Episode 12: Balancing Trust and Urgency in Early Reading with John Bennetts

Episode Show Notes

In this episode of The Reading Symphony Podcast, Katie sits down with national literacy consultant John Bennetts to discuss what reading development actually looks like in real classrooms and real families.

John shares how an unexpected start in education led him to work alongside renowned literacy expert Linda Farrell early in his career, shaping his approach to evidence-based reading instruction.

Together, Katie and John explore a question many parents quietly carry:
 How do we know if a child is progressing normally in reading?

Their conversation unpacks the difference between healthy developmental variation and signs that a child may need additional support. They also discuss how screening data should be used by schools, how parents can ask better follow-up questions, and why strong literacy systems depend on coherence across instruction and intervention.

The episode also highlights the powerful early literacy work of Reach Out and Read, a national program that partners with pediatricians to help families build read-aloud routines from birth.

Whether you're a parent trying to understand reading benchmarks or an educator working to build stronger systems, this conversation offers clarity, compassion, and practical guidance.

Resources Mentioned

• Reach Out and Read
• Research on phases of reading development (Linnea Ehri)
• Stephanie Stollar’s work on MTSS

Transcript

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Welcome to the Reading Symphony Podcast, the place where clarity meets compassion. This is where families and caregivers get evidence-based trustworthy information about how reading develops, how to understand reading progress, and how to turn overwhelming information into simple, actionable steps that help every child thrive. I'm your host, Katie Megrian educator, parent, and relentless advocate for helping every child become a joyful, confident reader. Let's get started. Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Reading Symphony podcast. John Bennetts is our guest today. John is a national literacy consultant specializing in evidence-based reading practices. He supports schools and districts nationwide in strengthening and instruction and building coherent literacy systems aligned with current research. John works closely with system and school leaders to evaluate existing practices, lead instructional shift and implement sustainable changes that improve literacy outcomes for students. John brings experience as a classroom teacher and school administrator at both the elementary and secondary levels, along with system level work, supporting curriculum instruction and assessment. You have so much on your resume in terms of your scope, your range, elementary to secondary. How did you become a literacy expert? Yeah, so I like to say it's a lot of, it's a lot of good luck. I actually have all my training to be a pharmacist. So I took all the sciences and my senior year I did an internship in hospital pharmacy and I didn't like it. And so I said, ah I have a history major with all my science prerequisites. What am I gonna do? My mom was in education and she was a reading specialist. And so, I looked at alternative cert programs. And so I found an alternative cert program and it placed me in Arkansas. In a very small town, an hour and a half south of Memphis, right on the Mississippi River, less than, 10,000 people. And, my district there that I worked for in my very first year had a consultant come in to work with our brand new elementary school. I was a founding teacher of a K one school. And the consultant was Linda Farrell from Readsters. She taught us how to teach reading and I didn't have traditional training before. And it wasn't, this is the science of reading and this is the theory and the framework. It was like, this is how we do it. And sure enough. It worked and I had kids in first grade that were non decoding before rolling through their decoding and really starting to devour and love books. And so I became a huge fan of hers. And so I asked her if I could do an internship with her and she said, I don't really do that, but you could come and live in my basement and i'll pay you in like Starbucks and Nice meals out and experiences. And so sure enough, I did that for a couple of summers and the rest is history. I feel like I've stayed connected to the research and the field and the practice through that relationship. That's amazing. I cannot imagine in my first year of teaching, meeting someone like Linda with the knowledge base that she had and just learning how to do it right from the beginning. That is so not my story. And so not the story of unfortunately, most educators. Linda is like a teacher's teacher. And so, linda would always come in and she didn't know a single kid in the room, and she would watch me do it. She'd say, John, can I just sit right there quick and just do this? And I would learn so much just watching how she corrected students, worked with students, celebrated students, demanded accuracy and excellence. She was a beacon on that and I've taken that in every facet of my career. Do you think that's the best way that teachers learn how to teach reading through watching a master do it. I think there's no replacement for watching somebody who is the vehicle of the research and actually deliver it to kids. And it's a practice I take now. I have a moment where I