“Everything was in silos” | Reading Comprehension Revisited

So far in "The Knowledge Matters Podcast: Reading Comprehension Revisited", we've heard from classroom teachers about their experiences making the shift from the standard approach to reading comprehension – which focuses on having kids practice supposedly general skills like “finding the main idea” – to a newer approach. That new approach involves building children's knowledge of the world so they can better understand what they're reading. In this episode, we'll look at the experience of shifting to the new approach from the perspective of a school or district leader.

Educators who have been through that shift say that strong leadership is crucial. Teachers can do a lot to build students’ knowledge within their own classrooms, but they can't control what's happening in the classroom next door. And to become fully literate, many students need a curriculum that builds knowledge in a logical, coherent way across grade levels. Only a leader can put that kind of system in place.

In this episode you’ll meet two leaders who’ve done exactly that: Brent Conway – Assistant Superintendent in Pentucket, MA, and Dr. LaTonya Goffney –  Superintendent of the Aldine Independent School District, TX. Brent and LaTonya will talk about what motivated them to initiate the change, how they navigated the challenges, and what they saw happen in classrooms after the switch. Change is hard, but, as you’ll hear in this episode, it can be worth the effort.

For more information about the information in this episode, visit the episode webpage on the Knowledge Matters Podcast website.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. You can learn more about our work at www.knowledgematterscampaign.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with Natalie, you can contact her through her website, www.nataliewexler.com. 

Production by Sarah Gilmore and Aidan Shea. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea. Narration recorded at Bamboo Recording Studios.

Transcript

LaTonya Goffney  

We had a facilitator, and they were talking about the fact that our kids needed access to on-grade-level texts and rigorous text and complex text. And literally one of them stood up and said--and I'm new, I'm still the new person--I teach fourth grade, and if my fourth graders, if I give them grade level text, they'll become frustrated. And I was sitting in this room, the new superintendent, and I was thinking about the fact that my grandfather wrote his name with an X, and how frustrating that was for him. And I remember what he said about Tonya, if you can read, you can go anywhere. And I thought about the fact that even on test taking day our kids’ first time seeing grade level text was on the date that they took the STAR test, and that was unacceptable.

Natalie Wexler  

Welcome to Episode Five of the Knowledge Matters Podcast. I'm Natalie Wexler. 

The voice you just heard was Dr. LaTonya Goffney, superintendent of the Aldine School District in Houston, Texas. We'll be hearing more from her later in this episode. 

So far, we've heard from classroom teachers about their experiences making the shift from the standard approach to reading comprehension – which focuses on having kids practice supposedly general skills like “finding the main idea” – to a newer approach. That new approach involves building children's knowledge of the world so they can better understand what they're reading. In this episode, we'll look at what the experience of shifting to the new approach is like from the perspective of a school or district leader. 

Educators who have been through that shift say that strong leadership is crucial. Teachers can do a lot to build students’ knowledge within their own classrooms, but they can't control what's happening in the classroom next door. And to become fully literate, many students need a curriculum that builds knowledge in a logical, coherent way across grade levels. Only a leader can put that kind of system in place. 

To make things more complicated, individual teachers don't always see the need to switch to a knowledge-building approach. All three of the teachers we met in Episode Three came to embrace that approach. But all were initially skeptical when they heard their district had adopted it. 

That's not surprising. Change is hard. How can leaders help teachers and other educators understand that it's worth the effort? And how do those leaders themselves come to see that it's necessary? In this episode, we'll meet two administrators who have engineered the switch to a knowledge-building curriculum. Their experiences have been different, but each has been a pioneer in this area. 

Brent Conway is now an assistant superintendent in Pentucket, Massachusetts, a school district north of Boston that he says straddles the line between suburban and rural. But about 15 years ago, he was an elementary school principal in a Boston suburb called Melrose. That was where his journey toward realizing the need for knowledge-building literacy curriculum began.

