Science of Reading: The Podcast

Adolescent Literacy, Episode 3: What adolescent readers really need, with Jeanne Schopf

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In this third episode of our four-part adolescent literacy miniseries, Susan Lambert, Ed.D., speaks with Jeanne Schopf, interventionist, national literacy consultant, and editor of the new book Reading Isn't Optional: Fulfilling the Promise of Literacy for Secondary Students. Susan and Jeanne discuss why belief systems about at-risk readers are often the biggest barrier to change, and why that's true at every level of a school system. They also explore how scheduling, data, and coaching serve as system-level levers that principals and teachers can use to transform secondary literacy outcomes—and why leadership remains the single most powerful lever of all.

Show notes:

Quotes:

"Everything rises and falls on leadership." —Jeanne Schopf

"I had to learn that people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." —Jeanne Schopf

"If we really, truly want to change kids' lives and graduate readers, it's going to take all hands on deck. Everybody has to have a voice." —Jeanne Schopf

"Success is a team sport." —Jeanne Schopf

Timestamps*:
0:00 Introduction What adolescent readers really need, with Jeanne Schopf
3:00 Jeanne's journey from whole language to structured literacy
7:00 Discovering structured literacy
10:00 "We fall to the level of our systems"
15:00 "Everything rises and falls on leadership."
20:00 Belief systems and their impact on instruction and expectations
22:00 Building intervention time into the secondary schedule
26:00 What a good data meeting looks like
30:00 Reading Isn't Optional as a call for action
34:00 Inside the book: from belief to transformation
42:00 Oral language and scaffolding grade-level text
46:00 "You were never taught to read and it's not your fault"
47:00 Closing thoughts
*Timestamps are approximate


[00:00:00] Jeanne Schopf: If we get literacy right, we get everything else right, particularly in the secondary space. We're going to have kids coming to school. We're going to have learning and teaching and growing.

[00:00:14] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. This is part three of our adolescent literacy miniseries exploring the research on serving this particular group of learners. In parts one and two, we learned about a new model for thinking about adolescent literacy called the Reading Circuit, and we learned some lessons from some transformational gains at a Vermont middle and high school.

Today, we'll talk about the role of leadership in driving change at the secondary level. We'll explore some of the common system-level barriers and unpack how scheduling, data, and coaching all play an important role in big change. And once again, we'll explore why beliefs are especially important when it comes to serving this group of learners.

I'm joined by Jeanne Schopf, a literacy expert, motivational keynote speaker, and educational leader with more than 35 years of experience. She's the editor and contributing author of Reading Isn't Optional: Fulfilling the Promise of Literacy for Secondary Students. And before we jump in, a quick reminder to go check out our free summer learning kit for middle school literacy instruction.

This kit brings together strategies, checklists, and activities designed specifically for middle school educators, and you can download it right now at amplify.com/adolescentliteracybundle. There's also a link in the show notes. But now, please enjoy this conversation with Jeanne Schopf.

Well, I am so excited to have you on our podcast today. We have Jeanne Schopf with us. Amazing. Thank you for joining us.

[00:02:04] Jeanne Schopf: Thank you for having me. What an incredible honor.

[00:02:06] Susan Lambert: We are going to talk about something that I know is near and dear to your heart. We're going to introduce our listeners to a new resource, a new book that they can order, but we're not going to get there yet, but I'm super excited about it.

The first thing we want our listeners to know is just a little bit about you, your journey, and position yourself in this world of secondary literacy or adolescent literacy, which we're going to talk about. So go ahead.

[00:02:33] Jeanne Schopf: Yes. Thank you so much. Well, I started teaching in 1989, and I was born and raised in whole language.

And so, I was a reading and writing workshop teacher for a big portion of my career, and then when I moved into the third grade setting, our school became a Reading First school. And so, I began my training in what we know today as the Science of Reading. But as a third-grade teacher, I was on a little bit on the tail end of that initial training.

And so, I just started vaguely hearing about digraphs and diphthongs, and I really wasn't quite sure what all that meant. And along that same time, my own daughter, my youngest daughter, was having a hard time learning to read. And so I just was really pressing that she just needed more time, and they... and she just needed to be read to more because that's really what my training was steeped in.

But underneath it all, I just, I had the sense that she had something called dyslexia.

[00:03:45] Susan Lambert: Hmm.

[00:03:45] Jeanne Schopf: But I wasn't really around any kind of information that would really help me break through that mindset shift that I had to have. And so, then I decided after that period in third grade, and she started moving through, and she was a great compensator, and she did fine for a long time.

But then I had an opportunity, a sixth-grade job opened up in the middle school as a reading teacher, and I had my master's degree in reading, and yet I was not trained in the Science of Reading. I did not know how to teach a child to read. And so I said, "I want to be in the middle school," and people thought I was crazy.

"You're going to go to the middle school?" And I'm like, "Yes, I think it'll be a lot of fun."

[00:04:22] Susan Lambert: Yay.

[00:04:23] Jeanne Schopf: Yes. And so I volunteered as tribute, and I jumped up into the middle school, and I became the sixth-grade reading teacher at that time. I had no curriculum. I had no particular standards. I just like created what I thought I needed to do at that point in time.

But at that same time, the special ed director in our district asked me if I would be interested in taking a structured literacy course to serve the kids with IEPs and dyslexia on our caseloads in the middle school. And I said yes, because I just knew there was more out there that I didn't know and I didn't have access to.