taught a whole phonics lesson and I called on a student helped the kid read the word correctly. Everyone was like, whoa, that student has the most services and when you called on them, we all kind of held our breath. Like, oh, he's on the spot, but we saw you do it right. And then we believed that they can do it. And Linda was that. And I think just continuing to carry that forward of this is how you do it and you can do it for all of the kids. Teachers deserve to see the thing done in their context with their kids. Like I find that part of the reason I have trust with districts and teachers is because I'm willing to jump in front of their class and I don't need to know the ins and outs of your entire classroom. And they also get to watch me then struggle and have a hard time, right? Yes. And you know, Linda always told me that she's always learned something from every tutor student she's ever worked with. And I take the same thing. I always learn something and I get to then debrief. This is why that was really hard for me. This is where I got tripped up in this lesson and what I would've, and that experience of seeing it as opposed to just coming in and saying, I think you should run a tighter small group and you should use this skill. It's like, let me show you that it can be done and where it might be challenging. And I think that as we ask teachers to shift, like legacy practices, they deserve to see it being done and they deserve to see a quote unquote expert try it and maybe not do it well, the first time. So we've talked a little bit about this offline, about how for young children, there are so many different benchmarks we want to see them meet. And so it starts with their first words or even before that, their first steps and sleep. Benchmarks that we're looking for and hoping for. And there's always such a range of what's normal. And something that a lot of families parents ask me is what's the normal rate of progress? What do we want to see? How do you think about that when it comes to reading progress? Yeah, I think about this a lot'cause I think we right. My son's in, pre-K four right now. And, in schools I work with in pre-K, like play is just such a core component of what we want kids to do. And it is celebrated and we want kids outside. And then when the grade level turns. It switches into sit, acquire this letter on this day and this sound, and then once you have five, we'll teach you to read. It switches right into this everybody's developing at the same pace versus all the way up until then, from my experience, it's. Development is a range, right? And yeah, you might be working on your social emotional skills, but there's a range that three-year-olds are at with this. So there's a 12 month range for walking, right? And I think some of that it causes the way we've transitioned the system to have those defined. Pacing guides and we learn it. And every kid learn at this rate, I think causes some panic for parents that maybe if we were approaching kindergarten the same way we approached preschool and before that panic wouldn't be there. And I think that's the thing that I have a hard time with is the panic that a parent might get in October of their kids' first year in, in kind of formal schooling and like they're not reading, are they behind? And so I try to think about it and I go back to Ehri's kind of phases of reading development and she's pretty clear that the fixed stages are not tied to age. She gives generalities and I think a lot of people's interpretation of the phases have attached specific grade levels to it because it's more convenient for our system. I've tried to take a step back from that and think about if this is a developmental stage and process. And she's also clear that kids can be in different phases at the same time and work between those things. And that they don't go through them, and that all kids don't go through them at the same rate, at the same pace. She's very clear about that from my interpretation of it. And I wish we would think about that a little bit with schools too. Mainly from the parent perspective of I don't want you to be like, my kid is terribly behind and I need to panic, because I think our kids can feel that and they feel it deeply when we're worried and panicked about something. And I think that can set up the wrong kind of at home relationship to reading and to a love of reading that we want, right? We want the home to be one that's fostering a love for reading and a joy for reading, and a very positive thing. And I, and again, I'll say panic a lot, but when the panic hits, I think the relationship with parent and kid changes at home. In Massachusetts, we do three dyslexia screeners a year, starting in kindergarten, beginning, middle, and end of year. And something that I tell friends who are parents who maybe get that first report in October and they're like, oh my goodness, my kid doesn't know anything. That's our job as kindergarten teachers to teach them those skills. So I totally hear you, the panic isn't helpful. I think where I get stuck and I don't know that there's a perfect answer to this is where's the shift of when and where do you move from there's this range to by now this child should have learned X. And I think about the national data we have for end of first grade, for example. And how if you're struggling end of first grade, you're gonna likely if you don't get the interventions you need, struggling at the end of fourth grade. So how do