Brent Conway  

When I went to Melrose, I took over as the principal at Lincoln Elementary, and that was historically the lowest performing school in the city. And that was at the time when "No Child Left Behind" was sort of taking hold. And in 2008, we were sort of on the verge of, you know, becoming a school in need of improvement, and we set out on a path to improve literacy performance.

Natalie Wexler  

Under the Federal "No Child Left Behind" law, schools were designated as being "in need of improvement" if they had persistently low test scores. If the scores didn't improve, a school could eventually be shut down. Melrose is a fairly affluent town, but Lincoln Elementary served a remarkably diverse population. Brent describes about 50% of the students as "high needs".

Brent Conway  

And we had 28 different languages spoken in the homes of the 400 kids and every kid lived right in that neighborhood. But we also had families that were very wealthy, who had high education backgrounds as well.

Natalie Wexler  

During the seven years Brent was there, Lincoln went from being a dangerously low performing school, to one that was awarded a National Blue Ribbon for academic excellence and progress in closing test score gaps among students subgroups. 

How did that happen? When Brent first became principal, only 50% of students were scoring proficient or above on standardized tests, and only 20% of students with disabilities were. He says that when he argued things needed to change, his starting point was that data.

Brent Conway  

And I can remember a very distinct moment in a staff meeting early on in Melrose, where we were, you know, talking about these necessary changes, and one of the teachers says, stands up and says, "Don't they", of course today is like whoever you "Don't they know who we have to work with here?!". As if saying, like, we have all the hard kids, right? We have the kids who are least resourced. Don't they understand that? And I sort of stood there for a moment, and I walked over the window and I opened the window shade. And I said, "Look out there." And that's, you know, there's an apartment complex. I said, "That's not changing. You need to". And we really never had to have that conversation again.

Natalie Wexler  

When Brent arrived, the school was using a literacy program that focused on having kids practice isolated comprehension skills and strategies. This was before anyone was using the term "Science of Reading", but Brent says he looked at the research that was available. 

A big influence, he says, was Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope, an infographic that shows the many different strands that go into reading. Another influence was the report of the National Reading Panel, which came out in 2000. That report led to another infographic, which showed five pillars of early literacy, including phonics, and comprehension. 

In Episode 2, we heard from Hugh Catts, the reading researcher at Florida State, who said that both of these infographics, the Reading Rope, and the "five pillars" have led to a lot of misunderstanding about reading comprehension. They both show that component of reading alongside others that are much less complex, like phonics. And that has given rise to the mistaken idea that reading comprehension should be taught like phonics as a set of skills that kids will master if they just practice them enough. 

But for some reason, Brent and his colleagues at Lincoln Elementary saw those infographics differently from most other educators, they understood that reading comprehension was complicated.

Brent Conway  

We didn't get caught up in, you know, practicing an individual strategy, per se, we wanted them to apply it to text.

Natalie Wexler  

They also understood that to equip students to do that, effectively, the curriculum would need to build their knowledge of the world. That was especially true for kids coming from less advantaged backgrounds. If teachers didn't get the reason Brent would explain:

Brent Conway  

An example I give to them a lot – kindergarten, first grade teachers – I say: think about the kid who walks in your classroom, and both of their parents are real estate agents. So the conversations at home, whether they're directly to the child or not, or the kid is just around, it hears these conversations about real estate and purchasing real estate and the value of land and all of those types of things. And they hear these vocabulary words, but concepts as well. They hear it all the time. And then something comes up in your classroom around a house. And all of a sudden, they start spitting out information. And it's like, whoa, you didn't even realize how much knowledge they have. 

So knowledge-building and making inferences and connecting all that, starts long before school. Right? It starts in the world and the households around them. But if the students who come to you haven't been part of that, they may not know that. So it's all very dependent upon information that they have outside of that. But we can fill that gap in school. And we can plug some of those pieces together with a knowledge-building curriculum.