[00:04:57] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:04:58] Jeanne Schopf: And so I went to this training in the summertime, and I realized, oh my good gravy, like if my daughter had had this instruction, she might have had an easier time of it through school. But the irony, Susan, is that we were a Reading First school, and my daughter was in first grade during the Reading First era, and she should have had that instruction.

[00:05:19] Susan Lambert: Oh, and she didn't get it.

[00:05:21] Jeanne Schopf: And she didn't get it.

[00:05:23] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Wow.

[00:05:24] Jeanne Schopf: Mm-hmm. Because the belief systems we all had, right, about how kids learn to read and still clinging. And I had to have my own ego death. Right? Because I was so clung to what I believed: This is what you had to do because this is what I was trained.

In that whole experience of getting that structured literacy training, I had my own ego death, like, "Oh my. There were so many kids that passed through my classrooms, and I didn't know why they were struggling, and I didn't teach them to read, and I didn't even teach my own daughter." Right?

[00:05:53] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[00:05:55] Jeanne Schopf: And that was a very painful journey for me. But it was in that journey that I got that training and I really started like, "This is the Science of Reading, and this is how you teach kids to read." And then a year later, Common Core came through, and I became the seventh grade English language arts teacher.

And that's where structured literacy came to live and breathe in my classroom, and I became this cog as far as interventionists in my building and really bringing structured literacy to our children.

[00:06:19] Susan Lambert: So, third grade up to middle school. So, that's how you made it to the secondary level. Really interesting story.

And, I've said it many times on this podcast, when we ask folks to tell their story, how many of us in this work have a child that has struggled to learn how to read? It seems to be a common theme. Either that or there's a lot of kids that were struggling to learn how to read. And it might be a little bit of both. I don't know. But that's really interesting.

[00:06:46] Jeanne Schopf: Yeah, and so my daughter ended up getting a diagnosis when she got into high school because her compensation strategies weren't working anymore in high school.

[00:06:55] Susan Lambert: Oh. Right. Right. Right.

[00:06:56] Jeanne Schopf: And she started really struggling in math, where she's never struggled before, and it just got really hard for her.

And she started also showing the negative effects of the trauma, really the social emotional trauma, of knowing that she was a bright, bright child and a bright person and should be able to read like her peers and couldn't. So, then it was this whole defeatist shame. And she still struggles with that today.

[00:07:22] Susan Lambert: Oh, man. It's so true, so true. So, you were teaching in sixth, seventh grade, but you also transitioned a little bit to a coach at the secondary level. Can you talk a little bit about that work and some of the things that you saw as you were coaching others?

[00:07:39] Jeanne Schopf: Well, my biggest challenge, because this position became open in the middle school and I was serving as a interventionist and I believed I could do the work but was getting the job and really just my principal not being real clear about the roles and responsibilities of the work that I was to do in the middle school.

[00:08:00] Susan Lambert: Okay. Yeah.

[00:08:00] Jeanne Schopf: And therefore, my colleagues not really being crystal clear about the roles and responsibilities of my work and what I was supposed to do in the building.

So, I had to manufacture my own job description and say, "Is this what you want me to do?" and then share it with the staff. And of course, because, and many people in this work, Susan, we get this enlightenment. Right? We, we get this knowledge that we didn't have, and we just want to pour into all the people that we come across of that this is, if we just did this, our kids would learn to read. And then you're met immediately with what? Resistance.

[00:08:42] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:08:44] Jeanne Schopf: And I had that experience, and so I had to learn, right, that people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

[00:08:52] Susan Lambert: Mm.

[00:08:52] Jeanne Schopf: And I just really had to find the teachers that I had built a relationship with, that they were willing to work alongside me to support their students.

And then the big shift in our building, in our middle school, was bringing in evidence-based screening assessment tools that really could identify the kids we needed to find and give them the instruction they needed. And so, when we could wrap ourselves around the data and the implications of our instruction, then we started getting more buy-in.

But it even still was more difficult. We had teachers, I had teachers that say, "I don't really like talking about data," because what we do as educators is we personalize it. Like, it's me.

[00:09:36] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:09:36] Jeanne Schopf: Like, I'm not a good teacher, and I'm not doing well. And so what I've always tried to do in this work, even as a consultant, is depersonalize the data.

Like, this is really a reflection of our systems. And as James Clear, in his work in Atomic Habits, he has this great line that I don't think ever he meant it to be a line that we use in education, but we use it, his line of, "We don't rise to the level of our goals, but we fall to the level of our systems."

[00:10:01] Susan Lambert: Oh, I love that. I love that.

[00:10:02] Jeanne Schopf: But so building those systems really helped me bring people along.

[00:10:08] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Let's talk about that assessment and that data, because... Back up a little bit. I think as elementary educators, I felt like when I was in the classroom and when I was a administrator, I felt like at the elementary level, we were a little more aware of the importance of even formative data or what we typically call summative data.

Any kind of information we take in, we'd feed that back into the system to improve our teaching. Right? Like, so it's not, like you said, it's not about, "Oh, I'm a bad teacher." It's about, "Oh, this is where this student is right now, and this is how I need to adjust something." Right? Adjust something and adjust something.

And I always felt like, at the middle and high school level, that assessment data ended up being more, like you said, about a reflection of, "Well, I don't want to look at it because I'm not a good teacher. I have this curriculum or I have these things I need to teach. I need to keep moving through the content or the kids are never going to get it."

So, all I'm trying to say here is that the timing, the elementary teachers have all day long. Secondary teachers have this window of opportunity. The system, to your point, isn't always set up appropriately to help us use that data in terms of thinking about what we can do next.

That was a really long way to say it's important to understand where students are at.

