How one teacher helps students beat national reading averages

Students in Michigan and nationwide are struggling with reading, but not in Amy Dyksterhouse’s classroom. The fourth-grade teacher at Kettle Lake Elementary School integrates reading skills into all subjects, as part of a K-5 curriculum that takes students from “learning to read to reading to learn.” We talk with her about why Caledonia’s reading scores rank well above state and national averages, and how she engages students with strategies like “brain movies.”   

Click here to watch a short video on Amy Dyksterhouse leading a reading activity.

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Transcript

Welcome And Why Reading Scores Matter

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Well, hello everyone, and welcome to Study Hall from School News Network, your window into the public schools of Kent County, Michigan. On this very cold snowy morning, we're out here at Kettle Lake Elementary School in Caledonia, a little village about 15 miles southeast of Grand Rapids, very pretty place, home to Caledonia Community Schools. We're here to talk about the teaching of reading in a school district that's done a very good job of doing that for several years now, at a time when persistently low student reading scores have raised deep concerns both in Michigan and nationwide. There's a state law that'll kick in in a couple years that's going to require more screening for dyslexia and training for teachers in the so-called science of reading. We're going to be talking with Amy Dijksterhaus, a fourth grade teacher here at Cadillac, who integrates reading skills into all her lessons. But first, let's pop into Amy's fourth grade classroom for a sample of how she engages her students' reading skills as part of a lesson focused on geology.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

We talked about those moving puzzle pieces. What are those moving puzzle pieces called? Lam. The tectonic plates. Turn to somebody near you and say tectonic plates. Tectonic plates. Tectonic plates. Everybody on page 22. 22. The big question, see it at the top there? This is what we're gonna make sure we know. What happens beneath the earth's surface to cause earthquakes? Anyone think they might know already? What happens beneath the earth's surface to cause an earthquake? Good. Well, keep that in your brain. Keep thinking about that knowledge that you already have, and we're gonna see if we can find that answer if you don't know it already. All right, you guys are now gonna close your eyes. And you guys are going to make a movie in your head. We're gonna visualize this, okay? We've done this before, and I want you guys just to picture while I read it. Okay? Ready for a brain movie? Here we go. The floor trembled under my feet when the books crashed into each other and fell down. I was frightened and hurried to leave the room. Outside, I saw the servants and many other people running anxiously to and fro.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Okay, well, that was very cool, very interesting. Uh, Amy, welcome and thank you for allowing us to uh to visit your uh creative place.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Absolutely. Thanks for coming.

unknown 2:38

Thanks for coming.

What CKLA Is And Why It Works

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Yeah. So you've been teaching here about eight and a half years, you said. Um tell me a little bit more about that lesson we were just hearing uh and how you weave like reading skills into you know students learning about geology.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Yeah. CKLA does a really great job.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Okay, now let's let's back up a minute. Oh, yeah. CKLA, what is that?

SPEAKER_00 2:59

Yeah, it stands for Core Knowledge Language Arts. Language arts, okay. So it's kind of a program that encompasses not just reading, but also the information that they're gonna glean. Um so as you get into a third and fourth grade classroom, we really focus on knowledge. Um, but kindergarten, first, and second are also really looking at all of the skills to go with phonics, um, morphology, grammar. We don't do as much of that as we get into the fourth grade on the phonic side, um, but we are really into the knowledge portion.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

I've learned I've heard it described as going from learning to read to reading to learn.

Building Knowledge Year Over Year

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Yeah, we love that phrase because as they are um learning to read, they're not able to process as much of the comprehension because they're just basically focused on phonics. But as we move into um third and fourth grade, now we're reading to learn, and they're challenging each other to like really go back into the text and try and infer what is it that the author's trying to teach us. Um I love CKLA, and that's how we approach it every time um we say CKLA, because I think of this curriculum kind of like a huge file cabinet for each one of my students. And as they open that file cabinet, they have different files. So, for example, let's let's look at what we're talking about with geology in fourth grade. In kindergarten, they're taking that file, opening it for the first time, and they're learning about our earth and how do they take care of it. Then in first grade, they're gonna open that file again and they're gonna be looking at the history of the earth. Second grade is gonna be talking about cycles in nature, third grade is going into ecology, and then fourth grade we go to geology. Well, every time they pull that file, they're able to add more pages of information, they're adding more vocabulary, they're able to build on that knowledge that they had from the previous year and be like, oh yeah, yeah, I remember when we talked about, and it just becomes just this beautiful, fluid information that they're able to then build on.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

So it's very, it's very uh systematic, right? One layer builds upon each layer builds upon the the previous layer. Yeah. Um and uh as part of this, uh I assume you're trying to engage students' interest in reading and a love for reading.

