Episode 90: Beyond the Literacy Program

Dr. Carrie Hepburn sits down with Kyler Barnes, Director of Curriculum and Instruction for Keokuk Community School District, to explore what happens when a district moves beyond programs and begins building a true system for literacy.

Kyler shares how Keokuk’s Comprehensive Literacy Plan is bringing teachers, leaders, coaches, interventionists, and the community together around a shared vision. They discuss job-embedded coaching, building internal capacity, using data to identify needs, and creating professional learning teachers can apply immediately with their students.

It’s a practical look at how literacy can become more than an initiative—it can become part of a district’s culture and identity.

Transcript

Welcome And The Big Goal

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Uh hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Compass PD podcast, where we explore evidence-based practices and research-driven strategies that empower educators and leaders to create lasting change for students. I'm Dr. Carrie Hepburn and I am the co-founder of Compass PD. We are joined today by Kyler Barnes, the director of curriculum and instruction for the Kia Cut Community School District. Hi, Kyler. Over the past year, we've had the privilege of partnering with Kia Cut Community Schools as they have built their comprehensive literacy plan. Today, our conversation isn't about a single program or a single professional development day, it's about what happens when a district commits to building systems, investing in people, and creating a shared vision for student success. So when people hear the term or the phrase comprehensive literacy plan, they often think about a document that's sitting on a shelf or another requirement that's just an items to check off a list. And our experience at KiaCok hasn't been that at all. It's been different. It's been about building a process that brings teachers, leaders, coaches, and the community together around a shared purpose. So today we're going to pull back the curtain on this journey and talk about the partnership and how it began, the work we've done together and the role of coaching, job-embedded learning, and how literacy is becoming something bigger than an initiative. It's becoming part of the district's identity.

Keokuk’s Community And Context

SPEAKER_00 1:38

So from the beginning, can you tell them a little bit about your district, your community, and some things that make it special?

SPEAKER_01 1:45

So I'm a graduate and resident at Kia Cut for the majority of my life. I was born here and was a graduate. One of the big things is we're right on the Mississippi River. We're as far in Southeast Isle as you can get. We are three minutes from Missouri, three minutes from Illinois, right where we're at filming this. Um, so we have both states just right on our borders. It's kind of interesting. We are like a very working class community. Um, a lot of people work at factories here. That was the big infrastructure here for a long time. Now some of that is closing and the population's dwindling a little bit. So that's kind of something that we've kind of combated recently. We have a really strong, strong education system. Um school is really an emphasis here. Friday night's like our brand new football field, you'll see everyone there. Just kind of like small town Iowa. Population is probably about 11,000 people, and we have about 1,600 students in our buildings.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

What I love about Kia Kuck, there's a lot of pride. There are a lot of people who are residents that stay and they come back. And there is like a sense of pride in the community and in being together. Uh we truly believe that at Compass, we believe that our public schools are the hearts of our community. And you see that demonstrated here.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Yeah. I think that one thing that is a big emphasis is we have teachers that, especially at our elementary, that were Kia Cut graduates that come back. So I just look at that and I say, wow, there's a lot of those people that were graduates. It's pretty special. Small town vibes.

Grant Goals And A Real Plan

SPEAKER_00 3:17

So when we started working together through the comprehensive literacy grant, what were some of your hopes or goals for the for literacy across Key Coke?

SPEAKER_01 3:26

The main thing that really intrigued me about the Comprehensive Literacy Grant when we applied was the community engagement piece. Dr. Kathy Dinger came and she had a lot of experience in curriculum and instruction in her past district and as being a curriculum director. She really emphasized me then as a new curriculum director to have really good practices for implementing high-quality instructional materials, using assessments to guide instruction. So we kind of started down that path. Her other emphasis when the state rolled it out was for our teachers to do letters training. So we had a cohort of 43 teachers that started to do letters training before the needs assessment. So the thing that really caught our eye with the opportunity for the grant was the community engagement piece. So our big emphasis was like, how can we get the community involved? Then when we applied, um, we saw the big binder, right? And the plan. Um and I we were like, whoa, this is a lot right off the jump. Fortunately, we picked the correct vendor in Compass PD. I was sold right off the Zoom. I really was because of your approach, how you'd already done some stuff similar to this in other states. Um, I really thought it was great. So then just walking through it, I thought it was awesome how you guys took that plan and you planned to break it down. Just doing the SWOT analysis for uh analyzing our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats um right off the jump was huge. You broke down that binder into chunks and helped me break it down into chunks for our team that made it digestible. And that was huge, I think, to give us um guidance throughout just not just the community engagement piece, but what we need to do with our systems within our district. We had some things in our district I felt like like we were moving in the right direction, but then we really could identify those gaps.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

