Adolescent Literacy, Episode 2: Moving the needle for adolescent readers, with Julie Burtscher Brown, Ed.D.

In the second episode of a special four-part Science of Reading: The Podcast adolescent literacy miniseries, Susan Lambert, Ed.D., speaks with Julie Burtscher Brown, Ed.D. a PreK–12 literacy facilitator. Julie talks about how she and her colleagues built a whole-school literacy initiative from the ground up, and what three years of data about it then revealed. Together, she and Susan also discuss why a few targeted, evidence-based practices (not sweeping overhauls) were what actually moved the needle for Julie's students; how content-area teachers can begin supporting literacy without reinventing their lessons; and what real, measurable change can look like at the secondary level when a whole school commits to the same practices. 

Show notes:

• Our Summer Learning Academy is back! Reserve your spot now to join Susan Lambert to dive deeper into the latest reading comprehension research.
• Check out our Science of Reading resources for grades 6-8.
• Connect with Julie Burtscher Brown on LinkedIn.
• Learn more about the Project for Adolescent Literacy.
• Explore Structured Literacy Interventions with Secondary Students.
• Review the IES 2022 Practice Guide
• Watch: Anita Archer: Secondary Reading—Implementing High-Leverage Practices.
• Get ready for Season 3 of the Amplify podcast Beyond My Years.
• Join our community Facebook group.
• Connect with Susan Lambert. 

Quotes:

"Adolescent literacy is enormous and multifaceted. There's specialized instruction that needs to happen." —Julie Burtscher Brown

"If you think of the word 'intervene' as a verb, it means to take action to prevent a predictable outcome." —Julie Burtscher Brown

"Real, meaningful change can happen." —Julie Burtscher Brown

"We reframed the word 'intervention' as an action, not a place." —Julie Burtscher Brown

Timestamps*:
01:00 Introduction: Actually moving the needle for adolescent readers, with Julie Burtscher Brown, Ed.D.
09:00 A structured literacy program at Vermont's Woodstock Union High school and Middle School
11:00 Grouping students by readiness
17:00 Moving toward a whole-school literacy initiative
23:00 High-leverage practices #1 and #2: Reading accurately and fluently
30:00 High-leverage practices #3 and #4: Building word and world knowledge and accessing complex texts
39:00 Building teacher leadership
44:00 "Adolescent literacy is enormous and multifaceted. There's specialized instruction that needs to happen."
46:00 Closing thoughts: what three years of whole-school effort produced
*Timestamps are approximate

Transcript

[00:00:00] Julie Burtscher Brown: One of the things that makes our story so hopeful is things don't look very different than they used to. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.

[00:00:13] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. Today, we're continuing our Adolescent Literacy miniseries. Over these four episodes, we're exploring the research specifically about serving this important group of learners. In part one, we spoke with Dr. Douglas Fisher, co-author of the recent book Teaching Foundational Skills to Adolescent Readers.

[00:00:36] Douglas Fisher: If you're going to look at the body of research on adolescents and literacy, self-efficacy agency is huge.

[00:00:42] Susan Lambert: Today, in part two, we're speaking with someone who has seen tremendous progress in adolescent literacy in her own community.

[00:00:50] Julie Burtscher Brown: If they can learn when they're 17, they can learn when they're seven. And look at the difference it makes in their lives.

[00:00:57] Susan Lambert: Dr. Julie Burtscher Brown has worked at the intersection of instruction, intervention, and school-wide systems as a structured literacy teacher, secondary special educator, multilingual learner teacher, MLL coordinator, and district pre-K through 12 literacy facilitator for Mountain View Supervisory Union in Woodstock, Vermont.

She established the structured literacy program at Woodstock Middle and High School, the first public secondary program of its kind in Vermont, which we will definitely talk about. She's also a founding member of the Project for Adolescent Literacy. Together, we're going to unpack highlights from the 2022 IES practice guide on providing reading interventions for students in grades four through nine.

And just before I bring her on, let me remind listeners that we've also put together a bundle of e-books about the Science of Reading and adolescent literacy. Along with listening to these episodes, please go grab those e-books and free activities at amplify.com/adolescentliteracybundle. We'll also drop a link in the show notes.

But now, please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Brown.

Well, today I'm excited to have Dr. Julie Burtscher Brown with us to talk a little bit about adolescent literacy, but I don't want to give too much of it away. But welcome, Dr. Brown.

[00:02:23] Julie Burtscher Brown: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:02:25] Susan Lambert: I'm really excited about this conversation, and I want to jump right in, but before we do that, I really think our listeners need to know a little bit about who you are, maybe tiny bit about your background. How do you fit into this literacy space?

[00:02:40] Julie Burtscher Brown: I am a special educator, secondary special educator, secondary reading specialist, and multilingual learner teacher, currently serving as my district's literacy facilitator, so helping to bring evidence-based practices K through 12 to our very rural district. We hail from a very rural part of the most rural state in the nation: Woodstock, Vermont.

Mountain View Supervisory Union has just about 1,000 students. So, my setting may be different from some others, but I do hope that our story translates across school settings for your listeners.

[00:03:18] Susan Lambert: Yeah, for sure. I do have a question for you. Did you always know that you wanted to be in the world of education?