Joy, Motivation, And Genre Challenges

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Absolutely. And the kids do, they fall in love with reading. Um not just through the lessons and the units, but also just through the daily interaction of pulling more out. The the lessons are super engaging, and it's also, I feel, really important that the teacher's excited. So hopefully from the lesson that you were just watching, you're able to um really hear the kids excited about reading because I love it. And um we do a lot of fun things with it as well. So you'll notice there's readers, extra books all around the classroom for kids to read more about geology. Um, and we do fun things. We we really engage them in like extra celebrations at the end of the month. We have a genre challenge every month that if they read so many books outside of the the text we're reading, they get, you know, like in our Middle Ages unit, we did a huge celebration where they're dressing up like knights with aluminum foil. And we're having jousting matches and we're axe throwing and creating like not real axes. No, they were those plastic ones, they were great. Um, but just letting them recognize like learning can be fun. So we do a lot of interaction with group work, um, a lot of dialogue, a lot of I I love debating with the kids on on certain things, but just pulling what they know and and being excited about it. Yeah.

Statewide Struggles vs Local Gains

Training, Coherence, And Score Growth

SPEAKER_01 7:08

So let's uh that sounds fun. I want to take your class, but um, you know, this let's back up for a minute on the context of what of what Caledonia is doing because uh, you know, basically American students overall are really struggling in reading full stop. Uh educators, lawmakers are really struggling to turn this around. Uh there's contentious debates on the best theories, best methods of teaching reading. And just some quick stats here. Nationally in 2024, just 24% of fourth graders were proficient in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the nation's report card. In Michigan, last school year, just 42% of fourth graders were proficient in the Michigan Student Test of Education Educational Performance, better known as MSTEP, and only 38.9% of third graders, which was the lowest level for third graders in the 11-year history of that test. Yet here in Caledonia, 74% of fourth graders were proficient last year, and 75% of third graders. Your fifth, sixth, and seventh graders also did well above the state average. And in fact, while many district scores are down from what they were before the pandemic, yours are as good or better than they were before the pandemic. So yeah, I mean, what's your what are you doing right? I went to Dr. Kamala Diaz, the Executive Director of Teaching and Learning for Caledonia Community Schools, with that question. And as you are talking about, Amy, she talked about the importance of the core knowledge, core knowledge language arts curriculum, CKLA, that's used across all the grades, K5, and all the teachers are trained in it. And she Dr. Diaz says that gives them a clear and coherent roadmap for instruction. Yeah. That wrote uh reading instruction works best when it's not left up to chance or individual teachers, but everybody's working from the same research-based framework on how children best learned to use to read. Now, she said some years ago the teachers were working independently. There was a lack of uh coherence. Once CKLA became the um model, it immediately created uh improvements in your reading outcomes for these uh students. Uh she said we've seen a consistent upward trajectory in our reading scores at the elementary level. And as she puts it, if you do the right work every day in the classroom, the test scores will follow. So what I get from this, Amy, is that you're all working, all you teachers are kind of working from the same playbook, right?

Trusting The Process Over Time

New Focus: Vocabulary And Morphemes

SPEAKER_00 9:46

Exactly. Exactly. And when we purchased the curriculum, there were so many questions, so many concerns. It's not hitting this, if we're not doing this anymore. Um, but they kept saying just trust the process, trust the curriculum. It it is scientifically based. And so for the last seven or eight years, we have been. We've been just every everything that we can put into our lessons from CKLA um is is showing that it's working. Uh they the students are learning to read. Um, and it's it's really kind of interesting because I've been here since the first year we've implemented. And this is one of the first years where our kids have come from kindergarten without that whole COVID year. And I think COVID year was their kindergarten year, but we're going now where they are truly getting all of it from K K4. And it's beautiful. Our um, our kids on our uh current Academic is what we use to to check on how they're reading fluently, accuracy, and with their comprehension. And we have one student in the whole grade level who is who is behind. Wow. One out of twenty-five in your class. One out of seventy-five. That's a good thing. Yeah. So we're we're now starting to think, okay, wait, like these kids are learning to read, they know what they're doing, and we can move on to other things like struggles, like vocabulary. So that's the newest thing that we're really going to focus on is morphemes. How are these kids like breaking apart words? So there's so many different aspects of reading that we can continue to grow in.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

So to be clear, um, you know, not all not all districts that have effective reading outcomes or good reading scores are using this method. There are other methods being used. There's still a little bit of um disagreement about what what the best way is, but it's working for you very well, uh, obviously. And um, you know, um what are some of the biggest learning difficulties you see in your students that you have to help them uh overcome?

