March 31, 2026
Season 1, Episode 6
Live at SXSW EDU: When Teens Can't, Won't and Don't Read: What We Can Do
Kala Jones (Host, SERP Institute, Literacy Specialist): Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for being here for this live recording of SERP Stories. Whether you're joining us in this room or listening from afar, we're really glad you're a part of this moment with us. Hi, my name is Dr. Kala Jones. SERP Stories is a space for me to slow down and center the human stories behind literacy work because literacy just isn't instructional, it's personal. The podcast grew out of a belief that improving learning for adolescents requires more than just material or theory. It requires listening to people on the front lines and talking about something often treated as secondary—engagement.
Today's episode reflects that belief. We're here to illuminate what we think is a missing strain in the science of reading. What happens when we design interventions that help students want to read again? Now, today is a little different because we're recording live. You'll hear real time reflection, unfinished thinking. It may be even a few pauses, all intentional because learning like reading doesn't happen in a straight line. And being serious about helping teens reengage with reading means starting earlier than programs or policies. It means starting with the people. So I'm honored to be joined by two guests who bring their expertise and lived experience to this conversation. First, Dr. Margaret Troyer, director of Literacy Research and Development at SERP Institute. I'll let her introduce herself.
Margaret Troyer (SERP Institute, Director of Literacy R&D): - Hi. So I'm Margaret Troyer. I began my career as a middle school English language arts teacher in Baltimore City. Then moved to Washington, DC, where I continued teaching and then became a literacy coach. And after a while went to grad school and earned my doctorate from Harvard Graduate School of Education and then moved into my current role at SERP Institute.
Kala: Thank you. And Geneviève DeBose, Senior Literacy Coach for school transformation with the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.
Geneviève DeBose (Partnership LA, Senior Literacy Coach): Good morning everyone. I'm also really happy to be here. My name is Geneviève DeBose. I am an educator, an artist, an activist. I've been working with middle school students for over 25 years in Los Angeles, in Oakland, and in the South Bronx in New York City. I am a proud national board certified teacher. I'm a proud board member for the Black Teacher Project. And I had the honor to serve as a teaching ambassador fellow at the US Department of Education under Secretary Arne Duncan, where I worked on middle grades reform. And I'm happiest when I'm working at school sites with young people and educators. And so that's what I do now.
Kala: All right, thank you both for being here. So before we dive in, I start with a question that I ask every SERP Stories guest. How did you learn to read? So for you all, here's something interesting to know. I asked this question at the end of every episode, but I record it first. And that's important because our reading origin stories, the context, the supports we had or didn't have shape, how we think about reading, struggle and belonging, those experience reveal the assumptions and beliefs we carry into conversations about literacy. It helps everyone understand the lens that we're looking through. So by a show of hands, who has a positive experience with reading? And who has a negative experience? Okay, so Margaret, I'll ask you first, how'd you learn to read?
Margaret: So I don't remember being formally taught to read. I was just lucky enough to grow up in a house full of books with parents who read to me from the time I was a baby. So I started reading before kindergarten. And the story that my mom tells is that when I was four and my brother was a baby, she took us to the library and my brother was having a meltdown and needed to leave. And my mom was like, Margaret, let's go. And I said, I can't leave, I'm reading. And she said, you can't read. And I said, yes I can. And to prove it to her, I read the book to her. So I've just been reading ever since.
Kala: All right. Thank you for sharing it.
Kala: Geneviève, same question.
Geneviève: Mom. I can read. Okay. I like Margaret. I don't remember exactly when I learned to read, but I know I learned to read in preschool. I went to a really wonderful preschool and I grew up in Los Angeles called Taylor Tots and it was led by Mrs. Taylor, a veteran black educator. And it was there that I learned to read, I learned to write. I have memories of really like, of being surrounded by text and also doing a lot of art and eating a lot of really good lunches. I remember that. But I know that when I went to elementary school they said, just go to first grade because you already know how to read and write so you don't have to go to kindergarten. So it was a joyful experience for me, although I don't remember the specifics.
