The Authority Podcast — Expert Insights and Fresh Ideas for Education Leaders

[00:00:00] Welcome in everybody to the Authority Podcast here on the BE Podcast Network. Thanks as always for being with us. It's a real pleasure to have you here, and a real pleasure to have you here for this conversation, which is going to cover one of my favorite topics in learning.

which is joy, joy in learning experiences and really prioritizing that in our teaching and learning. This episode is part of the National Literacy Month with RIF campaign, which is a partnership between the Bee Podcast Network and Reading is Fundamental, in which we're hosting a number of productive conversations across our network of podcasts about developing kids reading and literacy skills for life.

talking to a wide variety of experts, practitioners, authors, others that have a stake. In this effort to really improve literacy skills and the love of reading in our schools and our communities. And this is going to really build on that. My guest today is Dr. Erin Bailey. [00:01:00] Erin joined Reading is Fundamental in 2021.

And she currently serves as the Vice President of Literacy Programs and Research. Her role includes serving as the Subject Matter Expert and developing, curating, and managing content and professional learning for educators and families on literacy. Aaron, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Great to be here.

I'd love to start our conversation by talking a little bit. About you, your background, and we'd love to hear about your literacy journey. Right now your work is immersed in literacy, and it's certainly something that you journeyed through academically before getting into this work. We'd just kind of love to hear your time as a student. You spent time as a teacher as well.

What, Kind of drew you toward making literacy the focus for your work.

Oh, I love that question and introduction. So it's interesting. [00:02:00] I like to think of my journey and literacy through the landscapes on which I was a teacher and a learner. I started teaching fifth grade in Los Angeles in the Watts community there. And my students didn't have a lot of access to books there.

I loved reading. I knew that I wanted my students to love reading. So, I started bringing in books into the classroom however I could get them. You know, sales at Goodwill, I know my mom and my aunt would ship me books all the time to get the students interested in reading. And I knew something even I, even though I was very young, very new teacher, I knew something and that was that if you give children a books.

If you do book talks, if you talk about your experiences as a reader, that they will grow to love and enjoy reading. Unfortunately, at some point I lost a little bit of touch with that. So as I kind of continued on my journey, I started because Become [00:03:00] more and more focused on what it takes to become a skilled reader.

So even though this term, science of reading, wasn't used back then, as I continued my teaching in Los Angeles, I became incredibly focused on skilled reading and results driven reading. You know, were my students, how was their fluency score? Were they decoding the words correctly? All of these little things that you can very quantitatively measure and everyone in the class was reading the same thing because it wasn't about choice.

It was about can you read the text that's being assigned to you? So that was my Los Angeles landscape. As I said, I like to tell my story in these landscapes. Then I moved to overseas to Hong Kong. I was a kindergarten teacher there and I worked in an international baccalaureate school, very play based approach to learning.

And there they were all about choice. So I was kind of drawn back to Giving kids choice. So it wasn't about everybody reading the same text, scoring the same score, what are the outcomes, but more about children having [00:04:00] access to as many books as possible and choosing what they wanted to read. And of course the whole time I had a master's degree in reading instruction, so the entire time that I was teaching kindergarten there, I was still very much teaching phonological awareness, phonics, all of the foundational things, but really infused with student choice and student autonomy.

And that became really important to me. So important that when I moved to Washington, D. C. to start my doctoral studies, I was also teaching first grade at the time. I was really hyper focused on finding the next school that I was going to work at that valued student choice and autonomy. I had a long list of other things that I wanted the school to be but that was top of it.

So I chose a school that had similar philosophy to inquiry and play based learning that I had. experienced in Hong Kong. I wanted to continue down that path. And you know, after that I joined RIF in 2021 and it reminded me what I kind of learned and [00:05:00] unlearned along the way about reading was really something that I knew my first year of teaching.

And that was, if you give children choice and access to books, and if you model for them a love of reading, that they will become not just skilled readers, but lifelong readers and lifelong learners.

