A Conversation with Cathy Compton-Lilly

Dr. Compton-Lilly is known for her work in the areas of early reading and writing, Reading Recovery, and family literacy practices in local and global contexts, particularly with families from underserved communities. Her current interests include examining how time operates as a contextual factor in children’s lives as they progress through school and construct their identities as students and readers. She is engaged in longitudinal studies around these topics, several of which she has collected data for over a decade. Dr. Compton-Lilly holds emerita status at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She twice served as an Honorary Visiting Professor at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and recently completed a Fulbright Research and Teaching Fellowship in Taiwan. Dr. Catherine Compton-Lilly is the John C. Hungerpiller Professor at the University of South Carolina.

To cite this episode: Persohn, L. (Host). (2023, Sep 12). A conversation with Catherine Compton-Lilly (Season 4, No. 3) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/7733-70C8-75AC-88C1-BC42-K 

Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Transcript

Lindsay Persohn: 0:00

Education research has a problem. The work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom caffeine is here to help. In each episode, I talk with the top education researcher or expert educator about what they have learned from their research experiences. In this episode, Dr. Catherine Compton-Lilly talks to us about equity, child centered learning, culturally responsive teaching and longitudinal research and education. Dr. Compton-Lilly is known for her work in the areas of early reading and writing, reading, recovery and family literacy practices in local and global contexts, particularly with families from traditionally underserved communities. Her current interests include examining how time operates as a contextual factor in children's lives as they progress through school and construct their identities as students and readers. She is engaged in longitudinal studies around these topics, several of which she has collected data for over a decade, Dr. Compton-Lilly holds emeritus status at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She twice served as an honorary visiting professor at national Shinhwa University in Taiwan and recently completed a Fulbright research and teaching fellowship in Taiwan. Dr. Catherine Compton Lilly is the John C hunger pillar professor at the University of South Carolina. For more information about our guest, stay tuned to the end of this episode. So pour a cup of your favorite drink. And join me your host, Lindsay Persohn. For classroom caffeine research to energize your teaching practice. Cathy, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.

Cathy Compton-Lilly: 2:04

Thank you, Lindsay. I'm happy to be here.

Lindsay Persohn: 2:06

From your own experiences and education. Will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?

