The Teacher Rolodex feat. Aaron Grossman

Aaron Grossman, who finished the 2025–26 school year as a fifth grade teacher and begins the 2026–27 school year as a third grade teacher in Reno, Nevada, joins Rose Else-Mitchell to talk about how being curious about ended up changing his approach to reading instruction. After years as a classroom teacher, literacy coordinator, curriculum leader, and standards expert, Aaron returned to the classroom armed with new knowledge to reach more students.

Rose and Aaron explore the importance of learning from other teachers. Aaron talks about his “teacher Rolodex” of colleagues to call when he was trying something new and it didn’t work. He reminds us that the hard thing is to focus on a few practices that we absolutely know work, rather than chasing the next new thing. New insights are important, but getting better at managing background knowledge building for new texts is a really important capability for reaching all readers.

References and Resources:

• ELA Knowledge Map from Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University
• “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros 
• How to Know a Person by David Brooks
• Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
• Just Two Teachers: Aaron’s resource site for fellow teachers
• Room360: Aaron’s class website with resources
• Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz

Credits:

• Guest: Aaron Grossman, 3rd Grade Teacher and Goyen Literacy Fellow based in Reno, NV
• 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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Topics: science of reading, reading instruction, elementary literacy, fifth grade reading, literacy instruction, evidence-based reading instruction, research-based instruction, Common Core State Standards, knowledge building, background knowledge, knowledge retention, retrieval practice, forgetting, complex text, grade-level text, close reading, text complexity, reading fluency, repeated reading, prosody, readers' theater, oral reading, systematic phonics, syllabication, morphology, word study, vocabulary, memory, teacher learning, teacher collaboration, instructional coaching, professional learning, teacher community, evidence-based education, literacy research, classroom practice, reading comprehension

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Are you seeking high-quality professional learning that’s affordable and actually fits your schedule? Enroll in the SUNY Science of Reading Center’s Science of Reading Fundamentals microcredential and join a community of educators strengthening their literacy instruction.

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Save the date and stay tuned for more details.

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Transcript

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Aaron Grossman 0:47

Teachers love talking about what they do, you know? And so if you invite them into some kind of situation, phone call, coffee, whatever it might be, they love to share and highlight the things that have gone well for them.

Rose Else-Mitchell 1:00

Welcome to Reading Realities, a podcast about what it really takes to teach reading, because no one should have to figure that out alone. I'm your host, Rose Else-Mitchell, Executive Director of the Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz. Today I'm joined by Aaron Grossman, a fifth grade teacher based in Reno, Nevada, pretty far from New York. Aaron has served as a classroom teacher, a literacy coordinator, an instructional coach, curriculum leader, and standards expert before he returned to the classroom. In our conversation, we talk about how the Common Core standards back in 2011 and the research that underpinned them has shaped his practice. This includes the role of knowledge building and complex texts, of retrieval practice and of fluency. Aaron underlines the importance of finding colleagues who can challenge and can support your thinking. We talk about why great reading instruction doesn't have to be complicated. Stick to the research, do the fundamentals. That might be the most important thing today if you're just getting going. Let's get started.

Aaron Grossman 2:07

Thank you. Great to be here.

Rose Else-Mitchell 2:08

So you're not our first guest who has done a lot of different things and then gone back to teach kiddos. So tell us a little bit about some of those steps in the journey.

Aaron Grossman 2:17

So I started in title, like many people in education. I did that for about a decade. And then because I had pretty strong standardized test scores in a title building, that's when I was first invited out of the classroom to the Office of School Improvement in my district. And I was working on the Nevada State Standards, then moved to the curriculum instruction department within my district, where I worked almost exclusively on the common core literacy outcomes. And I parlayed all those experiences into a fifth grade teaching position. Having been back in the classroom since about 2014, I've taught third, fourth, and fifth grade with one year off to work in my MTSS office working on behavioral outcomes.

Rose Else-Mitchell 2:56

Fascinating. So tell us a little bit about what you see differently now that you've lived in those varied other worlds. How do you feel your teaching is today, say teaching fifth grade, than it was when you were in the classroom originally? What have you learned and what have you let go of and what have you embraced?