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Of course it's that literacy of love, but what ended up bringing you over to reading is fundamental and who do, what stakeholders do you engage with your work there? I've learned recently since we've been building and planning for this partnership that there's people who are very familiar with the organization, right?

And there's others who didn't really know much about it at all. And so we have listeners here traditionally. who are in school leadership and some teachers. I imagine through this campaign, we're also going to have a mix of other roles listening. But for those who maybe are listening, are really interested in the work that you specifically do, how it might [00:06:00] support them would love to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about that.

Sure. So I, as I mentioned, I was a teacher in Washington, D. C. I started out as a first grade teacher. I moved into the role of the reading specialist at the school that I was at. And then I had the opportunity to intern one summer at Reading is Fundamental. Fell in love with the work they were doing, especially their mission around diversity, equity, inclusion.

It lined up very much so with me. The work that I was doing at the school. And for me at least, I had reached a point in my teaching career that if I continued to be a reading specialist, there would be a certain number of kids That I impacted every year. It would be the kids that were on my caseload and maybe through doing some teacher professional development, I may be able to support teachers and reaching other students.

But I felt at least for me, it was the time in my teaching journey that I was ready to take my work outside of the classroom [00:07:00] and. Luckily, I had already built great connections with reading is fundamental, that way I could use my work, not just with this, with working with students every year, but really working with teachers, working with families and spreading this message about the joy of reading and the impact that it has.

Yeah. So I promised our listeners joy. So let's talk about that and start with defining it in reading and education. How are you defining joy when we're talking about it?

Great question. So there's a lot of different ways that you can define joy. For us at Reading is Fundamental, we define joy as motivation, frequency, and engagement. So I'll break each of those down for you. We'll start with motivation. I'm actually going to throw it over to you, if that's okay, and ask you, what was the last thing that you read?

And maybe if you're listening, you can think to yourself. What was the last thing you read or the last thing you remember reading?

Oh, goodness. I'm sure I was reading something today, but [00:08:00] nothing too interesting. Probably some emails. But what I just was reading yesterday, an article about the effect that Yelp has had on restaurants over the last decade.

And why were you reading that?

I was interested in the topic and I have had a lot of thoughts about the Yelpification the review culture around businesses of all kinds and particularly small businesses and the outsized effect it can have on them. So I was interested to see where this article was going to go.

Yeah, so you were interested, you were motivated to read that, and it's because you have an interest in restaurants, which, by the way, we share that in common my, my family and I are huge foodies, and we love eating at restaurants, so super into that, but you were motivated to read it, you selected that, you had an interest in it, and therefore you read it, and you probably felt successful while you were reading it, [00:09:00] is that right?

I felt like I learned a little bit. I felt like, right, I was able to achieve the goal of completing it. Know what it said and apply it in my like you I live in Washington, D. C. and so but I was thinking about in the context of currently we're on vacation in a place where it's a smaller population.

And so, our default to kind of look places up and see what the reviews say and how many they are is something that we have to contextualize when we're here and say, look, there's not as many people using these things here. So we can't. We have to apply our personal experience. If I've been vacationing here for my entire life, I know enough to make an informed decision, right, without having to resort to that.

So, anyhow yeah,

also

felt like I [00:10:00] achieved my goal.

Exactly. So having a goal, feeling successful in your goal, feeling like you had the ability to read that text you know, you didn't go in thinking, Oh, this is an article about Yelp reviews. This is going to be too challenging for me to read. I'm not even going to try it. That we call that self efficacy, your belief in your ability to read.

All of those things, it might not have been the most enjoyable article to read, But you got joy out of it. And so there is a difference between joy and enjoyment. Sometimes you can be reading something or doing a task. That's actually really hard, challenging, uncomfortable for you, but that sense of achievement and satisfaction that you get from doing it, that sense of purpose, that's how we think of joy in relation to motivation.

So that's kind of how we think of motivation in a nutshell. The next one is frequency, and you mentioned emails, you're still reading, so we talk about [00:11:00] frequency and we talk about not just being a skilled reader, your ability to read, but being a lifelong reader, bringing those skills that you learned on reading and even your, the skill that you were using about synthesizing and being critical of what this article is saying, taking it into context of thinking, reading a Yelp review from a, someone visiting That's a different context from somebody who lives there, knows the area, knows the food culture there.