Cathy Compton-Lilly: 2:13

Yeah, I would love to. One of the things that I've done is really focus on longitudinal qualitative research. So I really looked at what happens to kids over long periods of time as as literacy people is readers and writers and speakers and viewers and all those different forms of literacy that are out there. I follow kids from my own first grade class all the way through high school. And I've been able to see things and notice things and talk to them about things that I never would have imagined possible. So because I knew them as young children, and we had a long, ongoing relationship. But I also have relationships with their parents. So I was able to talk to the kids and their parents and kind of learn about their experiences. And when you go back and revisit kids over and over again, you see them so differently than you do when you just see them as six year olds. And I think a few things came out of that, that really have affected how I think about education, and particularly how I think about education is needing to be very child centered, much more so than curriculum centered, or standard centered, or testscore, centered, or any of those sorts of things is really putting the student as the primary center of everything that we do. So one of the things that came out of longitudinal experiences is I started to realize that when you think about children, there are very few people that know children over time. So the ways our schools are structured is we have a first grade teacher, and then a second grade teacher and then a third grade teacher. And if you happen to still be teaching in the same school, you may pass kids in the hallway and say hi, and may stop for a small conversation. But you don't really have many people in the building that have a long term relationship with kids, the music teacher, the art teacher may, but of course, they have such, you know, large numbers of students that they work with that it's very hard for them sometimes to form those really close relationships. So in some ways, our school systems are structured to prevent us from having these really rich relationships with kids. And I think, you know, we get to issues like kids emotional well being kids commitments to education, their enthusiasm for learning, and even things like equity, and how do we you know, treat kids from different backgrounds and get to know communities? I think sometimes schools are structured in ways that fracture instead of allowing us to put things together. So I think that's one of the things that kind of came out of this longitudinal view. The other thing is is what I started to referenced before is it parents are the only people outside of maybe an aunt or an uncle or that actually have that longitudinal view get to see how children unfold and who they become and what are the hurdles they faced and you start to see dimensions of their experience that are invisible. If you meet a kid in middle school, you know very little about who that child was, is six year old. And as a first grade teacher, you know, sometimes we see kids that are just amazing, marvelous kids, and down the road, you know, schools might not treat them well. And they may face all kinds of obstacles and other parts of their lives. And sometimes what we see in middle school is not what this child could be. And I think, you know, that longitudinal view is really important. And I think the other piece that goes with that, as you start to think about the impact that we have, so when I talked to, you know, the kids I've been following in middle school or high school, and I asked them about, well remember first grade, or do you remember things in your school experience that were really important to you, you start to realize how important teachers are. Because they talk about that teacher that made a difference. They talk about the book they read, that they really loved, or that they've read 13 times since second grade, even though they're in middle school, they say, Well, I still read it. Sometimes these these literacy practices, you learn about, you know, how they're becoming particular kinds of literate people. And it may be school literacy, it may be fanfiction, it may be, you know, writing songs, you know, there's just so many different ways that kids become literate. And, you know, being able to see those journeys that are often invisible, like I was saying, They're invisible to us as teachers, because we often don't know kids in those rich, multi dimensional ways. So a couple of stories kind of related to that. One is this idea of equity. And one of the things I've done in my research is, is look at children and try and identify some of the way schools gone bad for them, and to look over time and say, what were the kinds of things that kids complained about or worried about or felt uncomfortable with in, you know, elementary school, what were the things that bothered them in the middle school, what were the things about bothered them in high school, and then, you know, after looking at these different views from different children, taking one child, and just looking at her trajectory, the things that happened over time to her, and how in her case, how those things, even though she was a very good student, all the way up into high school, by the time she got to high school, she started to pull away from education pulled away from her schooling, got pregnant, dropped out of school got in trouble. And the longitudinal work allows you to see that there could have been other possibilities. And it's not just about this, this high school kid who, you know, doesn't care about school there, there were all these incidents that happened along the way that you could see building up into an inequitable school experience, or that's how I would describe it. And on the on the flip side, I've also got cases of kids who you just see them becoming amazing people. So I've got this one case study of a Muslim American young man who I followed since first grade, and he just becomes a social activist. He's trying to collect money for people in Syria, who he goes to the mosque, he's Muslim, and he has friends at the mosque who are from Syria. So he talks about the need to, you know, be a world citizen and to give money back. And he talks about what happened when notre DOM burned down, compared to when mosques are burning, or being destroyed all around the world, and which one gets coverage and, you know, so all these issues of equity and humanity and, and what we call cosmopolitanism, we're operating in his story. So you start to see things, both positive and negative stories, that as first grade teachers, you only would get a glimpse at if you happen to run into one of your students, you know, years later, but you don't you don't get the detail and the nuance of the story. So to me, those are really important pieces for us as educators to figure out ways to learn about our students in richer, deeper ways. And I think researchers have a role in that, because we need to tell these longitudinal stories.

Lindsay Persohn: 8:45

Wow, what what amazing work you're doing, Cathy. And, of course, as you're telling these stories, I'm thinking about students I taught years ago, and then, you know, potentially running into them having some sort of contact with them later in life. And it is pretty incredible to think about who they've become, and as you said, for, for better or worse, you know, how does their educational path how does their life path lead them to a particular identity later in life? And what important work because I think it really does shine a light on how important School is in shaping kids. And maybe I should say, in helping kids shape themselves into who they're becoming, right, because each of those positive or negative experiences can really have a lasting impact on who kids become. And I think it does make you think about the day to day a little bit differently, right? Because it's not just Yes, it is single experiences. But it's also, as I'm sure you've learned, it's, it's a cumulative effect as well. Yeah.

