Reading Realities

I Can't Differentiate My Way Out of This feat. Faith Howard

• Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz • Season 1 • Episode 8

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Faith Howard, a grades 6–12 literacy specialist and former secondary English teacher based in Pinedale, Wyoming, joins host Rose Else-Mitchell to discuss her journey from teaching Shakespeare to teaching older students how to read.

Faith shares the moment she realized that creating multiple versions of texts and heavily differentiated materials was not helping her students in the long run. While teaching Othello, she found herself spending hours differentiating for students who still lacked the foundational skills or fluency needed to access complex texts independently. 

Rose and Faith discuss the unique challenges facing older students who have spent years hiding their reading difficulties and how Faith's Literacy Lab intervention model evolved and grew over time. They explore the importance of trust, family partnerships, student ownership, and helping adolescents see themselves not only as readers, but as leaders.

References and Resources:

Credits:

  • Guest: Faith Howard, 6-12 Literacy Specialist, English Teacher, and Goyen Literacy Fellow based in Pinedale, WY
  • 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: science of reading, adolescent literacy, secondary literacy, literacy intervention, morphology instruction, structured literacy, high school reading, middle school reading, reading intervention, reader identity, literacy leadership, fluency instruction, vocabulary instruction, decoding, literacy coaching, knowledge building, family engagement, secondary English, struggling readers, literacy specialist

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Faith Howard

I cringe thinking about what I started doing versus where it is now and how beautiful it is for kids. But you have to start somewhere and be willing to chip away at the process.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Welcome to Reading Realities, a podcast about what it takes to change how we teach reading. I'm your host, Rose Else- Mitchell, Executive Director of the Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz. Each episode, I talk with an educator about the evidence-based instructional and mindset shifts they're making because the truth is, changing reading instruction is not simple. No one should have to figure it out alone. Today I'm joined by Faith Howard, a grade 612 English teacher and a secondary literacy specialist based in Pinedale, Wyoming. We discuss Faith's journey from Othello to morphology and how she realized that differentiation using level text was no longer helping her adolescent readers in the long run. Faith shared how she built a secondary literacy intervention model, which centered on explicit instruction, rich knowledge building, and student self-efficacy. We explore what it means to teach adolescents who have spent years hiding their reading challenges, how to build trust with those students and their families, and why literacy instruction in secondary schools has to go beyond remediation to help students see themselves as capable readers and leaders. Let's get started. So, welcome to Reading Realities Faith.

Faith Howard

Hi, Rose. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Well, thanks for spending some time with us. And I feel already moved by this conversation as a former secondary teacher myself and as somebody who started teaching at 22 with absolutely no idea and just expecting all students by the time they came to my classroom to be able to read. I'm so curious to hear your story and your learnings.

Faith Howard

Yeah. So I'll start from the beginning, but similar to what you said, I started at 22 as a middle and high school English teacher in rural Missouri, then moved to the inner city, um, taught where I graduated from high school. And while I was there, my district went really big into the teach like a champion, um, Doug Lemov kind of approach. I got a lot of professional development on that. And that's really like my first learning journey in tightening up my teaching. Then I moved to Denver and I worked for a really high-performing charter school there. And I actually was one of the founding members for a new high school. And I taught high school English and then I moved into a director of curriculum and instruction role for a couple of years, and I coached English and social studies teachers six through 12. During that time, they were huge on structured literacy. So I got a heavy dose of that, as well as we did a lot of focus work on Doug Lemov's book, Reading Reconsidered, and kind of that, you know, inside the bullseye, outside the bullseye approach to bringing in informational texts with literary texts. And so I had a leg up there, um, then moved to Wyoming. My husband is a teacher too. And so, you know, moved to Wyoming and again was teaching English. And then four years ago, our state got the CLSD grant. And I had the opportunity to apply to be a literacy specialist, not really knowing what that entailed, but feeling pretty fired up about the struggles that I was seeing with my high school students as readers and just continuing to inherit more and more kids who did not have the skills that they needed to access grade level text. I decided to apply for that position and got it. Even though I would argue that I wasn't the most qualified at that point in time.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Right.

Faith Howard

Because as we know, being an English teacher doesn't necessarily qualify you to be a literacy specialist, especially

Rose Else-Mitchell

No, you're into stories and narrative and different kinds of genres and plays and poetry. I was a big poetry teacher. Although I do think poetry is a great way to actually kind of come at structured literacy because it's so much less intimidating in terms of words on the page and first novels. But anyway, good on you for applying for something that you obviously felt connected to and passionate about, even though you weren't necessarily sure you had all of the skills.