All of those things impact the way that you read. So when you're reading frequently, it doesn't just have to be how many minutes are you sitting down and reading for at a time, but you know, that's sustaining reading. But it could be how frequently do you read throughout the day? How frequently do you use reading to achieve your goals?

And all of these things also come into this choice. So that's motivation. Frequency is how often, how frequently are you reading? And then engagement engagement, we think of, are you being an active reader, or are you [00:12:00] being a passive reader? We talked about autonomy, do you have choice in the materials that you're reading?

If you do, you're probably more likely to be engaged in it. When you were looking at that article, what other things did you take into consideration? Did you just read that article, or did you think, Oh, let me Google and see what other resources I want to fact check this. I want to see what other resources, what are other people saying about Yelp reviews about restaurants.

So all of these things are your engagement in it and also how you're thinking of yourself as a reader and your purpose for reading.

Are those You know, joy, motivation, engagement, are they intentionally presented in a sequential order or no,

So I believe that motivation and frequency lead into engagement. So you can kind of think of, if you like to, you can kind of think of it as a formula. Motivation plus frequency equals engagement. Some people might take them piece by piece, but really you need to have [00:13:00] a motivation to read, like, such as yourself, to be engaged in that reading.

I want to talk about why, Joy, why are we discussing this?

Why is this a priority in our schools? Because I really do believe that it can be the hidden sometimes overlooked to the question of student engagement to all of the sweat and effort and dialogue we put into how to engage students, what type of curriculum and content is engaging, what instructional strategies are engaging, learning environments, etc.

Where sometimes beginning with the understanding of let's prioritize joy and let's aim for that. Let's not have the, sometimes it's a little bit more of a I think deficit orientation to try to get up to a minimum baseline. Okay, if our students are unengaged right now or they're disengaged, let's get them up to like how we feel they're engaged [00:14:00] versus saying, like, let's aim for truly joyful learning.

And that starts with the adult in the room, whether if we're in a school and it's the teacher, and if the teacher is really joyful and engaged in what they're doing, right, or if it's at home and it's the parent That really will come into play with the students. And it also, I I was thinking about it when I was recording another episode for this series and considering the goals around readers and having them be competent, confident and engaged.

And we think about that. Linearly as well. Okay. First, we want students to develop skills, and once they have the skills, they'll be confident. And once they're confident, now they're engaged and that's one way that it can happen. But also we want our students. To be engaged independent of their current competence, right?

And we want them to be confident in their ability to learn and in the future of their learning, again, like, regardless of where they are right now. We want them to feel like they can [00:15:00] learn and will continue to learn, and they're motivated to keep learning, and that's how they're going to grow. If the only students that are engaged are the ones that are already highly skilled and proficient, then Obviously, we're going to have a lot of students whom we really can't engage.

And so it seems to me, like in all those ways that thinking about joy as the goal in itself and saying, look, if we prioritize and promote joy, a lot of other good things will happen as a result, or we'll set the, environment and the foundation for being able to make other good things happen and not just think that joy is only the result of you know, whatever else comes before it.

To me that's one of the ways I think about why It's something that's worthy of its own discussion, its own place in the learning goals, right? And but you know, certainly from you, would love to hear [00:16:00] from you. Why is joy something that we're talking about? Why is this our topic?

Yeah, that's a really great question. And I think you nailed it when you said we're so focused on competency, or I referred to it as being a skilled reader. And I love that order that you said competent, confident, engaged. I wonder how we could imagine it, reimagine it, if we reversed that, right? So first you were an engaged learner, and then you were confident in your abilities to be able to read, and then you became a competent or skilled reader.

And I'm talking about from thinking about engagement from birth. You have a newborn, a baby, a toddler, and you start reading to them every day. What you're doing is modeling for them that reading is an important part of your life, that you have a literacy rich and a print rich culture at your home. And there's not infants or [00:17:00] toddlers that can read, but in that you're creating a culture for them.