Cathy Compton-Lilly: 9:43

And like, you know, when kids are sitting in our classrooms, they're not just there in your classroom at this moment. You know, they may be thinking about the teacher they had last year or when they saw something on TV related to what you're teaching or something that happened before they got to school this morning. So they're all located in different temporal spaces, you know, they may physically be in the same space. But all of us when you make sense of what I'm saying right now, you're not just in the moment, attending to my words, you're making connections and seeing relationships between what I'm saying and other things you've experienced. And I think sometimes we forget that that students are very active and engaged and making their own connections to things, we're saying that their connections matter. And sometimes, you know, we're being pushed into these scripted kinds of programs where here's the curriculum, here's what you're supposed to read, here's how you're supposed to understand it, this is the right answer. And you know, literacy is not like that, but neither is learning in general. You know, we're all kind of diffused across all of our experiences, all of us come into classrooms all the time.

Lindsay Persohn: 10:46

That's such an important reminder, really thinking about learning as this network of ideas, right? It is building connections all the time. And I think it is easy, especially in schools these days to lose sight of that a little bit, right? Like you said it with everything being focused on what's the correct answer that someone else is predetermined, and you know, all of these sort of standardized ways of thinking, as you said, learning is not standard. And so I think that that is such an important reminder for anyone working in classrooms, or really anyone who has contact with kids, or dare I say, anyone who has contact with people to understand you know, that these are humanizing kinds of concepts. We're not numbers, we're not cogs in a wheel. You know, we all have individual aspirations, connections. And it also makes me think about intertextuality. And how important that is about, you know, thinking about how one set of ideas relates to another, or sometimes how these ideas are counter and how we make sense of that sort of rub. So, yeah, this is just such important work that I think really helps to frame what education is really all about, or maybe what it should be all about, is perhaps a more accurate way to think about it. Yeah. Cathy, what do you want listeners to know about your work?

Cathy Compton-Lilly: 11:55

Oh, well, I think one of the things that stands out that I think, I think what's been very powerful to me is, before I entered the university, I was a teacher for 18 years. So I really spent a lot of times with children and I spent time in schools looking back I consider fairly dysfunctional, you know, they were underfunded, they were huge. They had, you know, not enough people to take care of the kids that were there, class sizes were huge. They certainly were not counseling opportunities for kids with dramatic things happen in their lives. And, you know, when I think about those 18 years, I have never run out of things to write about, or to research or to think about, because there's just so much that comes out of teaching. So, you know, I think one of the flaws in our system is that in American schools, teachers are on all the time. You know, in South Carolina, here, the teachers even have to eat lunch with their students in the cafeteria, which kind of blew me away, but there's no time to think about what you're doing. You know, you're working all day long, you barely get a chance to use the restroom, you go home, you make dinner for your family, you take care of your kids, and then you you know, you're planning lessons until you know, 11 o'clock at night, and there's just no time to really think about what we're doing and why we're doing it. And I think, you know, even when we take coursework, we're often you know, worried about the next assignment and doing the readings, and you know, all those sorts of things. So, you know, I think having taught for a long time, and then having this wonderful gift of being able to work in a university. So I've now worked in the university 18 years, just like I've taught for 18 years. So I like this kind of balance right now. But, you know, it gives us this remarkable opportunity to really think and read and write, and to explore some of the things that, you know, we're, I don't know, if I want to see problems, but there's certainly challenges in our lives as teachers and really think about kids and literacy and how kids learn to read and write in ways that, you know, is is difficult to do when you're a teacher. And I think it sounds trite, because you hear it all the time. But one of the best things about teaching or about doing research on teaching is you're lifelong learner, you know, you're never going to figure it out. So you know, to the teachers out there who might be listening, you know, some days, you're going to get it right, some days, for whatever reason, things are not going to go well. And it's because each and every human in your classroom is unique and different, and learns in a slightly different way and came to school with a different set of experiences. And a different you know, daily life what happened over their weekend may have been wonderful may have been difficult, you know, but there's just so many variables and so many things changing all the time in education that all we can do is to just keep learning every time you get a new kid from a from a cultural or linguistic background that you may have never encountered before. You know, now you have to go out and figure this out, right and learn a little bit about you know, where they're from and what language they speak and how that language maps or does not map onto English. You know, what are the consistencies and in differences so, the most wonderful thing about teaching is that you're always learning But the hardest thing about teaching is you're always you always have to keep learning because there's always a new challenge coming in your door.