Natalie Wexler  

But Lincoln Elementary didn't have a knowledge-building literacy curriculum. And there wasn't any way to get one because at the time, that kind of curriculum didn't exist. So Brent and his colleagues took books they had that were supposed to be used for guided reading – when kids practice comprehension skills at their individual reading levels – and reclassified them according to what they were about.

Brent Conway  

We have this massive book room, which had been a guided reading book room, and it had great text. And we started to shift over the way we use that book room away from levels into content. And putting the books together in themes so that the teachers could use those books to give kids more theme-based and content-based exposure, a lot more nonfiction, we spent money on nonfiction books.

Natalie Wexler  

Later, Brent became principal of a middle school in Melrose, where he continued that kind of work. Teachers were generally doing a good job with what they had, he says, but it was tough without a coherent knowledge building curriculum.

Brent Conway  

It takes a lot for a teacher to develop their own. Can they do it effectively? They can, but boy, if you can give them a curriculum that has the majority of that done, that takes a massive lift off of their shoulders.

Natalie Wexler  

When Brent came to Pentucket as an assistant superintendent five years ago, he was surprised to find the district was still using an approach that is often called "Balanced Literacy". It's been the dominant approach to reading instruction for about 20 years. Among other problems, Balanced literacy puts comprehension skills in the foreground. Rather than trying to build kids' knowledge of any particular topics. 

Brent says he had been in kind of a "bubble" in Melrose, and didn't realize so many other districts were still using Balanced Literacy. In Pentucket, teachers were using a popular Balanced Literacy curriculum called "Units of Study". 

Brent Conway  

It was like choose-your-own-adventure when it came to curriculum and books. Everyone was doing their own thing, it was so varied. So when they asked “Are you, you're going to help us implement ‘Units of Study’?” And I said, “Oh….No. No, We're gonna– I will use the Reading Rope, and show you all the things that should be included in a literacy block. And let's talk about the structure of a literacy block.” But all they had was “Units of Study”. And that's what they were sort of basing it off of. And those first couple years, that first year and a half, we had a lot of teachers trying very hard to do what the Reading Rope sort of outlined – of all the components, but everything was in silos.

Natalie Wexler  

Eventually, Brent says teachers came to see the need for a curriculum that integrated the various components of reading, and took a knowledge building approach to comprehension. The district adopted Wit & Wisdom, that's the same curriculum that Kyair Butts, one of the teachers we heard from in our previous episodes, is using in Baltimore. Pentucket has been using it in kindergarten through sixth grade for two years, and has just finished their first year of using it in grades seven and eight as well. 

Inevitably, as with any radical change, there have been bumps in the road. Teachers are used to doing most of their reading instruction in small groups at different levels. And it can be hard to adjust to a curriculum that has them spend 30 minutes or more reading aloud to the whole class from a complex text – a text they worry their students won't understand.

Brent Conway  

Oh, yeah, that's like the first thing that comes up. Right? Is that these texts are too hard.

Natalie Wexler  

And old habits are hard to break, Brent says.

Brent Conway  

It's the Balanced Literacy hangover, and it is these lingering things of practicing skills and strategies, right? It’s if those are the things that they're trying to master when in reality, if you're trying to make if you're trying to find the main idea, you can't find the main idea until you've read the whole book. Like, finding the main idea is in service of the knowledge of the book.

Natalie Wexler  

Brent says that it takes more than adopting a new curriculum to bring about a shift to knowledge-building, you need to change the entire system: the way teachers assess kids' progress, the way they try to help kids who are falling behind all sorts of things. And the schedule, which turns out to be really important. It's also something an administrator can easily control.

Brent Conway  

Like if teachers are used to saying “We need– where is my 20 minutes of independent reading time for kids?”

“Well, it's not in your schedule.”

“Well, it needs to be”

“No, it doesn't. It's not part of what we're doing anymore. It's not in your schedule anymore.”

And I think those are the types of things that a principal can, or an administrator can do that helps with this change.

Natalie Wexler  

Equally important, though, is that teachers understand why the schedule and other things are changing.