Aaron Grossman 3:15

So I got my first full-time teaching position in 2002. I happened to be teaching in an SFA school, which has gotten some attention because of Emily Hanford's podcast series, Sold a Story, in which she highlights an SFA building. So that's Success for All, the Robert Slavin program. And there were certainly components of that that were really strong. But if you flash forward then to first the drafting of the Common Core and then states beginning to adopt it, I think people don't attend very specifically to the fact that the Common Core was sort of the arbiter of some of our reading wars. So for example, I took for granted that everybody was doing systematic phonics instruction because that was in SFA. So that was certainly a highlight of the program. Conversely, there was very little attention paid to knowledge building. And very frequently the text itself, whatever we might be reading, and this is not to pick on SFA, I think this was just, you know, instruction across the board. Texts were selected in service of a skill rather than just how good the text was. So when I think about changes over my own instruction, especially in intermediate grades, one certainly is that attention to systematic phonics instruction. And for my classroom at this level, that's syllabication, that's attention to morphemes. There's a considerable more energy on my part to thinking about the text itself and what makes it complex. And is this chewy? Is this really worthy of their time, worthy of a discussion? And then how does it fit in within knowledge building? So within my grade and across my grades, what am I doing? That one is either building on something they might have learned in the past and then moreover getting them ready for middle school and high school.

Rose Else-Mitchell 4:50

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Actually, the first or second training that I went to when I first moved to the United States was an SFA training. And I support Success Academy schools in New York City. And those schools all use SFA to teach reading. And almost every kid can learn to read by the end of second grade. So I do think it's not glamorous, it's not ed tech, but it's certainly a proven method and program. And rest in peace, Bob Slavin. Thank you for your work. Let's talk a little bit about this knowledge theme, because I think that was probably a misstep in terms of communication of the common core. Because there was, they had that wonderful section in it, which had, you know, what ocean life would look like at every grade, where it was really about building that knowledge just as you say that you were doing. But there wasn't a lot of support, including in the text list, for what a curriculum might look like. So how do you go about doing that other than incidentally?

Aaron Grossman 5:45

Well, I think we have to remember uh this was an initiative led by the National Governors Association and the CCSSO, our state superintendents. And so there was no way that you're going to get 50 states on board with what knowledge and in what sequence and what's like who is going to adjudicate that stuff? At least they say knowledge building is important, but they can't tell you which knowledge. And so, with respect to, well, how do I navigate that? I've really limited what I can do at the classroom level. So my version leans into retrieval practice. So I will create experiences in which it brings back things that we might have learned in the past, or it's previewing some content always through literacy, so that I know that my kids are appropriately prepared for whatever's coming next.

Rose Else-Mitchell 6:27

Can you give me an example of one you might have done either a preview or a retrieval where you were helping, you know, I retrieval is particularly interesting, I think, because I think students forget things very quickly. You know, they're immersed with their own digital experiences, et cetera. And we need many exposures before things do go to long-term memory. So maybe you could just talk about a retrieval example that you felt, you know, worked.

Aaron Grossman 6:55

I love the fact that you used that word forget. Our kids forget. I think uh this is not really baked in the cake anymore. But certainly we need to acknowledge it. So let's say as a fifth grade teacher, I know, for example, they studied in fourth grade how to classify triangles, how to label them by different properties, but I know they're gonna forget. And a real important sort of disposition in my classroom is always two things at once. So I've created a series of reader's theater scripts, and they're built around certain math standards. So I know that I'm about to do my geometry unit, and I know that my kids are gonna have to go much deeper with whatever they learned from fourth grade. So, with what I will do, rather than just telling them, rather than giving them a series of workbook pages, I give them these scripts. And so then it's then it's like, you know, whatever the script might say. Remember in fourth grade, we learned about the properties of triangles? I've forgotten altogether. Next speaker, you know, there are three types of triangles.

Rose Else-Mitchell 7:50

That's fun.

