuring I understand my position to the best of my ability. Not that I always get it right, and I am willing to admit it when I don’t. But at some point, I lean into what I believe to be true and then share those beliefs with others. 

Maybe a deeper question here is, how does a professional arrive at a point where they feel confident in sharing what they believe? How does one know when they are “right”? 

In this first of two articles, I want to share two processes I have used to examine my beliefs and then act upon them. Writing, and the reading, conversations, and research that support it, is the best way I know to build and understand what I believe. This first post explores a top-down approach to writing. Next week, I will share a bottom-up approach I am using for exploring a topic of study. Both have their purpose depending on where I am at regarding what I know and what I need to learn.

Part 1: The Top-Down Approach

The top-down approach to writing is likely a process you learned in school. In a nutshell, you outline the main topics you want to talk about in your writing. In my eBook, my main topics were the five beliefs I hold about the Science of Reading. I use this approach when I have a general idea of what I already know and believe, and I want to support my position with research, stories, and others’ insights.

I didn’t start from scratch. Each section started as a blog post I wrote a couple of years ago. That’s a reason why I blog: to get my ideas down in writing. Draft, revise, and publish in an hour or two. Blogging’s short nature leads to a quick sense of accomplishment. Plus, I get feedback on what resonates with readers.

But a blog is not an article (“blog” is short for web log.) What it lacks is a narrative arc and the accompanying structure to explore bigger ideas or concepts. A blog-style approach to writing longer pieces will lose the reader. I need the power of story to keep them engaged.

That’s why I often choose to write about problems in education. I actively search for conflicts that point to deeper issues and values that I and hopefully others care about. A top-down, outline approach can help me see how the story is unfolding. I can rearrange the order of ideas to build a more logical narrative and flow.

Conflict contains tension, a gap. This gap is the distance between where we are and where we want to be. This is cognitive dissonance. Effective coaches and leaders create this space, which colleagues want to close. My writing is doing something similar, helping the reader close it. A top-down approach allows me to see this gap from a balcony-level view.

Even our titles can create dissonance. For example, in What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading, the title is provocative if you are familiar with issues surrounding “the reading wars”. You don’t know which way I will go based only on the title, but you know I will have an opinion (”What School Leaders Need to Know…”).

I explore this tension in the introduction with a professional anecdote.

• I was asked to offer some advice to a new school leader who was feeling uncertain about the phonics-first approach to teaching reading.

• I laid out my arguments for the entire eBook in an email message to this new leader.

• When I later revealed that this person had left their position, I raised the stakes for the remainder of the text.

The Science of Reading is a contentious topic. Because a topic is contentious, we tend to avoid talking about it in education. This is not good. If we don’t talk about issues like the Science of Reading, what else are we reluctant to discuss? Book bans? The current abuses of power in Minnesota? Social justice? Our students see how we interact with each other, and they take our cues. What we permit is what we promote.

The rest of my eBook on the Science of Reading offers the reader five principles for navigating the movement in their school. It’s the pathway for closing that distance. For the sake of consistency for busy leaders, I also laid out the structure for each section:

1. An anecdote from the schools I worked in or learned

2. The problem with the current way of thinking

3. A better way to approach teaching/leading

4. A “Try It and Apply It” that invites the reader to take the ideas presented and put them into action.

If you are unsure how to develop a longer piece, use the activity/strategy “List, Jot, Write Long”. It’s a way to get ideas flowing and structure your entire article or book. The idea comes from Jennifer Allen.

1. List the five big ideas or beliefs you currently hold about a topic

2. Under each big idea, jot down two supporting ideas.

3. Select one of the 10 supporting ideas and write long about it, whatever comes to mind. Avoid self-editing or rereading of what was written. Just write.

Subscribe now

Going through this process helps me examine my beliefs more objectively. I may reorganize the list as the big ideas build toward greater complexity. Or I might even change one of my beliefs. For instance, after reading part of my eBook, a colleague questioned one of my initial beliefs/headings: There is more than one science of reading. “Do other fields say they have ‘sciences’?” I wasn’t sure. Then I asked myself: What am I really trying to say? What do I believe? My deeper concern is that other domains of reading instruction (engagement, self-efficacy) were being ignored in favor of phonics. This reflection helped me arrive at a better understanding of the issue: Good intentions can lead to inequitable outcomes. This new heading/belief reshaped that section for the better.

The colleague who questioned my heading—"There is more than one science of reading”—gave me a gift. His pushback forced me to ask: What am I really trying to say? What do I actually believe? That process of revision, from a blanket statement to a deeper truth about equity, reminded me why this process and our work matter.

The top-down approach works when you have beliefs to examine. But what about when you’re still forming your thinking and beliefs? Next week, I’ll share the bottom-up approach I’m using right now to explore a new area of study, one where I don’t yet know what I believe.