[00:11:31] Jeanne Schopf: Well, you and I have been in this game a long time, and I remember when I first started teaching, I did just that. I had curriculum. I had assessments at the end.

[00:11:42] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:11:42] Jeanne Schopf: And I taught what I was supposed to teach, and I gave the grade that I was supposed to give, and that grade went on the report card, and the students get the grade, and I kept just, just kept doing the same thing.

[00:11:52] Susan Lambert: Keep going. Yep, yep, yep.

[00:11:52] Jeanne Schopf: And it really wasn't until when I was... I started actually in sixth grade, and then went to fifth grade, and then went to third grade, but it really wasn't until when I was in third grade and we became a Reading First school that we started having a screening tool that we started using.

[00:12:05] Susan Lambert: Okay. Yep. Yep.

[00:12:05] Jeanne Schopf: And when that data came through with that universal screener, we still were not in that paradigm of shifting our mindset around, "Okay, they're behind. What are we going to do to catch them up?"

[00:12:17] Susan Lambert: Yep. Yep.

[00:12:17] Jeanne Schopf: It was more, "They're behind. Let's give them intervention so then they qualify for special education."

And that's what happened with my own daughter. Right?

[00:12:26] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah.

[00:12:26] Jeanne Schopf: They just thought, "They're behind. She needs special education." And I'm like, "No. We need to, we need to figure this out."

[00:12:33] Susan Lambert: Right. Yeah.

[00:12:33] Jeanne Schopf: But we weren't quite caught up to that.

[00:12:35] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:12:35] Jeanne Schopf: So then, when we think about going into the secondary space, we're not even close to having, in my work across the country, systems in place where kids are getting screened universally three times a year, and we're looking at that data in ways like, "What are we going to do to catch them up with their unfinished learning?"

[00:12:54] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Right.

[00:12:54] Jeanne Schopf: Because the reality is... Reid Lyon, he spoke to this, that, and I speak to this often, that of the 75% of the kids that we have that are struggling, particularly in the upper grades, 90% of them are instructional casualties. Like, they were never really taught to read.

[00:13:08] Susan Lambert: Yeah. So true. Instructional casualties, that's an important term to say. It's not their fault. They didn't get the instruction they needed to have in the previous grades, and we need to figure out what we can do to help them get it now.

[00:13:21] Jeanne Schopf: And we need to have the systems in place, the assessment system in place, so we screen. And then, we look at the screening data, and we have our schedule ready where kids can get that intervention that they need to build up those foundational gaps, as well as integrating that really good instruction into our core instruction.

[00:13:39] Susan Lambert: Yeah, absolutely. So you went from practitioner, you went from in your district to being this national consultant.

And I'd really like for you to talk a little bit about what did you notice that was happening across the nation? Because it can be one thing for it to happen in your own backyard in the context you're working in, but did you have some ahas about what was happening across the nation as you started to work there?

[00:14:07] Jeanne Schopf: Well, I mean, I think the ahas I'm having is, is the reality of what I experienced in my own district is the experiences that a lot of people are having still everywhere.

[00:14:18] Susan Lambert: Did that surprise you?

[00:14:20] Jeanne Schopf: It does, but yet in a way it doesn't, because, and even in my own district when I came in with this information, we started making our transition into getting the systems in place and changing our schedule.

The reality is that everything rises and falls on leadership. And as much as I really knew this is what had to happen with kids, and I could do it in my classroom, I couldn't, I couldn't break that barrier to lift it beyond my four walls in my classroom until I really started bringing my school leader along with me.

[00:14:57] Susan Lambert: Hmm. Hmm.

[00:14:59] Jeanne Schopf: And so when I'm in schools across the country, schools that are really shifting on a dime, it's because leaders are owning the data, and they're owning the conversations, and they're owning the problem so they can be part of the solution.

[00:15:16] Susan Lambert: Hmm. And I think educators, whether they're elementary, middle, or high school right now, will connect with that because I know we've heard a lot of teachers say, "Listen, I'm trying in my own classroom. I really am, but it seems like I'm only making a little tiny bit of difference, and what can I do next?"

And so I've heard lots of people say, "Bring in your leadership." Like, it's those system-level barriers you're talking about, isn't it?

[00:15:44] Jeanne Schopf: Mm-hmm. Because it has to start. And I know our school leaders, they're working hard. Right?

[00:15:52] Susan Lambert: Oh, yes.

[00:15:52] Jeanne Schopf: They're managing their schools. Yes. Their day is constantly being intercepted by text messages of this situation and that situation, and so they're managing.

[00:16:01] Susan Lambert: Oh, yeah.

[00:16:01] Jeanne Schopf: But this is what I truly believe. Right? If we get literacy right, we get everything else right.

[00:16:06] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:16:06] Jeanne Schopf: If the vast majority of our students can access grade-level text, particularly in the secondary space, we're going to have kids coming to school.

We're going to have kids staying in the classroom. We're going to have learning and teaching and growing. We're going to have all those things, so we really have to really just understand that we have to dive into why are kids disenchanted and why are kids unmotivated and why do we have outbursts in our classrooms?

[00:16:31] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. If you had a piece of advice for teachers about bringing leadership in, because I know you tried to do that in your own context, do you have any advice for them? And we're going to talk about leaders too, but first let's look at teachers. Like, what would be your advice?

[00:16:48] Jeanne Schopf: Don't give up. Oh.

[00:16:51] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:16:52] Jeanne Schopf: Just be persistent. Be that large voice in the room that just will not stop. And I know for me, I had the luxury of having a school leader that had his own students coming through the district.