Kala: Awesome. And before we move on, I also want to answer that question because I'm not just a host of this conversation, I'm a part of it. And I remember learning how to read from my mom as she made it fun by creating games at home where I could like practice my adult words and my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Bee Williams, who bribed me with peanuts. Once I learned. If you want to tell us your how I learned to read story, you can stop by our booth 210 after this session.
We're recording stories to share on a future episode of SERP Stories. But something I noticed about our conversations here and the experience we had, there was a, a single thing that connects us was that joy. And a joy is constant either in like the playfulness of it, in the discovery through our, or even in proving mom wrong in that achievement. And that's not a coincidence, but unfortunately that's not what it is for all of our students. So we're going to start with talking about the problem Margaret, Geneviève, think back to your early years in the classroom and the classrooms you served. What was reading like for your students? And if you can think of a specific student who seemed disengaged from reading, what did you notice? Geneviève, I'll start with you.
Geneviève: Yeah, I, I think back to my third year in the classroom. I was teaching in Oakland and I was teaching sixth grade English and history. And I think of one of my students, B, she was very quiet, shy, young black girl. And I had the opportunity to do a lot of assessments with my students before the start of the school year. And I noticed that she was a very striving reader, but she wasn't someone who made herself stand out. She kind of could fall into the, like melt into the wall. And so her, she would do the work, but whether it was, you know, right or not, she would attempt it. And as a newer teacher it was very easy for her to kind of fall through the cracks. Because I didn't, you know, sometimes you struggle with other things like management. And so a more quiet child who's doing what they're supposed to do but is disengaged, kind of falls by the wayside. And so I think of her because her disengagement was a very quiet kind of surrender versus a very loud active disengagement.
Kala: Yep.
Geneviève: Yeah.
Kala: Margaret.
Margaret: So when you ask me to think of a student who was disengaged, the first student that comes to mind is Lamont. On the first day of seventh grade, Lamont threw his English teacher's jacket out the window. And I was a literacy coach at the time. And when I later had the opportunity to work with him, I learned that he was a student who did not have foundational skills in reading. And that was the way that it manifested for him, was by very active disengagement.
Kala: Okay, so here's a question that might seem obvious to to others after hearing those stories. Why doesn't the school just do something about it? Like why not hire a specific reading specialist or a reading interventionist to work with those students like B and Lamont?
Kala: Would you care to answer that Geneviève?
Geneviève: Yeah, I mean I think, I think schools do try, right? But because the need is so great, one interventionist is not enough. So for example, at the school that I work at now in Los Angeles, we're about 600 students. At the beginning of the year, we had about 70% of our kids reading three or more grade levels below. So we had one reading interventionist. But because the need is so great, that person's not sufficient and unable to provide the level of support that our students need.
Kala: Okay, so we've already heard that there's not enough staff. And I know some people think the next thing is what about technology? And as I've spent years in education as an education researcher, I hear all the time like we can just use programs to fill the gap. And I, before we begin, I'm going to show a little story about how that might be a little bit complicated. In my time as a department chair, back when I was teaching high school, there was a teacher who complained a lot about students being disengaged in that reading class. And I wanted to see that firsthand. So I went to her classroom and I saw row of computers for juniors and seniors on the computers. And I didn't know what they were doing, but I saw in there it was a picture of a cartoonish bright yellow duck. And these are high school students. I knew then that, I honestly didn't know if they can decode or comprehend, but I knew at that point what they were doing was they had shut down because the content was so far beneath their capabilities, it was almost insulting. So that's just something you want to keep in mind when it comes to certain technologies. So as I mentioned, we can't hire our way out of it. We can't tech our way out of this problem, but this all could be anecdotal. We could have all just worked at schools that gotten the short ends of the sticks here. So Margaret, I want you tell us what the data actually says, like is this as widespread as it might feel for us?
Margaret: Yeah, so when we take a look at NAEP data, NAEP is the National Assessment of Education Progress, often called the nation's report card. So according to 2024 NAEP data, 70% of eighth graders could not read at a proficient level. Meaning that they could not, for example, read a passage and identify the main idea and supporting details. And that number is slightly worse than 2022. So this problem is massive and it's also growing.
Kala: So we know that the data confirms it, but data doesn't tell us what it feels like to be in those specific classrooms. Geneviève, have you lived in LA, Oakland, the Bronx? Take us to one of those classrooms at the beginning of your career, what did reading instruction actually look like?