Aaron Grossman 7:51

Tell me more about uh an isosceles triangle. And so I borrow a protocol by Dr. Chase Young. So we read it throughout the week, we develop prosody, and then in this case, right, we're either, I hope I'm not building new knowledge, but rather just reinforcing something that was launched somewhere in long-term memory that they're just bringing forth again.

Speaker 8:10

Yes, I I like that optimism. I discuss this a lot, the idea of activate versus build. You know, you can't activate what's not there, but you you hope there's something there. I'm glad you mentioned forgetting. I think nobody really knows about the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve anymore. So, yes, we can't always get frustrated with kids when when that drops off. That goes back to the 1880s. So I'm one of my favorite examples around forgetting is, you know, vocabulary, a vocabulary word needs between, it's a very large range, four to fourteen exposures to really get into the neurons.

Aaron Grossman 8:42

We all forget. I also know that we all have very strong opinions about homework, but let me explain why I'm doing homework. A big part of it is retrieval, a big part of it is space practice. So in general, what your kids will be doing at home is trailing my classroom by about three or four weeks, or in some cases, it's content that is going to get them into something much more rigorous at this grade level.

Rose Else-Mitchell 9:03

Well, I love that idea as well. Uh it's very hard to find good research on homework, and sometimes it's more just that it develops habits. So that's often a reason that I hear educators give it. Also, one of the things I've heard talking to teachers a lot is that more and more they're not giving it, especially since COVID, because kids aren't doing it, which is a very depressing. So that sounds like the most meaningful thing I've heard about homework for a long time. So thank you. Um, other than really talking sort of about common core, but is there a particular moment where you decided that there were research precepts that you needed to incorporate more directly into your teaching moves?

Aaron Grossman 9:41

So for me, it continues to go back to this sort of moment of 2010, 2011. Common core is written, states begin to adopt it. And I will be perfectly frank, I approached it with incredible skepticism, peppered it with a little bit of cynicism, and it was just serendipitous, pure luck. I found a video of David Coleman, and I don't want to oversell it. I watched the video, I watched his explanation, and he kept sort of framing it as this is what would shift instructionally in our classrooms. And I just started taking notes on it, and I began to email people that he was quoting. Amazingly, many of these people responded. Uh, and so the more I began to accumulate these experiences, talking to academics, talking to researchers, the more I was impressed with the care that which with the standards were written and the attention to the research and evidence that it was born from.

Rose Else-Mitchell 10:36

What a wonderful experience learning all that. That's great. Just on the knowledge building side, uh the work of Johns Hopkins and their Institute for Educational Policy, they've done some really great work around knowledge mapping. They've done knowledge graphs for all curricula, you know, tier one curricula, obviously. So you can look at how well different curricula do actually build that vertically and horizontally. And there is more intentionality and awareness about what it is to actually build on top of something so that when you are receiving kids in fifth grade, you know, assuming they've been through a standardized curricula together, you can make some assumptions about what they do know. And it really is activation or building versus new knowledge.

Aaron Grossman 11:23

So I always say there are three big revelations, and the ones that sort of moved me most instructionally were attention to systematic phonics instruction and how that again looked a little bit different in the intermediate grades, but also this idea of knowledge building and then complex text. And we level students out throughout the instructional day and they get things at whatever designated reading level. And for me, hearing that one the importance of all kids working with grade level complex text, and that takes a little bit of unpacking to understand the difference.

Rose Else-Mitchell 11:56

Yes.

Aaron Grossman 11:57

I had just been used to this is a lexile level, you know, we've identified this as a third, fourth, or fifth grade text, and then those would be uh uh farmed out to whatever particular teacher, whatever grade level they had been assigned. And so, you know, when you asked that question about these these experiences and what changed me, one was working with a close read around Sandra Cisneros's uh "Eleven." That is a magical piece of writing. It's just north of a thousand words, you can print it front and back, but what happens within that text is kind of indescribable. And up until that point, I had never had an experience like that with kids, in which there's so much depth to that text. And to see kids wrestle and to see them chew on it, and to see them come to these revelations, that's kind of what sold me.