[00:17:12] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:17:14] Jeanne Schopf: And when I personalized reading and literacy to his own children, that helped him lean in and lead.

[00:17:26] Susan Lambert: Mm. Yeah.

[00:17:27] Jeanne Schopf: And I think, as you said, we're all... most of us are in this space because we have a personal story, but we all have a personal story. We all have our own children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews that have a personal story of reading not becoming easy.

[00:17:46] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:17:46] Jeanne Schopf: And that it not being okay that we continue doing what we've always done.

[00:17:51] Susan Lambert: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[00:17:52] Jeanne Schopf: Because as Stephanie Stollar said in a recent podcast, we know too much to fail so many.

[00:17:58] Susan Lambert: Oh, that's... yeah, that is brilliant, and it's so true. And what you highlighted early on about your own daughter, and it's shameful to kids because they know they can't read like some of their peers. And I don't know that they have the tools to even be able to talk about it. So as adults in the classrooms and in leadership positions, it's really imperative for us to get this thing right.

[00:18:26] Jeanne Schopf: And I think what's going to help us get this right is overcoming our own belief system about our students that are struggling.

[00:18:35] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:18:36] Jeanne Schopf: Because, particularly in the upper grades, our belief system about our struggling students impacts our instruction. It impacts our expectations on our children.

[00:18:50] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:18:52] Jeanne Schopf: And if we don't wrestle with that, about our own belief system about children who are struggling, because what happens is, particularly in the upper grades, it's like, "Well, the kid's not motivated. They didn't try."

[00:19:05] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:19:05] Jeanne Schopf: "They're not engaged." And that's where we have to lean into, "Well, why are they unmotivated, and why are they disengaged?"

[00:19:14] Susan Lambert: Yeah. It's such a theme with adolescent literacy to think about the mindset, right, that we have, and I think that's really important. And I want to come back to that because I think there's some barriers that we want to talk about. In our message or in your message to leadership, there's some real barriers that leadership can help with. Right? Do you want to talk about some of those?

[00:19:39] Jeanne Schopf: Well, particularly, and I've heard it from leaders, too, is the first barrier is themselves seeing themselves as literacy leaders, as instructional leaders.

[00:19:50] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:52] Jeanne Schopf: That's the first barrier.

[00:19:53] Susan Lambert: Tell me more about that.

[00:19:55] Jeanne Schopf: Well, because our school leaders, they're trained in managing. A lot of them come through as an educator themselves that really were not trained on what really good instruction is and what data systems tell you.

So they're coming into this space with their own belief system about how to lead, and they don't see themselves as leaders of literacy or leaders of instruction.

And once they start to see that in themselves, then they start getting close to the data or making sure that we have the right data system in place. Because in all honestly, they're the ones making those decisions. And so really not being grounded on how children learn to read and what kind of data's going to give us the right instruction, we're not going to have the right tools in the upper grades.

[00:20:42] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:42] Jeanne Schopf: But to me, I think those are the first two steps. Right? Having them see themselves. And the research is really clear. Strong instructional leadership really making a difference for reading outcomes, and we know that also to be true with our implementation science, that if we have, right, the enabling context, which is MTSS, which is leaders, which is culture and then we have all those evidence-based instructional tools and assessments, we can improve outcomes. So really it starts with our leaders.

And then once our leaders see themselves as literacy leaders and instructional leaders and understand the Science of Reading and how children learn to read, they're going to bring in the data systems, and then they're going to make sure that we have schedules in place that is going to serve our students.

So in my particular experience, I did have a leader that saw himself as an instructional leader, and he created a schedule where our kids got their core instruction. And we had a block, we had a block where it was our W.I.N. time. All kids got intervention or instruction, and it was every day. I had the luxury, and I talk to middle school specialists and teachers all the time, I say, "I had my students five days a week for 45 minutes, and I could teach them to read."

[00:21:49] Susan Lambert: So let's stop there. What is W.I.N. time?

[00:21:52] Jeanne Schopf: What-everyone-needs time.

[00:21:53] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:21:54] Jeanne Schopf: What-I-need time. So in elementary school, really good about categorizing, like we have our W.I.N. time, what-everyone-needs time, where we build in these systems of support and give them that extra dosage.

But we don't really see that in our upper grades. They have so much unfinished learning that we have to have time in our schedule, our schedule that supports instruction. Because teachers, they are tethered to their core curriculum and their content areas, and they do have to teach their content.

And so when we have kids that have unfinished learning and foundational skills, it's really our moral imperative to teach them.

[00:22:28] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[00:22:29] Jeanne Schopf: And when that... and in the middle school where we don't have graduation credits.

[00:22:32] Susan Lambert: So, part of the issue here is you can have a great assessment and understand those kids that are at risk and need some extra support, but if you don't have that time built into your schedule in middle and high school to give them that support, then what happens? Right What do you do about that?

So that's a little bit of a paradigm shift, isn't it, to build that into the schedule.

[00:22:52] Jeanne Schopf: Well, right, and that's why our graduation rates are increasing, yet in our National Assessment of Educational Progress came out in 2024, we have 70% of our kids graduating not at the proficient level.

[00:23:04] Susan Lambert: Right. Yeah, yeah. Give them what they need. Right? Put time in the schedule. That's a leadership response.

[00:23:10] Jeanne Schopf: That's a leader move. Put time in the schedule.

[00:23:12] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:23:12] Jeanne Schopf: Another leader move is, quite frankly, is making sure people are trained, and they have good curriculum, and making sure that they get training on the good curricular tools. Right?So they can deliver it, and that's really a critical piece, too.