you think about that? Yeah. If I think about how I want parents to receive a message from those reports, right? Like, I want kids screened three times a year. That's lovely. Mm-hmm. We should be doing that, right? I want parents getting those reports. Parents see that as an A, B, C, D, E, F. They put it into their own schema about education. Top is good, bottom is bad, and then there's no context to it. Right? So I just wish we would frame it a little bit around. Some brains just take a little bit longer to get their wiring correct to, interpret symbols. And symbols have meaning other brains. Everyone can develop this with great instruction and we're here to provide that great instruction for you. I would say we intervene early. It's not a, you don't intervene, it's a, instead, what I want parents asking is, okay, so what skills does my student not yet have? How are you working on those and how will you know they have them. So I want a parent to be able to say in the first round of that, great I noticed that this indicator is red. What is that? Assessing? Oh, this one's their letter naming fluency. Okay, great. Then I want them to know and be able to ask, I should ask how many letter names do they currently know, and our education system ought to be able to provide that. And then that we should ask and. How many do they know and how many have you taught? Right? Yeah. Because that's where we actually wanna get into. I'm not worried if my son gets a red on letter dam fluency because he's probably learning the task and he's learning his relationship with his teacher in early k. I am concerned if I ask a follow-up question and they can't tell me that he already knows 20 out of 26 uppercase letter names and they've taught five, but he already knows them, right? That's what I want to know. And I think where we wanna intervene early is if we've taught 10 letters a corresponding sounds and my son has zero of them and we've taught them over the course of 10 weeks and he still has zero of them that, to me is the critical piece and then of course we're intervening there, but my questions to the school is, okay, when can I get my next update on this? Does that make sense? Oh, so much sense. Yeah. I think that hinges on the fact that there's deep awareness of where each kid is with those essential foundational skills. I love that you offered some follow up questions for parents, some targeted ones, and I can add them to the show notes as well, around how to just get a little bit more information. What happens if, what would you do if. I noticed they're in the red on letter naming fluency. Can you tell me more about what this means? Or can you tell me how many letters they, they know and don't know? And which ones? And it's, and the response is vague. Like, you know, it's just the beginning of kindergarten we'll worry more about that in a couple weeks. Like then what do you do as a parent? I would trust the system a little bit because in my early years I would probably have said something similar, but I would then ask, okay, when can I have my next update? I think the danger we're running with this mandatory screening K three is that we're treating them as the thing, all they are is wave a red flag. I need to look under the hood more of what's going on with John. And when I work with schools on some of these measures, like we'll go through and someone will be in panic about their data and we'll say, okay, let's think about the curriculum and what's been covered at this point in the year. And we work with one program that does sounds first and so we say now we're gonna monitor and make sure this happens for end of year. Right. But that nuance. We look under the hood with every single kid and we have additional tools to help support that for kids, right? But a lot of implementation at this point is just wave the flag and then. The flag gets waved and it sets off stumbles, but we're not using it. Okay. So then what do I need to do with my instruction and how do I monitor that? And I think that is the number one things that parents deserve is like, who knows what a nonsense word fluency assessment is like. I wouldn't know it if I wasn't in it. Like, yeah, definitely. Tell me what definitely would that means, right? Why it's important and how you're gonna know my kid is growing on it before the next window, four months from now. And our parents deserve to know, and our teachers deserve to have systems that help them answer those questions. And so my hope is you ask the questions to teachers, but also hold the systems accountable and not just the teacher accountable. Yes. If a teacher doesn't know or doesn't provide enough information, that's more of a reflection on the larger system. Totally. Our kids deserve teachers that stay and that are respected I just think we're so quick to judge in education when those in it know that like, huh, reading is like this much of what we're asking a teacher to do on top of so many other things. And so I always try to hold that front and center, like who is the human on the other side, what system are they operating under, and how do we think about longevity of them and support for them. Many would argue that one of the most important aspects of being a great teacher is showing up every day and feeling like your cup is full and that you are ready and energized enough to meet another day with 25 to 32 little ones. Have a whole range of needs. And you're right, ELA is just one small slice of the day. So