Building their confidence that someday they will be a reader. And we talked about self efficacy, not your current ability, but your beliefs in what you can be able to do. Or I have a three year old, so what I say to my daughter, we call it the power of yet. It's not that you can't do it, you can't do it yet.

And so if you're reading aloud to your child every day, and building up this engagement and this love of reading, what you're saying to them is, you can't read traditionally, yet, but you will. And that's building the confidence in them that they need that's going to help them be, become a competent or skilled reader.

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yeah. Yeah. My, my three year old has become very confident that he knows how to read. He doesn't, but he will confidently point a word out and tell you what it says. So that, I [00:18:00] mean,

And there's some people that would say, Ben, he's not a reader. I would say he's not a conventional or a traditional reader. But you always want to say to all young children, you are a reader because what you're doing is building their literate identity.

Yeah. Yeah. And so with this joy, when we are Aaron, working toward it, prioritizing it making it a part of our teaching and learning. Is it something that can be measured? How can it be measured? Should it be measured?

I know, I I think about this a lot too. Can it be measured is one question that's tactical. I think it can. Should it be measured is another thing. So to answer, can it be measured? Sure. For example reading is fundamental. We have a couple of our own research initiatives, and one of the things that we're measuring is motivation to read.

We're using a motivation to read profile, and I can share that with you in [00:19:00] case you want to link the citation or email. for your viewers. So we're using this motivation to read profile and basically it measures a child's self concept of themself as a reader and their value of reading in a very Likert scale quantified kind of way.

So you can get some quantitative results from those types this. particular measure that we're using or other kind of motivational measures that have been used in research. And you can also connect those to reading achievement. So you can show a correlation between motivation to read and reading achievement.

It's something that's been done In many studies, it's something that we at Reading is Fundamental are doing in our own research. But then comes the question of, should you measure joy? Or are there more qualitative ways that you can measure joy? Can you measure joy in the smiles? or satisfying that you see in the children's faces when they're hreein somethieing and feeing accomplished in it.

[00:20:00] Or when a child gets to pick out their own book and take it home you know, their enthusiasm to do so and these are kind of things that we can't really capture necessarily through like quantitative or statistical type of data. It doesn't mean that they're not important or that they're not valuable.

And I think that for me is what I saw between my first year as a fifth grade teacher when I believed in the joy of reading and I could see it and feel it in my students. And then when I became hyper, hyper focused on are my students skilled readers and everything was about the data that I can measure.

Sometimes it's easier to look at the data because it's so tangible and concrete, but we can't forget about the feelings that we have too.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I talked about joy and relationship to engagement. I mean, I think engagement is a thing that there's a lot of people [00:21:00] who don't who think if you're, if you believe you're measuring engagement, you're really measuring compliance. Because I'm looking at somebody following my directions, are they and it might not be that they're truly engaged.

Now, joy would be different from that. But of course, People may humans may exhibit that in different ways. There's probably certain telltales when we're talking about reading. If kids keep reading and reading new things, then it's probably a good sign that they're enjoying that, right? And they're feeling motivated to continue.

And that certainly, again, can be independent from proficiency, right? I mean, a kid who is a pre reader, who is He's constantly bringing new books to mom or dad and saying, can we read this? I mean, he's getting joy out of reading, even though they're not reading it independently. So the and there's, There is a sense too, if I'm an educator and [00:22:00] I'm making this a more joyful learning environment, that I have to at least use my eyes and ears and and try to see, am I achieving that at all?

And what does that look like? While still understanding the limitations and, and the benefits in a school environment. What are some of the things practically? that educators can do to ignite a joy and specifically a joy of reading for their students.

I think particularly when it comes to middle grade students and middle school students, making reading social. So engagement has a very social component to it. So as a teacher, you can make reading social by giving students opportunities to talk about their reading what they're reading. I mean, if you've read a great book, you're excited to talk about it.