[00:23:24] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:23:25] Jeanne Schopf: Because we can have a tool, but if I never got training on it, then I'm not going to serve the kids in the way that they need.

[00:23:31] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk a little bit about that training because I would imagine that there is a lot of leadership in elementary school that says, "I don't know how kids learn how to read. I don't know the cognitive capacities I need to support."

And so what would you say to leadership who is, "We need to make this change, but I'm not a literacy expert. How can I lead this school when I'm not an expert in literacy?"

[00:23:58] Jeanne Schopf: They have to also have the same ego death that I did and many other teachers did. Like, we weren't trained. We don't know. But I need to learn. Because in all reality, right, you can have this beautiful vision and this wonderful mission that is on the wall, but teachers are going to buy into the leader before they buy into the vision.

[00:24:23] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:23] Jeanne Schopf: And they're only going to buy into that leader if they have the trust and the credibility to follow them.

[00:24:30] Susan Lambert: Yeah, and I would imagine as a leader, it takes a little bit of being humble and being willing to say, "I don't know, but we might have to learn this together." So, taking that step together is really important.

[00:24:42] Jeanne Schopf: It's really important that they are leading us, and they bring in professional development, and they're not on their computers. They're completely engaged with the learning and growing together as a unit, as a team. Because really, we're all here to serve our children, and we want... everybody wants what's best for them.

[00:25:03] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:25:03] Jeanne Schopf: But the reality is many of us were not trained in instruction, in explicit systematic instruction. Not everybody had the privilege of being taught on what good instruction is, and they certainly have not been trained on how the brain learns and how to bring that instruction to life into our classrooms.

[00:25:19] Susan Lambert: Yeah, such important things. Okay, so I think I took us on a rabbit trail there, but let's go back to some of these system-level barriers. Anything else you want to highlight in terms of system-level barriers?

[00:25:30] Jeanne Schopf: Well, not only do we have to have an assessment protocol that's in place, but we also have to have our data team meetings.

So, as many leaders in the space say, "We have data," right? But we just got to get around and talk about it, and then leave that data meeting with a plan on how it's going to improve our instruction.

So anytime we meet, right, it's always around what is our data telling us, whether in the middle school and high school, just helping middle school and high school teachers understand the role of formative assessment being attached to whatever my learning target is, and really looking deeply at my formative assessment, and did my kids learn what they were expected to learn? If not, what can I do? Because how well I teach equals how well they learn.

[00:26:16] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:26:17] Jeanne Schopf: What can I do differently next time rather than saying, "Well, they just didn't try," or, "They weren't engaged"? So having time in the schedule that allows middle school and high school teachers to regularly talk about their formative assessment as it's attached to our learning targets, and then look at really the assessment protocol that we are gathering as related to oral reading fluency measures and our foundational skills, and marrying those two together and understanding that.

Because I was just recently asked to be an advocate in an IEP meeting, and this particular student had really slow oral reading fluency measure. She was accurate, but her rate was way beyond what she needed to have as to be able to access grade-level text.

[00:27:02] Susan Lambert: Okay.

[00:27:02] Jeanne Schopf: And as I listened to the special ed teacher speak, he's basically using the language of, "Well, she just needs to improve her comprehension."

[00:27:10] Susan Lambert: Mm. Okay.

[00:27:12] Jeanne Schopf: And I'm like, "Hmm, we really don't understand what kind of data we need to be collecting, and what the data is telling us and what kind of instruction our student needs in order to close those gaps."

[00:27:23] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So what would your advice be like, because okay, so we have oral reading fluency measure which is a good indicator. Right? A good proxy for comprehension. The student is accurate, great. That's important, too. But the rate isn't appropriate. So what was a solution there? What's the next step?

[00:27:44] Jeanne Schopf: Well, I, as an advocate, right, I was not able to continue this conversation. But if I could have, I would've said if the student is 98% accurate on the oral reading fluency measure, we have to work on automaticity of word reading. And so we need lots and lots of practice at reading words at the phrase and sentence level and the passage level.

So that's what I would recommend. But that is not just a special education challenge in itself.

[00:28:14] Susan Lambert: I was going to say the same thing.

[00:28:16] Jeanne Schopf: It is also the role and responsibility of the classroom teacher to ensure that children are in text and reading text, choral reading, cloze reading, echo reading, shared structure partner reading. They have to work together because the gaps are too big to just address in isolation.

And then back to leaders. Sometimes we have this broad stroke about who a leader is in the building, and yes, it's the building leader, but it's quite frankly the special education director that also needs to be leading this because they are the ones that are signing their names off on IEPs that are not written and aligned to the science and what kids really need to close the gaps.

[00:28:55] Susan Lambert: And that is, goes back to, sorry, we're going to loop back again to professional development and knowledge... If you don't have an understanding about how comprehension is impacted by word reading, automatic reading, prosody, right, then you won't know how to make a very specific recommendation or how to support that student then in getting where they need to get.

[00:29:18] Jeanne Schopf: And so one of the work that I did in one school district was working with the special ed director and the special ed teachers, helping them understand how children learn to read and what the data is telling you in writing appropriate IEP goals, either grounded in word recognition or grounded in fluency or grounded in language comprehension.

So if we have a student who has the appropriate rate and has great accuracy but still can't make a mental model or comprehend, then we're talking about language deficits. And so, let's bring in a language screener, and let's bring in language intervention.

[00:29:52] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Such a good point. Well, all this probably then leads to a reason for your co-authoring and editing this book.