how can we lean in with love and encouragement and persistence if need be? But also that we'll get there. You are chair of the board for Reach Out and read Rhode Island. You must do so much outreach in thinking about the ways in which we can support the development of language and literacy. Reach out and read is national and the whole premise is let's use a trusted visit to also get language and literacy skills built. So every single wellness visit that a kid has from birth to age five, they get a choice of a book. And the pediatrician can use that as a way to foster relationships but also to key parents in on good practices and early literacy skills. So early on they'll have the book and the pediatrician can hold the book and narrate the things the kid's doing. Like, look at how they're tracking the page and helping make that visible for parents. And there's so much research to back this form of intervention. There's of course milestones and things to be thinking about but the biggest is just have you developed the standard practice of reading aloud to your child each night and letting their curiosity drive the book? As board chair, I don't deliver the intervention but the gist is how do we just build this as your practice and make sure that everybody has a set of books. If you think about the first year of life and the number of wellness visits you have, we can give you a robust amount of books. And also at that age. They like reading the same book over and over and over again anyways, like I've got a bookshelf full of books and my kid wants to read the same one. The same one. So we don't need a 500 to do this. We can have a few. And the organization, if your whole language is Haitian Creole, we have books written in Haitian Creole to do this, which is just remarkable. And so it's that standard, repetitive kind of routine. And the resources in books in order to do that, to help foster the relationship between caregiver and child and this love for literacy and learning. That is so incredible. And so are the pediatricians trained in how they're talking about the books and is it voluntary? How do you link that? Yeah, you can, your practice can choose to be. To be a part of it and the books are all free, and so we provide a hundred percent of the books for free. And Regener National provides training modules for practitioners to take and we do a lot of innovative research here in Rhode Island, Reddit too, where they're first to get in the NICU space too. Oh, that's so cool. I don't have the data on the tip of my tongue, but through the maternal health surveys, we're gonna have data that we can track around impact of that and mothers and how mothers are feeling postpartum, and correlate that to whether or not they're reading out loud to their kids. So if any pediatricians are listening to this right now and your practice wants to learn more, the national website, I'm sure it can tell you if there's a chapter nearby'cause that is amazing. There's some research coming out around efforts to train pediatricians to screen for dyslexia. Do you know anything about that that you could speak to? So, there's a book we have, and I'm gonna forget the name of it and the doctor, but I think he's based in Ohio. But it's a read aloud book where basically in the pediatric office you could be reading the book out loud to kids and screening them at the same time. And so I remember a page where a bird is holding the letter B and you would say like, what color bird is holding the letter B? But it's a whole book, and so you're actually reading and the kid doesn't quite know that they're being assessed with it. So we have that. I know in Rhode Island we've brought it to our pediatric advisory council and of course, like any other industry pediatric offices are swamped and they have so much on their plate. And with all of the conflicting factors, I'm finding it's more complex than just, oh, I like reading we should, we should do this. But I know there's an effort out there and to be thinking about how do screeners and surveys are good standard of care practices that we give, like we do these developmental screeners and surveys and considered a good standard of care. And so how do we get literacy in that too? To be something that we can actually bill for and think about? I think the thing that pediatricians would need is like, what do they do next? Right? So you screen a kid there. What's next? Where do you actually plug them into if they're four years old? Early intervention systems are swamped. It's just a, yeah. What do you do with that? And I think my thing is just, even if we do nothing and it's just a, Hey, we notice these things in your kid, you might wanna have an eye on it and maybe think about doing some letter sounds and names at home or talking to your child's teacher, but like, not actually give it a diagnosis, but just saying, here's what we noticed in this. The other piece of this org that's so great is there's also research out that's showing kids are being read to less and less and less. I forget the study, but I think it was done in the uk, it's rapidly declining and to me, this is what's exciting about it, is like, how do we keep this front and center and do that in a space that's so important, with pediatricians who I'm sure are seeing competitions from screen time and all of this, and just bring the book back to the center of it. Yeah, absolutely. So moving back into the classroom. My final question is around the MTSS