The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Best practices, tips, and stories to help you be extraordinary in your classroom and beyond, featuring Curriculum Associates' Manager, Voice of the Customer, Hayley Browning.
The Extraordinary Educators Podcast
Measuring Literacy Development with Dr. Kristen Braatz
What if a single test score isn’t telling you what matters most about your readers? We sit down with Dr. Kristen Braatz, AVP of Curriculum and Instruction at Curriculum Associates, to unpack how educators can capture a fuller, more actionable picture of literacy growth.
Kristen traces the realities behind stagnant literacy scores and the rising demands of reading in a digital world. We dig into why high-quality curriculum must go beyond comprehension checks to challenge students to analyze, argue, and create. You’ll hear how meaningful tasks, like structured discussions, frequent writing, and opportunities to teach ideas back, make thinking visible and reveal true progress. Along with that, we dive into the power of aligning assessment with instruction -- teachers gain time, students get targeted support, and literacy growth shows up both on the page and in real-life tasks.
If you’re ready to move beyond data for data’s sake and toward evidence that drives meaningful reading and writing, this conversation will give you clear steps to start now.
Read Kristen's blog: CurriculumAssociates.com/blog/measuring-literacy
Follow us on Twitter: @CurriculumAssoc
Follow us on Instagram: @MyiReady
Have feedback, questions, or want to be a guest? Email ExtraordinaryEducators@cainc.com to connect with us!
Curriculum Associates, an education technology company and the makers of iReady, presents the Extraordinary Educators Podcast. Join host Haley Browning to hear tips, best practices, and successes to improve your teaching and leadership and drive student growth and learning. We believe all educators are extraordinary and we are here to support you. Hi everyone, welcome to today's episode of the Extraordinary Educators Podcast. Today I am joined by Dr. Kristen Bratz, a member of the team here at Curriculum Associates. Dr. Kristen Bratz is an AVP of Curriculum and Instruction, and she brings a ton of experience to our topic today. We talk about this idea of measuring literacy development and better understanding literacy as a whole for your students in your own classrooms. So we dive into things like measuring literacy skills, understanding the power between assessment and instruction being connected. So Dr. Bratz runs us through how high-quality curriculum can support your literacy classrooms and wraps up with this idea of considering tools that you may want to use when measuring literacy development for your students. So with that, we hope you enjoyed today's episode with Dr. Bratz. Hi, Kristen. Welcome to today's episode of the Extraordinary Educators Podcast. Hi, Haley. It's great to be with you. We're so happy to have you on today. And with that, Kristen, before we begin, I want to give our listeners a little bit of background about you. So could you tell us a little bit about how you got here, where you are today?
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. So today I am the AVP of curriculum and instruction, and I lead a team of literacy and math experts that work with our educators to help them find solutions and understand how our products may be able to help them. And before coming to CA, I was a sixth grade teacher. I taught high school, and I was a reading specialist, K-12, and a district literacy coordinator as well. So I have enjoyed the transition to be able to still continue to work with educators in a slightly different way.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome. And it's very clear that you have a lot of experience regarding literacy. And you wrote an incredible blog that we'll make sure to link in the show notes for our listeners. But we're going to jump off of your blog topic today. So your blog is all about measuring literacy development beyond this idea of a single test score. So to kind of kick us off here, Kristen, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about measuring literacy skills as a whole. You mentioned how assessing foundational skills is just kind of one piece of this larger puzzle. So what else can our teachers or listeners be doing to assess students' literacy skills?
SPEAKER_00:I think that it is important to have measures to help us assess literacy. And those are often a great starting point for educators. When educators are able to take assessment and use it as a tool, the really important piece is that when they're thinking about literacy development, that they are mirroring those measures with things that they are observing. So we want to be able to see not just what students can do in isolation, but we want to be able to see in real authentic tasks what that looks like and if they're able to really take what we have taught them and what they may be able to demonstrate in isolation and really apply that in a task that they would be doing the rest of their life and outside of the walls of school.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's really helpful. And it kind of jumps into my next question. You had mentioned this idea of the power between assessment and instruction in your blog. So why is it important for there to be a connection between assessment and instruction, specifically in a literacy classroom? You had mentioned this idea of things not being in isolation. And does it relate to that, or is there more to this idea of assessment and instruction?
SPEAKER_00:I think there are a few things that come to mind for why it's so important. Um, first, I would say that teachers have so many things on their plate. And when we don't make connections between assessment and instruction, that cognitive load of what they're doing to look at the data that they have about their students and then make instructional decisions is very high. And we're asking them to do a lot to really interpret that data and figure out what that means for next steps, and then from there figure out what those resources might be that they need. And so when we can make that a little bit more seamless for them, it allows them to use that cognitive load for other things, like really thinking about how they're going to approach a specific skill with a specific student, or how they can really make the instruction part meaningful for their students. So that's one piece of it, I think, is just the cognitive load of that for teachers. And then the other piece is that with where literacy scores are in this country and kind of the crisis that we have in literacy, we really want to maximize every moment of instruction that we have as students. And so when we aren't looking at what we really know about them and making sure that we are leveraging every minute that we have on the things that are going to really move the needle for them, we have a missed opportunity. And so when we bring these two things together, it's just really beneficial for both students and teachers.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Kristen. That's really helpful. And Kristen, I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more. You had mentioned the kind of literacy crisis that we're in, and we're seeing some important scores coming out. Could you talk a little bit more about what these scores are, what we're seeing, what these trends are, just kind of put it into digestible terms.