And we talked about measuring joy, measuring engagement. That's one way to measure it, at least [00:23:00] anecdotally, is how excited and enthusiastic is this student to talk about the book? Would they recommend it to their friends? The other way you can make reading social, and we see this a lot at book celebration events when students get to choose their books, is that often times students will choose the same book.

and they're choosing it because they want to start their own book club, to be able to read and talk about it together, to make it a social activity for them. And I'm part of two book clubs myself, so certainly being social is a motivator for me to want to read something. So as much as possible, if you can make it social, if you can make it a group activity.

That's one way to engage students and get them exposed to other things. You know, maybe you weren't that motivated to read or that interested in a particular book, but three of your friends are reading it and you're going to read it because you want to talk to them about it. You want to be part of their book club.

And that's definitely one way to engage students.

Yeah, there's, [00:24:00] it's positive social pressures, right? I mean, I'm sure for adults, especially with busy lives and it not being part of the curriculum, I understand. If I have this community around this reading, now I have that incentive to make sure it happens so that I can then engage in the discussion and have the social benefits of that and the same can certainly be true of students to have that, to want to have that shared experience the same way that they might.

with other media and, okay, I need to hear this song or see this movie or something that my friends are talking about because I, and to make that something that applies to reading there's to it and a good way also of making the point that choice In reading and in a wreath of curriculum approach, far as mandatory or shared [00:25:00] reading versus more options. And it doesn't mean that it's not communal. community, because in the example you you provided, kids may, they're choosing something that they can do together, but it's based on whatever interest they have, etc.

that they might get. more of the desired benefits from it than if they all read whatever was assigned to them and didn't necessarily have a natural interest in it. Or some of them did, some of them didn't. We're just learning. I think the dialogue around the choice can, they can learn a lot from that around what are the options here?

Why might you choose different ones? What are the reasons? Can you articulate and discuss what drew you to this book? What, and then what were your results, right? You know, were you happy with your [00:26:00] choice? Did you find out that it wasn't what you expected? All those kinds of things that are made possible by the introduction of choice.

You know, that you can't quite have as substantive of a discourse around something that you didn't choose and certainly around you know, the accountability for making a decision that you're happy with or learning from. Okay, now that I chose this, next time I think I might choose another book by that author, or something totally different, or whatever. case may be and those are all great skills as well for students to be learning as they're going to go out and have kind of boundless choice a lot of times as far as what to engage with, what not to, what to dedicate their time to and what they find to be beneficial, right?

and I think, too, there's another element to choice, and that's choice to what I used to call abandon a book. You started a book, [00:27:00] you selected a book, you started reading it, and for whatever reason, it didn't sit well with you. And so you decided to, what I used to call abandon the book, make another selection.

But for me as a teacher, rather than just letting students abandon books here and there all the time, It was a way to open up a conversation. Why are you abandoning this book? Is it because it's too difficult for you? Did you find the topic uninteresting? Because that then feeds into future choices that they're going to make.

And for you as a teacher, recommendations that you can make for that student.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I, that's, I mean, that's another great example because I was thinking about remembering or potentially misremembering, but I think accurately remembering and another of these episodes about it was about the choice and how to make the, Write decisions as educators [00:28:00] around what to make a universal part of the curriculum, where to give choice, etc.

And I was thinking about in high school when we read The Grapes of Wrath and being a very long unit. It's a long book and I don't know, we would do however many chapters at a time, right? And then have a discussion and a quiz or whatever. In any case if I were in that class and I knew after a few chapters, I.

do not like this book. I don't like the way it's written. It's, this is just not interesting to me. And yet I know that the next month of this class, this is what we're doing. And there's 30 more chapters and it's not going to get any better because it's not about if the story is this is just something I'm not enjoying reading at all.

And if that's, the approach, right? Okay, now I know I'm not going to be super engaged in what's happening in this class [00:29:00] for the next few weeks, at least. And versus When I'm reading a book, do I have more choice over what that is when I'm going to be dedicating more time to it, right? Do I have the option to abandon it the way that you and I might have that option as adults who are choosing what we want to read, and if we go to the library, And we pick out a book and we start and we say, well, I don't like this one.

