Reading Realities

Centering Text with Middle School Readers feat. Sara Quinn

• Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz • Season 1 • Episode 5

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Sara Quinn, a middle school reading interventionist in Atlanta, Georgia, joins host Rose Else-Mitchell to talk about her journey from teaching kindergarten to supporting adolescent readers. Along the way, Sara questioned familiar practices, went deep with Orton-Gillingham instruction, and continued searching for evidence about ways to connect reading instruction with meaningful text experiences.

Rose and Sara discuss what it takes to teach middle school students who have experienced years of reading difficulty, what’s challenging about assessing comprehension with adolescents, and the importance of explicit instruction that helps students understand both what to do and why as they build reading and writing skills.

References and Resources:

Credits:

  • Guest: Sara Quinn, Middle School Reading Interventionist and Goyen Literacy Fellow based in Atlanta, GA
  • Host: Rose Else-Mitchell, Executive Director of the Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz
  • Produced by the Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz, Rose Else-Mitchell, and Onalee Smith
  • Original music and audio editing by Ross Gentry

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Keywords: middle school literacy, adolescent reading instruction, science of reading, reading intervention, reading comprehension, explicit instruction, structured literacy, reading fluency, vocabulary instruction, writing instruction, student engagement, literacy coaching, comprehension strategies, reading motivation, literacy development
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Sara Quinn

We can't give striving readers these piecemeal experiences. They need meaningful experiences of reading and writing. They need it to mean something.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Welcome to Reading Realities, a podcast about what it really takes to change how we teach reading. Each episode, I talk candidly with an educator about the evidence-based instructional and mindset shifts they're making. I'm your host, Rose Else- Mitchell, Executive Director of the Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz. I've spent my career in education as a classroom teacher, a learning and product designer, and working alongside schools, districts, and systems in teaching literacy. Today I'm joined by Sara Quinn, a middle school reading interventionist based in Atlanta, Georgia. In our conversation, Sara shares her journey from teaching kindergarten to working with older students and how that path led her to question and to reshape her whole approach to teaching reading. We talk about what it means to bring text back to the center of the classroom, especially for students in middle school, and those who are still developing foundational skills while being asked to engage with increasingly complex content. Sara shares how she's integrated decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and writing into meaningful work with texts, and how she's experimented with approaches that prioritize skill development and student engagement. Throughout the conversation, Sara offers a clear, thoughtful, and empathic perspective on what it means to teach explicitly while still creating space for curiosity, for motivation, and for the students that are in front of her. Let's get started. Hi, Sara. Thank you so much for being here.

Sara Quinn

Hi Rose. I'm so excited to get to have this conversation.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Let's talk about you and your literacy journey because it's a really interesting one. So maybe you can just share a little bit about how you made this journey and um what you I know you love doing what you love doing today.

Sara Quinn

Yeah, I'd love to. I started off my teaching career in New Orleans. I taught third grade my first year. I was always very interested in reading. Um, I had an amazing mentor, um Libby Michellini, my first year, who was just an incredible research, super research-based teacher, just that kind of teacher who was always shoving books into my hand and trying different strategy. I um we'll come back to this later, but I remember um learning about teaching the gist um with her, and that was 2011. Um, her mother was an SLP. And so I just feel like there's like this SLP lineage, kind of like the SLP club.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Um we love SLPs here at the Science of Reading Center. We think that they're just they're a secret, a secret weapon in a school's literacy arsenal, you know.

Sara Quinn

And they've been doing, you know, the kind of conversations that are more mainstream now, they've been having those conversations.

Rose Else-Mitchell

100%.

Sara Quinn

Via, yeah, Libby's mother to Libby, and then she really took me under her wing. And so I was immediately kind of really intrigued by research to practice and research-based literacy instruction um in my first year. And then I taught art for a couple of years um and did that as an arts integration, but I was always I really wanted to know how to teach children to read at the very beginning. So I decided to teach kindergarten. And I figured if I could learn to teach kindergarten, I could go to any age because I would know the foundations.

Rose Else-Mitchell

I love that. I it's funny, I was talking to someone yesterday, a mother, and we were talking about what we loved about our respective kids' kindergarten teachers and just how important and skillful and hard teaching kindergarten is. I mean, how was that for you?