[00:03:26] Julie Burtscher Brown: No. Nope. I always knew that I wanted to raise a family, and I was a stay-at-home mother for quite a while. And our oldest son had difficulty learning how to read. And we tried many different interventions until someone talked about structured literacy, and I didn't know what that was. And they changed his life.

And for your listeners who have children who struggle, you know that changing a child's life changes their family's life and changes their future.

[00:03:59] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:03:59] Julie Burtscher Brown: And I was so taken by the profound impact that the instruction had on our son that I wanted to learn more about it. So, I found my way into a master's program in language and literacy.

And your podcast, I've listened to nearly every episode. Hearing directly from researchers talking about their work, interpreting it for teachers, has profoundly impacted my practice. It's impacted our school's approach to reading and my own personal academic journey. So, being here with you is a real joy, and I want to thank you again for having me.

[00:04:38] Susan Lambert: Well, thank you for joining us, and thank you for sharing that story because there's so many of us in this space, and I've mentioned that before on other podcasts, so many of us that were drawn into this world because we saw our child or children really struggling to learn how to read. And I love that you mention the fact that it doesn't just have an impact on the child. Right? It impacts the family and other children. And so, yeah, thank you for joining us.

And you made it into the world of secondary education, which a lot of folks ask me, "What does the Science of Reading mean for kids in middle and high school?" And so, I'm so excited that we're going to unpack some of that work.

[00:05:19] Julie Burtscher Brown: I am, too. I'm really excited. I'm hoping as a result of our conversation, educators have a little bit more confidence in answering the question that's out there, that's on everyone's minds: Where can we even start? Yeah. It feels so big.

[00:05:35] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Not only where can we start, but listeners, you're going to hear that it works. Right? It can be effective that even though it's best to get kids early in their literacy career, we shouldn't give up on them, and we should continue to help support them.

So, you know, when we talk about that, a lot of times we focus on all the negative things that are happening. Right? You know, the NAEP scores aren't doing what they need to. So many kids come to sixth, seventh, eighth grade, high school behind. I know. It's overly complicated, but your story is a little more positive. Right? There's some simple ideas that have a big payoff.

[00:06:13] Julie Burtscher Brown: Yes. High-leverage practices for the win.

[00:06:16] Susan Lambert: Yay. We're going to unpack some of those. So, first let's actually hear your story from Woodstock Middle and High School in Vermont.

Let's maybe start at the beginning. Can you talk a little bit about what the context was or what the situation was like there?

[00:06:34] Julie Burtscher Brown: I think like many schools, we had far too many of our students really struggling with literacy, and our excellent special education department really asked themselves, "What is it going to take? We've been trying everything."

They tried so many different interventions. They tried pushing into classrooms. They tried pulling students out for homework help. So many different things. Assigning paras to read to students because they were unable to teach them how to read. And in 2012, our special education department read the National Reading Panel report, which came out in 2000.

But again, I think our story is so similar to others. In rural settings, perhaps especially, turnover is so low. Teachers tend to move to the area and stay and build their families and build their lives, and fewer teachers are coming in freshly trained with this knowledge.

And so, in 2012, 2013, they read the National Reading Panel report and tried their best to look at the research and answer the question, "What is it going to take? For our most striving readers, what kinds of services can we provide that will change their lives significantly and provide them access to the education and the independence that they need with text to access their education?" And so, our school started a structured literacy program, which was an intervention program.

And I was lucky enough to be the founding teacher, fresh out of a master's in language and literacy, no classroom experience at the secondary level, and my colleagues were so supportive of me. We knew what we wanted the program to accomplish, but we didn't know how to build such a program because we'd never seen a secondary intervention of its kind before: credit-bearing classes, small-group lessons, multi-grade classrooms.

We knew what we didn't want it to be, which was ineffective and remedial. We wanted it to be something special for our students that addressed their skills and supported them in engaging with their school community.

And so, for 10 years, 9 or 10 years, I was able to work with my colleagues creating our program, and I've put it all out there in a website for your listeners if they're interested in learning more about specifically the nuts and bolts of what we did and how we did it.

[00:09:11] Susan Lambert: Yeah, absolutely. And I'd like to talk high level a little bit about that.

Yeah, and we will link listeners in the show notes to that website, so we'll be sure to grab that. So, over the course of 10 years, I'm sure where you started was not where you ended in terms of program effectiveness.

[00:09:28] Julie Burtscher Brown: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:28] Susan Lambert: What do you remember from those early years were the first things that you tried? And I'd like to talk about some things that didn't maybe work, because I think it's important to highlight that, too.

[00:09:38] Julie Burtscher Brown: Absolutely. So, the program began with single-grade classrooms grouped by grade level, not necessarily by instructional need, and that was a mistake So, we, rather than having a paraeducator support the program and try and address the different needs in the classroom, we took a jump and said, time and time again identifying a barrier and then solving it with my colleagues, "Let's try multi-grade."

[00:10:09] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:10:09] Julie Burtscher Brown: "Let's try grouping students by what they're specifically ready to learn." And that was a game changer for us.

[00:10:16] Susan Lambert: Can I ask you, how did you decide? What did you use to determine what those students needed?