Brent Conway  

So if I'm going to say we're not scheduling 20 minutes of sustained silent reading time anymore, you know, it's like, it's like pearl-clutching for a lot of people. Like that's how kids become,that's how they love reading. Yeah well, I gotta tell you, I got news for you! Half of your kids despise that time. And doing it more is not going to create a love, it will make it worse. Okay. Let me explain why. And we go through it and they begin to understand why.

Natalie Wexler  

Just as Brent started with data to make the case for change, he points to data as an indicator that the change is working. The district hasn't seen improvements in state test scores yet. That can take a long time, for reasons we'll talk more about in the next episode. But Brent says the internal testing the district has done shows that on most measures, including comprehension, students are performing at higher levels than before the pandemic.

Brent Conway  

And we had students growing at levels well above the 100 percentile mark at mid year, and we've never seen that before. So it's, you know, the growth of students is pretty impressive.

Natalie Wexler  

LaTonya Goffney has been superintendent of the Aldine Independent School District in Texas since 2018. I've apparently been in Aldine, although I hadn't realized it. As LaTonya told me, Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston is right in the middle of the district. Aldine serves over 62,000 students. 75% are Hispanic, 22% are African-American, and almost half are still learning English. 90% come from families poor enough to qualify for free or reduced school meals. Before coming to Aldine, LaTonya was superintendent of a smaller district that was somewhat more affluent. But she was drawn to Aldine because she saw parallels between the lives of its students and her own childhood.

LaTonya Goffney  

My mom was 15 when she had me. I never knew my father. I ended up being raised by my grandparents. Big Mama, she had a fifth grade education and Paw Paw had a third grade education, so at an early age, I knew the importance of reading. My grandfather, who again, collected cans and my grandmother cleaned houses. And I remember my grandfather, he used to tell me that if you can read, Tonya, you can go anywhere.

Natalie Wexler  

LaTonya was lucky. She had no trouble learning to read. And her grandmother encouraged LaTonya’s reading in her own way.

LaTonya Goffney  

My grandmother loved going to garage sales. And so early years, we would go and she would give me change. Because my grandmother didn't like to stop at a place and not buying anything. So she would give me change to go over to the book area and buy whatever books I wanted. And she didn't know, you know, because she wasn't a reader, but she knew that I love books. And so I had -- we were poor. I lived in a single-wide trailer, no indoor plumbing, but I had, Paw Paw had made me a bookshelf and I had all these books that I would buy from these garage sales.

Natalie Wexler  

Those books weren't always age-appropriate. LaTonya remembers sometimes picking out Harlequin romance novels. But her grandfather was right, she says. All of that reading helped her succeed academically. She graduated at the top of her high school class and became the first person in her family to go to college. Then she went back to her hometown to become an eighth grade Language Arts teacher. The district had been labeled low-performing, so she was under pressure to get her students' reading scores up. She did the best she could with the training and materials she had.

LaTonya Goffney  

I can't say that I taught kids how to read. But what I can tell you is I spent a lot of time teaching them how to prep and how to look for key items.

Natalie Wexler  

That's a test taking strategy. You look for certain words in the test questions and try to match them with "key" words in the reading passage. That kind of trick was enough to enable some students to pass the test, even if they couldn't read. LaTanya remembers one student named Corey:

LaTonya Goffney  

Corey passed the test, we celebrated him passing, celebrated his effort, but Corey still couldn't read. And I think it hurt Corey in the end because Corey ended up – he was one of my first students to end up dying because he made life choices that ended up in gang activity and some other things, and couldn't graduate with choices and opportunities because he couldn't read, you know.

Natalie Wexler  

When LaTonya got to Aldine. She says reading scores were "alarmingly" low, with only 28% of third graders reading on grade level. The district had been using the “Units of Study” reading curriculum, the same one Pentucket was using when Brent arrived there. That curriculum is often referred to as "Lucy Calkins", after its lead author. And Aldine had also just been through a curriculum audit.