Sara Quinn

I love teaching kindergarten. I think all the time and and threaten to go back to teaching kindergarten because it's this really magical year in their lives that transition from being a little kid to being a part of the life of school. They're so creative, they've got amazing ideas, they can do so much. We would do, I mean, we would do like critiques on their art and we would do weaving and we did projects about, you know, any topic that you could think of that people think, oh, they're too little for that. They're not. You just have to tailor the conversation to them. Um, it was really amazing. And I loved teaching them reading. I love seeing their success. I was very successful with them because I used some of those research-based practices and that Libby had modeled for me and that I'd been investigating. So I do my two years in kindergarten. I loved it so much, but I was also being told to do, like I was still being told to do guided reading. And I was like, this doesn't seem right to me.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Tell me more about that. How come it didn't seem right?

Sara Quinn

Why was I questioning it?

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah.

Sara Quinn

Number one, I had this deep attention to the decoding process. And I had both an intuitive and a and a lived knowledge of what it took to get kids actually breaking that code. So that just didn't make sense to me. I was like, I'm doing all this work to get them to decode, and then they're not sitting down and decoding with me. But then I kind of at the end of those two years, I was like, okay, what? This isn't, I was like, I'm being taught and told curriculum. And I was in a very top-down charter district. It was like, do this and do this. They really wanted you to stick to the script. They want, and I was like, I want to know the why behind this. I want to understand and that deeper, I don't want to just implement curriculum. And I asked myself, like, when rich kids struggle to read, what do they get? When affluent families with all the resources in the world have kids that are struggling with this, what do they do? And so I started researching, and of course, I found these amazing schools. They they get something called Orton Gillingham, which I'd never heard of in my life. And I was like, I'm gonna get that. Like, I want to know what that is, and I can bring that back to my students here in New Orleans. And that was a really interesting experience. Um yeah, it was just like a total immersion year in Orton Gillingham, which I loved. And my mentor, Lori, wanted me to kind of continue down the Orton Gillingham path. She wanted me to get the higher levels and, you know, become a fellow. And to be honest, Rose, there were just things about it, even though it was like so empowering to have these tools, there were things about Orton that still didn't rub me the right way. I said, Some of these things are not research-based. There's not great evidence for some of these practices. So, for example, the um the tracing, there's not good evidence for tracing. We just don't have it. Some of the things are traditions instead of being research-based practices, and there's a rigidity to it. I also was just finding, you know, you have an hour with these kids, and so much of the time, and I was hearing this from other people participating in the process, too, the reading and the writing were at the end of the lesson, and we were almost never getting there.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Getting there, yes. Yeah, I hear that in almost all tutoring or intervention programs that, you know, as somebody who's made a lot of curriculum in my time too, I mean, you always underestimate how long something is going to take. Because when you create it, whether it's a lesson plan or an even a lesson plan, you create yourself for your kids in your classroom, let alone something that's a lesson, you know, that that's in some kind of packaged curriculum, there's stuff happens. You know, you're surprised by something. That's part of what's interesting about kids too, right? Is you have to do this thing even though you really know them and you differentiate, you have to do this different thing. And so yeah.

Sara Quinn

And the text was not at the center of it. I also felt that the language component and the writing component were just so absent. So it was I continued doing Orton Gillingham tutoring, and I'm so excited to be equipped with these tools and with this knowledge and with this approach. And I still had a lot of questions and I still had more seeking to do. I didn't feel like I'd found it. Yeah. Still had questions.

Rose Else-Mitchell

And I guess, especially now that you work with older students, I'm sure you have even more thoughts around um, you know, the explicit, the rigidity, necessity of structured literacy and everything else. So I'd I'd love to hear a little bit more about that transition into older students.

Sara Quinn

I left New York. I went back to New Orleans, I did Orton Gillingham tutoring that year, and I did some arts integration coaching. And then the next year I went to Vanderbilt to do my master's degree um in curriculum and design. And I took a lot all the reading, all the reading courses there. And I remember sitting in one of my classes that was about assessment, and I was like, hold on. We were looking at the research. I was like, so what I why are people still doing guided reading? I was like, shouldn't we not be doing guided reading?

Rose Else-Mitchell

Right.

Sara Quinn

And my teacher who worked for the Nashville school district, she was like, Well, yeah, I mean, probably, but it just was so entrenched. Yeah, it was really interesting. And I and I worked at a summer program that was supposed to be like catching students up academically, and they were just so insistent on on guided reading and on three queuing. And I was like, this isn't

Rose Else-Mitchell

actually so odd and and so adjacent to Vanderbilt too, you know. I mean, there's so such good science that came out of Peabody around assessment. So yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? How it sort of got into the water, really, didn't it?

