[Music] oh hi minetonka I'm David law superintendent of minetonka schools thank you for joining us for this episode of our district podcast aoy minetonka today we're diving into a topic that we are all passionate about literacy it ties in direct with one of our Schoolboard goals excellence and student learning and support and the state of Minnesota has made it a key priority for all school districts with the react which we will dig into today joining me is our associate superintendent Dr Amy Leu and our literacy coordinator Alyssa Rutherford thank you both for being here please tell us a little bit about yourself and your roles so I have been with the district I'm in my fifth year um have a background both in teaching and as an administrator and currently I get the a great opportunity to support our teachers our principes and our schools in all aspects of teaching and learning mean you've got a strength in literacy in your background do you want to talk a little bit more about that yeah so as an elementary teacher obviously I've been in the classroom at multiple levels kindergarten through fifth grade um but as an elementary principal I had an opportunity to participate in extensive literacy training and so that really Built My Strong Foundation okay Alyssa you've joined us recently in your role what's your background coming into literacy in motanka yeah so I began my teaching career almost 20 years ago um as a middle school Spanish teacher and then I was the AVID coordinator and that's kind of where I started building my disciplinary literacy or literacy across content area skills um and Avid is advancement via individual determination it's a worldwide um college readiness system okay that is adopted in various districts and um Works to support college readiness so in that role you worked with students across curriculums yep yep and then um and the schoolwide implementation of various strategies that really built Reading Writing and inquiry skills for students so that they could be College ready okay and access rigor during their time in school too so how' you make that jump from AVID coordinator to literacy yeah so I mean that that again was that middle level literacy and high school level literacy piece and I decided you know what I need a change so I became a literacy coach at an elementary school and that's when I got letters training and really learned a lot more about the science of reading and all of those things we're going to come back to the science of reading because that's pretty important in this conversation but so you were a literacy coach and then how'd you get here well I saw this opening and thought I really miss the language component of teaching Spanish and minaka has these great immersion programs and I was ready for another challenge again so thinking about my K12 background and my language and literacy um loves my passions um it kind of just brought everything together uh Amy menth talk has a long history of strong literacy performance specifically in reading and yet the board has goals to improve reading talk about where that drive for literacy and for improved instruction comes from both from the board and from teaching and learning right so literacy obviously is the foundation and the core to all student learning and so fundamentally we want to make sure that our students are prepared both to um mechanically read but then of course to comprehend at Deep levels and so while we do very well as a district typically we're first or second as we look at comparison districts we also know that all of our students aren't proficient yet and so our goal is to make sure that we have programs and practices in place that ensure the greatest number of students will be reading on or above grade level as quickly as possible so that they can use those skills to access across the content areas so one of the State uh guidelines probably for the last decade has been the world's best Workforce and that was ready to read by third grade what are some of the ways that Minot Tonka identified students that maybe weren't on track to read by third grade and and what was currently available to help students who weren't on track right so as a part of world's best Workforce every District you know shined a light on literacy and their practices um we certainly have been aggressive with our district curriculum um continuing to update that over the years and as you mentioned standards only update about every 10 years but we continue to almost annually bring teachers together to evaluate what's working effectively what's not um prior to the pandemic we implemented a phonic based program called foundations uh that we implemented fully in our kindergarten and first grade um as it relates to how we identify and that's for all students students that's Core Curriculum um all students access that as far as identification the state also came out with requirements several years back but we've been using screening tools that look both at early reading skills as well as student fluency for I would say at least eight or 10 years um and we use that data to help determine which students are not yet at grade level or at some risk of reading difficult ulty and from that um we've had a very robust system of uh providing kids both their classroom instruction as well as layering that with additional supports um and we continue to fine-tune and revise what's most effective and we'll talk some more about that well one of the things I think that was confusing with read well by third grade do we care if kids aren't reading well at fourth grade or fifth grade or Beyond right and I think the idea with read well by third grade was that idea that early literacy begins in early childhood and really goes through about third grade and that's the typical stage where a child is learning again those technical aspects of reading learning word recognition becoming fluent readers um and while we emphasize that part of reading simultaneously they're also growing their comprehension it's just that typically kids are able to comprehend in those Early Childhood ages above the level that they can read independently at so the thought was that if kids are on track by third grade and the research will show that you know if kids are on track leaving third grade that they're set up for the most success as they move into Upper Elementary and secondary school now I've looked at our test scores there's a lot of students who look like they they developed Proficiency in fourth fifth 6th 7th do we still intervene in upper elementary and middle school with students that aren't proficient yet yep we absolutely continue to intervene um we screen our students in kindergarten through fifth grade in minetonka and students who are not at grade level we continue to uh Monitor and Screen depending on what their needs are um and provide targeted instruction based on those needs so that we can ensure that we're helping all students get two grad level and Beyond as quickly as possible well one of the things during your time in leadership and unless I'm going to get you but I I know that some of this is before you came to banka there was a state push to