And the title of the book is called Reading Isn't Optional: Fulfilling the Promise of Literacy for Secondary Students. So, first of all, why this book and why now?

[00:30:16] Jeanne Schopf: Well, we know that right now we have a lot of kids, as the national data is indicating, going into middle and high school that have so much unfinished learning, and we continue to just push them through and push them into graduation.

And so, this is really an unfulfilled promise for our students, and there's a lot of kids that are in these words, in this text, of kids that I worked with in my own building and my own daughters that deserved to have high-quality instruction in middle and high school and were not on the receiving end of it, and therefore internalize that they're not smart enough, they're not good enough.

[00:31:01] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:31:01] Jeanne Schopf: And have this, the depression and the shame that goes along with kids who are every day faced with, "I can't do what my peers can do. I must be stupid."

[00:31:11] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Mm.

[00:31:12] Jeanne Schopf: And going into spaces now where I'm talking to teachers, good friends of mine who are in education, and talking to teachers that say, "What is the Science of Reading? And is there a book for me?"

[00:31:27] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:31:27] Jeanne Schopf: And I would say, "No. There really isn't." And realizing that I always say when I was working with my students and I was doing this intervention and COVID hit and my principal kept pulling me to cover choir and band and cover these classes. And I'd say, "I have to teach these kids to read. It's a moral imperative. I teach and they read." And he goes... And I always thought, "If not me, who?"

[00:31:55] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:31:56] Jeanne Schopf: And so for this book, it's like it's if not us in middle and high school, who? Who's going to teach them? And then realizing it's one thing, because the research, Susan, has been there since 2008.

The IES practice guides came out on improving adolescent literacy. The new guides came out two years, three years ago on interventions grades four through nine. So, we've had the research available to us, and I did the work in my classroom, but couldn't have really transformed kids' lives without the collective call. The collective call of systems in place.

And understanding what the Science of Reading is, and understanding what implementation science is, and understanding, having that MTSS system and having that coaching and having that leader lead. I can do this work in my classroom, but it's only going to impact a few kids that I have control over.

And so that's where I started ruminating with this, and then just I started having conversations with other leaders, and they're like, "Well, Jeanne, why don't you write it?"

[00:33:12] Susan Lambert: And I think in our pre-call, you really talked about this idea of this book is not so much about instruction, which it is.

I mean, there's... And we can link our listeners in the show notes, too, to those IES guides because they're brilliant and fantastic. But this book is really about transformation. Right? Going beyond the classroom.

[00:33:31] Jeanne Schopf: Right. This is really a call for action.

[00:33:34] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:34] Jeanne Schopf: Because in realizing my own personal experience and how just the resistance I even experienced, I realized one is too small of a number for greatness. If we really, truly want to change kids' lives and graduate readers, it's going to take all hands on deck.

[00:33:50] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:33:51] Jeanne Schopf: Everybody has to have a voice. And so, when I was processing this, I thought, "Well, I can write about leadership, and I can write about systems, and I can write about coaching."

But there are other people who have way bigger voices that have done this work that need to be part of this text. And so that's really what I realized. Success really is a team sport. And I needed to have a team, a team of voices that were going to just raise this to a new level than just me writing a book and having it go out there.

[00:34:23] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Can you talk just a little bit about some of the topics that you cover throughout this book, just to give our listeners a sense of your table of contents, if you will, and what they can expect?

[00:34:34] Jeanne Schopf: Yes. So I mean, I had the honor to write the first chapter, which is really about our belief systems, because I truly, truly believe... Beliefs, right?

[00:34:44] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:34:45] Jeanne Schopf: If we don't change our mindset about our students that are struggling, it's going to end there.

[00:34:51] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that.

[00:34:53] Jeanne Schopf: Because I go back to my own daughter, who was in first grade and should have received structured literacy based on the tenets of the National Reading Panel report during the Reading First initiative. Yet she didn't get it. Why? Because the teacher didn't buy in, and the leader didn't either.

[00:35:16] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:35:17] Jeanne Schopf: And so that's why it's all about changing our belief system. And then, of course, we needed to have like, okay, I'm changing my belief system. I know I have to teach kids to read, but what is the Science of Reading?

So we had to have a chapter on what is the Science of Reading, what is the science of instruction, because I might know I've got to teach them to read words, but if I don't have good instruction in my classroom, good explicit instruction, I'm not going to move the needle either. And then I have to have understanding about implementation science, because to my point earlier, if we want to have outcomes, we have to have all those systems in place.

[00:35:53] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:35:54] Jeanne Schopf: So those are the beginning chapters, and then we get into the foundations of literacy transformation on leadership.

[00:36:00] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:00] Jeanne Schopf: We need our leaders to lead us. We need our leaders to be instructional leaders. We need our leaders to lean into what they don't know, to learn alongside us, and to lead us. And then we need to have a system in place, an MTSS system that helps us rise to a level of our goals.

If we don't have a system in place, I could be teaching my heart out in my classroom, but it's not going to make a dent. Right?

[00:36:22] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:36:23] Jeanne Schopf: And then, of course, we need to have coaching. And, a lot of people talk about having coaches, but it has to be really, really clear, because we know what the research says.

Joyce and Showers did this research years ago that we do professional development. What, we have 5% of those teachers that actually translate what they've learned into their classroom. I was one of those. I'm sure, Susan, you were one of those.

[00:36:40] Susan Lambert: Me too.

[00:36:41] Jeanne Schopf: Right? You were one of those that said, "Oh my gosh, I've got to do it right away."