Rose Else-Mitchell 12:49

What do you remember about the first time you taught it and what stayed with kids and what stayed with you?

Aaron Grossman 12:55

Well, without reading the text out loud for the listeners, there's this idea that when you are 11, you're still two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. And that self is the accumulation of all these experiences and this revelation when the kids finally realize, oh, what she's trying to express is she's crying, she's embarrassed. Because although she's 11, she's still age five at this particular moment.

Rose Else-Mitchell 13:21

Yeah, that is such I haven't read that for a really long time, but thank you for bringing it back. I just finished reading David Brooks's How to Know a Person, and he talks about this exact idea. Um, and what a great, what a great match um that would be as a text pair in one of the chapters. I think it's a chapter on wisdom. He talks about that idea that you are all of the ages at any one point. And it's true.

Aaron Grossman 13:47

There's gonna be some very nerdy, but my wife and I planned an entire vacation around being able to see David Brooks speak.

Rose Else-Mitchell 13:53

That's very cool. Well, I recommend this if you haven't if you haven't read the book. It's fabulous. Um so how do you manage for students who may come to your fifth grade class without the decoding skills or the fluency skills?

Aaron Grossman 14:07

One, there are a series of scaffolds that we can use in order to get kids in the text. I mean, the most obvious one is, you know, I'll be your first read. And then later, if I have a partner read, I'm gonna rig it in such a way where I'm gonna have you rework with shoulder to shoulder with somebody that you've identified, you're comfortable, sort of revealing to them that you're disfluent.

Rose Else-Mitchell 14:26

I like that.

Aaron Grossman 14:26

And that yeah. So I joke that the very first time we we, you know, I was encouraged to use a curricular resource. I was struggling with it enormously. And I began to reach out to people that I knew who had used it. And it was, it was sort of comical insofar as I would call teacher A on Monday and say, I got destroyed today. What am I doing wrong? And they give me a series of suggestions. And then I'd call teacher B on Tuesday and say, Went a little bit better. What can you get for me? And I kind of had five teachers on Rolodex for about six weeks, but never call one consecutively. And they just kept giving me ideas, all kinds of things that I could be doing. And it was important insofar as pushed through the disequilibrium, got my kids with me, learned a whole bunch of strategies and different ways of, you know, holding this line of we all get to work with sufficiently complex grade level text. And I there's this beautiful analogy, again, by a teacher here in Washoe County. Her name is Linnea Wolters, and she said, picture the head of a dandelion with that big white head, and they're gonna hold on to the stem and they're gonna blow on it, and stuff is gonna go everywhere. And the kids are gonna be reaching for those little particles in the air. As long as they don't let go of the stem, whatever your central learning or your main point of teaching that, you're winning. And some are gonna grab a bunch of that stuff in the air and some are gonna have very little, but as long as they don't let go of the stem, you're in good shape. And so that's what I have to remind myself of.

Rose Else-Mitchell 15:52

I love this idea of calling a teacher every day. I feel like this is a service that should be offered. It's it's sort of helping your confirmation bias. And as long as you're, you know, calling teachers who are in very different contexts, you're getting really different inputs. So tell me some more about why you did that, how you chose the people. You know, in in business, people often have what they call their kitchen cabinet, which is like having a board of directors or your own personal people that you go to, maybe when you get offered a new job or you're dealing with a challenge at work. But this it sounds like this was your board of directors, was your teachers on a rolodex.

Aaron Grossman 16:27

Well, the genesis of this all was my first year teaching. I was getting, I had 36 sixth graders in a school that was 100% free and reduced lunch, 70% of the kids coming from homes where the English was not the first language. And I cannot overstate how much I was struggling. And I happened to go to a conference. There was a sixth-grade teacher there. I approached her after a very short session in which she sort of described a classroom economy that she was using. And I said, Can't overstate how much I'm struggling. And she literally handed me keys to her classroom and she said, There's two filing cabinets, go in there, just start sorting through it, find stuff you like, start making copies. And I think that was an important experience, which is you're reminded of every this is a shared experience. Yes. It's lived for so many of us. But moreover, teachers love talking about what they do, you know? And so if you invite them into some kind of situation, phone call, coffee, whatever it might be, they love to share and highlight the things that have gone well for them.