Lindsay Persohn: 15:06

Yes, absolutely. In fact, I think that's probably one of the things that drew me to the teaching profession is just this idea that you, you always get to learn something new, whether it's learning about people learning about content, it is an exciting place to be, that's for sure. You know, it seems to me that in many of the school settings I've worked in, and I've had the pleasure of sort of growing with some of my students and their families, I've, I've served as a school librarian in the past. And so getting to see those kids from preschool all the way up. In fact, one of the students who was in pre k when I was a school media specialist, is actually my next door neighbor. And he's 18. Now, so that's, that's, you know, that's a fun thing, too. But I say all of that to say, but I know a question that comes up often in schools is how do we engage families? How do we honor parents? And how do we involve them in their child's education, and I'm hoping that you might share a little bit about what you've learned from families over your your research experience,

Cathy Compton-Lilly: 16:05

I think the biggest thing is to listen, and to really listen and not to be afraid of parents, I think sometimes we're, we're scared, you know, we're afraid of what they're going to tell us there, we're not going to like what they're going to tell us or there's something wrong with these people, or, you know, just all these really negative, you know, what could they possibly know, because they may not have a lot of money, or they may live in a neighborhood that's, you know, not a desirable place, or they may even be dealing with, you know, mental illness or addiction or, you know, so we kind of write them all off and say, Oh, I guess it's going to take me to save this child. And that's really, really, I mean, once you get into that, of disrespecting parents, and families and communities, then it's going to be very hard to earn the trust of the child, because the children are going to be able to see and hear that. So being able to listen, being willing to talk, get them to tell you their stories about their own literacy practices, you may be very, very surprised on how much literacy is going on in communities and households that have traditionally been defined, under educated or illiterate, I think that was the biggest surprise when I first started doing research is just how much literacy was happening in spaces that, you know, my colleagues at my school it said, all these parents never read, they don't care about their kids, you know, they don't, they can't read and write themselves. They're just all these negative discourses, which I picked my family's randomly from my first grade class, and I didn't meet anyone that was illiterate. You know, everyone was literate and caring and interested. But we're just living, you know, difficult lives. So

Lindsay Persohn: 17:37

there's a word that's come to mind several times, and what you said, Cathy, in relation to teachers working in schools, as well as the way we deal with families, and the word is reactive. I, you know, because I do feel like so often, we live in this really reactive kind of mindset where like you said, it's Go, go, go, it's the checklist sort of mentality, we've got to get this done, we've got to get this done. And I think, living in that space, whether it is you know, in our day to day lives, or the way we deal with with children or their families, it really does limit the way that we can see things right, you know, it's like, missing the forest for the trees, because we're just moving through the day to day without acknowledging those rich literacies that families are already involved in and things that kids already know.

Cathy Compton-Lilly: 18:24

Yeah, yeah, yep, that's definitely true.

Lindsay Persohn: 18:27

Yeah, it's, I remember those days as a classroom teacher, I've just feeling like, you've just got to get through right, because when you finish one thing, there's 10, more right behind it. And so I think we do tend to live in that sort of mindset where it's just, let's just get it done. So

Cathy Compton-Lilly: 18:42

a few years ago, I was visiting schools in Japan. And in Japan, the teachers teach the kids till noon, they have lunch in their classroom, and then the kids go off to clubs and the teachers get together and plan every afternoon. I know, wow, wow. Right.

Lindsay Persohn: 18:58

Right. Because I think so often, we think of Japan as being a model for learning a model of society for learning. And, you know, here in the US, what do we do we add 3060 90 more minutes on to a school day, right. And in order to support education, where, you know, in other places, they are going in a very different direction. And I think providing some really wonderful experiences for students and for teachers that could help us to get out of that reactive kind of mindset. Definitely. So what else would you like listeners to know about your work?