Sara Quinn

Well, and it's like it's all right here. I was like, we're reading the research, we're looking at what assessment, we're looking at what kids, what what are you? I was like, why are we doing this? Yeah. And uh yeah, and that summer, the other there was another literacy interventionist, and she was like, Look, my kids are moving through these books, through those like A to Z levels. And I was like, but you've not actually taught them to read the words. You've they've you've not actually taught them to read the words. And we just I remember having this conflict with her. This was like 20. And then the next year I went to work for the Rollins Center here in Atlanta, and that was amazing experience. Um, and I um wrote the phonics course, and that was an amazing immersion in this science of reading movement and and explicit and systematic instruction and and research. But I kind of still had like this nagging feeling of, okay, but what does this really look like in the classroom? How do we implement all these things? You know, and it's kind of this flood of when you open the flood of research for teachers, it's exciting, but what does that really look like? And I don't, I just I had a discomfort telling teachers what to do without having known in my bones like that I could do it and that I had done it. And it just didn't sit right with me.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah.

Sara Quinn

And I missed the classroom. So I left and I went back to the classroom. And I've been at my school, my charter school for five years. I started off doing elementary reading intervention and did a very kind of like adapted OG approach for the first couple years. I just kept, I kind of, it was like, but gee, I just kept moving the text more and more into the center of what I was doing. I just kept kind of inching the text closer and closer to the corner of what I was doing.

Rose Else-Mitchell

I love that metaphor. And I think when you're talking about middle schoolers, you have to do that. Otherwise, there's an invention and these skills are not going to transfer to the fact that every class, you know, maybe except math, has has text everywhere and they're constantly besieged by text they can't read.

Sara Quinn

Math too. I mean, math at this point. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And even, and I was working with second, third, and fourth graders, and that, you know, even for that, like as soon as you can, yeah. We're text is at the middle of what we do. Yeah. And I started experimenting with instead of giving children a random list of words, every word I was putting in front of them for the most part came from the text or just gave them practice with what they were about to read. So I I think I did two years elementary reading intervention, kind of experimenting with moving away from Orton, keeping the things that really worked, focusing more on text, focusing more on writing, writing is thinking. And then I did a year as a curriculum coach for K2, which was I just I wanted to go back to the classroom.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Kids are kids preferable to adults.

Sara Quinn

I love kids. I love teaching. That's why I'm here. I think it's hard for me when I'm not when I'm teaching, I'm so it's so fulfilling, it's so exciting, it's so interesting. It's hard for me to get even one level away from that is hard. But then my executive director asked me to go to middle school and I was like, what? And so that was kind of something I didn't choose. I was open to it. Um I've always said I can teach any kid, just you know, give them to me. But middle school, immediately I'm just kind of run right smack into the conundrum of comprehension. And I'm as as an interventionist, I'm being asked to assess and track their comprehension.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Right.

Sara Quinn

What does that actually look like?

Rose Else-Mitchell

Even mean. Yeah. Yeah.

Sara Quinn

What does that mean? And I'm just diving through layers and layers of of this question. Yeah. And I just have the chance to play and explore with them. It's been a really exciting two years in middle school.

Rose Else-Mitchell

So let's talk about that. Let's talk about comprehension in middle school. You know, I I have always been really driven by the idea and pained by the idea that middle schoolers are kind of linguistically and [literacy-ly] malnourished, right? The whole Matthew effect, which is because so many of these issues clicked in or didn't click in, right? These it started early and you have that reading avoidance. And, you know, it really is the Matthew effect, the rich get richer, and the more you read, the more you're able to build not just vocabulary, but you know, a text-based understanding, genre without even knowing the names of genres. You're able to start to recognize texts and context and tasks that go with those texts with just much greater nuance. You just know more. For kids that have not had that, I just the pain of seeing a kid who hasn't read a book or who hasn't really ever been able to finish a reading test or whatever metric we use who's struggling in middle school is still one of the most painful things that I can imagine.

Sara Quinn

Yeah. Figuring out how to work with students who've got so our school is fifth through eighth grade. So you've gone through five grades and you're still struggling to this degree. And I have to, you know, figure out how to connect with you, how to encourage you, how to motivate you. I'm so proud of them. They're actually today we got I shared uh the podcast they've been working on. We've been doing a podcasting project this semester where I've been weaving in their fluency work, their decoding work, everything's been woven, their writing work, it's all been woven in, which has been a really exciting experiment. But they're so proud of their work.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah.