[00:10:22] Julie Burtscher Brown: Well, typically, by the time you're in high school, if you're really struggling at that basic word-level difficulty, typically you're on some sort of a plan that comes along with testing, an EST or an IEP, individualized education plan. So, we used that, and really based on phonic skill. But we also had a separate class for writing, for foundational writing skills. But typically grouped by phonic concept.

So, really our program began with a focus on students, the very basic level sound-symbol relationships.

[00:10:57] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So important. Right?

[00:10:59] Julie Burtscher Brown: So important.

[00:10:59] Susan Lambert: We talk about that all the time, gateway into reading, writing, and comprehension.

[00:11:04] Julie Burtscher Brown: And then as we started providing students with the instruction they needed to crack the code, very quickly, I didn't know this was a good thing at the time, very quickly we were able to start reducing services. "I don't think they need a para anymore to help them access text. Can we take that off their IEP?"

[00:11:20] Susan Lambert: Wow.

[00:11:20] Julie Burtscher Brown: That's a good thing. Yeah, and again, as a new teacher, I wasn't so familiar with all the ins and outs.

And then very quickly, our students who graduated from our program began exiting special education, if not entirely, then for reading-related specific learning disabilities, basic reading, reading fluency, and reading comprehension.

[00:11:43] Susan Lambert: That's amazing. Sometimes when you're identified in, or needing special education services, we assume that there's going to be no change to what that student can accomplish. And oftentimes we take that deficit approach. But you were actually able to impact students' lives to be able to reduce services or maybe even exit them.

[00:12:09] Julie Burtscher Brown: Yes.

[00:12:09] Susan Lambert: That's great. What other big lessons did you have from those times?

[00:12:14] Julie Burtscher Brown: So, grouping students by what they're ready to learn creates community. And when students can be vulnerable with each other and support each other's learning, that's when you're up and running with a school community, with a classroom community.

We learned very quickly that that classroom culture was paramount, and we learned to leverage our graduates to support our current students, to encourage them, to share with them their stories of success. "I was in this classroom. I had this very same lesson. I'm off to college next year. If I can do it, you can do it."

[00:12:53] Susan Lambert: Wow.

[00:12:54] Julie Burtscher Brown: Nothing was as powerful as that, that peer mentorship, and as well connecting students intentionally with their community. So, yearly themes with community partners to build that connection, not only to their peers within the school, but in meaningful ways to their community. I think those were the main lessons that we learned.

[00:13:18] Susan Lambert: Hmm. And I'm thinking about the students themselves because by the time you get to, well, even late elementary, but for sure middle and high school students, there's a stigma associated with not being able to read, and you know you can't read. And just for them to be able to be vulnerable. And then I would imagine be proud of what they did once they started to learn and then graduate the program.

[00:13:44] Julie Burtscher Brown: So proud of themselves, as they should be, and so brave, yet often, fairly ubiquitously, they feel alone. They blame themselves.

They don't trust the adults in their lives to help them because they've been trying and have not found success. So, building on their success. I think the hardest part about a program such as ours is the first few years when there aren't graduates yet to lean on.

But building that culture of success, I promise you, my school, our district, we are going to be here. We're going to provide you with the instruction that you need to reach independence and reach your goals. That's just game-changing.

[00:14:26] Susan Lambert: Wow, that's amazing. And that just leads me to ask you this question about how did that success for you in middle and high school impact what was happening in the elementary level?

Did that... Was there any sort of impact? Did people see what was happening and what was doing? Did that change anything at the lower grade levels?

[00:14:46] Julie Burtscher Brown: Not yet. Not yet. And in the years that I was in the classroom, no, not yet. The same year that we pioneered our structured literacy program at Woodstock High School was the same year that we adopted a balanced literacy approach and curricula in our district to follow what we thought was best practice at the time.

So not quite yet, but what it did start to do was build this understanding, a visceral understanding, that, you know what, these students can learn. If they can learn when they're 17, they can learn when they're 7. And look at the difference it makes in their lives.

So, for leadership to have those stories of success, for teachers to see that this is possible, especially in the high school, I think it started to build a little bit of credibility and momentum for what I'm most excited to talk with you about next, which is what are we doing at the Tier 1 level for all students.

[00:15:45] Susan Lambert: Yeah, for sure. Do you want to just jump into that? And then we can go and identify for our listeners some of those takeaways that you had.

But you want to talk about that Tier 1, that strong Tier 1 instruction?

[00:15:57] Julie Burtscher Brown: Yeah, absolutely. So, what we found at Woodstock High School was, yes, our Tier 3, if you will, interventions were having profound impacts on the lives of our students, life-changing instruction. Students who were truly unable to read going to college on a regular basis, going to trade school, finding independence, becoming leaders and teaching assistants in our school. However, one teacher, you can only teach 25, 20 to 25 students per year if you have a small class of four to six students.

[00:16:38] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:16:39] Julie Burtscher Brown: And we still had far too many of our students below proficient on our screeners. And so, we looked very carefully at what does the research suggest these students need, the students who are below proficient, and what can we do differently for them? Because our data was very stagnant and stubborn, like the national data is.

[00:17:00] Susan Lambert: That's right. Yeah.