Geneviève: I think back to my very first year of teaching, which was in Los Angeles and I was teaching sixth grade English and history. And for my extra class, my period five class, I had a reading elective. And it was honestly, now it was probably a it was a dream class because there was about eight boys, all boys, sixth graders who were struggling readers, striving readers. And if I had those students now we would be rocking it. But as a first year teacher, I had no idea what what I was doing. And I had very little training and support around reading instruction. So all I could say to my kids was, sound it out. And what we did that year was we read Captain Underpants books, we wrote our own autobiographies. I was trying to cultivate a joy of love and joy and and love of reading, but I wasn't helping them with the actual needs that they had. So that was my best attempt as a first year teacher.
Kala: Okay. And so Margaret, that's what you encountered when you were doing research at Harvard. For a teacher who isn't prepared to teach reading, what makes it so hard to do?
Margaret: Yeah, there are several reasons why it's really hard teaching reading to adolescents who struggle with reading. So, the first reason is that adolescent literacy is what we call a big problem space. So, I think probably everyone who's listening, even if you're not a literacy educator by this point, you have heard of the science of reading. So what science of reading means is that there are two strands. There's the word recognition strand and there's the language comprehension strand. So little kids who are struggling with reading, basically what they need help with is the word recognition strand. They need help mapping sounds onto letters and then blending those sounds together to make words. In middle and high school, we have some kids who are still struggling with that. But by middle and high school, that language comprehension strand is really playing an important role. So, the kids who are struggling with reading in middle and high school are struggling to understand the vocabulary words in the texts that are in front of them. Are struggling to comprehend the complex sentence structure. Are struggling to make inferences and understand figurative language. And they have to be able to do all of these things to read grade level texts. So when we intervene with students at this age, we have to address all of these issues, not just sort of one simple and isolated thing. So that's the first problem. And the second problem, is engagement and motivation. So by the time you get to middle school and you have been struggling with reading, probably since kindergarten, most kids have made the really psychologically appropriate choice to disengage from academics and say, this is not my thing. Because none of us choose to do things that we feel like we're not good at. So you know, I've taught middle school, if they don't want to do it, they're not going to do it. And if they don't do it, it doesn't matter how good the program is, they have to actually engage with it in order for it to help them. So this leads to even this sort of second thing breaks down into two separate categories. Because you've got the kids who don't read, right? So when they don't read, they are not building their vocabulary, building their ability to analyze complex sentence structure and understand academic language. And so the gap is growing between the kids who don't read and the kids who do read. And then you have the kids who won't read and that's our Lamont's. That is the kid who would rather throw his teacher's jacket out the window and get sent to the office rather than risk being embarrassed by being asked to read aloud or being asked to answer a question about something that he's read and not being able to do that. So he's like, I would rather be the kid who won't read than the kid who can't read. And so you've got all that going on in one classroom. You know, the kids who are struggling with decoding and language comprehension, the kids who are disengaged, and the kids who are openly defiant as a result of those struggles that they're facing.
Kala: Okay. So Geneviève, you were facing all of that, the can't, the won't and the don't in one classroom. What was the moment that made you realize that you had to do something fundamentally different?
Geneviève: Yeah, it was after two years of trying to teach that reading class. Luckily when I, well not luckily, but when I started my career, you could teach on an emergency credential for like up to two years. And so I stopped teaching after those two years, went back to school full-time. And it was when I was in grad school to get my teaching credential, I said, you have to place me with a reading specialist because I need to know how to teach a sixth grader how to read. Because I knew I was going to be going back to a middle school classroom and I was going to be encountering the same things. And so in my credential program they placed me with an elementary reading specialist. She was actually a former middle school science teacher who had encountered the same issue and was like, hey, I want to go back to become a literacy specialist. So I got to work with her and there I learned all the foundational skills that I knew nothing about prior to that year. And so even though I got the chance to learn alongside her and I felt equipped to like, you know, support my students when I was back. I still returned to the classroom with no kind of guidance or curriculum. It was me and you know, 90 kids and all the, the things that Margaret just described in one class that was unsustainable for me as a teacher, but also nearly impossible because I didn't have guidance curriculum, anything to kind of lead me in how to support and tackle my students' reading needs.