Sara Quinn

For many of them, it's one of the they have the chance to create something that is actually excellent and high quality and to feel what that's like and to have done it themselves. Um, they spend a lot of their time pretending, drowning, yeah, not numbing, feeling completely lost, avoiding or trying and and losing, scaffolding them to have these meaningful experiences with both reading and creating text is really important too.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Um so how do you approach the idea of building some of that independence? So the idea that they can sit with a piece of text separate from an instructional context or a testing context, and what are the what are the kinds of tools that you give them to help them extract or construct meaning?

Sara Quinn

I teach them some I'm like hesitant to use the word strategies, you know, fraught. But I teach them some strategies. Um well, and I'll just say I do want to start by saying, so kind of my like working concept of comprehension when I was on the beginning spectrum, the lower age of of teaching them to read, you know, there's all this research that's like affluent words correct per minute is a proxy for comprehension, you know? And so I was like, oh, you know, we'll do that. We'll ask some questions, build some background knowledge, you know, do the vocab. And and then I got up here and I was like, no,

Rose Else-Mitchell

right.

Sara Quinn

no, that's not necessarily true. There is, yeah, I don't have the answer about what comprehension assessment and instruction should look like exactly, but I you can't collapse it into fluency. You can't collapse it into background knowledge and vocabulary either, I don't think. I think there's other pieces. So some of the things that I teach my students explicitly are first thing we start with is annotation, engaging actively with the text. And I I bring, I have some books from college that I I literally I have a book from high school and a book from college that I really loved. I we look at it, my annotations.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Like your, your, your work.

Sara Quinn

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I've got, yeah.

Rose Else-Mitchell

So you so you're modeling this is what good, this is what good readers do, right?

Sara Quinn

This was a real this was a really challenging book. I really enjoyed my freshman year of college, face of the deep. It was in a religion class. Um, it was so challenging. I was like reading theory for the first time. And yeah, I've got I show them all my annotations and what that looked like and how I use them in class, and we talk about it. Um, I also have the I was using Word Connections, the program for a bit last year. And I showed them how I tried to I tried to read the manual and I so I started annotating it, and that was how I was able to comprehend. So that's like where we start that in active engagement with text. Um, and then that is reinforced and just expected of them as we go. We work on formulating questions, and that is folded into annotation, writing your own questions and formulating questions.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Formulating questions is an a really underrated skill, I think.

Sara Quinn

Yes.

Rose Else-Mitchell

You don't see it in standards very much, but when you do set that work, we I just did this with some graduate students, getting students to come up with a question, actually, rather than you asking them questions. I mean, it's not like loads of adults are good at this either.

Sara Quinn

No, and that comes straight from the WhatWorks clearing how that's one of their for the older readers, that's one of their um high impact strategies.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Do you know Peter Bauer's work? Using the matrix.

Sara Quinn

Yes.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah. That that's really, I think that's a great older, older student activity for, I mean, particularly if you're starting a new topic, because you you can be generating all of these kind of related words, right? Um and uh it it it's very empowering in terms of kids knowing many more words that are quite academic, you know, that might be connected to a content area and that they are able to both put together and and break apart.

Sara Quinn

Yeah. The other strategy that I teach them explicitly is paraphrasing, and we do a ton of practice with that and teaching them they can work through a text like that. They can something that feels completely impenetrable, and I intentionally choose challenging documents that are from 200 years ago or things that are pertaining to the government, and we intentionally work our way through. And then the main thing that we do is we do a little bit of pre-work, uh, we activate background knowledge and curiosity. I always want to know what their questions are, what they're interested in. I love to bring in some kind of multimedia or realia moments, and it's such a more effective way to do that, to have a video, to have an image. I do a lot of work with maps, bringing something in physically, like just you're gonna get so much more retention, you know. And it doesn't have to be complicated, but their excitement and engagement is also a critical tool. If you don't have their engagement, it's it doesn't matter how good your lesson is.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah.

Sara Quinn

They're not listening, they're not in it. And I was gonna say the other piece, so as we do our pre-work, we do our vocabulary words, and then we are working through really rich, challenging social studies text, informational text. And I use integrate sentence level writing throughout.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah.