[00:17:01] Julie Burtscher Brown: The problem is, it feels so big and so intractable. But just like my excellent colleagues in the special education department, they looked to the research, we looked to the research. Let's try and best understand what our striving students' needs are and how best to meet them through core instruction, and our whole effort really snowballed from there.

So, we read the 2022 IES practice guide, which I cannot recommend to your listeners enough.

[00:17:29] Susan Lambert: That's great, and we'll link listeners in the show notes to that too. That's great.

[00:17:33] Julie Burtscher Brown: And then importantly, we reframed the word intervention as an action, not a place. If you think of the word intervene as a verb, it means to take action to prevent a predictable outcome.

[00:17:49] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:50] Julie Burtscher Brown: When we looked at our data through an equity lens, we found that there were far too many groups with predictably non-proficient outcomes that we wanted to improve. So how can we intervene? What does the research suggest we do to prevent those outcomes from happening?

And evidence-based instruction, thinking about MTSS or multi-tiered systems of support, what differs between the tiers shouldn't be the presence or absence of evidence-based instruction, but rather the intensity, the explicitness with which it's taught. So, what kinds of evidence-based instruction can we infuse throughout the day to support our students?

So, that was our thinking, and our main anchor text was the 2022 IES practice guide, which has the word intervention in its title.

And when you think of intervention as an action to respond to your data instead of a place to teach a select number of skills, then it becomes much more accessible to all teachers.

[00:19:03] Susan Lambert: Amazing. So, I'm going to say back what I think I heard you say. Essentially what you did was you took the actions from the IES guide and then you infused them into core instruction, and then all the way through all of those levels of support for students. Can you tell us what one or two ways that core instruction looked differently as a result of that?

[00:19:32] Julie Burtscher Brown: Yes. So, I think one of the things that makes our story and the work of my colleagues at Woodstock High School so hopeful is things don't look very different than they used to. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. High school teachers are, all across this country, are working incredibly hard to provide meaningful learning experiences, to connect their students to their classrooms, to read, to write.

We're doing such good, important work. What are some small shifts that we can infuse into what we're already doing to help our students not read for reading's sake, but improve their reading, writing, speaking, and listening for learning's sake, because it improves their learning in my content areas. Right?

I'm not a reading teacher. I'm a math teacher, but I know when my students can pronounce the word hexagonal, when they can spell it, when they can read and talk about it, when they can write with that word, it's going to improve their learning of that word.

So I think, again, you asked what is different, students are reading more, they're writing more, and they're speaking more intentionally across the content areas.

[00:20:49] Susan Lambert: I love how you said that because I think sometimes content area teachers feel like, "Well, I can't teach reading or literacy." And more and more are coming to understand that the literacy of their content area is important for this learning process, so you said that really nicely. Thank you for sharing that.

[00:21:10] Julie Burtscher Brown: Some of the research that our teachers found most compelling was around the Matthew effect and how speech is lexically impoverished, if you will. That when we speak, we're rarely speaking above the fourth grade level And complex syntax and vocabulary and knowledge is found in text.

And so, if I want my student to master my content area, to speak, write, read, and listen like a scientist, I've got to ensure that they can access this scientific text, for example. So, providing teachers with some high-leverage strategies to scaffold students' understanding and access to text rather than level the text down to students makes all the difference.

[00:21:58] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And that is a great segue to those four things that we talked about in the pre-call, the takeaways to share with the listeners. And one of the first ones I think is helping students read accurately. Can you talk a little bit about that one?

[00:22:13] Julie Burtscher Brown: Yes. So, from the IES practice guide, the only recommendation in the practice guide, recommendation 1.1 I believe it is, teach students sound-symbol relationships.

I think that's the only recommendation that might not be entirely suitable for a driver's ed class, for example. But everything else in there, absolutely. And they have a strategy right in the IES guide around breaking apart multisyllabic words, which we know is a key barrier to students accessing text.

So, reading accurately. Let's make sure our students can read these multisyllabic words accurately. Let's just use this strategy. And even if we don't know as a teacher If we're not well-versed in morphology, I myself have unfinished learning around morphology, even helping students syllabicate the words and pronounce the words ahead of time can be incredibly powerful for students and help them remember the word and help them spell and write, read, and speak with that word, with that vocabulary word.

We started with simple syllabications. I don't know the morphemes in this word, but I can pronounce this word. I can pronounce it by syllable with my students. Let's go. We're using the words that are, were already in the vocabulary list for this lesson. Didn't have anything to prepare special for. I'm just going to take 10, 15 seconds. Ready? Let's read. Off we go. And it provides that on-ramp and that support and that continuous modeling of the strategy of reading words by parts for students.

[00:23:54] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And when we talk about the content areas, those multisyllabic words and those word parts are often quite complicated.

I think it was not too long ago, a recording with someone who said, actually science has the most... It's a content area with the most words that are multisyllabic with morphemes that actually make a difference in terms of the content.

[00:24:15] Julie Burtscher Brown: And we don't need to wait till all of our high school teachers know the nuances of morphology to be able to preview these multisyllabic words with them using the strategy right from the IES guide.

[00:24:26] Susan Lambert: Yeah. That's great. That's awesome.

Okay. So number two is then, makes a lot of sense, is helping students read fluently.