Kala: Okay. And Margaret, when you realized that you, you noticed this, this problem when you were in this situation, what did you do about it?
Margaret: Yeah, I also went to grad school. So after spending about a decade in the classroom and as a literacy coach, I enrolled in a doctoral program to try to get to the bottom of this. Like how do we, how do we solve this problem for adolescents who struggle with reading? And while I was in grad school, I had the opportunity to work on the first randomized controlled trial of a literacy intervention called STARI, the Strategic Adolescent Reading Intervention. And that is what I still work on today and Geneviève does as well. And you know, we're not here to talk to you about a particular program. There are many programs that can support adolescent struggling readers, but what we're now going to talk about is some of the features that can make a program successful in supporting adolescent readers.
Kala: Okay. You already started into, so one of those you're, we're going to list those components. So what's the first one you want to discuss?
Margaret: Yeah, so the first one is that, like I said earlier, adolescent literacy is a big problem space. You've got the word recognition strand and you've got the language comprehension strand. And in the early pilots of the STARI program, we learned that most schools only have the capacity to implement one intervention. So, we had to develop an intervention that was going to meet the needs of all of those kids who are struggling with reading. So, an intervention that was going to address decoding, and fluency, and comprehension, all in an integrated way.
Kala: And Geneviève, what did that look like in the classrooms you supported? How do students experience the multi-component aspect?
Geneviève: So I'm really lucky that I get to coach teachers now who get to implement STARI, and they, I get to see specifically I think a lot about the fluency work. I didn't do any fluency work with my students prior to learning, you know, about the science of reading and the different and the word recognition strands. But when I walk into classrooms now and I'm supporting teachers, I see a lot of joy in kids because they're working with partners, they're recording their words per minute, they have fluency passages that are developmentally appropriate for them. So they're not reading about ducks, but they're reading about, you know, like foster families or thinking about like bullying, things that actually are applicable to them. But they, they, when we, we, the year after our first year of implementing STARI, we did a series of focus groups with students and we said, when you think of all these different components, which one do you think helped you most as a reader? And hands down kids said the fluency, they said, I feel more confident as a reader in all my classes. I, I actually read more accurately now, kids are like, I stop at periods now, I didn't know I needed to do that. Other kids were talking about, you know, hey now I actually don't speed read. I know I need to pause, I know I need to use expression. So they felt like empowered as readers. And so there's a lot of joy in that because kids are the ones that are tracking their own data. And we know with middle school kids especially like they want to have choice, they want to have agency over their learning and that gives them that that sense of agency.
Kala: Okay, so we talked about that first one. What's another high priority component?
Margaret: Yeah, so you know, when you read a really good book, you don't go like, oh that book was so good, now I am just dying to get on the computer and take the quiz about it. When you read a really good book, you want your friend to read it so you can talk about it or you want to go to your book club so you can talk about it. Right? So our theory of change is that it is talk about text that's going to build students' comprehension of text. So students talk about text every single day. They talk about text in the whole class, they talk about text with a partner and every unit has at least one whole class debate where students have to take a position and then support that position using evidence from the text. All as just ways of getting them to engage with the comprehension that needs to happen in a way that's, you know, motivating. Because you get to talk to your friends about it.
Kala: Yeah. And back to you Geneviève, what did you see in your students when they had the actual opportunity to talk about those texts?
Geneviève: Yeah, middle schoolers come alive. Like kids love to talk, right? They're very social. So if we are asking kids to read a great text and then take a quiz about it on the computer by yourself, that is a no-no. Right? That is incredibly boring and disengaging for kids. So, what I love is that kids have opportunities to debate each other. So in, you know, they read The Skin I'm In by Sharon G Flake, middle school classic. How many people have read that? Yes, yes. So good if you haven't, it's, it's a classic. But they are debating, you know, who has more power, Maleeka or Shar. And those are real questions that there's not a right or wrong answer, but they're there, you know, sharing their opinions, going back to the text. They also, we also found in some of our focus groups that the second component that kids love the most was the partner work. Because they do a lot of work with partners and they said it allowed them to talk with their friends or encouraged them to get to know people they didn't know so that they could build, you know, more relationships and community in their middle school setting, which is really important, especially for our kids at this developmental age.