Rose Else-Mitchell 17:25

And that's why we have Reading Realities. You're right. You know, it's interesting though. I'll share a story from my first year teaching. We were teaching To Kill a Mockingbird, which I had read as a kid, but also remember I'm in Australia. So, you know, very, very different context. Reading that now that I live in America is an extraordinary talk about background knowledge. Very different experience. But I hadn't taught it. And most of the other books that I had to teach, I was a middle-on and high school teacher. And I remember asking in my third week, asking a teacher who had had 12 or 13 years of teaching experience if she could share her unit on To Kill a Mockingbird. And she literally said, No, it's mine. And at that moment, I was like, wow, this is you know, this is not a friendly collegial sharing kind of group here. But I love that idea of teachers just literally opening their filing cabinet. And when it's based on not just here are the resources, which anybody can find anywhere these days, but also posing a problem of practice or a challenge and asking for feedback on what happened and what you could do better. I mean, that's feedback is a gift, but not everyone knows how to ask for it. So do you still have a kitchen cabinet or teachers on Rolodex that you call?

Aaron Grossman 18:40

Absolutely. I mean, really, absolutely. And part of it is sometimes it's just therapy. So uh that's part of it. But last summer I took out a teacher for coffee. It was her second year teaching, and she looked at me and she's like, What could I possibly tell you? And I said, more than you probably know because I'm old now. And you are on all kinds of platforms that I know exist: TikTok and Instagram and Pinterest, but I'm not attending to them. So you're gonna tell me, I'm gonna tell you sort of an outcome, and you're gonna tell me how you hit it with all these different things that you're now aware of. And I learned so much from that experience. And some of these things, you know, I've absolutely used. Some are they don't fit well with me. She does a lot of singing and dancing. That's not really me.

Rose Else-Mitchell 19:20

I can see it. So I'm wondering, you know, as you've learned new things, how have you made decisions about use this, not use that? Because not everything can be action research, not everything can be proven by end-of-unit test or a standardized test. So, how do you make that decision? Because it's really one of judgment and discernment and experience, but I think it's part of what can create overwhelm, you know, even for experienced teachers is as new things come on, they feel always that they're additional. How do you make those decisions yourself in your instruction?

Aaron Grossman 19:49

You know, it took me a long time to figure this out. Certainly the first cues came from Robert Slavin, which is the difference between research and evidence. And I know that I was handed things in the past that were absolutely research-based, but the interpretation of that research may not have actually had any evidence to support it. And so a lot of things that I have dropped, I knew were well-intentioned, but they just didn't seem to work as well as I thought they might. And later, when I realized, well, there was no evidence for whatever. I'll give you a very specific example: reading fluency. I was handed a reading program. It absolutely has reading fluency in it, but it's broad reading fluency. It's every day they're reading something different out loud. And the evidence seems to be no, it's got to be repeated reading. So, how do you get to prosody? If everything is a cold experience, I'm not going to get to expression and pace and smoothness if every day it's a brand new text. And so that's why I lean very heavily into things like readers' theater, to a certain degree, some poetry, because the scripts I give kids tend to be no more than 500 words, four parts. That means you're responsible for 125 words. That means over a course of a week, you're going to get really good at your expression.

Rose Else-Mitchell 20:58

Yeah, that makes a difference for sure.

Aaron Grossman 21:00

So that's that's what's cued me, which is, you know, one, it's part reflection on was there evidence for this? And then if there wasn't, is there evidence for something that's better? Similar, but just better.

Rose Else-Mitchell 21:11

So uh would love to ask you, maybe we think about that conversation you were having with the new teacher. And if that new teacher or another one came to you as you did at that conference and said, I'll be honest, I'm really struggling. You know, what can I, what can I do, particularly in my literacy or reading instruction? And where do I start? What's the key piece of advice you would give them?