[00:24:33] Julie Burtscher Brown: Yes.

[00:24:33] Susan Lambert: Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:24:34] Julie Burtscher Brown: Absolutely. This has been so powerful for our teachers that they don't need to find anything new to read. There's plenty to read.

But let's make sure that we model for them what fluent reading is and why it's important. We're trying to translate this text into language that we can understand, and we're primed, we're wired to understand spoken language. So, if we're going to turn this text into spoken language, how can we read it like we would speak? So, let's practice that together.

The teacher might model. The students turn and read to each other. They can have practice with all kinds of short texts around an anchor text, for example, but a lot of partner reading. And right from Anita Archer's webinar that has been our North Star... I need to explain this a little bit. Let me go back there, but she talks about the "me or we" option.

So, from Anita Archer, we studied this IES practice guide, but we needed a one-liner to really communicate with our peers what is our approach. And Anita, like no one else, came up with a one-liner that we have co-opted and built our entire whole school literacy response around, which is "Every day, in every class, students read, write, and speak."

And that comes from her 2022 PaTTAN webinar, literacy symposium webinar, on high-leverage practices. So, "Every day in every class, students read, write, and speak." And in that webinar, she talks about the "me or we" option, where pairs of students can read to each other, and they have that "me or we" option: "I'm going to read," or, "Let's read it together."

So if you're looking at your directions for math class, if you're looking at a driver's education manual or a chemistry text, taking a few minutes to read it out loud with your peers, "me or we" option, ready, go. The content's already there. It's important learning, and let's just put a little bit, as we like to say, let's put the read back in reading.

And let's read this together. And it's been very powerful for our teachers to translate that IES guide into practice with Anita Archer's "Every day in every class, students read, write, and speak," and let me design my lessons around that.

[00:26:57] Susan Lambert: A pretty simple approach. Three things to remember. Right?

And I love how you said we don't have to find different texts. We don't have to find ... Like, they're right there. We can use the things we have right there. We can practice what that looks like within our content area. I mean, again, going back to thinking about what fluency sounds like in a math classroom, when you're reading a math text, is different from what fluency might sound like in social studies or in science.

And the rhythm of that language and the parsing and the phrasing and the syntax are all very specific to each of those content areas.

[00:27:30] Julie Burtscher Brown: Mm-hmm. And I like what our teachers have framed this as. You know what, we can make a big difference for our students if we make a few small changes together. And absolutely, that's in the research.

Shanahan talked about that right here on your podcast. It is so true. So, let's really think about, well, what changes are we going to ask teachers to make? What changes does the research suggest will have the greatest impact? And the IES guide and Anita Archer's webinar, to sum it all up, are our North Stars there.

So, our previewing multisyllabic words, our reading for fluency in our classrooms, we use Rasinski's rubric with our teachers to demonstrate there's multi-dimensions of fluency.

[00:28:17] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:28:18] Julie Burtscher Brown: And students are using that to rate the teacher, to rate each other, to discuss fluency, fluency connected to content area learning.

[00:28:28] Susan Lambert: That's awesome too. A little metacognition happening there too for the students, which is really impactful to get them thinking.

[00:28:35] Julie Burtscher Brown: You know, it's so important, and I think of all the places we have looked to improve secondary literacy, volume of reading and reading fluency are rather simple to integrate and have been overlooked.

So really that's, I think for us, our secret sauce. Increasing the volume of reading and reading fluency, promoting that.

[00:29:00] Susan Lambert: I think Doug Lemov would agree with you. That episode that we did with Doug Lemov around fluency was super powerful, and I think he says something very similar to that.

And that actually then helps. We know fluency and comprehension have this really bidirectional impact on each other. But number three for you is actually providing some comprehension or some key comprehension strategies. You want to tell us a little bit about that?

[00:29:25] Julie Burtscher Brown: Yes. So, the guide talks about first for comprehension is supporting word and world knowledge, and we've adopted that.

We really like that language, building word and world knowledge. What does that mean? So yeah, I used to think of vocabulary as a list of words to learn. But it turns out vocabulary represent knowledge, and the more you know about a topic, the more vocabulary words that you can develop to describe that knowledge.

And reframing vocabulary as a proxy for knowledge or as supporting, representing knowledge is very powerful. So if I, for example, want my students to deeply understand A Tale of Two Cities, I can use that as a grade-level anchor text, but I can build world knowledge around that text with a variety of ways.

Dr. Lupo and her colleagues talk about text sets quite a bit, quad text sets. Background knowledge, I can watch a little video that builds their background knowledge of the time. I can read some poetry. I can read some firsthand accounts of the Industrial Revolution. All kinds of things you can do around the text to support students' comprehension.

And again, secondary literacy is so huge. What we're talking about is some high-leverage strategies to support the striving readers in our school system, so that's what I'm really focusing in on with those strategies. Not to say this is all there is around literacy.

[00:31:00] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:31:01] Julie Burtscher Brown: All the good things we're already doing. What else can we do? Let's do reading accurately we've talked about so far. Let's support their ability, students' abilities to read fluently, and let's build their background knowledge. Let's not activate knowledge that they may not have. Let's build knowledge, and that supports vocabulary acquisition as well.