Kala: Definitely. And these are already things done in those higher level classes that we definitely, it's already seen there as well and we see that that works. And so our last component here, which is probably the most topical for this episode, you want to care to share?
Margaret: Yeah, so the last one is the focus on engagement and motivation. So one thing that I do think makes STARI special compared to a lot of other reading interventions is that it was developed from the beginning with that focus on student engagement and motivation. So we give kids really good books to read and books that are age appropriate books that are accessible to them even though they read below grade level. But books that don't feel like baby books. And books that are relevant that are about things that are happening in their lives or that they can relate to. And then we give them questions to discuss about those books that are relevant real world questions. So, you know, even though maybe they've been struggling with reading since kindergarten, they still have lived experiences that we can value, that they can bring to the classroom and that they can share and they have ideas and opinions and being able to speak about those in the context of literature is what engages them and motivates them and makes them want to participate. And giving them that respect to their developmental stage is just really hugely important.
Kala: Okay. And Geneviève, that piece of putting engagement in the front and center, how did that show up for your students?
Geneviève: Yeah, I mean I was talking about The Skin I'm In, right? And that book was written, I don't know, 30 years ago maybe 1990, yeah, it's still relevant. So gosh, 36 years ago, still very relevant. But kids, Sharon G Flake wrote another book more recently called The Life I'm In, which is told from Char's perspective and then a new book told from John John's perspective. And what we've seen is that kids are like, hey, we read this, she has more books about these characters, we want to read those next. Whether they were in the curriculum or not, kids are like asking for these texts. We also read Jacqueline Woodson's Locomotion and which is a very powerful book about loss and grieving and family. And we have a teacher who shares her own experience growing up in foster care with students. So it like also creates these like very rich connections between kids and teachers. And I've a kid said once that by reading Locomotion it helped them better deal with the loss that they were experiencing in their lives. So they, you know, whether that, I didn't know if that was like loss of a best friend or loss of a family member. But this idea that texts that are actually at our developmental levels or at students' developmental levels and that are engaging really matter and support students to actually want to deepen their, their knowledge and their ability to read.
Kala: That is amazing. And before I continue, I just want to mention something and highlight something that's striking about this conversation. Margaret is talking about the research aspect of it. So asking those hard questions and the systemic aspects. And then Geneviève is talking about real world like Practitionership and so the things that are actually going on in the classroom, and this is what happens and this is what it looks like when research and practitioners actually collaborate. And it's not just the researcher handing down mandates, but actually collaborating with the people that are on the ground, the people that know best. And although we often, Margaret has been in the classroom, it's been a while. And so talking and deferring with teachers and practitioners like Geneviève whose been in the classroom more recently, it definitely makes a difference. And the evidence, there is evidence behind this. STARI has a tier one evidence of effectiveness rating, which is the gold star as far as rigor and education. But what I think Geneviève's story shows us is that the evidence actually exists is why this evidence exists. It's not just magic, it's not just happening like that, but it's designing instruction that takes adolescents seriously. It gives them books that are worth reading and opportunities to think, talk and utilize those skills that they actually need. When you do all that together, it's obvious from hearing, it's apparent that students show up differently. So we've been talking about the classrooms and students, but here's another reality. We cannot afford for student success depending on having the right teacher like Geneviève or myself with Ms B. One of the things I've learned is that students don't fail, systems do. So teachers are working inside constraints that were already designed before we entered the classrooms. So Margaret, now that you're working at a systems level as SERPs Literacy Director, what does it take to make this work in schools? Not just the ones that Geneviève supports, but in districts?