Cathy Compton-Lilly: 19:28

Well, I think there's two big takeaways that I'm thinking about. One is being child centered, and one is being culturally responsive. So I'm going to start with a culturally responsive piece because I have an example from some recent work we've been doing. I just came back from a Fulbright in Taiwan. I was there for six months and I've been working with some of the professors in Taiwan for the last couple years. And what we've been doing is creating bilingual books in indigenous languages, because the indigenous languages in Taiwan just as they are aren't in the United States are being lost at a quick pace. And Taiwan I think is actually taking more steps to preserve those languages and the United States is doing but what we did there is we were working with kindergarten teachers, and we created very, very, very simple pattern books. So the kinds of books you would talk about is as caption books or pattern books, where each page has one sentence, so it might be, I see a duck, I see a heron, I see a swan, you know, so very, very simple. Each page has one sentence. But what's beautiful about that, if we're trying to think about language sustenance, is that you get the pattern i see a, which is a very useful pattern, right? You can use it in the book, but you can use it in other parts of your classroom in your daily life. But it also gives you those nouns. So what we did is we work with the Atayah people who was one of the 13 tribes in Taiwan. And we work with two groups of Atayah leaders in two different communities. And we asked them, what would they want the books to be about what sentences they want in the book, and what kind of images they would want us to use. And we took that information. And we work with language specialists. And we created bilingual books in English and Chinese and in Atayah, we actually one of the communities also wanted English. So there's this actually trilingual book, which is good, because my Chinese is really, really bad. So, but we created these books. And then we sent the books back to the tribal leaders and said, what did we get wrong? And we had them tell us and we, we revise, and then we showed them again, and we revised again, and we got went back and forth until the books were the way they wanted them to be. And now the teachers have been using those books in classrooms, we made eight books originally, and the teachers have now made 23 books of their own, the classroom teachers working with the Atayah language teachers. This was probably the first project I've done that was culturally responsive in the sense that whatever they told us to do, we did, we didn't say, Well, you know, we're experts, and we're not sure we should do it that way. Or it's hard to find that kind of an image, whatever they told us to do, we did. Right, we allow them to tell us what to do. And for them to approve what we did, which I think is a very different notion of cultural responsivity. I'm not Atayah, you know, I'm this white lady coming from the United States who doesn't even speak Chinese. But you know, what we did is we came up with that very, very simple text, which is very good for language learning, because by the time you get to the end of the book, you start to be able to say the phrases that are in the book, we posted them with audio recordings online. And not only did the teachers write their own books, but they also wrote songs to go with the books that we have written. And the songs were written in both communities independently, they didn't know each other was writing songs, which just blew us away. But singing is also one of the best ways to learn language. So intuitively, you know, the people we were working with, they knew better than us, what would be useful and helpful in their communities. And I think, you know, this is what it means to center culture and center language and center other people's experiences and do everything we can I'm sure our own positionality is shifted in there. And there's probably things in the text that not everyone in the entire community, you know, is equally in agreement on so you're never, we're never going to get perfect. But I think this was a project where we really came fairly close. And I think, you know, if we think about the communities we serve here, how often do we allow parents to tell us what we should teach? Or how we should teach or what we might do? Or what activities would be good homework even, right? Because parents would be able to tell us things, it'd be helpful to them if we could, just going back to what I said before, just listen.

Lindsay Persohn: 23:41

And the fact that you had two groups of teachers who independently created songs based on on those books, I think it really does speak to the power of not just spoken language, but rhythm. And you know, I think there are so many cultural implications there as well when it comes to what music means to societies. So that's really, really incredible work. And as you said, that idea of the work, being driven by leaders in the community, I think, is also really, really incredible. And you're right, it seems so obvious, but it's not something that we do very often. Yeah.