Aaron Grossman 21:31

I've gotten this question before, and I always say, look, here are the five pillars of reading. This is well substantiated. These are the things that we should be doing in our classroom. So don't overthink it. Are you doing some kind of like in the primary grades? Are you doing some kind of systematic phonics every single day? And then at my level, are we syllabicating? Are we thinking about the etymology of words? Are we looking for morphemes and those little units of meaning? Are we reading every single day? Are we asking questions about what the kids read? Are the kids reading out loud? And we'll get better at our fluency routine, but are the kids reading out loud? So I think that's always a starting place. Let's just make sure we're doing the good stuff and then we'll get better at the good stuff.

Rose Else-Mitchell 22:08

Yeah, I I really like the idea too. You're not trying to make it so fancy. You know, there's stuff that we know, and do the things that you know and stick to those. And even if they do get a little bored, practice matters. So keep doing them because we get better, right? As we teach, we get better with some of that teaching. Well, this is coming to the close. We would love to ask you what you're reading right now, or what's a book you'd recommend to our listeners.

Aaron Grossman 22:33

So uh I encourage everybody to read Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons. And I have that suggestion for a couple of reasons. One, if you read it, I want you picturing, picture a bunch of 10 and 11-year-olds in front of you as you read it. It is a remarkably good book. It is complex, it's certainly relevant to the kids that we're working with, but it's a remarkably good book. The kids are going to become stronger readers. I promise you, they're going to be engaged. But the second part to this is well, how do you curate an experience, especially if you are not particularly seasoned? And that's when I would direct you to Sharon Walpole's uh Bookworms materials. They're all housed at Open Up Resources. It's completely free. It's a again, a really strong curated experience for our kids. So read Sharon Creach, read Walk Two Moons. You'll, it's it's such a good I've not read it.

Rose Else-Mitchell 23:20

I'm I'm in. Well, Aaron, we have a a new a new thing we're trying. We're gonna do a lightning round. Yes, no's would you rather zend one word one or two word answers? All right, hardcover or paperback?

Aaron Grossman 23:32

Paperback.

Rose Else-Mitchell 23:32

New book or used book?

Aaron Grossman 23:33

Used book.

Rose Else-Mitchell 23:34

Audiobook or print?

Aaron Grossman 23:35

Print.

Rose Else-Mitchell 23:36

Classics or contemporary?

Aaron Grossman 23:37

Contemporary.

Rose Else-Mitchell 23:38

Poetry or prose?

Aaron Grossman 23:39

Prose.

Rose Else-Mitchell 23:40

And which reading researcher would you like to most have dinner with?

Aaron Grossman 23:43

David Didau.

Rose Else-Mitchell 23:44

That's a good one. And would you most rather meet your favorite author or your favorite character? And who is that?

Aaron Grossman 23:51

Well, I would love to be able to have dinner with David Brooks.

Rose Else-Mitchell 23:53

That I can't promise, but great moment to end. Thank you so much, Aaron, for a wonderful and exciting and wide-ranging conversation. It's just been a delight.

Aaron Grossman 24:02

Thanks so much, Rose. This has been fun.

Rose Else-Mitchell 24:07

Thanks, Aaron, for joining us for this episode of Reading Realities. And thank you all for listening. One of the themes from this conversation that stayed with me is that great teaching is not about chasing the next new thing. Aaron reminds us that the strongest classrooms are built on practices and instructional moves that we know work. As teachers, our challenge isn't to make instruction endlessly novel, it's to help students build lasting knowledge and keep them engaged in that work that matters the most. Aaron also highlighted something so important to us at the Science of Reading Center. None of us becomes a better teacher alone. He introduced me to the idea of the teacher rolodex, whether it's borrowing ideas from a veteran colleague, learning from a teacher just starting out, or reaching out to a researcher with a question. Professional growth happens through conversation, through shared practice, and some vulnerability. Teaching can really feel isolating, but it doesn't have to be. If you'd like to learn more about our work or 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, as well as the references from today, in the show notes. 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. And if you could take a moment to rate and review the show, it would really help us reach more educators doing this work. We'll be back soon with more conversations from educators navigating the realities of reading instruction. Thanks so much for listening.