You hit the nail on the head when you were saying your hopes and your goals aligning with that community engagement piece because 20% of the kindergartners are coming into school ready for kindergarten in your district compared to the state average, which is almost almost 60%. 60%. So we were able to really get specific and targeted by using the data and the information provided and build a plan that ensured that we were building that community engagement. And I think building on the structures and the systems and the high quality instructional materials you had already invested in. And the learning through letters was huge. The comprehensive literacy process asks districts to step back and look at their systems rather than isolated programs and resources.

Shifting From Programs To Systems

SPEAKER_00 6:10

What did that shift in thinking from looking at programs and resources to systems look like for your team?

SPEAKER_01 6:18

So, yeah, when we created our team, it was comprised of administrators, but also teachers. What I thought was really interesting for our teachers is it allowed them to maybe look at the whole rather than their classroom. It is what good teachers do. Easy to get caught up in like what I'm doing in my classroom, how am I, how am I effective for my students? It honestly gave them probably a point of view of kind of what I see every day. And it kind of gave them ownership from a bigger vision. And same with our building leaders, they are laser focused on what's occurring in their building. If they're a middle school principal on the team, you're mostly focused on middle school, but it allowed them to zoom out and see how these outcomes that we're getting at middle school contributing to what a graduate looks like. So I feel like that was huge. I think how we further broke our teams down into action teams, they're focused not just on their grade level band, they're focused on the whole K through 12, well, pre-K through 12, really, and just their area. So whether that's MTSS, community engagement, that broader focus is good for them to see the whole big picture and how their part of it is impacting all of that.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

I do think one of the things that we talked about a lot was how it's you're building a program, not it's it is about what we're doing in our classroom, in our individual classrooms, but how it's all connected and how you're responsible for these standards for execution of these evidence-based practices so that they're ready for the next year and that it should build on each other. Was there a moment during the process where you thought we're on to something bigger than just improving reading scores?

SPEAKER_01 7:57

Yeah, I think for me, it is they are reading scores and they are important. But I mean, just the ability to read, we talked about how it'll impact our kids that are in CTE programs that may they may want to be a welder or they may want to be FFA or work in ag. It's not just reading a textbook, it's informational text, it's cross-curricular reading. Mr. Harrison, our high school principal, always talks about enlisted, um, employed, or enrolled. And I just think that literacy overall is gonna, whatever route our students go, is really going to make an impact, improving their literacy on whatever whatever career path they choose.

Investing In People And Capacity

SPEAKER_00 8:35

I think one of the things that has stuck out to me about Kia Cuck is the uh willingness to invest. So you've invested in resources to support, you've invested in professional learning, like uh letters, and you're investing in people, you're building capacity within the organization. So your letter C leadership team, they are learning, they're spending time outside of their school day, they're being paid for that. You're investing in them being leaders in the district, and you've also invested like in your coaches and increasing their learning. And so there's been an investment, not just an expectation. You've you've put the money to make sure that there's success. And I think that's really unique. That doesn't always happen. One component we've been excited about was the coaching academy. Dr. Brenner from our team came in and worked with your instructional coaches and your interventionists. Why was it important to you to invest in instructional coaches and teacher leaders rather than relying solely on outside experts to deliver literacy learning?

SPEAKER_01 9:49

So for us, our instructional coaches are really like the boots on the ground. They're the first people that go in to support teachers whenever they have an issue. Um, a lot of times a teacher is more willing to reach out to them than an administrator, maybe their building principal or myself, though I think that we are approachable. I think that it's just a little easier to ask your teaching colleague for some support. I think it's huge to invest in them because that builds our capacity within district. They are like really experts in what they do. Our interventionists are absolute experts in um phonics, fluency, and those early reading strategies. And those are huge in literacy. So, like, if those gaps, if we can close those gaps as students are kindergartners, first graders, second graders, um, really they're gonna have way better outcomes as it goes, the research says. So that was huge to invest in their capacity and their ability to really support their colleagues.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

You can't have somebody on site from another organization all the time. And that's what's great about having the people that you

What Job Embedded Coaching Looks Like

SPEAKER_00 10:53

have. So, for someone, you know, maybe unfamiliar with what job embedded coaching could look like with colleagues, could you explain what that looks like and why it's been valuable?