[00:31:20] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Yeah. That was a big aha for me, too, about this idea of vocabulary is not a list, but actually knowledge is the important part, and vocabulary is like a secondary benefit when you gain new knowledge about a topic. So, love that. And then number four, which is my favorite, talk to us about complex text because you know what we tend to do.

[00:31:42] Julie Burtscher Brown: I know.

[00:31:43] Susan Lambert: Even in the younger grades, it's like, "Oh, they can't read that. I'm going to give them something easier to read because I want them to be confident in their reading." Why is it so important to give all kids access to that complex text?

[00:31:58] Julie Burtscher Brown: As everything we've talked about today, you've got a podcast for that. Shanahan talks about in his recent podcast with you on leveled texts so eloquently. But complex texts are incredibly important because our students need to learn two to three thousand vocabulary words a year, something like that, to remain on par with the... there's so much to learn and know about the beautiful world we live in.

We want to provide students with learning experiences that are meaningful. And in high school, we're working with young adults who have dreams. They have goals. They have things they want to learn about. And to level down a text to a certain decodability, if you will, does them a profound disservice. It not only prevents them from developing their language capabilities, it separates them from their peers, and I don't think we talk about that enough.

So, ways that we can support our students' access to grade-level text is so important, and I absolutely love that that is the fourth recommendation in the IES practice guide. Yes, let's make sure students can read accurately. Absolutely, we're going to intentionally build their fluency because that can often be an omnipresent barrier to comprehension.

Yes, let's build their background and vocabulary knowledge, but let's do it all with complex texts to not only support reading skills but their language development.

[00:33:43] Susan Lambert: Hmm. And that sort of speaks to, not to take a couple steps back, but I'm going to, that also speaks to this idea of volume of reading. Right?

[00:33:51] Julie Burtscher Brown: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:51] Susan Lambert: And so, did you take some certain strategies to both make sure students had access to complex texts as well as had that good volume of reading? Were there specific things you did to do that?

[00:34:04] Julie Burtscher Brown: We as a faculty discussed the Matthew effect, this idea that the less you read, the slower your gains are going to be in reading, but also in knowledge.

So, to support access to complex texts, we really look to the first three recommendations. So, let's make sure students can read accurately, fluently. Let's build their background knowledge, and most importantly, let's not take away the complex texts. I think like many schools, in a misguided effort to support universal access to learning, we maybe were too quick to take away the complex texts.

[00:34:45] Susan Lambert: Got it.

[00:34:46] Julie Burtscher Brown: So, in an effort to ensure all students had access to the learning, perhaps we were teaching with the slides instead of the text. And once teachers looked at that research around the importance of complex texts and how rich they are in sentence structure and in vocabulary usage, and how there's no way to get to that rich academic vocabulary without going through texts. I think that understanding was so empowering for our teachers.

[00:35:24] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense, and it links back to something you said earlier, which is when we speak about something, our syntax is less complex, our vocabulary tends to be less complex than when we read about something, and getting students into that actual text and reading is really what we want to do.

[00:35:46] Julie Burtscher Brown: Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:35:48] Susan Lambert: All right. So, we've talked about some of these particular strategies. I love how you just walked through the IES guide, so, again, we will link listeners in the show notes to that. But it's a great one. And the other thing that I love about what you did with that is you made a decision about four things, and then you implemented four things.

We are so quick to say, "Oh, we're going to do this whole list, this whole list of stuff." And there maybe might have been other things you could have done, but you knew that those were high-impact strategies, and so, that sort of was your focus.

[00:36:22] Julie Burtscher Brown: Yeah. And hearing Anita Archer's webinar High-Leverage Practices in Secondary Literacy, and when she said, "Every day in every class, students read, write, and speak," that became our ... That was our "That's it" moment. We read the guide, and it's 80 pages. The front matter is 80 pages of excellence. I cannot recommend it enough. And what do we do? We were still left with, "But what do we do?"

[00:36:49] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:36:49] Julie Burtscher Brown: And when she gave us that one liner, then our superintendent, our principal, they all got behind that. It's on our principal's door, "Every day in every class, students read, write, and speak." And we began implementing there. And we really followed a model from Brockton High School and Dr. Sue Szachowicz. We went looking for a model.

What can this look like in high school? How are we going to roll this out? And we found Brockton High School. And at the time, Dr. Sue  Szachowicz and her team had a high school that was really in trouble, and their literacy outcomes in a very urban, large school district in Massachusetts, I believe they were on the front page of the Boston Globe as a "cesspool for dropouts."

[00:37:36] Susan Lambert: Oh my gosh.

[00:37:36] Julie Burtscher Brown: They were really, really struggling. And again, all the teachers in that school could not have been working harder. So they asked these questions that we were asking. "What can we do for our striving students to add to the good work we're already doing?"

[00:37:50] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:37:50] Julie Burtscher Brown: And she wrote a book, Transforming Brockton High School. It's out of print, but you can still find copies of it on AbeBooks, for example, and things like that. And we read that book. And that became her model of empowering teachers.

That's the key. How can you build a leadership team around literacy in a secondary setting that will lead this work? Supported by the building leadership, someone's got to set the meeting schedules, someone has to set the priority, set the vision.