But there are a few teachers like that out there, and so we need to have somebody working through that instruction and helping us grow in our instruction that's a colleague, a partner, a think partner that works alongside that principal and just as that bridge to that gap.

So that's why we have to have that, because frankly, we don't have those pieces and parts, it's going to be really difficult to change our reading outcomes.

[00:37:04] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And to be fair, sometimes as a teacher, I felt like I would go to this professional development or hear something, and I would get excited about it, but there was always something else that that took my attention away. Like, I had to do this, or I had to do that. And so this idea of implementation after you learn something exciting is often difficult, and it's better with a team. Right? It's better when you have people help you.

[00:37:27] Jeanne Schopf: Right. And that's why we need the coaching. But also to your point, Susan, what made it difficult is conflicting priorities.

[00:37:35] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:37:35] Jeanne Schopf: And what I've noticed in schools is we have too many initiatives. And first and foremost, we've got to get literacy right.

[00:37:42] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:37:43] Jeanne Schopf: We get literacy right, we get a lot of other things right.

[00:37:45] Susan Lambert: Yep.

[00:37:45] Jeanne Schopf: And we get instruction right, we get a lot of things right.

[00:37:49] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. It's a really good point. It's the point about you can't put something on your plate, your plate is going to overflow, so what are we going to not do? Deciding what not to do is often super important.

[00:38:02] Jeanne Schopf: It's that deimplementation. The deimplementation.

[00:38:04] Susan Lambert: That's right.

[00:38:05] Jeanne Schopf: Which we're not so good at because we keep doing what we've always done. And we just don't rethink to say, "Hmm. Is what I'm doing working for students? Is it working for the vast majority of my students? Is this data I'm collecting, are we even talking about it?"

[00:38:18] Susan Lambert: Yeah. That episode we did with Doug Reeves was brilliant about that. Right? Like, this whole concept of what does implementation and deimplementation look like? So it's a really good point. Okay, so back to the TOC. What else are we going to expect from this book, Jeanne?

[00:38:31] Jeanne Schopf: Well, of course, we can have the foundation of transformation, and then, then comes, okay, now what do I do about it?

[00:38:38] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:38:38] Jeanne Schopf: And what does it look like in the secondary space? And so we have brilliant leaders, experts that across the country who have put their expertise and their words into this book. So we're going to have a chapter on what is comprehension because so many of ...

When I was doing coaching in my building, I would have teachers come up to me saying, "My kids can't comprehend. My kids can't comprehend." Well, what does that mean? So we had to have a chapter that broke that down. Like, this is what it really means.

And then, of course, because we're in the secondary space, we have to speak to our content teachers and the whole idea of disciplinary literacy. That has gotten a lot of attention lately.

[00:39:20] Susan Lambert: It has.

[00:39:20] Jeanne Schopf: No doubt it's one of those hot terms. And so bringing in Nancy Hennessy and Julie Salamone, who are boots on the ground doing this work to really shed light on what that actually is and what it looks like in your classroom, was a key piece to putting that section together.

And of course, speaking of assessments, we have to have a chapter on fluency.

[00:39:39] Susan Lambert: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:39:40] Jeanne Schopf: And because... That chapter drives everything else we do, because if teachers understand oral reading fluency and what fluency means, they can really understand what they're seeing with their students.

So if I was in that IEP meeting as an advocate and we had earned fluency data, even though I had that data because they didn't, being able to look at that and say, "Oh, look at where their rate is. They're so slow in their reading rate that they're accurate, but they can't... Their working memory is processing all of these words. They have no working memory available to actually integrate what they just read."

[00:40:16] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. So important.

[00:40:17] Jeanne Schopf: And so, if secondary teachers understand what fluency is and how it exasperates yourself in the classroom, then we can make instructional moves to support them.

[00:40:26] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good point. Really good point.

[00:40:29] Jeanne Schopf: So we have that chapter, and then because we know so much of the role of comprehension is vocabulary, and that has been around forever. Right? About explicit vocabulary instruction, but yet it's not coming to life in classrooms.

[00:40:44] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:40:45] Jeanne Schopf: We have to get it to come to life. We have to be real intentional about that, and we have to change our instruction around how we integrate vocabulary into our classrooms.

Then there's a chapter on... Well, my really important chapter. They're all important, but the one that I really am tethered to because it was work that I really did in my classroom is about bringing oral language into our classrooms. It's so critical.

I know you just spoke to that about our elementary years and our kids talking. It's even more critical in our secondary space. I think the research is really clear that we, our kids maybe have 1.7 seconds of conversation in a classroom.

[00:41:24] Susan Lambert: Oof. Oof.

[00:41:25] Jeanne Schopf: And they need way more than that. And we need to have them... If we want them to write these really complicated, high-level pieces of writing, which we expect our kids to do in secondary, then guess what? We have to have high-level academic conversations.

[00:41:44] Susan Lambert: Yeah. For sure.

[00:41:45] Jeanne Schopf: So that's in there, and then, of course, critical chapter is because we have so many kids that aren't accessing grade-level texts, we need to have a chapter that helps teachers scaffold.

Because what I saw happening in my own personal experience and I see happening is we have kids who can't access grade-level texts, so what do we do?

We lower expectations, and we lower our standards. So rather than giving them the book To Kill a Mockingbird, we give them a graphic novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

[00:42:18] Susan Lambert: The CliffsNotes. The CliffsNotes version. The leveled text idea. Right? We're going to lower the rigor so that you feel comfortable and confident doing it.

[00:42:27] Jeanne Schopf: Yeah, but we're robbing them. Right?

[00:42:28] Susan Lambert: We are.