Cathy Compton-Lilly: 24:20

So the last thing I wanted to talk about today, and this is involving reading, is the importance of being child centered. Because I think we've been working very, very hard to find the silver bullet, especially around reading instruction. But I think every form of literacy is probably equally as true. But reading has been kind of the great debate, right? It's been the place where, you know, we pulled out our swords and, you know, kind of argued for the last actually about seventy years, we've been arguing about reading instruction. So this is not a new argument at all. But, you know, with what we're facing now, the science of reading and this idea that phonics is the most important thing for early learners, which I totally disagree with these ideas about, you know, What kids are capable of and how we should be approaching reading and writing, a lot of this stuff has been called the science of reading does not have a strong research base, or if it does have a research base, it's only a slice of a much larger pie. And that there's other things we need to think about. But I think when we put the children at the center, when we use formative assessment, we look at who the kids are. And we say, Okay, this child is trying to sound out every word, the last thing she needs is more phonics. She knows all her letter sounds, but sounding out every word when she gets stuck, and not using any other sources of information is probably really not a good reading system that she has put together so far. Right, she needs other things. On the contrary, I have kids who never even look at the letters on the page. And my job is to glue them a little bit more to what's actually there. But, you know, both of these kids could get the same score on a running record, both of these kids could get the same score on a map test, you know, both of these kids could look the same. When you when you try to quantify their reading, you know, through accuracy rates or test scores. But when you actually look at what they're doing, as readers and writers know, we need to be very, very good at having lots of different ways of teaching lots of strategies, and been able to figure out, which is the right one for each child. And sometimes we make mistakes, we need to try a different one. So we think, Okay, this is going to work. Nope, that didn't work, then we need another one, right. So we have to be very resourceful, thoughtful. And this also goes back to culture and interests. If the child is interested in Black Panther, I had a kid a couple of years ago, who had watched the movie Black Panthers, and African American little boy, and he just loved that movie. So you know, he wasn't reading well. So we started writing little books about Black Panther and downloading pictures from the movie, you know, I you know, another ones into Minecraft. And we download things off the internet, they write sentences, we read those, I typed them up, we create pattern books based on some of their sentence patterns, you know, so just trying to figure out, you know, who kids are as readers and writers, what they care about, and using those as tools to get them reading and writing. So it's centering the child. And one of the things I've just written is a piece in in Memorial commemoration of Dr. Ken Goodman. And I know Dr. Ken Goodman was vilified as the whole language, you know, Guru and unscientific and all that, but he actually had a very, very strong research history. And he watched kids reading, and he talked to them about their reading. And, you know, he was looking at language differences, their language variations, and he was looking at processing. And I, you know, trying to make a distinction between reading and understanding text versus saying every word correctly on the page, and, you know, what's our role as teachers? You know, what are the goals of reading? So, you know, I think there was a time, I think, when I first started teaching that we were doing lots of experience charts, and really focusing on kids stories and writing their stories out and having them read that. And I think we've lost some of that. And I don't think it's our fault. Because I think teachers knew, you know, what worked and got kids excited. But I think, you know, there's been so much test preparation, and kind of formulaic approaches to reading that we've lost sight of, you know, who we're teaching, and we're focusing too much on the why.

Lindsay Persohn: 28:19

And I know, in my experience, it can be those systematic structured approaches that really just sort of suck the life out of you, when you treat every kid with the same kind of pedagogical approach, I think it is, it is really easy to lose sight of the true goal of education, right of actually giving kids the tools and the strategies that they need in order to meet their own goals and to be successful in life. So yeah, I appreciate everything you've said, because I think it reaffirms a lot of the work that I've done to support teacher preparation, right? We always start with a kid and yes, do teachers need to know how to teach phonics? Sure. But does that mean the right that everyone needs to spend 60 minutes a day on it? No, that's not the case, either. And so this child centered approach to teaching, I think it's critical, I think, for finding joy and learning for sustaining not just sticking with the profession, but I think for sustaining an idea around lifelong learning, right, kind of back to this longitudinal view of what learning can be and what education can be. Because, yeah, it I think it's so easy to get lost in the standardization of education. You know, it's just so easy to lose sight of what really matters. The individuals right in front of us. Definitely. So thank you for that. Yes, of course. So, given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?