start screening for dyslexia as part of our programming and we we have students that start in kindergarten in Spanish or Chinese and there's that language acquisition in that language how how do we ensure that all of our students regardless of immersion or in English we're screening for their growth and for dyslexia so we uh are screening all students when they enter kindergarten um to see if they are on track with the expected early literacy skills um and then students who continue in English continue to be screened with a similar screener three times a year um and then teachers use that data to make instructional decisions students who enter immersion um we screen them in the targeted language and we make sure that they're acquiring literacy skills in the language of instruction and continue to work to align our practices to meet the needs of students who are in immersion um but might have some reading difficulties and then we uh will start looking at uh needs also in English and I'm going to add on sure that we have we've have have the fortune to have um reading specialists in both of our partner languages So reading Specialists who um intervene if kids aren't make on track for their Chinese literacy goals and um also in our Spanish programming so if if they're showing that they're not developing literacy skills when they're in their immersion program they can get intervention early on in the partner language which is what immersion research tells us we should be doing is intervening in that language of instruction so of course we also have those reading interventionists in our English program so we have a robust system of teachers that partner with our classroom teachers to provide kids more time and more support when they're not at grade level yet so one of the things uh last week I was visiting a reading intervention class at a middle school and I was with two of our board members and uh the students were getting reading support because they weren't yet proficient for their grade level coursework yeah yet they were reading some pretty complex stuff and I think there's a difference between proficient and illiterate I mean I think these kids were illiterate but just not at grade level what what is proficiency what does that mean proficiency really means that they're able to demonstrate their ability to apply use the standards that the state of Minnesota sets out at any grade level when we talk about the MCAS when we talk about reading it means that they can read fluently and comprehend and does it get harder at every grade level it does okay it does it definitely gets more difficult as kids move through the system and it's not unusual to have students who are fluent readers and accurate readers who are still struggling to make meaning and that's where we work on different strategies about the conversations that kids should be having inside their brain and the questions they should be asking themselves while they're reading before reading and after reading so that they build their understanding and a key to that also is then of course vocabulary because being able to decode words is the first Cornerstone but then being able to understand the content really is dependent both on vocabulary and students background knowledge well Alysa I'm going to lean to you because this whole discussion about the science of reading this wasn't something people were talking about in the 90s and now wow it's every where were none of our teachers trained in the science of reading or were there parts that were included in their college experience talk to me about this transition I mean so I think it depends on when when and where you went to your pre pre-service training right and um you know the the national reading panel came out in the year 2000 which was a long time ago and a lot of that research has been replicated and is still solid as our basis for the science of reading and then of course there's been additional studies and not just in English literacy but in other languages that kind of show how we how our brains read um one of the kind of big breakthroughs is being able to look at somebody's brain with brain Imaging to see how the brain processes while it reads and so that's kind of been some of the recent research is to inform what that means for our instructional approaches and so the that's the research but then it's like how do you put that into practice instructionally um and one of the big components recently is the idea of mapping the sounds to the spellings and trying to build that pathway in the brain because that's a piece of our brain that hasn't like we don't we're not born with that piece that pathway has to get built through explicit instruction I watched some of that in class last week really impressive so mapping the sounds with the spellings um some kids that pathway gets built a lot more easily than others some people can actually pick it up just by hearing their caregivers read to them um other people really need that systematic and explicit phonics I would say like they're saying like 60% of the population really needs to be taught explicitly how to how to match those sounds to those letters so from 2000 to 2024 that's that's a long time for adults to struggle with implementing what the a panel recommended were were people indifferent or were they committed to Old practice what what accounts for the national delay and shifting to the science of reading do you think um I think there's a it's multifaceted um if you want like a really nerdy podcast about it a novel idea from the Iowa Center for reading research goes all the way back to the 1700s and covers all of the like ups and downs of the reading Wars from then until now so there's been Wars about best practice and reading going back 300 years and yeah I guess and the reality is I think what matters more is less about I think we kind of nitpick about the little things when really we should be thinking about the big things like there's word recognition and there's language comprehension and we need both to be robust in order for kids to be able to be proficient read so I've heard you say the pillars of reading what are the essential pillars that every classroom should have so that's from that National reading panel they call it the pillars but people have since kind of dubbed it the pillars it's the five components pheic awareness which is the sounds let's see if I can do this off the top of my head um I can help vocabulary um which is obviously word knowledge and then fluency is being able to take the sounds and read them decode them in a way that's fast enough that you can actually comprehend which comprehension is the other component I'm missing one you're um missing phonic phonic there we go and I think it's also important to note that with the science of reading often people think that just means phonics it means all five of those pillars and it means kids using those interwoven and I would say a base of oral language too right you have to like Amy mentioned earlier the kindergarteners can understand at a higher level than they can read independently so building kids ability to talk and discuss is equally important because