SPEAKER_01 11:05

So Dr. Brenner came and trained us kind of on some job embedded coaching, and she does demonstrated numerous different strategies that you can use within a classroom. But really, the way we've used it so far has been where we would use a sub. They would rotate to through a teacher. They would sub out the classroom teacher. Dr. Brenner would work with that teacher on whatever strategy that teacher wanted. She would say, uh, what do you really want to focus on with your students? And it may be vocabulary, it may be fluency. They would work on a strategy together, they would look at data, they would say, okay, so let's do this. What happened is Dr. Brenner would either poll a small group of students and she would model that strategy for our teachers real time. So not sit and get, you would meet with her, you would choose what you're gonna do, she would model it real time, kind of like a menu of strategies and things you could do. And then the teacher would have the opportunity to practice that then with their classroom, all while that's uh they have that sub-coverage. So it's really you got to take something, learn something, implement and practice it right in real time, and then hopefully you could use it again tomorrow if it was successful. So far, we've had amazing feedback.

SPEAKER_00 12:17

How often I think one thing about the job embedded was it's like, what problems are you having today? Let's find some evidence-based practices or strategies that can impact. Let's look at the data, let's find some that are will impact that that's going to help with that. I'll model it for you. Let's try it out, let's talk about what worked and what didn't. I think teachers appreciate that honesty, that sometimes that didn't go the way that I had hoped. And we learn just as much from that. And I know that Dr. Brenner or anyone in our team, we know that we learned we're not perfect.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

The authentic part is the huge part.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

Um, you know, a lot of times, like we'll get a PD from a company and they're good companies. Maybe we purchase a product from them, but wait, maybe it'll be like, I don't know if that'll really work with my kids. I don't know if that's gonna be effective when we get there. We may get that professional development in August, but it's not gonna be implemented till October. Right. This is really authentic. We're gonna apply it right there with your kids, your students, and let's see if it works.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

So trying to do like job embedded work is complicated because one, you have to have classrooms and then you have to have teachers available to be able to do

Making Coaching Work Logistically

SPEAKER_00 13:38

that. So if somebody wants to start thinking about incorporating some job embedded learning in their schools, let's talk through some of the different ways that you've done it and some ways that you're thinking about doing.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

So, yeah, originally the idea was five subs, sub out a team. And in our district, uh, depending on the time of the year, that's just not really super doable. Um, we struggle, you know, with sub coverage, like a lot of probably smaller districts do. So we decided to make a schedule where we rotated through with Dr. Brenner in two hour blocks, and she worked with every teacher individual. Like our interventionists that a more flexible schedule would jump in. Our instructional coaches that a more flexible schedule jump in. If our special education teachers may have had a planning time at that time, they would jump in and kind of observe and watch that PD if it was okay with that teacher. So that's kind of how we built it. Our ideas for next year for middle school is a lot of our ELA teachers have shared planning times and preps. So we may only need like a half day sub to make that happen, but we may be able to get two teachers at once. The main thing is student learning, and the less that we can disrupt that, the better. So that's why this is really a great model for us because our teachers can stay in their classroom, go about the majority of their day just as usual, but still learn.

SPEAKER_00 14:53

I love that. Don't you feel like you used to send teachers to a conference and if they walked away with one thing, it was good, and they're getting something in two hours with their kids immediately based on what their kids need and some of the biggest problems that they're having. So I do see that being very powerful.