Faith Howard

I think it was like this build-up of frustration with a broken system, where I reached this critical mass where I said, like, I've got to be a part of the solution because I have this distinct memory, if I can share it, where I was teaching 10th grade world literature. We were reading a fellow, you know, I'm teaching Shakespeare. And I had started spending hours to differentiate my instruction because that's what, you know, that's what good teachers do. And that's sort of the recommendation is if you have low readers, differentiate the text. And, you know, now we know like Tim Shanahan's book, Leveled Readers, Leveled Lives, like this idea of I was creating three different versions of class packets and materials for every single day for my students. And, you know, when you're a strong teacher, they'll give you, like, they're like, oh, let's give you all the lower readers because you're gonna be able to catch them up. You get good test scores, right? And so I felt like I was actually causing more of the problem. We were reading Othello, and I had these three different versions in the packet, and it was like columns of text with the same text-dependent questions, but where I was changing the version of the text. So I was using that no fear Shakespeare. I don't know if you've seen it, but it sort of like paraphrases into modern-day text.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yes, adaptations, I remember.

Faith Howard

No knock at those. But if our end goal is to create greater access to grade level text, that's not actually doing it. It's lowering the bar. It's not teaching students how to read and understand Shakespeare. And so I just kind of stopped myself and I was like, what am I doing? I can't over-differentiate out of this hole when ultimately these kids cannot sound out big words, they cannot read fluently, and they cannot comprehend because their vocabulary and background knowledge is really stunted. And so that's when I applied for that other position. And then in moving into that literacy specialist role, boy, was it a learning curve, right? Like the biggest shift that I had to make was initially systemic. So typically in high schools, the way that we've historically done reading intervention, a lot of times is let's take the kids that get in trouble a lot and fail a lot of classes, let's put in an academic support class with someone who may or may not be qualified in reading. And my role initially, my first semester in that position was you're gonna tutor these students in English and social studies, like homework assignments and stuff that they're scoring low in for their core classes.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Right. So you're basically a kind of understudy or the homework help instead of actual intervention or prevention or making up uh real skills, right?

Faith Howard

Absolutely. And for me, that was problematic because I realized in that first semester early on that I'm not actually fixing the root issue, which is foundational skills gaps. And what are we doing in our schools if all that our goal is is to pass them on to the next grade and then graduate them, but they don't have the skills or the tools to be successful in life. And so that's really where my big shift and learning journey started for being a literacy specialist, where I took every training, I did every professional development, I went to conferences because I realized even through the initial morphology training, I didn't have the foundational skills of phonics and decoding that I needed knowledge on to be able to teach students how to do it.

Rose Else-Mitchell

And it's detailed. It's it's you know, morphology comes more naturally to a secondary teacher, right? It's a bigger jump to really go backwards to every sublexical piece of the language and and break that apart. And then, as you've said previously, you know, and make that appropriate and respectful for a 15 or 16 year old, right?

Faith Howard

Yeah, I think that's where it's been a beautiful and exhausting experiment for me. But as I started to gain more knowledge about the science of reading, that was the first time I heard that term was in the fall of my first year of becoming a literacy specialist, which is very interesting to me that I hadn't heard that term even prior to becoming a literacy specialist. That seems pretty late.

Rose Else-Mitchell

And then you heard it everywhere, right? It's one of those things when you first hear it and then suddenly it's it's all around you.

Faith Howard

So I went to my building principal and I pitched an idea where it was like, I want a class with kids that I can teach using these skills and strategies as my framework. And he gave me the green light. And that was the most beautiful moment because that next semester, I only went off of what I knew. So it was a gradual process for me. This is why some people will ask me, you know, like, we want to incorporate and do this literacy lab model, right? This is like what I've coined it as. It's called literacy lab. And it has all these amazing components to it, but I didn't start with all of that. I built up to it. It takes time. What I started with was oral reading fluency. We were just doing like repeated reading passages that I got free online. So they were not great. They weren't knowledge building, right? There was so much left on the table there, but I was just so fresh and new to it. And then, and I'm I'm being really vulnerable in sharing this because I cringe thinking about what I started doing versus where it is now and how beautiful it is for kids. But you have to start somewhere and be willing to kind of chip away at the process.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Let's take a moment to acknowledge that you found your way to passages that were research-based that you could use with norms so that you could measure where kids were. The fact that you weren't doing everything that could be done with a piece of text and, you know, really bootstrapping all of those, all of those kids' knowledge and background, you know, as you say, you've got to start somewhere. And I think that's really smart. You were at least starting with something that could be utilized to build on and to grow from fluency back to morphology and then forward to to some of that. So yeah,