LaTonya Goffney  

And in this audit, it had literally in bold, like "abandon Lucy Calkins today",

Natalie Wexler  

But teachers were reluctant to blame the curriculum.

LaTonya Goffney  

Time and time again, I heard about what our students weren't doing and how this wasn't necessarily implemented with fidelity and how, you know, there was a lot of blame, blaming the system or blaming the kids or blaming something, but no one wanted to take ownership. And that was alarming for me.

Natalie Wexler  

LaTonya did what she calls "selling the problem", creating a sense of urgency based on the data – especially the data on the performance of Black and brown students. Shortly after she got to the district, she heard a fourth grade teacher say in a meeting that her students would become frustrated if she gave them grade level text to read – that's the story you heard her tell at the beginning of this episode. LaTonya's own daughter had just started as a ninth grader in the district, and she told her mother that the curriculum didn't include any novels.

LaTonya Goffney  

She said, "Mom, they're going over all the stuff that I went over in third grade!" I'm like, "Huh?" And so all these thoughts are going through my head as I saw this adult literacy leader say that if I give our kids on-grade level texts, they'll become frustrated. And I couldn't sit quiet. Now, I've heard stories about what I said and how I said it. But you can imagine that I wondered what kind of education you will want your child to have. Do you want your child to have access to choices and opportunities when they graduate? What kind of education do you want– does your own personal child deserve?

Natalie Wexler  

LaTonya didn't just "sell the problem" in Aldine. Shortly after becoming superintendent, she was in a meeting with the Texas commissioner of education. The results of national tests in reading and math had just been released – they're called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or the NAEP – and the commissioner was going over them.

LaTonya Goffney  

It was daunting, how Texas was at the bottom for African-American and Hispanic students. And it was quiet the whole room. And he showed that it was, I mean, you could see it: Texas at the bottom, like literally. You know, Illinois, New York, California was around there, but we were, we're in and for literacy, period, we were at the bottom, and then for African American, Hispanic, it was even worse. Like it was, I wish I had the numbers in front of me, like it was almost a single digit.

Natalie Wexler  

I checked the numbers for the 2019 NAEP for Texas, in eighth grade reading 11% of black students tested proficient or above. For white students, the figure was 35%,

LaTonya Goffney  

I remember being speechless. And I was one of the only African-Americans in that room.

Natalie Wexler  

LaTanya says she generally doesn't say much in meetings like that one. But that day, she felt she had to say something.

LaTonya Goffney  

So I just literally raised my hand and I say, "Um... Commissioner, so do we think that African-Americans are just inherently inferior?" I literally asked the rhetorical question "Are Black, brown, and students of poverty, just inherently inferior?" And so he was taken aback because again, I was new to the room, new to my position

Literacy was top of mind because of the problem I was trying to solve in my district. And then, of course, he said, "No." And I said, "Well, if not, then when are we gonna stop talking about it and do something about it?", And at that time, I just remember all my colleagues in the room becoming interested, and, you know, we were able to kind of have a conversation.

Natalie Wexler  

A couple of weeks later, LaTonya got a text from the commissioner. His name is Mike Morath. He asked LaTonya if she had read a book called "The Knowledge Gap". She hadn't yet but she did shortly afterwards.

LaTonya Goffney  

And so it became the –  I hate to say the Bible – but it was a starting point to open conversations about our vision and our framework for our district, our districts moving forward. And so I told the Commissioner that my whole district was reading the book.

Natalie Wexler  

LaTonya says she's used the book to help others understand the importance of building kids' knowledge, especially kids like those Aldine serves, who often come to school with fewer experiences of the world than those in more affluent districts. 

When LaTonya first came to Aldine, the district was supposed to be adopting a new curriculum in response to the audit that said, "abandon Lucy Calkins". But LaTonya put a pause on that process. She brought in a consultant to help the district review its choices. And she went to districts that were already using knowledge-building curricula to learn more. At the time, there weren't any districts like that in Texas. So she traveled to places like Baltimore and Tennessee. 