SPEAKER_01 15:12

It's much more collaborative in its approach. It doesn't feel like yet you're being talked at, and it's like so applicable, you can go and do it tomorrow.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

So one of the unexpected outcomes of this work, I think, has been that your leadership team, especially coaches, interventionists, and teachers, are that they're talking about the experience. They're talking about the job-embedded coaching and how it looks. And it's the kind of rumor that you want to spread.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

It's not like it's being done to them. It starts to become like grassroots. When can we do more of this? And when can we problem solve like this together? That won't always be with us. That will be within themselves. Yeah. And that's what's really cool about it. They have coaches that they can reach out to, they have interventionists, they have Sed people that are experts in what they do. But now you've started spreading this fire a little bit, it'll be fun to see how they take it and roll with it.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

I think the collaboration piece and just them being more seeing the big picture and being more open to collaborate, collaborating with each other is huge. Uh one thing that hurt us with letters and having that cohort of 43 teachers is it hurt their PLC time and ability to collaborate. That's what we're trying to kick back up this coming year as our PLCs. But that collaboration and just that awareness and emphasis on literacy, people are excited for it and to get back to looking at that data, collaborating with their colleagues, and just bringing all their partners to the table and just to improve student learning achievement.

Community Engagement That Builds Readers

SPEAKER_00 16:49

So because I I know how important this time in August is and kicking this off, you bring the fun to things at times. Like you can be very serious, and then you can bring the excitement and fun as well. And so I think people would love to hear some of your ideas about community engagement and some of the things that you're doing, kicking off this comprehensive literacy plan.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

Oh, as far as community engagement, we're thinking about a ton of stuff, collaborating with the library, um, our community engagement teams thinking about a lot of different ways we could do that. Literacy nights in within our buildings, um, the free little libraries for adults and kids. Maybe getting some of those up around town. Maybe some stickers, maybe some t-shirts. We do a back to school bash to start the year. We're thinking about getting students signed up for the Dolly Parton reading program that our United Way really pushes for those early readers. The library summer reading program. When we we're starting to dismiss kids uh school in June, how do we get kids piggybacked right into going into that summer literacy program? Um, and just getting those community resources and collaboration with them in our buildings. So just getting kids excited to read would be huge.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

Tyler spent some time on like t-shirt designs and readers are leaders and some really cool stuff, like with including their logo on the front and then something on the back. We've talked about a lot of different things, and there's an excitement about what's to come.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

Yeah, chief readers are future leaders.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

Chief readers, I I really think there's like this really fun excitement about what's going to happen here in Kia Cup. So

The Next Three To Five Years

SPEAKER_00 18:33

what excites you most when you think about this work at Keck Community Schools over the next three to five years?

SPEAKER_01 18:40

Well, I guess the most exciting thing to me is just kids being excited to come to school and enjoying literacy and reading. That's the most important thing, really, as kids and our staff just being excited to come every day and uh read, get better. Because really, if we can teach students to read, process information and all the communication skills and writing skills that go with it, they're gonna be able to do whatever they're motivated to do. And that's really my goal. So if they're motivated to be go to college, that's awesome. If they're motivated to go into a trade, that's awesome. If they're motivated to be enlisted, if they're motivated to run their own business and mow yards every day. Literacy plays a part in all of that. And I just think that for me, it's like the most exciting thing beyond like test scores, just really coming together as a community and our kids being excited to go read and just grow and have the power to do what they want to do, whatever that may be.

SPEAKER_00 19:36

Well, at Kia Cut Community Schools, they're really lucky to have you. You're doing a great job. You are doing a great job.

Key Takeaways And How To Connect

SPEAKER_00 19:44

So when I think about this conversation today, a few different ideas stand out to me. One, meaningful change isn't happening because a district buys a program. It happens when a group of people come together around a shared vision and they commit. And in order to have that happen, you have to have a leader who's guiding that work. And that's what Kyler has done. Second, sustainable, sustainable improvement is built through capacity. So the coaching, the job-embedded coaching, building up your instructional coaches, but not just them, other people and those classroom teachers that had that experience can become teacher leaders. So that helps create collaborative leadership opportunities and builds capacity across the organization. And I think that's really strong. And finally, literacy isn't just owned by Kyler, it's owned by the entire literacy leadership team. It's shared, a shared responsibility that they're part of. Buildings as a whole will start to learn about their role in a few weeks and they'll become part of it. We've also met with the community at their board of education meeting and they want to be a part of it. So if you want to learn more about like this process or the coaching academy or job embedded, job embedded learning, you can reach out to us. But we just want to say thank you, Kyler. Totally appreciate you taking this time. It was great.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Thank you for it. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 21:15

So remember that Compass P at Compass PD, we believe that every educator has the power to inspire, change, and transform student learning. Stay focused, stay inspired, and keep making a difference.