Margaret: Yeah, so our mission at SERP, our mission as an organization is to engage in research practice partnerships. So we are researchers, but we've been teachers and all of the work that we do is based in problems of practice posed by districts and then we apply for funding and then we bring researchers to design solutions to those problems. But then the problems are piloted in schools and educators give feedback and the programs are revised and then eventually evaluated. So when we designed STARI, when we designed all of the programs that we've designed, we begin in real world settings. So, you know, we know for example, that every school doesn't have a reading specialist or maybe they have one reading specialist, but that's not enough to serve all of the students who need reading intervention. So we designed STARI from the beginning as a program that does not need to be taught by a reading specialist or even an ELA teacher. We have had math teachers, Spanish teachers, paraprofessionals, folks who are uncertified and teaching under an emergency credential. All of these folks have been able to teach STARI successfully because it was designed that way from the beginning with comprehensive lesson plans, clear professional learning because we knew that, you know, this has to work in the real world if in order for it to actually be effective. And likewise it is not a tutoring intervention because then again you run into a body problem. It is a whole class intervention. It is designed for a 45 minute period because that's what fits into a regular school day. So designing within the systems with the end user in mind is how we hope to make change in the world of education.
Kala: Okay. So we've talked about those structures, like you said, scheduling, staffing, whole group versus like pullouts and things like that. But the bigger question that's underneath all of this is what would change if engagement was treated foundational and not secondary to literacy improvement?
Margaret: Is that for me?
Kala: Yes. I'm sorry Margaret.
Margaret: So, I think the number one thing I would say is give kids real books. Give kids good books. Not baby books, not passages, not reading on a computer, but like an actual book in your hand that you want to read that looks like the books other kids your age are reading. And then let them talk to their friends about it.
Kala: Okay. And Geneviève, from your perspective, you are working with the teachers and the students in the classrooms. What would that shift from engagement being secondary to foundational? What would that mean for you and the students you serve? -
Geneviève: I mean, I think it hands down would mean that kids would want to come to school, right? Kids would want to engage if they know they have the opportunity to engage with their peers, read really good texts, and they're getting better at something that has been hard for them for many, many years. We struggle with attendance at my school. We are a very high need school. We find that when students have more positive experiences in their classrooms, they are more likely to come to school, especially at middle and high school when they have a little more agency about getting to school. So I think it would mean kids would want to come to school, but I also think it would mean that they have stronger relationships. You know, it's a hard time out there for young people. And if I am, if you are able to build stronger connections with your peers in a space where your teacher has cultivated a space where you feel comfortable enough to read aloud your words per minute in front of a 13-year-old who maybe you didn't know at the beginning of the year, that creates a space where people want to come, they feel connected. And so we really want to create spaces where kids belong. And this is a piece of that belonging
Kala: And that's ultimately the vision where students, you know, reading instruction that honors adolescents, who they are, what they care about, and what they need to succeed. And as you've heard today, it's not just a vision, it's actually happening in classrooms across the country. We started this conversation talking about the joys that we had when we were learning to read and the joy that brought us all into reading and have kept us sustained so far. And we've talked about how to bring that joy back for students who have lost it, not through the gimmicks or the shortcuts, but through interventions that honor both the science of how we learn to read and the reality of who adolescents really are. And so Margaret, with all of that in mind, and despite the numbers right now of what NAEP tells us, what gives you hope?
Margaret: So what gives me hope is getting to work with great educators like Geneviève and getting to go into classrooms and hear students say things like, well I used to think I wasn't a good reader, but I'm getting better. Or, oh, I really want to read this book. This is such a good book. I love this book. Yeah, that's what gives me hope.
Kala: Geneviève, same question.
Geneviève: There are many things that give me hope in this very difficult time. I will start with young people, the young people that I get to work with every day. When I get to see them light up because they are getting better at something that has been hard for them or they are able to engage, that gives me hope. I think of three teachers at my school, Mrs. Patterson, Ms. Celestine and Ms. Delgado who all teach STARI and have helped kids. And some of them are math teachers and science teachers and they've seen that that transfer to their non lit, to their math and science classes in terms of students' abilities. They give me hope because they provide really safe spaces for kids to take risks and grow. And then the last I think group of people that give me hope are are young adult authors. We cannot get kids to read without great text. And so I think of people like Jason Reynolds and Elizabeth Acevedo and Rex Ogle and Renee Watson who just won the Newberry Award. Just thinking about authors who write texts that our kids can connect to and that respect them as people and their experiences. I'm grateful for them and they also give me hope.