Faith Howard

yeah. And I did, it's funny because in that evolution, I wasn't teaching novels or whole texts. It had its limits because it wasn't building any kind of comprehension of like longer texts or novels. That I just, as a former high school English teacher, I was like, I know how to do that. I can do that. And so as my knowledge grew, I said, okay, the next year I want to start teaching novels. And I want to start integrating informational texts that are directly linked to what's happening in the book that's gonna build that background knowledge for my students so that they're getting that fluency practice, they're getting that knowledge building. Then my morphology instruction, I changed from where I'm gonna do explicit vocabulary instruction of like key words and terms that are going to either come up in the book that we're reading or that are going to help them to talk about and write about the book. And in doing that, I'm gonna break apart the morphemes in those words, and those are the morphemes I'm gonna teach my students so that it's all interconnected. And then last, I was like, they need an explicit routine for decoding multisyllabic words, and they need an encoding routine because they cannot spell words and there's a direct relationship between the two. So then I just started like experimenting and trusting my gut. I had always felt like it was a hindrance that I had been a high school English teacher before because I didn't have the background knowledge that an elementary or early childhood person would have in reading. But what I undersold was the idea that I had this deeper, richer understanding of like how to teach students how to access grade level text and how to pull out deeper meaning and how to do this really cool, what Maryanne Wolf calls the multi-component approach, right? It's this integrated model that research, right? Yeah. It's it's this integrated approach works for sex for specifically for secondary or adolescent readers that struggle, instead of it being like, I'm just gonna teach you phonics today, or we're just gonna do a comprehension exercise, or just focusing on vocabulary. And so, you know, it's been an incredibly hard-thought journey for me in this process because five years ago, I would have never thought I was would be doing any of this. But now I look back and I'm like, a lot of these things could be happening in tier one classrooms for just like middle and high school English teachers, period.

Rose Else-Mitchell

With social studies and history and other subjects. I mean, every subject in high school has a lot of text. That's the basis of it. And a lot of that text is topics that are new to kids and require background that have tier two and tier three vocabulary, right? That require rereading to understand. There's so many things that if you move from literature to more informational or content area text. So I want to go back because there was so much in there and so much you've built that you've been focused on these kids. I think you call them the forgotten students, right? And I just I love that you're so 100% focused on them and bringing them to grade level and to graduate. So when you said you were teaching novels, were you teaching the grade level novels and then using these other tools to scaffold into them? Or were you choosing kind of adjacent novels to what might be being done in, you know, English one or English two?

Faith Howard

Yeah. In my setting, in my school, I have a mix of students from sixth through eighth grade and then ninth through twelfth grade in these intervention classes. And so I don't have the luxury of pairing it with their core English class or novel in terms of the content. But I actually think that was a blessing in disguise. Yeah. And here it's like it's separate and it actually then can build knowledge and build these approaches that then they're transferring into their tier one classes. So yeah, I I choose a novel. I typically go with one that is it's gotta be worth reading. It's gotta be

Rose Else-Mitchell

w hat are some examples?

Faith Howard

Yeah. Okay. So it has to require deep thinking and build empathy. And I tend to go toward narrative nonfiction because you can play with the genre for both building knowledge while also it follows narrative structure for like hitting at literary standards still. So it's the best of both worlds, in my opinion. So for high school texts, if you think about like a lot of these books, they are they're knowledge rich. You can build history, you can build vocabulary, you can build morphology, but they're grade level. They are difficult. And so the key is how do you provide scaffolds, not differentiation of like lowering text level, but actually explicitly modeling and teaching comprehension strategies that then they can use to have like greater understanding and greater bandwidth mentally for accessing those texts. And it builds their confidence over time.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yes. Yeah. And so many, so many of these kids have never have never read a book, right? All the way through from beginning to end.

Faith Howard

You said that in one of your previous episodes of this podcast. And I was like, that resonates because I've had so many students tell me that, like when we read a book in my class and we we finish it cover to cover, and they say, This is like the first book I've ever actually read, Mrs. Howard. And it's beautiful and it breaks your heart because you're thinking, this is a 16-year-old saying this. What has happened in your educational career where you could fake it this long?

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I remember working with intervention students and seeing some of them be interviewed about how they'd managed to avoid, you know, not just the system, but what were the kinds of behaviors, you know, you think about the Matthew effect and how once they get to a certain age, it becomes avoidant. So there's not coming to school, there's going to see the nurse, there's going to the bathroom right when they're supposed to read and round robin reading, you know, all of those kinds of things. And I'm sure you've seen, as an English teacher, you've seen every single one of those. And until you really know that students can't read, I think those things happen in my class when I was a teacher and you don't know what you're seeing.