[00:42:29] Jeanne Schopf: We're robbing them of critical vocabulary and syntax. Yep. And so what we have to do is we have to help teachers understand how to scaffold better.

[00:42:36] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:42:36] Jeanne Schopf: And then the last chapter, which I think is just imperative right now, is a chapter on our English learners.

[00:42:44] Susan Lambert: Hmm. What are you most excited about for this book to... because it, as of our recording time, I think it has not yet been released. Is that correct?

[00:42:52] Jeanne Schopf: Yes.

[00:42:53] Susan Lambert: Almost. We're getting close.

[00:42:54] Jeanne Schopf: So close.

[00:42:55] Susan Lambert: What are you most excited of for or most excited about when this book hits the market?

[00:43:02] Jeanne Schopf: I'm super excited that the NCTQ accepted it, so that means it can be on a list for books for at the college level.

[00:43:10] Susan Lambert: Oh, great.

[00:43:12] Jeanne Schopf: Because we have to have teachers who are coming into our classroom understanding the Science of Reading, implementation science, MTSS, all those parts and pieces, so they can help raise the lid in all of their buildings.

[00:43:27] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:43:27] Jeanne Schopf: So I'm super excited about getting it in the hands in our higher ed.

I'm super excited that it's going to be the... it was selected as the National Reading League chapter book study for the summer.

[00:43:41] Susan Lambert: Oh, that's so great. That's so great.

[00:43:44] Jeanne Schopf: Because we need to get it out there everywhere. And we need to also bring in our upper grades... our middle school and our secondary teachers into the Reading League chapters and get them involved because we're serving all children in our state. So I'm super excited for the potential of that.

[00:44:01] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:44:01] Jeanne Schopf: I just hope it gives people hope that they can change the lives of their students.

[00:44:08] Susan Lambert: Well, and what's so exciting to me is I have lots of middle, high school teachers ask, they want to know, "What does the Science of Reading mean for me? How can it help me in my classroom?"

And you just filling this gap by helping them see with a book. Right? Like, books are always so great, and by the time listeners are hearing this, it'll actually be available, so that's cool. But this is just a really amazing space and an amazing resource that you're bringing to middle and high school teachers and administrators to really help support.

Because I truly believe that they want to help, too, but we haven't, as a field, necessarily provided as much support or information for them.

[00:44:53] Jeanne Schopf: And to your point, two stories. So one of them, I have a good friend of mine who teaches in a high school, and I talk to her often, and she's often like, "I know. We see it everywhere. Our whole department sees we don't have kids that can read. We're all struggling." This is a big high school, and she's like, "But we don't know what to do." And I say, "But we do. But we do know what to do." Right? Our leaders need to lead because our kids, it comes down to our kids are suffering, and it's not okay.

And so I had a student, seventh grade, that I heard all the stories about him. Again, beliefs. My beliefs of struggling students, "Oh, give him anything, he'll refuse to do it, and blah, blah, blah, blah. He's from that family, blah, blah, blah, blah." I heard it all. And then when he came into my room for intervention, he... you could tell he was oppositionally defiant.

He was not wanting to be there, and he refused to engage. And it took me a few days, and then I finally started just breaking down the reading brain and how children learn to read. And I explained to him, and to the other kids in the room, I said, "You know, you were never taught to read, and it's not your fault."

And this 200-pound kid broke down in sobs and said, "I have felt dumb my whole life."

That's what, that's what this is really about.

[00:46:17] Susan Lambert: Mm. Yeah, that's a really powerful reminder of the influence teaching, quality teaching can have on lives.

Before we wrap up, do you have any closing thoughts, pieces of advice for those middle and high school teachers or leaders that are working to make change?

[00:46:43] Jeanne Schopf: I mean, I think it's the same story I had to tell myself... was I needed to let go of my belief systems about instruction and children and reading. I really needed to lean in to what I didn't know with humility and honesty and authenticity.

And I just had to learn, and learning never stops.

You just, you keep learning every day like you are, I am, because I know we want what's best for our students.

[00:47:23] Susan Lambert: Well, I want to say thank you, not just for this podcast, but I want to say thank you for the work that you have done and continue to do, and especially thank you for pulling together a group of experts and co-authoring and editing this book that we can get this out to the world and support others in making that change in middle and high school for students.

So, thank you so much, Jeanne, and thanks for joining us.

[00:47:51] Jeanne Schopf: Thank you, Susan. It was really truly a privilege, and let's keep this work going.

[00:48:00] Susan Lambert: That was Jeanne Schopf, a literacy expert, motivational keynote speaker, and educational leader with more than 35 years of experience. She is the editor and contributing author of Reading Isn't Optional: Fulfilling the Promise of Literacy for Secondary Students. As the founder of Pathways Towards Literacy, she partners with schools and leaders to implement evidence-based practices. Visit the show notes for links.

And don't forget to download our summer learning kit, which is filled with evidence-based strategies to strengthen your middle school literacy instruction. Get your white paper, e-books, and more today by visiting amplify.com/adolescentliteracybundle. Again, there's also a link in the show notes.

Next time, we're closing out this adolescent literacy miniseries by talking about policy with Dr. Kymyona Burk. Dr. Burk will detail the similarities and differences in policy at the adolescent and early literacy levels.

[00:49:03] Kymyona Burk: So we have started with K-3. We know that there are things that work. We know how to take this comprehensive approach, and I think that we had to do that. Right? We had to see something working to be able to say, "Okay, now it's time to extend this beyond third grade."

[00:49:20] Susan Lambert: That's next time on Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify.

I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.


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