SPEAKER_00:I would say that we are we are not seeing growth in literacy. Things have been fairly stagnant for a long time. And the other thing that I think about when we talk about a literacy crisis is that the world has changed in ways that just require literacy beyond what it may have been 10, you know, 20 years ago, even five years ago. Like there are so many ways that we are using our literacy skills to navigate in a digital world. And so as the demand for literacy is increasing, the you know, the scores are remaining stagnant. And so we have kind of a bigger gap, I think, between where we want kids to be and where they are, just just even because of what we are now expecting of them.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And in your blog, you also talked about the power of high-quality curriculum, and I'm sure that will have some impact on these scores. And I'm curious if you could talk about high-quality curriculum a little bit more. How would having a high-quality curriculum build out more of a full picture of literacy development? How can it better support our literacy students if we have this really solid curriculum as we're working through in our day-to-day classrooms?
SPEAKER_00:When we look at curriculum, I think we really need to consider what we are asking students to do in that curriculum. And it is very common to find curriculum where the end goal is really that students have demonstrated specific skills, that they have comprehended a text, they have acquired these skills, we have poured this knowledge into them, and they now have it. And if we are going to really change what literacy outcomes look like for students, we need to start thinking about the text that we put in front of them, the reading that we're asking them to do as a really critical piece, but not the end goal. So it's not enough to just have knowledge, it's not enough to just comprehend a text. But we really should be thinking about how are we challenging students and how are we giving them opportunities for their thinking to develop and for their thinking to be made visible. So when we are looking at what our students are doing, we want to see evidence of things like they are writing, they are having really meaningful discussions where they're taking what they've read and they're using it to help them form an opinion, to help them feel knowledgeable about a topic, knowledgeable enough that they could go then teach about that topic to somebody else. So I think that that power of curriculum is really the experiences that we put in front of students and how their literacy develops.
SPEAKER_01:That makes a lot of sense. And I like how you said the power is what we put in front of students and how it really develops from there. And from what I'm hearing, it sounds like a lot of this is more student-driven. Like you're you're kind of leading them to water and giving them the opportunity to have those in-classroom conversations. You're giving them the opportunity to write. And then I love how you mentioned that they would even then have the confidence to go and teach that themselves. That says so much about the power of that high-quality curriculum. For our listeners to kind of wrap up, I have one more question. In your blog, you had talked about tools to measure literacy development. I'm wondering if you could give just some quick hits for our listeners of what you may recommend for teachers to keep in mind when they may be looking for tools to measure literacy development?
SPEAKER_00:I would say that a couple of things I would think about when measuring literacy development are for teachers to really think about if they are understanding what is the purpose of this tool. Is it to give me a baseline? To know kind of where to go next? Is it to give me a fuller picture? Am I looking at one skill? Am I looking at multiple skills and how they're coming together? So I think really just understanding the purpose of the assessment so that they can accurately take the information and data that they receive and apply it in the right way. Just kind of understanding both the strengths and limitations of what that assessment is. And then the other piece I think is that really thinking about no one assessment is gonna give you a full picture of literacy development. So, how are you looking at these things alongside each other? And when you're when you think about what you're asking students to do, what you envision for students when you think about a literate and competent student, are you finding ways to assess all of the factors and components that go into that vision that you have of a literate student? So I think just um making sure that it's not one-dimensional, making sure that they're looking at multiple things and really matching purpose with the response and outcome with what they're doing with that assessment.
SPEAKER_01:That's really helpful. Thank you, Kristen. Um, and with that, we're gonna go ahead and wrap up for today. Thank you so much for your time. And for our listeners, as I mentioned, we'll make sure to link Kristen's incredible blog in the show notes if you would like to take a deeper dive into her blog. All right, thank you so much. Thanks, Hillie. Get inspired by following us on social and please tag us in your posts on X at Curriculum Association and on Instagram at my iReady. If you have feedback about the podcast, a topic of interest, or want to be a guest, email extraordinaryeducators at caink.com. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you'd like to help more educators like you join the conversation, please leave us a review. Remember, be you, be true, be extraordinary. The Extraordinary Educators Podcast is produced by Curriculum Associates. Curriculum Associates believes that with the right support, all children can reach grade level. We provide evidence-based high-quality instructional materials and world-class implementation services to classrooms across the United States. Editing completed by Shane Lowe, social media by Atsidi Hannon, guestbooking and production by Haley Browning. This podcast is Copyrighted Materials and Intellectual Property of Curriculum Associates.