Ultimately, the district decided to adopt CKLA For kindergarten through fifth grade. That's the same curriculum that Deloris Fowler, who we heard from in previous episodes, was using in Tennessee. Aldine adopted Wit & Wisdom for grades six to eight. Originally, the district was going to start on a small scale with just a couple of grade levels. But that changed.

LaTonya Goffney  

We ended up sending a group to go visit a school and they came back and they were like, "We can't wait. We want our kids to have this experience". And so we decided we're gonna launch district-wide.

Natalie Wexler  

That was in February of 2020. The next month COVID hit. District leaders had to decide whether to go ahead as planned.

LaTonya Goffney  

And it was one of those things where we knew that we didn't need COVID to become the new excuse for low expectations either. And so we launched, like I said, completely virtual.

Natalie Wexler  

COVID Hit the Aldine community particularly hard, LaTonya says. The process of shifting to the new curricula would have been easier without COVID, but the district made it work. They even hosted a free virtual literacy conference during that first year of implementation. 

Natalie Wexler  

Not everyone in the district was on board. Some teachers who felt strongly about sticking with Balanced Literacy ended up leaving for other districts. But LaTonya says that by the end of the first year, 79% of teachers were in favor of the new curriculum, despite the challenges of implementing it remotely. And over 90% of the district leadership and instructional coaches were supportive.

LaTonya Goffney  

Some of my best coaches in our district now were truly originally trained in the Lucy Calkins methodology in New York. And they're some of our best and they say, Dr. Goffney, we didn't know and I can relate because as an eighth grade language arts teacher, I didn't know either.

Natalie Wexler  

That reminds me of a number of educators I've met who have told me they used to be devotees of Lucy Calkins – teachers or coaches who have invited me to speak at their school, or who have lined up to get their copy of "The Knowledge Gap" signed. 

Natalie Wexler  

LaTonya also did some “administrative reorganizing”, retrained all the districts' literacy coaches and, like Brent Conway, made sure that teachers understood the "why" of the new curriculum. But she says the most important thing she did was to make sure that all the district's staff, including herself, saw themselves as literacy champions. As in Pentucket, Aldine hasn't yet seen its test scores rise. And COVID has made it especially hard to see progress, at least as reflected in scores.

LaTonya Goffney  

It's been, it's been hard. I tell people, if COVID had happened, I mean, like, when we were launching and doing this work, we were outpacing other districts that look like ours. And then this hit and we, we plummeted. But we knew that the plummeting would have been even more significant had we not been doing this work that was outlined in our strategic priorities.

Natalie Wexler  

Now that students are back to school in person, LaTonya has seen changes in classrooms. She's seen middle school students reading novels, and fifth graders reading "A Midsummer Night's Dream".

LaTonya Goffney  

And to hear them say, "Oh, Dr. Goffney, we're reading a novel, we got a novel!" And they were so happy about it. I mean, that's, you know, when it's all said and done, I know what we've done. It's been hard, it was tough, and we have a long way to go. But the sense of pride and just knowing that kids in other districts, kids in other places, kids in other economic groups, already having those types of experiences. And so to be able to make sure that our teachers have the support, so that our kids can have that experience. It's probably one of the highlights of my career.

Natalie Wexler  

In our next and final episode, we'll look back to see how the standard, skills-focused approach to reading comprehension came about in the first place. We'll also look at how our deeply entrenched system of standardized reading tests has been a significant obstacle to change. And we'll talk about what teachers, administrators, and policymakers can do to ensure that the growing trend towards knowledge building curriculum continues. I hope you'll join us. 

For more information about this episode, visit the Knowledge Matters website linked in the show notes. This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. You can learn more about their work at knowledgematterscampaign.org and follow them on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search the knowledgematters hashtag and join this important conversation. If you'd like to get in touch with me personally, you can contact me through my website, nataliewexler.com