In the meantime, what’s one belief you hold about literacy or leadership that you haven’t examined lately? Consider trying the “List, Jot, Write Long” process this week. I’d love to hear what you believe and discover in the comments. Maybe you’ll find, as I often do, a truer belief than the one you started with.

Leave a comment

Enjoyed this post? Please restack and share with colleagues!

Share

Printable version

“She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.”

- Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

A colleague shared an article with me. The author, a well-respected academic, was critical of the notion of teaching skills without knowledge.

I thanked my colleague, and also responded with my own critique: that while knowledge is important, it is also problematic if developers are also not cognizant of what knowledge is considered “core,” the process in which students are constructing knowledge, and what students are expected to do with that knowledge (i.e., take a test or engage in a project).

I wanted to write my own response for my newsletter, and so I sat down and started. Multiple emotions were coming up for me at the moment:

• Worry that I don’t have the academic pedigree to offer a counter to the author’s post.

• Anger at the larger forces at play here - think tanks, policy wonks - who I believe are influencing public education to conform with their ideologies.

• A sense of overwhelm as I considered how to organize all that I wanted to say.

These feelings stayed with me as I pushed through the writing. I switched from my laptop to handwriting. Still, no luck. Stalled and frustrated, I put the piece away.

I share my example to note that anyone - students or adults - can get caught up in the emotions that often accompany writing. No matter how long someone writes, no one is immune to it. It is sometimes referred to as “writer’s block”. Like a disease, you can apparently diagnose it. But what is the cause, and what is the cure? And if adults can experience these emotions and situations, how do kids manage these same feelings with less capacity for self-regulation?

This article is not a cure-all for addressing writer’s block (or whatever you want to call it). I have found the following strategies helpful for managing and moving through challenging situations and emotions while writing.

Talk about it with someone else

Sharing what I am writing and where I am stuck is my go-to initial strategy. There is something cathartic about revealing my frustration with someone else. Maybe it’s because the emotions are no longer bottled up inside me. I am no longer feeling alone with the problem. Someone else is helping shoulder this weight.

My wife is often the one I speak with when I am stuck. She is closest to me in proximity, plus she is also a lifelong public educator who can relate to what I am writing about.

For students, it can be helpful to start with partner sharing before engaging in any writing task that involves more than one session. As an example, students are asked to select one piece from their journals as a seed for a larger story, essay, or report. Give them some questions to guide conversations, such as “Which entries have you been thinking about after you wrote them?” and “What questions have you been exploring?”

If words have been put down to page, sharing one’s writing with others can also trigger anxiety. In his book Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write with Confidence, editor and teacher William Kenower bypasses this barrier by reading aloud other writers’ pieces in a workshop or asking a willing party to do the reading of someone else’s writing. There are additional benefits to this practice.

“There are two reasons to read each piece aloud. First, doing so brings the prose or poem to life. Second, it is helpful for the writer to hear her work in a voice other than her own. After all, in real life we cannot tell readers what to emphasize and what not to emphasize as they read what we’ve written. Plus, it helps the author hear her words anew, granting her distance that is simply not possible when she reads the work herself.” (p. 72)

Embrace compassionate curiosity

Even after years of writing, I am often still the worst judge of my own writing. What I think will land well with readers in my newsletter can result in crickets. Conversely, a 20-minute reflection I quickly wrote out after an interesting interaction with a coaching client can spark a series of comments from readers.

When we adopt an attitude of compassionate curiosity, we can detach ourselves from any judgment about what we have written. Our writing and the response are not ours. In his book Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder1, Dr. Gabor Mate defines compassionate curiosity as looking “beneath the surface of what so often is seen only as obnoxious behavior…to consider exactly what message the child may be trying to communicate to us by a particular behavior” (p. 172). Our students’ strong reactions are their way of telling us the situation is too difficult for them right now. We can respond with compassionate curiosity in two ways:

1. Recognize that writing is a challenging endeavor. It takes a lot of courage to put our ideas out there for others to read.

2. Ask questions about what isn’t working with a genuinely curious tone and approach.

This approach can help writers notice our reactions to feedback without over-identifying with the writing or its reception.

Break up the writing into chunks

In one of my favorite books on writing, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott shares a story from her childhood.

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”

Chunking is effective because it helps writers focus on one idea at a time. The limited writing space gives students a sense of accomplishment. Our working memory can only handle so much information - usually 4-7 ideas at one time, and often less for neurodiverse students. I used this strategy as a 5th and 6th-grade teacher. If students were stuck or frustrated, I would give them a stack of Post-it notes and invite them to write down each idea on a note. Then they could rearrange their ideas to form the writing they wanted to see. It didn’t always work out that way - arriving at an organized piece - but it at least got their words down on paper.