you can't necessarily read something you don't you can't speak about sure so you came on before there was a react in place what were you doing when you first started in minetonka um so we did kind of a crash course in Literacy for principles um learned about the science of reading and what it means and what it does not mean and um that was the first thing that I did when I got here and then I don't know the rest is history I guess I was going to say you also spent a great deal of time both learning about our programs of course but then uh preparing for the English language arts curriculum review that we knew would be um fully underway that coming fall so there was this weird timing of we had a plan for how we wanted to improve literacy in our district but the react required us to submit a plan and we waited to submit a plan until the react told us to what caused that DeLay So as you know we had we set a goal the fall before Alysa started and the fall before the read act even was being talked about broadly and so once we um started down that path we learned that there was legislation likely pending coming our Direction and so the delay really became um us waiting to make sure that the work we were doing would be in alignment with the legislation um we were eager to do training with teachers so as Alyssa mentioned we started with our leaders um we also have been delayed as the state has sorted out what and how uh the various components of the read act would be implemented so I know the state uh about halfway through last year identified a list of vendors that the you had to use to do training and we had connected with them early who is our uh chosen provider to do literacy instruction in our district our provider is core and they also have one of the online programs um that me to talk about it you can name it so how does that work with core what I mean does one person come in and Tau all of our teachers in an audience of 900 or what what happens so the all of the platforms for the react are Blended learning where it's modules and then like Zoom calls and we because we started in January which was prior to the State registration for professional learning we had begun the in-person version of that it's called Ola online language and literacy Academy and so core learning is the company that created that and we have the kind of the inperson version so we have um what is it like 10 nine cohorts about 40ish and they have a consultant that comes in and do they are they Cross grade or by individual grade we did actually uh grade level cohorts so we have a cohort for each grade level K5 and it really crosses over our English and our immersion program so anybody who teaches in any of our first grade programs is in the first grade cohort and each of those cohorts are led by an administrative team made up by an elementary principal and an elementary AP principal are they doing the training or they're just in the room they are fully participating in the training but not leading they're not leading it they're participants and so they have a facilitator that comes in and works with each grade level team and then of course we have our K5 intervention teachers um we have an early childhood through fifth grade special education and kind of mixed group as some some of our smaller teams of teachers that didn't have does that happen on evenings and weekends or when does that happen for teachers so as you know uh we worked with our school board to identify some days for full professional learning over the past two years and we've used those full days uh to bring our teachers together uh for a you know that uh training to happen and it really will have been spread over about a little more than a year by the time we complete the sessions that are needed and our teachers um are able to demonstrate their Proficiency in it what's the feedback been like from our teachers I've heard this is the best professional learning that I've ever had why didn't I learn this sooner um a lot of them really love being able to be in those grade level teams because they get to talk across um elementary school buildings there's not a lot of time to talk for deep Haven to talk to Clear Springs Etc um and we also try to group them in their plc's which for most teachers is with their grade level professional learning communities so they can also collaborate based off of what they're learning there's a lot of time to pause and connect and say okay how can we apply this to our actual real life teaching so um there's a lot of sessions and we're not through all those sessions yet when should we confident be thinking our teachers are using this and our students should start to be showing some gains so last fall we did some District literacy professional learning that teachers could start applying and then we moved into this core literacy training last January and our primary teachers based on what we were learning we're able to start applying things um the training is great because it's not tied to a specific set of resources or material um it's really best practices that they can apply with any resources when they're working on specific areas or skills I know that there's a English Language Art adoption we're probably going to come back because this has been so great we've got more to talk about and we'll probably have to do a second podcast about just literacy continued including the new Ela and an update on our read training but this has been great to explain the district's commitment What A literacy coordinator does how we've been training our staff in terms of just our literacy efforts and reading is there anything else you think is important to share today I think the last thing that I think is really important to share is that while we've focused much um of our time today on the elementary we really are looking at literacy from E to grade 12 and we've had efforts in our grade 6 through 12 content areas in addition to the reading Specialists or teachers who teach special education so this really is a district-wide effort and it's really thinking about that Continuum of learning to read and of being great thinkers and so we'd be excited to tell you more about that as well I was just in a middle school science class and the teacher was teaching reading covering science content and probably the kids didn't know that but I had heard the lesson that we'd given teachers and was watching him model those things and and just a drop in he didn't know I was coming so that was really impressive well I want to thank you both for giving up some time to explain to our community what we're doing with literacy and a lot of this science of reading and pillars of literacy and read act and all those changes I'm excited for the changes happening in our schools and eventually what we really care about for kids to start feeling be like they're more confident readers thank you both so much for joining us today for this episode and thank you for joining us and learning more about literacy and reading in motanka and we look forward to doing another episode with this group as we talk about English and language arts and curriculum but until next time ohy vonka