[00:38:22] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:22] Julie Burtscher Brown: But our principals can't be literacy experts before this work begins. They can be literacy champions, and I'm so proud of the work of Mountain View Supervisory Union and Woodstock High School, that we have champions in our leadership that make space for this work and developed teacher leaders. So, following Brockton High School's model, we formed a secondary literacy leadership council.

And the work is never perfect. It's always ongoing. We're finishing our second year now of our ... our third year, excuse me, of our secondary literacy initiative and teacher leadership, and I'd love to tell you more about how that has really made the difference, I believe, in our school.

[00:39:04] Susan Lambert: Oh, tell us a little bit how that's made a difference.

[00:39:06] Julie Burtscher Brown: Okay, great. I'll just go ahead and tell you how that's made a difference. So, we have a group of teachers from across disciplines following Brockton High School's model where we read the research. We have Anita's mantra or her motto, "Every day in every class, students read, write, and speak."

Then, directly from her webinar, based on her webinar, we've created posters inspired by Brockton High School for our fellow teachers for their classrooms. "Every day in every class, students read." What does that look like? How are they reading? What's the "me or we" option? And we've created workshops for our colleagues that we present at staff meetings.

"Every day in every class, students read, write, and speak." Let's do a workshop on read. Let's do a workshop on writing. And then go ahead and practice it and come back the next month, and we'll talk about it. This year, we have folded into it a powerful protocol from the Goyen Foundation written by Kata Solow, When Teachers Teach Teachers, Teachers Learn.

[00:40:09] Susan Lambert: Mm.

[00:40:10] Julie Burtscher Brown: We've never done anything like this before. We are videotaping our own lessons, two-minute clips of "Every day in every class students read, write, and speak." So we're focusing on one part of that. We're having two or three colleagues videotape themselves teaching in their classrooms with our students in our setting.

[00:40:33] Susan Lambert: Wow.

[00:40:34] Julie Burtscher Brown: And then sharing that video in staff meetings, and really leaning into these routines. And that has been very powerful. So, rather than just telling our teachers, "Hey, every day in every class, students read, write, and speak." Our teachers are on board. We're still left with a lot of questions. But what does it look like?

And so, we are now, all of our meetings this year have been following that Teachers-Teaching-Teachers protocol of videoing, talking about the video, debriefing it, and then moving on to the next, but really focused on one of those practices. That has been really empowering for our teachers to be able to reflect as a department, "Okay, I'm seeing that in wellness.

I'm seeing that in AP biology. I just saw an AP math teacher talking about because/but/so strategies in their high school math class. I can see now how these strategies might work and how I might adapt them." And when we're all doing and focusing on the same high-leverage practices, we're also building community for teachers, which is very important.

[00:41:43] Susan Lambert: That is amazing.

[00:41:44] Julie Burtscher Brown: Yeah. It's been a game changer.

[00:41:45] Susan Lambert: I bet it has been because the vulnerability then to say, "Hey, whole staff, watch this video I took of my classroom." Oh, that could be scary.

[00:41:56] Julie Burtscher Brown: It really was scary, and we framed it as, you know, this isn't a video of excellence. This is a video of me trying to improve my practice ...

[00:42:05] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Love that ...

[00:42:05] Julie Burtscher Brown: ... as an issue of equity for my students. And so, what we'll do is we'll, if we're focusing on writing for several months, for example, teachers who are part of the Literacy Leadership Council will do the videoing first. So, they'll video from their classrooms.

And then we're putting out our tentacles and finding other teachers to do the follow-ups and say, "Okay, I'm trying this strategy in my classroom. This is what it looks like. Here we go." And it's really powerful. Very powerful.

[00:42:36] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And it makes me think of this idea of education and teaching as a professional practice. Right?

[00:42:43] Julie Burtscher Brown: Yeah.

[00:42:44] Susan Lambert: So, the things that I heard you say: You studied the research. You read it. You talked about it. You found ways to implement it. You stuck with those ideas that were identified as high-impact strategies, and then you actually are starting to study your own practice. Right?

So, what does this look like for us? And how powerful. That is the true definition of a professional learning environment right there.

[00:43:16] Julie Burtscher Brown: Our colleagues are amazing. It's very empowering, I think, for schools to realize we're already doing very good, important work.

[00:43:25] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:26] Julie Burtscher Brown: When we hear the research, it's so deep, it's so wide. The problem is intractable seemingly. The data's just not budging no matter what we try. So, seeing this research come to life at Woodstock High School, I think, I hope, is very empowering for your listeners that, yes, adolescent literacy is enormous.

It's multifaceted. There's specialized instruction that needs to happen. But when we increase the volume of reading, when we scaffold up students' access to learning by introducing vocabulary words, by pronouncing multisyllabic words, by practicing reading fluency, by building intentionally word and world knowledge, when we do all that with complex texts and when we provide teachers with a learning community provided by strong leadership from the district level, real meaningful change can happen.

[00:44:30] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. That's so encouraging. You're right. There's some great news in this story, and I love that. Quick question for you. What is next... now that you're thinking about where you've come and how well you're doing? Any plans or thoughts for what's to come next?

[00:44:48] Julie Burtscher Brown: Our secondary literacy leadership council next year is being renamed WILD, Woodstock Instructional Leadership Development.