Cathy Compton-Lilly: 29:45

I think the most important message is for teachers to follow the kids and follow their instincts. And I say this with the with the understanding and the assumption that anyone listening to this podcast is someone who cares about education, you're not going to sit listen to a podcast on your way home from work in your car, unless you are really trying to figure it out really trying to do it better. So my sense is that anyone listening to this presentation, you know, the teachers I meet at conferences, the teachers that stay after school or hunt me down in hallways, when asked me questions, you know, we are really trying to figure out how to do what's best for kids. So, you know, as long as you keep thinking, listening, reading, find some good professional books, find some good colleagues who will challenge you and, you know, show you new ideas and share things with you go to conferences, if you can, you know, as long as you're doing all those things, then you have the tools to do what's right for kids, you know, find the corners, the cracks in which you can do the good work, think about which kids really need a little extra boost, and spend a little more time with those kids, you know, those might be the ones that you're making books for that you're following their interest, most of our kids are going to learn to read and write, no matter what program we give them. And that's what Marie clay told us is that most of the kids wherever we do, they're going to be fine. But it says once it slipped through the cracks, for different reasons that we need to figure out how to connect with. So that would be you know, trust, trust your gut, and listen to the kids.

Lindsay Persohn: 31:21

That's great advice. And I think that, you know, I've come to the conclusion that anyone in education cares about kids. And I think anytime I have entered into a potentially tense conversation or anything around, you know, around school and what school should be when we bring it back to what kids need every individual child needs, it's really hard to argue with that. So whether that is phonics, whether that is, you know, related to wide reading, whether that is related to their own interests, it's got to start with kids. It's gotta start with what what they need and and what they hope to learn. Definitely. Great advice. Well, Kathy, I thank you so much for your time today, and I thank you for your tremendous contributions to the field of education.

Cathy Compton-Lilly: 32:06

Thank you, Lindsay has been a pleasure.

Lindsay Persohn: 32:09

Dr. Catherine Compton-Lilly's research has focused on family literacy practices, particularly the literacy practices of children from communities that have been traditionally underserved by schools. She has a passion for helping teachers to support children and learning to read and write. Her interests include early reading and writing student diversity and working with families. Throughout her career, Dr. Compton-Lilly has been a strong advocate for developing knowledgeable teachers that are committed to continual learning and improved practice and her initial work. Dr. Compton-Lilly documented the home and school literacy practices of eight of her former first grade students as they moved from elementary school through high school and a current study. Now in its 10th year she's exploring the family literacy practices of children from immigrant families. Among the books she has edited or authored are Reading Families, the literate lives of urban children, rereading families, reading time, the literate lives of urban secondary schools and their families. Bedtime Stories and book reports connecting parent involvement and Family Literacy edited with Dr. Stewart green and reading students lives, literacy learning across time. Kathy has also authored multiple articles related to family literacy in major literacy journals including the reading Research Quarterly research and the teaching of English the reading teacher, Journal of early childhood literacy, written communication, Journal of literacy research and language arts. A recent review of Family Literacy scholarship, co authored with Rebecca Rogers and Tisha Lewis Ellison, and published in reading Research Quarterly is among the most definitive reviews of the field of family literacy. Her current interests include examining how time operates as a contextual factor in children's lives as they progress through school and construct their identities as students and readers. In an ongoing study, now in its 13th year, Dr. Compton-Lilly has worked with a team of graduate students to follow children from immigrant families from primary school through high school. Dr. Compton-Lilly has a strong interest and teacher education and is currently documenting the exceptional teacher education practices at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Compton-Lilly holds emeritus status at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She twice served as an honorary visiting professor at national chin Hua University in Taiwan and recently completed a Fulbright research and teaching fellowship in Taiwan. Dr. Catherine Compton-Lilly is the John C. Hunger pillar professor at the University of South Carolina. For the good of all students classroom caffeine aims to energize education research and practice. If this show provides you with things to think about, help us spread the word. Talk to your colleagues and educator friends about what you hear. You can support the show by subscribing liking and reviewing this podcast through your podcast provider. Connect with us on social media through Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, on our website at classroom caffeine.com. You can learn more about each guest find transcripts of our episodes, explore topics using our drop down menu of tags, request an episode topic or potential guest support our research through a listener survey, or learn more about the research we are doing on our publications page. We would love to hear from you. As always, I raised my mug to you teachers. Thanks for joining me