system, and so I know that you've done a lot of thinking and work around keeping that system as coherent as possible. And so for our community, it has been defined in various podcast episodes that we've had so far. But if you wouldn't mind just briefly summarizing what MTSS means and then. What you really have your eye on and the work that you're doing to support schools to make sure that that's as high impact as possible. Yeah, so MTSS is the multi-tiered systems of support. And I will say if anyone wants to follow somebody on this the follow is Stephanie Stollar I wouldn't consider myself a quote unquote MTSS expert. I think what I think about is how are we making sure all kids in a system are getting what they need? Right. And MTSS can be a framework that helps us. It's not a curriculum that helps us make sure kids aren't falling through their cracks. Right. And so if we back it up to a screener, the screener is step one on. Do we have the data to know who might be lagging behind and might need additional support? And so a lot of times what parents know this as is tier one or tier two or classroom instruction versus something an interventionist is doing. So if we distill it to simple terms, kids who are even in kindergarten by like midyear. If you've not learned any of your letter names yet, we should be giving you something more. We should be giving you more repetitions, more time, more at bats, because that is what you require in order to acquire those skills. We know that kids don't develop at the same rate, and so some kids just need a thousand net bats while some kids need one, and our MTSS system should provide for that. As states have turned a lot of their policies, what we'll see, right? If I put my technical educator hat back on is states will approve programs for tier one or whole group, then they'll approve an intervention program for tier two. Then they'll approve a program for tier three. And sometimes the programs for tier two and tier three are also computer adaptive ones, right? And so what we can find sometimes is schools for a kid who's not typically developing and struggling, that kid might experience four different instructional systems or programs in one day to try to attack the same quote unquote problem. But it might not be targeted on the same thing, right? It might be that this is actually working on. Irregularly spelled high frequency words. And over here they're working on your letter names. And so again, we have to do some piecemeal stuff, but it's not like we're all going a hundred minutes on the same thing. And then their tier one whole group is like on digraphs and something way beyond where they're at. And so everything's done in silos and isolations. And moreover, oftentimes the programs have all different approaches to doing things. So I think sometimes we call something the bossy e, and another program calls it the Silent E. And another program asks us to use our fingers to count sounds. Well another one is shoulders and. Those are small micro variations. Some of them are much larger, right? Our approach to decoding polysyllabic words sometimes in some programs is very much based on syllable types and other programs. It's based on flexing vowel sounds that gets confusing for kids, and it doesn't become a coherent experience for them. I think we can do a better job thinking about providing a little more consistency for kids. And of course, I'm not critiquing like we ought to have better materials for our kids and we ought to make sure there's a bar for quality of them. But I think the next iteration of this is we've gotta go beyond where we're at and actually think about one of the simple things I can do to make this experience for a kid more streamlined. So if I jump this to my parent hat, then, right? If my kid is, if I'm told they're getting support from a reading interventionist, I wanna be super clear about what their goal is and how that goal is aligned to what they're getting in their whole group time. Are you using a program that has an entirely different scope and sequence over here? So now my kid is learning the letter names in a different order. Or if we're using image cards to support the acquisition of letter names and sounds, are the images different in the other program, I wanna know how do these two things work together? Like, my kid's gonna be sitting for 30 minutes in your class and then they're gonna get 20 minutes in a different class, like how are those two things working together? And get a little bit more information about that. And then I also wanna make sure my kid isn't missing out on things like science mm-hmm. For this to happen. Mm-hmm. Or at least not every day missing out on those things. I understand that time is time. So if I'm thinking MTSS, I wanna know the school will catch my kid if they fall has pre-planned for some of that and then can talk to me about how all of the minutes related to literacy can work together to benefit them. That's so great. And the examples you gave were phonics based, which happens all the time the different programs that speak slightly different languages. I'm even thinking too about a student who might get writing support and they're working on writing paragraphs or even sentences, and so they are in their whole group lesson reading about birds and know a ton about birds because that's what they're focusing on but then they go into their intervention lesson and maybe they have to read a whole different article on alligators