Then we can pick a different one and just say, look you don't have to, there's a lot of things out there. There's so many different things that you could choose to engage with. And every now and then you're going to Come across one that you just know is not for you and that it's not really benefiting you to continue on with that when you could choose a different one.

Versus how there might be shorter things article length, individual chapters, short stories, et cetera, that, okay, we're all going to read this and discuss it, and it's [00:30:00] something you're gonna read in one night and then. If you like it or not, it's done. And we talk about it, we reflect and we see what we learn from it, but you're not stuck with it for weeks at a time.

But I, again, I like the option to have that continuing conversation about, okay, if you're choosing that you're abandoning this one, what are the reasons why? And as you're still a developing reader, one of are we, yeah, is it a challenge with there's. something that you're having a hard time with the reading of it, with the comprehension, with the style, with the vocabulary, etc.

Or is it the storyline, or is it something about the characters, etc. So it's not, it's an opportunity to have discussions that are Individually responsive, culturally responsive, right? And also responsive to reading skill development. But really to have students have that ownership over their [00:31:00] learning and to have intentionality around, okay, if I'm choosing Not to read this because of X, Y, Z reasons.

Think within that, you made some really good points about choice. Maybe not within the text, because sometimes we are assigned texts in a curriculum, but choice or opportunities within what you do with that text. So something that students love is to critique. So I'm, I have to read Grapes of Wrath. It's part of the curriculum, but suddenly my role as a student is not a literary analysis, but to be the critic and to analyze and explain to everyone what's going on.

Why this isn't a great text or to break it down for students and kids love to do critiques and I can give another example. At the school that I was teaching at in Washington, D. C., fourth grade students were doing some test prep. [00:32:00] So they were reading some shorter passages with multiple choice questions that came from.

A website, which I will not name for you, but what the students realized after reading many of these test prep types of passages was that they didn't feel like there was enough strong female representation in the protagonists, in the characters. So, and I worked at an inquiry based school, so suddenly the teacher had the opportunity to change this reading into a different assignment, which was the students crafting a letter, to the editors to this website about the lack of reference representation of strong female protagonists in the reading passages that they were providing.

And there you go, suddenly with a different type of opportunity or assignment, you have motivation to read. It's a different motivation that what then maybe what the curriculum had in mind for you or what the teacher initially designed, but you did have motivation to read.

Yeah, absolutely. What role does joy play in the science of reading?[00:33:00]

Great question. So that's really where we're trying to you know, show the research through our own research initiatives at Reading is Fundamental, but also as I mentioned, drawing from past past research. So unfortunately with the whole science of reading movement, or some people might call it the simple view of reading, that's what you're going to get, a simple view of reading.

And really you're just looking at two components. Word Level Decoding, and Language Comprehension. Those are two very important parts of becoming a skilled reader. But what we want to say is, Joy is also a part of becoming a skilled reader. And in fact, there's tons of research on this already.

And I will share the, this reference with you. But, In very recently, in 2020, there was a meta analysis done of 132 studies, 132 studies that connected motivation to read with reading achievement. And what they found was that there is a statistically significant [00:34:00] correlation between being motivated to read and your reading achievement scores.

And that's the type of research that we're trying to contribute to as well. If you gave me an hour, I'm sure I could come we're focused on joy, but if you gave me an hour, a day, a week, I could come up with dozens, hundreds of other things that influence how you become a skilled reader. So I think where the intersection is just acknowledging and looking into all the other research around reading and not trying to boil it too down into a simple view of reading.

Yeah. Is there. An underutilized strategy that you have in mind that you think is effective for for teaching reading it can be specific to the joy piece, but just in general for helping students and kids. Develop their reading skills, something that is simple, effective, but could be used a lot more.

Yes, relationship building. When you build, take [00:35:00] time to build a relationship with a student. You will be amazed how much more motivated, engaged they are in the reading task when, and you can do this in a lot of different ways. I had the privilege of working at schools that prioritize social emotional learning, so we would do things like morning meeting, a lot of opportunities to get to know the students.