Kala: Yeah, and, and I'll just answer that what gives me hope is being able to have conversations with amazing practitioners and researchers like this. So, and I want to turn that question to you all. I want you to think about it for a second. What gives you hope? And I want you to just sit with that for, for a moment. Whatever came to your mind, I want you to hold onto that and let that be your compass for the rest of today and the duration of this, this conference. For everyone listening, Whether you work in a school system, at a nonprofit, ed tech or ed industry, you have a role to play. Maybe it's committing to learning more about this topic. Maybe it's serving as a thought leader within the field. Maybe it's building deep and supportive relationships with people on the ground doing the actual work like Geneviève. Whatever your role, you can help create conditions where students experience the joy that we talked about earlier in this episode. And serve stories you believe that every person deserves to see themselves as a reader. Not someday. But now, if you're here at SXSW, please come visit us at our booth 210. We'd love to continue this conversation and we'd love to hear what gives you hope and your how you learn to read story. And if you're listening later, explore more at seep institute.org/podcast. I want to thank you Margaret and Geneviève for this conversation. And thank you to everyone here at so by SXSW for listening, for listening, for the work that you do every day to transform small moments into turning points for our students. Until next time, keep centering curiosity, keep channeling adolescent readers and keep building the bridge between research and practice. This has been SERP Stories. Thanks for listening. We do have a little extra time so feel free to use the mic and if you have any questions. Andrea (audience member): Hi, my name is Andrea. I really enjoyed this presentation. I'm not an educator, well actually, yeah, I am. What actually gives me hope is I teach an afterschool Shakespeare program for elementary school kids. I'm an actor and it's very interesting to watch kids come in thinking that I'm never going to get this, what am I doing? Half of them try to drop out within the first week and their parents push them on. And then when we get into really great texts like Midsummer that they can really relate to and have fun with, the difference in their confidence and their self-esteem is just tremendous. So that actually gives me hope. I have a very good friend who does a educational blog called The Bell Ringer and she's a reading, she loves all the reading stuff, her name's Holly Corby. And I asked her a question that she would ask you, and she asked, how many books do kids actually read in the classroom? I think that was really important. I actually did an audition with my son where he was having to read aloud and I wondered if that still happens in school.
Kala: I defer to the panel.
Geneviève: Yeah, I, we do read books. I will name, this is actually very funny because I, I work as a literacy coach, so I support our English teachers, I support our STARI teachers, our reading teachers. We actually read in our English classes, we probably read as an entire class, only three to four books a year. Which to me is very kind of sad. And that's as a class, kids may be reading independently as well. But in our STARI classes, our reading classes, we actually read far more books, which I'd say we read maybe six to nine. Andrea: Oh, oh wow.
Geneviève: Books as a class. And I think there's lots of reasons for that because we go a little bit slower in ELA because there's more standards and in, in our reading classes we're really focusing on reading as opposed to the writing and the well we are doing listening and speaking. But, so we do read books. I would say it's not as many as I think we should read, but we still do. Andrea: And my kids read them on iPads and I'm fortunate my kids are really great at reading, but we've never had to do in interventions. But I would imagine having a real book is important. Is that so?
Margaret: It is, yeah. There is research that shows that reading on real paper is more beneficial for kids than reading on a screen that the experience is just different. With that said, I mean I read all the time and I read on my phone because I always have my phone with me and I don't have to take a suitcase full of books when I travel like this. So for people that are proficient readers and the avid readers, read however you want to read. But yeah, for kids who are learning, it is beneficial for them to have actual books in their hands on paper. And I also just want to say, I loved teaching Shakespeare when I was an English teacher. Romeo and Juliet was my favorite unit and I taught in low income schools where people wouldn't necessarily assume that eighth graders can read and understand Shakespeare. And it's like, you know what? They love it. Andrea: Oh yeah.
Margaret: Because you know, I spent the first two thirds of the school year begging them not to beat on their desks. And then it was like, I am the pentameter. We're beating on the desks today. Andrea: Right. Love it. I mean it makes sense. Yeah. I, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Claire (audience member): Hi, thank you all. This has been wonderful. I'm Claire, I'm the Director of Literacy First and I mostly focus right now on early literacy. I have previously taught middle and high school reading. And I love what you said about that theory of change, being talk being the differentiator in reading comprehension and engagement. And I see that also as a potential lever for bridging those two strands of, of the science of reading that you spoke about Margaret. And I wonder how do you leverage that talk or do you teach that directly sometimes with book talk or oral language development in combo with real reading?