Allow good to be good enough

At some point, we have to let go of what we created. There’s no room for improvement, at least not enough that’s worth the additional time and stress of revisiting a piece of writing to find one more sentence to revise and clarify.

My colleague, friend, and literacy expert Regie Routman expressed this beautifully with a story she shared during one of her residencies in a school.

“When I would go into a school…I never heard a teacher say ‘You don’t have to do anymore. It’s fine as it is.’ It’s always, ‘Improve, improve, improve.’ When I left one of the residencies, I had a teacher give me (I have it on my wall) this huge necklace that was handmade with paper. It says on it, ‘Good is good enough.’ That was the message they took away which I was thrilled about. We are all trying to do the best we can. We need to slow down, breathe, find moments of joy, do the best we can, and accept that our families and students are doing the best they can.”

I have not always followed the words of wisdom as a writer. For example, I still write outlines of longer pieces I am trying to put together, which too often feels like I have boxed myself into one way of writing. Buried in my office materials is a box of index cards. I think I will start using them, thinking of my writing as a puzzle to put together, even if I don’t have the finished picture to go by. There’s more than one possibility, which is the essence of art.

Try it and apply it: Next week, I’m going to pull out those index cards. What small practice might you experiment with?

Leave a comment

What I’m Publishing

I just sent 2000+ subscribers to this community a link to my new eBook, What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading.

It’s a treatise for leaders who are ready to move past simple stories and into the complex, equity-focused work of actually teaching readers.

In the guide, you will find:

• Five research-grounded arguments about teaching readers (not just reading)

• Five practical leadership strategies you can implement immediately

• Common threads of high-performing schools (spoiler: they’re not all using the same program)

• An appendix on building your instructional leadership team

Subscribe today and download the free resource immediately!

Subscribe now

This piece is an excerpt from a longer work I’m developing for literacy leaders called “What School Leaders Need to Know About the Science of Reading.” I’ll be sharing it at upcoming conferences this winter (here, here, and here), and wanted to offer this section to you first. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Leave a comment

I didn’t truly become a reader until my 3rd grade teacher read aloud Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing by Judy Blume. Years of phonics lessons and worksheets didn’t stick like the world of Peter Hatcher and the antics of his younger brother, Fudge. After the read-aloud was done, I reread my own copy, which I bought from a Troll book order, until the pages began to fall apart from the spine.

While I wasn’t aware of the skills I was using as I read that book over and over, I have to imagine it was more than just phonics.

• For example, after the read-aloud, I probably had a goal in my reread: I wanted to revisit the funniest parts from the story, those that made me laugh out loud without a care during class.

• Another reread likely helped me pay attention to the family dynamics and how they connected with my own experiences. I developed a deeper understanding of the messy nature of relationships with siblings, parents, and friends.

• An appreciation for Blume’s writing craft led me to write my own fan fiction based on this book. (I still have the homemade text, hidden to avoid any present embarrassment.)

What we know today about what is going on in a reader’s mind goes beyond the deciphering of text. Factors besides basic skills and strategies are what make a reader and writer.

No Theory, No Action

A problem with strict adherence to a program or singular philosophy is that when instruction isn’t working for students, teachers don’t know what to do next. They lean on a program through thick and thin. Some of my former elementary teachers meant well, but by prioritizing the prescribed curriculum over meeting the needs of each student, some were left behind.

This topic came up during a conversation with two experienced literacy educators, Denise and Sandy. They were observing a similar troubling pattern emerging in how schools are approaching reading instruction.

“The assessments are extremely narrow,” Denise observed. “There’s typically an assessment of phonemic awareness, and that’s it.” She contrasted this with comprehensive literacy assessment approaches that examine all aspects of reading development - including students’ attitudes about reading and their motivation to read.

Sandy affirmed this gap in current scripted approaches: “The big thing that’s missing is the transfer piece. How does instruction apply when students go off to be independent readers?”

She pointed to a common misconception in the science of reading movement: “They think, ‘The students don’t know something, so I need to teach it to them. And once I teach it to them, they’ll be readers.’” But becoming a reader isn’t simply a matter of skill acquisition.”

Sandy noted that at the root of these problems lies a lack of a theoretical framework. “Science of reading - I don’t know what their theory is. They talk about ‘sequential’ and ‘direct, explicit instruction’, but that’s not a theory.”

Without a coherent theory of how children learn to read, educators can’t make informed decisions when the plan falls apart. They lack the professional knowledge to adapt and meet individual student needs. They’re left with two options: keep following the script, or start questioning. If the mandate is made by state legislation or administration to follow the script with fidelity, that questioning feels professionally risky.