or jet planes and then they have to write about that and so that's a whole other cognitive load of figuring out, okay, what am I writing about? What do I know about this topic? Now I need to produce writing on it. Where we could use that same text that they were reading on birds in class and you could preview that text or reinforce that text. And I do think in education oftentimes it's just easier to work in silos. It's easier for the interventionist to get the goal, to plan the lesson, and to do it. And because we don't have a lot of time for the right. For the crossover and the silos are just easier to work out of. But they're so ineffective for kids. And we have data and research that shows when you align your tier one and your tier two outcomes for kids improve. And it's a kind of a no brainer. And again, if I'm a parent, if I'm gonna get outside services. For my student, I need to know what is the scope and sequence you're learning for acquiring phonic skills because I don't want my outside service provider doing something entirely different either. That's a whole other new system for them. It's a whole other new system. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So thinking about the questions, it's how do the different tiers of support connect or reinforce each other as a starting point for a question then just something else going back to that systems level, if. If support teachers or intervention teachers and classroom teachers don't have those mechanisms to talk or to plan often that's a reflection of district or school-based. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Prioritization of time and often they just really don't have time to get together. The more coherence and time, we can provide teachers the more coherence kids will benefit from as well. Yeah, and something that's top of mind for me recently is schools should be planning ahead for the variability and skill acquisition that we know happens. I'll shout out Dr. Mitchell Brookins, who made that very clear for me, but just why are we planning for that? We know some kids that are five take longer to learn their letter even sounds. Why don't we just have that already. We know it's gonna happen. Why are we surprised in January? Yes, we're not shooting to have a hundred percent of our kids needing that, but have it planned for, let's have it staffed, let's have it ready to go. And again, that's one small thing. But we know that across the board, we know in third grade some kids have a hard time writing a full response paragraph. We know it happens every single year. Let's plan for that and let's resource it and staff it and plan for the predictability and variability that we know kids bring to the acquisition of skills. We have covered so much, John. One thing that I wanted to ask you to leave our parent community with is what are you most hopeful about when it comes to the state of literacy instruction in our country? I am super hopeful for a couple of reasons. I first think, it's exciting to see we're waving flags for all kids where there might be risks. I think that's really energizing from a national level that more parents who aren't as queued into this world and these conversations are gonna start potentially getting more information about their kids to start asking the right questions. I think the other thing I'm really excited about is watching my own kid move through this. He's so unaware of every single worry and he just wants to learn. And wants to go to school and ask questions and be curious. And I think every kid is bringing that to school, right? And I think I always channel my hope and what are the little people actually doing in bringing, and the little people are not concerned about these debates. The little people want to learn. And I think we're primed to be setting them up to be in spaces where they can continue to learn the most they can possibly learn because we've equipped them with the skills necessary to do that. I know that you're doing so much work across the country to make that experience as beneficial and effective as possible for kids so that they can have a lot of fun, but also be learning what they need in order to continue to enjoy learning as it gets harder and harder. Yes. Yes. And just really grateful to have gotten to know you and learn from you. And I really do think your approach to the many problems we have in our system, nationally is one of hope. If we take things one thing at a time and just talk about it and focus on what the science tells us and follow that thread, we're gonna get somewhere. Likewise to you. It's really privileged to be here and to get to know you. Thank you so much for listening to the Reading Symphony Podcast. My hope is that each episode leaves you with more clarity about what actually helps children become skilled, joyful readers. If today's conversation was helpful, I'd be so grateful if you would follow the show. Leave a quick five star rating or review and share this episode with a friend or teacher or another parent who cares deeply about kids. Those small actions make a big difference in helping this work reach more families. You can also find resources, deep dives and practical tools for families by subscribing to my free weekly substack newsletter at katiemegrian.substack.com And you can connect with me on Instagram thereadingsymphony Until next time, take care. And remember, reading doesn't happen by accident. It develops when the right parts come together.