When you get to know the student, you will find out things about their lives, their interests, their culture, and then we talked about choice a lot. You can align the reading that you're doing to things that interest them, things that are relevant to their lived experience, to their social world. And it's amazing when you have this type, kind of engagement with students, how much better they are going to be at reading.

Yeah. Now, that's a good And that's certainly something that everybody can do if they commit [00:36:00] to it. And with that in mind, and then with, I guess, All of your knowledge in mind and having the combination of both the academic and practical experience, right? Having earned advanced degrees in this and also having taught in a school and now working for an organization that is really dedicated to it and thinking about what school leaders. can do to foster a strong culture around reading and around literacy and reading instruction. Is there something that comes to mind that you would really encourage them to look into or to try or to develop a practice for teachers to really strengthen this? Again, especially if there's something that You know, that you are, that you're familiar with because [00:37:00] of your approaching it from different angles, right?

That that there's certain things that you only know when you've done it. And when you've been in a school, there's other things that you only learn when you study it. And then when you have the combination of experiences, there may be things that stand out as, oh, yes, this is clear that we should be doing this.

But, It's not always being done.

Yeah, I think that goes back to the story I was sharing at the introduction, the difference between my first year teaching when I loved reading and I wanted to share my love of reading with my students. And at that point, I I had a bachelor's degree in education, but I wasn't a trained reading specialist.

And I kind of felt like the more I got into my master's degree, which was in reading instruction, the, I became hyper focused on the individual skills of reading. Breaking them apart. And what I learned was through this process of what I call learning and [00:38:00] unlearning was you really need both. We want skilled teachers.

We want trained teachers who understand the research and what the best practices are around the very technical aspects of teaching reading. But if you don't have an understanding of things like I spoke of relationship building, social emotional learning, understanding of student culture, choice, interest.

Without those things, you can be the most technically skilled teacher in terms of your knowledge of how reading develops on a skill level, but you are not going to reach the students in an impactful way.

Yeah. Excellent. Well, Erin we are getting close to the end of our conversation here, but in the spirit of the joy of reading I suppose our listeners may be interested in something that, that you've enjoyed. Is there anything that you've read recently that brought you a lot of joy?

I, so this is an example of, [00:39:00] it's not the most enjoyable text, but it has brought me joy. I'm currently reading with my reading group outside in the teaching machine by Gayatri Spivak. It's a very, it's a she's a literary theorist, so it's a very philosophical book. Not an easy read at all, but what I've come to learn through that, and I've kind of described throughout, is that.

In many ways, I am outside in my own teaching machine. You have this very academic knowledge, but then you have your lived experiences, and that's what we need to carry into our teaching and learning.

Excellent. We will put that in the show notes. So anybody can check that out. If you're interested and there's also plenty more resources here and links and you can go ahead to www. rif. org. org if you want to learn about Reading is Fundamental, all of their programs, how you can get involved. Go to bpodcast.

network if you learn about all of our shows. Again, many of our shows across the network are having [00:40:00] conversations around literacy this month and in the coming months. Aaron, is there anything in particular on the Reading is Fundamental website that you would like our listeners to check out?

Yes, especially if you're an educator, part of our website is called Literacy Central. And on that website you will find thousands of free reading engagement resources. You can search by a book that you're using in your curriculum, or maybe just a book a student's interested in, or a book that you're using, and find lots of great resources like discussion guides, vocabulary supports, crisscross puzzles, and other ways to engage your students.

Excellent. Listeners, check that out. We'll put the link below to the website, and you can go there, and if you're an educator and you haven't seen these resources yet, there's a whole lot there and certainly there's plenty of things to support you in your work, so, visit that. Please do subscribe to the authority if you haven't already.

We have a lot more of These conversations [00:41:00] coming around literacy and interviews with authors from across the leadership and education landscape. Lots of strategies, advice, insights to help you in everything that you do. So I hope you'll stick with us there. Aaron. Thanks so much for being here.

Thank you. It was great to be here.