Curiosity is at the heart of any strong literacy theory of action. We need to ask questions instead of casting blame when students don’t respond as we had hoped to our instruction. For example, Regie Routman’s Optimal Learning Model positions the student at the center of teaching and learning. Explicit instruction is not defined as “I taught it, and students need to learn it.” Explicit instruction is found through the perspective of the students - what is their level of understanding and readiness for what I am trying to teach?

Without such frameworks to guide our decisions, the “science of reading” becomes whatever publishers are selling.

The Sciences of Reading

In his book Teaching Readers (Not Reading), Peter Afflerbach refers to the three different domains of reading development as “sciences”. It’s a refutation of the Science of Reading movement’s attempt to create a sense of exclusivity of what counts as science. The plural “sciences” also creates language to recognize how each domain depends on the other two to effectively teach the whole reader, all of which he argues must be attended to together, not ranked or treated as either/or.

He offers a definition for the different sciences/domains, each supported with a robust amount of research in his book.

• Cognitive science of reading - Focuses on the thinking work of reading: strategies and skills for constructing meaning (decoding, vocabulary, comprehension strategies, metacognition, executive function). This is the part most curricula and tests emphasize, often narrowly as “strategies and skills” or phonics, which he critiques as only a “partial science” of reading.

• Affective science of reading - Focuses on feelings and attitudes about reading: motivation, interest, engagement, self-efficacy, and the positive or negative emotions students attach to reading. Readers who associate reading with enjoyment and success are more likely to continue reading, strengthening their skills over time.

• Conative science of reading - Focuses on will, effort, and purposeful action: perseverance, goal-setting, agency, autonomy, and accountability. Conation is about the reader’s willingness to begin, persist, and complete reading tasks, to see effort as tied to outcomes, and to take responsibility for their own reading growth.

Afflerbach’s central claim is that reading achievement emerges from the interaction of these domains—cognitive, affective, and conative—so teaching reading as only strategies and skills is fundamentally incomplete compared to teaching readers within all three sciences.

As a 3rd grader, I benefited from actions by my teacher that aligned with all three sciences working together.

1. Affective: I was fully engaged with the story during the read-aloud. This was evident in my laughter and in the sense of disappointment I felt when the teacher stopped reading at the end of a chapter.

2. Conative: I purposefully orchestrated my attention toward the text while rereading the story, paying special attention to the humorous scenes. My teacher allowed me to read the same book again, providing voice and choice along with access to relevant texts.

3. Cognitive: Through repeated readings, my understanding of the themes of the text deepened. I was able to apply the craft moves Judy Blume was making, such as dialogue, to my own writing that emulated Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing.

Yes, foundational reading skills also came into play, but were more of a backdrop to the more complex and nuanced aspects as I became a reader. You will also notice what came first: the science of motivation and engagement (affective). My initial desire for enjoyment was an entry point to more purposeful and cognitively stimulating reading experiences.

This was my personal pathway to becoming a reader. It’s not something you can prescribe.

Try it and Apply it: Read Professionally Through a Critical Lens

Most commercial programs come with professional development, but it’s typically designed to support implementation of that specific resource—not to broaden your understanding of reading development. To build genuine expertise, you’ll need to create your own professional learning curriculum.

I recommend the following professional journals as a good place to begin or continue your professional learning journey.

• International Literacy Association (ILA): The Reading Teacher, Reading Research Quarterly

• National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE): English Journal, Voice From the Middle, Language Arts

• Phi Delta Kappan: Kappan Magazine

• ASCD: Educational Leadership

Subscribing to these journals gives you access to more diverse and credible perspectives than you will find in a closed online group or one consultant’s blog. The articles are peer-reviewed and highly respected by the majority of educational professionals. Nothing gets published without a thorough critique of what is written and how it is supported by a body of research.

As you read an article, highlight parts that resonates with you. Write in the margins what is affirming, interesting, or disturbing. At the end of the article, take a few minutes to reflect on what you just read. Did the author(s) offer a holistic and comprehensive viewpoint of teaching readers? If not, what “science” was missing from their position?

Synthesize your knowledge by writing a short summary of what you learned and sharing it in your next staff newsletter. You benefit from writing about what you are learning with a deeper understanding of the topic, and your teachers benefit from your newly developed knowledge. They also know where you stand on these issues. Over time, you will develop or enhance your own theory of action that teachers will look to with respect and confidence.

Enjoyed this post? Please restack it and share it with colleagues.

Share

What I’m Reading

In the chat, I posted my sketchnote from Chapter 1 of Penny Kittle’s Micro Mentor Texts.

Below is what I was thinking as I read Chapter 1, along with an invitation to full subscribers:

Join the book club and professional conversation - become a paid subscriber today!

Subscribe now