Sara Quinn

So we'll do a because but so, we'll do sentence stuns with different subordinating conjunctions, we'll do a positive, um, we'll do sentence expansion. And I've done a lot of work this year with writing the gist of the text. And so a lot of our time is spent in in writing. Um, and especially in tier three intervention, it's on that sentence level writing.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we could all do with more practice at that, I think. I mean, it's just so weird when you think about how writing's taught generally. Like you it's like asking kids to read a novel rather than reading a paragraph first or something, right? I mean, we just it's like, okay, let's just write. Whereas looking at the smallest possible sentence that you could write and then expanding it and all of that is it has so many parallels to reading that yeah, it just doesn't it just doesn't feel like we've given it the same amount of time. And then we give all of this other time to the writing process, which has good research around it, but it's nothing if you don't actually have some sentences that are worth writing, um, you know, and that you can feel proud of too. So I know we're coming to the end. I guess a couple of last questions, which is what do you think you understand now about reading development that you didn't before? Now you've taken this extraordinary journey from from kindergarten through intervention and middle school and all this wisdom you've gained.

Sara Quinn

I think the biggest I feel like this was something I've just developed this lens all along, but the explicit teaching lens. Attending to what your students are actually doing, to what they can do, and then showing them what you want them to be able to do, and then helping them climb the ladder. Like just that model, I just think so often in teaching it's like assigning work instead of teaching, or it's like, do that. They just they are the students I work with do not understand what they're being asked to do. So figuring out what do I want them to do, why can't they do it, what can they do, and and how do I show them what I am looking for.

Rose Else-Mitchell

I think one one tool you just touched on prior, which is the concrete nature of what growth looks like. Those things are as important, I think, in in making it real, right? I think it's hard for anyone who's had failure to then kind of re- really sit with this is actually changing.

Sara Quinn

Yeah. And I think, well, just coming off of this podcasting project, giving them the opportunity to complete high quality work, most of the time they are spending their days and for maybe many years never completing any work, doing and and with effort, like trying to finish the sentence and then it they've moved on. So giving them that experience of no, like we're gonna. Do this until it's done and you're gonna do it at a high quality. And then knowing and seeing that and then being able to share that, that's also really, really important and powerful. And it's just we can't give striving readers these piecemeal experiences. They they need meaningful experiences of reading and writing. They need it to mean something. They love to learn. They you'll be like, how could they possibly get engaged with this text? But asking them questions, showing them primary sources, watching videos, letting them letting their curiosity lead. Kids love learning and that yeah, but being able to coax that out is yeah, one of the biggest motivators you can have.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Well, that feels like a a good moment to end. What's one book that you might recommend um to a listener?

Sara Quinn

Oh man. I just started a book that's really amazing, actually. I didn't go to sleep one time last night because I just started it. It's called Staying Power by Zena Sharman, and it's a memoir of her life. Unbelievably beautiful and powerful and well written. Yeah. And it's so important to me as a literacy teacher to stay connected to what writing can do in someone's life, what writing can do for me, what reading books can do for me. And I talk to the kids about what they're reading. I share with them what I'm reading. I read a lot of cookbooks too, so they're always like, What cookbook are you reading, Miss Gwen? And I'll show them. Because you learn a lot from cookbooks. You can really learn a lot.

Rose Else-Mitchell

I love reading cookbooks.

Sara Quinn

Yeah. You you really do?

Rose Else-Mitchell

No, no, I really do. I have a friend who used to read cookbooks and and uh I was like, What? The cookbooks are for cooking. So for ages I didn't, and also as a terrible cook, so I never did. In my 30s, I got into cookbooks and then I I think when all of the recipes went online and that's what I'd used to cook, the cookbook became something to read in bed and to really enjoy and sort of plan to make food. And then, you know, more and more people who write cookbooks tell their story of traveling somewhere or why a meal's important to them and their cooler. Yeah. Well, we'll have to exchange cookbooks as well as uh I would love that real.

Sara Quinn

Yeah.

Rose Else-Mitchell

This has been such a wonderful conversation, Sarah.

Sara Quinn

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Reading Realities, and thank you, Sarah, for such an open and fun conversation. I love how Sarah describes her own evolution as a teacher, not as a single shift, but as a series of questions, of experiments, and refinements over time. Her emphasis on keeping text at the center of the classroom is particularly powerful. For older students, it's not enough to work on isolated skills. They need sustained, meaningful opportunities to engage with text, to read, to write, to build knowledge in ways that can connect across the whole day. There's also something important in how Sarah talks about making learning visible. Her reflections on student motivation and engagement are a reminder that this work is as much human as it is instructional.

Rose Else-Mitchell

If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next and share it with a colleague or an educator in your life who's interested in this work as well. As we continue to build this community, it'd mean a lot if you could take a moment to rate and review the show. It really helps us reach many more educators. If you've got a story to share about your shifts in a classroom, please reach out to us at science of reading [at] newpaltz.edu. We'll be back soon with more conversations from educators who are learning, reflecting, and refining their practice. Thanks so much for listening.