Differing Needs And Comprehension Gaps

SPEAKER_00 12:01

A lot of students come from different backgrounds. They're coming in, moving in from different districts. Um we've got a lot of different clientele where we've got kids who aren't reading at home at all. So they're not learning it um as they grow up to learn to love to read. We also have issues where their skills and fluency are are tough and they're still looking at how to phonetically read versus comprehending to read. And so all of those different things are um sometimes what we would consider, you know, a a challenge. Um but sometimes kids can read the words just fine, um, but but they just struggle to understand what they're reading. And so making sure that they are having this new kind of comprehension. So to you might have heard earlier me saying, like, let's look at the brain movie. What brain movie are you looking at right now? Like, what picture are you putting in your head to comprehend what those words just said? And it's kind of a great way just to make sure that they're comprehending the big picture.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

The brain movie, that's such a cool concept. Because that's what happens, right? When you're reading something, you're picturing things in your head.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

Exactly.

Visualizing Text With Brain Movies

SPEAKER_01 13:22

Um that's what sort of obviously great literature does for you, right? You're seeing these dramas play out in your mind. Yeah. Um so you've got that different levels of preparation, different home environments, I assume some differences maybe in socioeconomic status, where they have different resources. Um, um what about factors, other factors like there's been a lot of talk about the distraction of cell phones? In fact, there's a bill in the works in Michigan to uh ban cell phones during instructional time, and some other states have already done it. Is that a factor for you, or are these kids too young where that's really a deal?

Distraction, Devices, And Classroom Norms

SPEAKER_00 14:00

At fourth grade, we're not dealing with that so much as their smart watches. That's the thing that we're dealing with, where I'm like, why don't we just put that in your backpack? So right now they're um they're pretty compliant, and um they do a really nice job of just realizing that's not for you to use right now. Right. But yeah, can you imagine? I can in in high school I can't imagine dealing with all those issues.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

And I had no idea kids at your grade level were using smartwatches, but there you go. I'm a baby boomer, so that's what I know. Um so um, you know, here's here's a chance for you to step up for all teachers, Amy. I mean, there's all this talk about kids aren't learning, reading, the the they're not being taught well enough. Do you ever feel like teachers are kind of just unfairly blamed for this whole thing? Because you only have them X number of hours a day, right?

The Workload And Thinking Skills

SPEAKER_00 14:50

And there's so much to teach them, and so many things that are starting to come into their world, the social emotional, the you know, things at home that we're bringing now to school. But yeah, there's there's a lot of work that we put into making sure that these kids are are learning and we work so hard. Um I I can't express to you, like you go home and and you're not done ever with prep or with new slideshows for the next day, or making sure that you're really asking those really great questions that are gonna have them start thinking. I think that's part of our problem is kids aren't learning to think for themselves, we're kind of telling them what to think. So, how do you how do you get all of that learning into place as well as making sure that they phonetically know how to read so that they can learn? So we're working hard.

Why Amy Teaches And What She Loves

SPEAKER_01 15:48

And they say, right, at this grade, your grade level, yeah, if they haven't learned to read well by now, that's gonna hurt them all the way through the rest of their educational career, right? Yeah, exactly. Um so uh I like to ask this question of all teachers because I think they're amazing. Um, what do you love about teaching? Why are you doing this?

Closing And Where To Listen

SPEAKER_00 16:11

I love the kids. They just bring me so much joy. Um they need people to love on them and so to be able to love them and to make learning exciting. Sorry, here I go getting emotional because it's true. Like um I struggled in school. And so to see some kids just come in and just be bored. Um I don't want anybody in my class to ever be bored. I want them excited to learn, um, excited to come to school every day, even uh if it's a really bad snow day and they want to stay in bed. Um I get that too, but to be able to just be passionate about what I do. And we were talking before the podcast, even just like it's kind of a performance. Like you are truly like you're on for six hours of the day, just trying to do your best to make learning exciting. And so that's what I love. I love. I was never an actress, but I sometimes feel like I am. I can put them on different voices, I can sing, I can sometimes I have to dance, but you know, I've never had to do a cartwheel because I can't. But if I could, I maybe would do that too, just to grab their their attention. But they're they're so awesome. These kids are great.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

And you've got to make it happen, right? There they are. 25 kids, you've got to make it happen six hours a day. Exactly. Yeah. So well, uh I think it's fantastic what you and your teaching colleagues do. And my thanks to you, Amy, for meeting with us this morning and helping our listeners better understand how you're helping students understand reading and to do it well. So, best wishes for continued good results.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

And thanks to all our listeners for tuning in to State Hall again. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Look forward to joining you again soon on our webpage, schoolnewsnetwork.org, or wherever you get your podcast. So see you next time, and don't forget your pencils.