Faith Howard

Yeah, I I actually wrote a substack recently that I interviewed a student of mine who just finished her junior year of high school, but I taught her how to read from the ground up as a sophomore.

Rose Else-Mitchell

It was so beautiful. We'll make sure that's in the show notes.

Faith Howard

So yeah, I just think like when you hear a student's words directly about how she was able to fake it and kind of fake read throughout a majority of her educational career and and just continue to be passed along through the system. Kids are aware of when that's happening.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah.

Faith Howard

And it doesn't do them any favors in the long run. So I just I think like hearing it from them directly is so powerful.

Rose Else-Mitchell

And and I think it makes them cynical about school and education and learning. You know, there's an interesting debate going on in New York at the moment because there's a lot of focus on multiple pathways to graduation and the skills of a portrait of a graduate, and it's got a beautiful infographic. And one of the things that breaks my heart though is that, you know, being literate is not actually on that infographic. And it's really the key to every pathway. You just don't want to be faking that through any of those steps to graduation.

Faith Howard

Well, and it has like damaging impacts on them socially, psychologically, emotionally, and then you think about like long term for their lives, even economically.

Rose Else-Mitchell

When you talk to them about the fact you're about to help them learn to read again, how do you approach that in a way that's both honest to them? Because we all know teenagers are so good at smelling the BS and and empowering at the same time. You know, what's the what's the message?

Faith Howard

Yeah, I this is through trial and error, but I I think you have to honor their intelligence and their age and their maturity. And it's a real conversation. I have a presentation that I give at the beginning of every year with my students where I share national reading data where I'm like, this is a this is a national crisis among adolescent readers. You're not alone in this. And then I pivot and I play clips from Emily Hanford's Sold a Story, and I bring them alongside me and I say, It's not your fault. Like they're a part of the conversation. They get really fired up about it and they're like, Are you kidding me? And I have them reflect on how they learned how to read. And many of them learned through balanced literacy or whole word reading

Rose Else-Mitchell

Or didn't learn.

Faith Howard

Or didn't learn. Yes. Yeah. Learn learned to guess through three queuing. And now here they are. And so then they get really fired up about it. And then I make some commitments and we do class commitments. And I say, these are the things I'm committed to. This will be a different experience for you. And I'm going to bring everything I have every day. And that's a tall order for an adult. And like kids are the first ones that'll call you on it if you don't follow through on those commitments. 100%. 100%. That's why I say the work is exhausting, but it's so worth it, right? Because of what's at stake for these kids. And then they make commitments to me. And some of them have to say, yeah, you know, I'm not going to fake it anymore, or I'm going to show up and actually try, or I'm going to come to school consistently because absenteeism has been a real issue. For us, you know, just things like that, where I'm going to try even when it's hard. Their coping mechanism is just to shut down the second that it gets hard. And so I think just that real talk, and then I show them their scores, right? Like I sit with them and I show them all of their beginning of year reading data and we set goals and they're tracking it throughout the year. And then we have student-led literacy conferences at the end of the year where their parents are invited in and I coach them and how to talk about their growth with their parents. And so they're running it completely. And I'm just like standing by and watching. And those are really emotional, but really powerful as well because they're taking the ownership. And I think like the older the learner, the more they have to have that ownership.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Right, right. Yeah. It's so respectful what you're doing and and and uh tough, but creating a kind space to allow it to happen. So, what about when you communicate with families? One of the things that we know from a lot of data recently, an organization called Learning Heroes has laid out, which is that 90% of families think that their kid is reading on grade level. So, what does that look like when you communicate with a parent or grandparent of a 15-year-old who's reading at a first grade level?

Faith Howard

I make a phone call and offer to meet. So some choose to come in, some it's over the phone. Every single one of my students that's going to be in my classes calls their parents and I send them the student scores. And similar to this, the meeting I have with the student, we have an honest conversation about where they're at. And it's really challenging sometimes because, like you said, that 90%, some of them will say, but so and so has A's and B's in all their classes in school. Right. So how are they a poor reader? And it really is this paradigm shift of like, well, I can't guarantee what's happening in their classes. And if they're being graded on, you know, their merits or on sort of how hard they work, it's possible that they could still have good grades, but their skills are still down here. And and then I think building credibility and trust with the parents has been huge, where over time, when I first started my program, I got some no's, some parents that were like, you know what? No. So I really had to like prove myself to families in this community in order for them to trust me to be able to make a difference because the parents are also burned out by the experiences in school with their child struggling with reading. They trust the educational system, and that trust gets broken if year over year they don't see anything change. And then we do an immersive parent experience night in the fall, which I would highly recommend, where after I've sort of trained my students in all the initial routines and procedures for the class, then we invite the parents in and I do a quick presentation on science of reading and kind of the course model of what we do. And then we go through and do the routines. And the students are like timing their parents in oral reading fluency, and they're doing like Review games with their parents. And all of a sudden their parents are like, oh wow, this is stuff I wish I would have learned or had somebody help me with. So really, really good stuff, I think, that helps kind of get them to be partners in the work.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah. You raise an interesting point too, that it's sort of like intergenerational miseducation, right? So I could talk to you all day. Coming to the end of our time, what would you say to a teacher, a secondary teacher who kind of knows this is something they need to get their head around? What would you say to them that they should do first to start to reach all students in their class? In in tier one classroom, not necessarily with this intervention block.