Margaret: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I think that one thing that is really important for teachers to understand is that we cannot assume anything about what our students already know when they come to us. Everything has to be explicitly taught if you want them to be able to be successful. And so, you know, if I just put books in front of them and I say, now talk about the books kids and then they're not successful. And I say, well that didn't work. So yes, like we explicitly teach them, we start with a lot of culture building activities where they interview their partner to find out what they have in common and what is different about the two of them. And then, you know, we build the questions really intentionally and it's not a scripted program. You know, we encourage teachers to ask their own follow up questions or, or you know, extension questions if their kids are getting answers really easily. But the questions are intentionally built and scaffolded so that we're starting with literal questions and then we're building into more inferential questions. And we do recommend that that teachers use sentence starters and provide some in the curriculum and, and teachers may use their own as well. Just to help give kids the words to say, to be able to speak intelligently about a book that they've read and you know, sound like they know what they're talking about. Claire: Thank you. 8th Grade ELA teacher (audience member): Hello. So 8th grade ELA teacher here and recognizing a lot of the same things. The majority of our students struggle with reaching grade level proficiency as well as that engagement piece. So understanding that this seems to be more of that intervention program design, how do you see that partnering with a traditional grade leveled curriculum? And then also what are some of your thoughts on how they coexist with some of these modern day curriculums where there is such an emphasis on screen digital work, passages, excerpts, older text versus like the fresher, more relevant texts?
Geneviève: I have a thought, I think the piece that Margaret just spoke about in terms of talk about text and like leveraging that is one of the, the biggest connections I see. Because oftentimes, or not oftentimes, but sometimes in more of our traditional ELA classes, kids may be reading, they may be answering questions, some people may be lecturing, but kids are not having opportunities to engage in dialogue with their peers about text. So I think that is a huge piece that is a connector. And then I also think because a big piece of STARI is building students' background knowledge through fluency work, some of the work that we've done in our ELA classes is to try to bring some of more of that fluency work into a traditional ELA class when the need is presented. Because we do, like I said, have a lot of students who are reading three or more grade levels behind. And so I'll work with teachers to pick a piece of, of text from the anchor text or from a support text that will build their background knowledge to support them to access that anchor text. And we'll do, whether it's like through choral reading or in smaller groups, more fluency work, not for like a whole period, but for a five minute portion of the period to support students in that work as well. So I feel like there are pieces that work really well in STARI because of how it's built out that we have adopted and taken into our traditional ELA class. But I'd say the talk about text is the biggest one.
Margaret: Yeah, agree. And I love 8th grade, it's my favorite grade, what I taught most of my teaching career. But yeah, talk, talk about text and you know, when Geneviève said that her school reads three or four books a year in the ELA class, like that's pretty good actually because I know there are schools where they're not reading whole novels in the ELA, they're reading excerpts and that makes me really sad. And I know as a teacher you probably don't have any control over that. But yeah, I think talk about text and like you can make the text relevant for your students even if it is older. I mean, I was just talking about Romeo and Juliet a minute ago, what's older than that? And yet, like Romeo and Juliet is about romance and fighting, what are 8th graders thinking about all the time? So as long as you can position it so that they understand that that's what they're reading about, then they absolutely have something to say and something to bring to the table.
Kala: And just adding to that, like I mentioned, we are working within a system. And so you may not be able to include all of the components that Margaret mentioned in a, in a class, but even just taking one of the components then you've helped your students a little bit more. And we have to do what we have to do as, you know, middle school teachers, high school teachers to ensure that our students get just that much more understanding, especially our struggling readers. And just adding on, like I said, I was also surprised with the two to three books a year. I've worked at a, a school where it was frowned upon to read whole books because we were teaching to a test. And so it was a doing students a disservice by reading an entire book because they don't get to the skills they need to master an exam. So that is something that some people may be navigating, but like that talking, even if it's an excerpt, how would this conversation look? You know, talking to a classmate about it, finding a way, like Margaret said, to make it more engaging for them goes a long way. Again, this has been SERP Stories. Thank you for listening.