[00:44:57] Susan Lambert: I love it.

[00:44:58] Julie Burtscher Brown: And we are going to start intentionally folding in whole-class participation and pedagogy designed to reduce cognitive load and reflect learning science, so I'm really excited for that. Our through line for literacy is going to continue, and we're going to continue to follow our principal's motto, which is, "Go for traction," is what he told us.

[00:45:20] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:45:20] Julie Burtscher Brown: Let's not try terribly many new things. Let's continue to lean into what's working. Also trying to increase the rate at which we're improving for our most striving readers. So, continuing to look at the data and starting to fold in some more instructional strategies for our teachers intentionally around learning science.

We're excited for that. And I would say responding to our data. So, our end-of-year data, we don't have it yet, but we'll definitely be looking at that and, if we need to, we'll go back to the research and look carefully to inform our next steps.

[00:46:01] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:46:02] Julie Burtscher Brown: Our intervention systems are evidence-based. Our core instruction is evidence-based, but we know that we can always improve, and we're not the best that we can be yet.

We have seen some pretty profound changes in our reading data, and I would like to share them with your audience if you think that would be...

[00:46:20] Susan Lambert: Yeah, please. That would be great.

[00:46:22] Julie Burtscher Brown: So, since we started this whole school initiative, our PSAT percentage of students at or above college and career readiness for reading and writing on the PSAT has risen from 77% in 2022-23 to we're now at 88%.

[00:46:41] Susan Lambert: Oh, wow. Proficient. Congratulations.

[00:46:43] Julie Burtscher Brown: It's very encouraging to see those numbers rise. Our overall attendance, our on-time rate, our chronic absentee rate are all trending in very positive directions on our universal screener for comprehension. When you average that for grades seven through ten, that has risen 10 percentage points in three years, from 67% to 77% proficient.

[00:47:06] Susan Lambert: Wow.

[00:47:07] Julie Burtscher Brown: And we're especially proud of our tenth grade screening data, and what I like about our data at the tenth grade is even our seventh and eighth grade teachers see their work reflected in the numbers. We know in secondary, improvement can be a multi-year effort.

[00:47:25] Susan Lambert: Right. Yep.

[00:47:26] Julie Burtscher Brown: And like at the beginning of the episode when I shared, yes, our interventions were making profound differences in the lives of our most striving readers, we still had too many students who needed intervention.

[00:47:41] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:47:41] Julie Burtscher Brown: At the tenth grade level, we had 43% of our students scoring below the intervention, at or below the intervention level on our screener. So, we had 4 in 10 of our students demonstrating a need for some sort of intervention. And correlation is not causation. However, coinciding or correlating with these whole school efforts and many other good work that's happening in our district, we have brought that number down so significantly that we are now at the beginning of this year, 7% of our tenth graders scored at the, at or below the intervention level.

[00:48:21] Susan Lambert: Oh my goodness. That's amazing. How amazing.

[00:48:25] Julie Burtscher Brown: So, that means 93% of our students are above the intervention level. And that is incredibly encouraging for us to see. It's our last year that we do the screener at the universal level.

[00:48:39] Susan Lambert: Right. Yeah.

[00:48:39] Julie Burtscher Brown: And to see a steady rise year after year beginning in '23 has been very encouraging.

[00:48:47] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Well, congratulations to all the success at Woodstock, not just to you, but to the staff there, the administration there, the students there working hard. This has been a very encouraging episode, and I'm really excited about it. And thank you for joining us to tell the story of Woodstock High School, and all of the resources that you mentioned during this episode, we'll be sure to link our listeners in the show notes to that. But we're probably going to have to have you back on to talk about that next journey in your, that next wild journey, I guess, that you have and to check in on how the students are doing.

So, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.

[00:49:33] Julie Burtscher Brown: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:49:37] Susan Lambert: That was Dr. Julie Burtscher Brown. She's worked as a structured literacy teacher, secondary special educator, multilingual learner teacher, MLL coordinator, and district pre-K through 12 literacy facilitator for Mountain View Supervisory Union in Woodstock, Vermont.

She established the structured literacy program at Woodstock Middle and High School, the first public secondary program of its kind in Vermont. In addition, Julie is a founding member of the Project for Adolescent Literacy, a national educator-driven effort to confront the adolescent literacy crisis and scale effective solutions.

Please check out the show notes for a link to learn more about the Project for Adolescent Literacy, as well as Julie's wonderful website, Structured Literacy Interventions with Secondary Students. Remember, we're also sharing a collection of adolescent literacy resources, including a white paper that details four principles to genuinely engage middle school students, three e-books that explore how to strengthen middle school literacy instruction using the Science of Reading, and also a link to free poetry activities.

All of that's available in the show notes or by going directly to amplify.com/adolescentliteracybundle. Next up on part three of this Adolescent Literacy miniseries, I'll be joined by Jeanne Schopf for a closer look at some of the system-level barriers and practical considerations when it comes to adolescent literacy.

[00:51:09] Jeanne Schopf: What I've noticed in schools is we have too many initiatives. And first and foremost, we've got to get literacy right.

[00:51:15] Susan Lambert: That's next time on Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.