Faith Howard

Yeah, I think it's bringing text to the center of instruction in other content areas. I think we've gotten away with in secondary pulling in, like, we're letting YouTube videos teach kids, or they're doing a lot of like online independent work. And so I know I do a lot of supporting other school districts now as well, just because of the success that I've had with this model. And some schools, the first battle, it's not getting secondary core teachers to believe that they're reading teachers. I don't think that's the push. I think it's getting them to ascribe to exposing kids to text in their content area as well. And then it's not all just direct instruction or lecture with a PowerPoint in front of the class, or we're going to watch this video. Matt's going to teach you instead of here's a read to learn. Could we pull a piece of informational text and read about this to gain knowledge? Just those like little changes there as an initial starting point, I think could be really powerful. But then I'm like, secondary, explicit vocabulary morphology instruction can be done across all content areas. And if it looked the same across classrooms, if a school committed to that, yes, did the same routine for those words within their content. So it's honoring content area teachers. I think you could see some really significant gains within a school for doing that for a year. Uh yeah. In school year, it would be a really interesting, you know, action research kind of project.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yes, I so agree. And imagine how great that could be for kids if they knew that they were going to be taught vocabulary the same way by the science teacher and the history teacher and the government teacher. Like, I mean, wow. Yeah. They would actually feel like they were in a system rather than just in individual classrooms, right?

Faith Howard

Yeah, it's science of learning at its finest, right? Where you reduce cognitive load by the predictability of the routine.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah. And teachers are different enough that that, you know, it's not going to become so predictable that everything's going to kind of merge into one. So yeah, I love those suggestions. They're really great. This has just been wonderful. The last question we ask is always, do you have a book that you'd recommend to someone?

Faith Howard

So it's Whale Eyes by James Robinson. And he tells his own personal journey of having strabismus, which is a vision condition where as a child he was seeing two of everything and like he could not read. And he really struggled. It's just such a beautiful and heartbreaking story. I mean, I sat there the first time that I read it and I just cried during this one chapter because he talked about he was completely fake reading and he gave all the tips of how to make it look like you're reading but not be reading during guided reading at his school. And he was in elementary school, and then a kid noticed that the he was holding the book upside down. He didn't even know that the words were upside down, and he got made fun of. And I just thought, so anyone who teaches kids how to read or works with kids in literacy should read that book because, like, the amount of understanding of what some of our kids go through on a day-to-day basis. But then he's a success story, and everything that he's come through on that, it's just such a good book. Wow.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Well, I'm off to get that. Thank you. And, you know, I'm not surprised because what I learned from reading your Substack was your focus on empathy. And that's just been resonating throughout this conversation, but also by that book recommendation. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today, sharing your practice, your story, and all your wisdom.

Faith Howard

Thank you, Rose. This was like an absolute pleasure. I could talk to you all day as well. So

Rose Else-Mitchell

I hope to see you soon. Take care. Thank you, Faith, for joining us for this episode of Reading Realities. And thank you all for listening. Many older students who grapple with reading are not unwilling learners, not even unwilling readers. They're students who've just spent a long time developing tricks to hide their reading challenges. We explored how explicit literacy instruction, grade level text, and a focus on agency and dignity can help those students rebuild confidence and develop the skills they need to read and to thrive. Faith's work demonstrates that literacy intervention at the secondary level doesn't have to lower expectations or just accept the status quo. It can provide students with tools, support, and real opportunities so that they can engage with text and really see themselves as readers.

Rose Else-Mitchell

If you'd like to learn more about our work at the center and to share your story on a future episode of Reading Realities, you can reach us at scienceofreading at newpaltz.edu. You'll also find that information in the show notes. If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next from Reading Realities. And as we continue building this community, it would mean a lot if you could take a moment to rate and review the show. It helps us reach many more teachers who are learning, reflecting, and refining their practice every day. We'll be back soon with more conversations from educators navigating the realities of reading instruction. Thanks for listening.