Hi, and welcome back to the Smarter Literacy Podcast, where we explore practical strategies, real conversations, and innovative ideas that make literacy instruction more effective and sustainable for educators.
Today's episode is a special one because we're diving into what literacy leadership looks like at the district level during a time of enormous change in education. If you've ever wondered how schools navigate curriculum shifts, support teachers through change, balance the science of reading with a love of literacy, or create meaningful systems that actually work with students, this is the conversation for you. Today, I am joined by Sarah, who is the Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum Innovation and Pupil Services in Orchard Park Central School District.
Sarah shares an honest, behind the scenes look at the leading district wide literacy initiatives, responding to community pressure during the national literacy conversation, building collaborative leadership teams, and supporting teachers through one of the biggest instructional shifts education has seen in years.
We also talk about balancing structured literacy with student engagement, why go slow to go fast became a guiding philosophy, the importance of teacher voice in decision making, the growing challenges around writing instruction, how technology and screen time are impacting reading culture, and what schools are still trying to figure out when it comes to tiered support and intervention. Whether you're a classroom teacher, literacy specialist, administrator, or parent, this episode offers thoughtful insight into the realities of educational change and the power of collaboration in building strong readers and writers. So let's get into it.
Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the Smarter Literacy Podcast. We are so excited to have you.
Thanks, Lindsey. I'm really excited to be on today.
All right. So let's just start with you telling our listeners a little bit about yourself and your position.
So my position is, I'm the assistant superintendent for curriculum innovation and pupil services in Orchard Park, New York, which is a suburb of Buffalo. We are the home of the Buffalo Bills, for anyone who's familiar with football. That's often Orchard Park's claim to fame, but I would say our other claim to fame is being an amazing pre K-twelve school district. Now we finally have pre K in all of our buildings for all of our students, which is wonderful. And my role as assistant superintendent for curriculum is really overseeing all of our pre K through twelve initiatives related to teaching and learning. So I like to often say that is my whole world is talking about teaching and learning and the relationship that those two really critical components of education have and supporting the teachers doing the teaching and the students doing the learning.
That's amazing. And and I can say, you know, from personal experience, you are great at what you do. Thank you.
So as an administrator who is looking at literacy district wide, what were some of the the initial challenges that you faced when you kind of started in this field when you took over this position?
Well, I would say my story is a little bit unique. I started in August of twenty twenty three. I was just new to the position, but not new to the district. So I was previously our director of technology and had worked in the district for four years.
I had really come out of the pandemic having supported technology in a really high stress and high touch environment with everything that we had to do to respond to the global pandemic. But as I transitioned into this role, it was August of twenty twenty three. And I will never forget my first, I think within my first week, I had parents and school board members knocking on my door saying, what are you doing about Readers Workshop? Because that at the time was our adopted curriculum.
And being one week into the job, it was kind of terrifying to have to face this, what I felt to be this mounting pressure for us to respond to some of the really polarizing and national discussions about literacy instruction and how we were responding to that.
Within my first thirty days, I remember getting notification that Teachers College had separated from Lucy Cawkins. It was a huge New York Times article.
And those are the things that when you're in an administrative position like mine, you have to be ready to respond when not just families and board members reach out, but there's always the potential that news channels are reaching out to say, hey, here's this really big story that's happening on the national education stage. We understand that you use this curriculum. What does that look like for you? And so I had to be responsive in a way that, you know, nobody wants to come in their first thirty days and change anything. Leadership one hundred one is you want to be able to come in and listen and you want to be able to come in and just get a lay of the land and not have to respond or change anything. But I didn't really have a choice because we were faced with such public pressure.
And so our whole story, and I'm sure it will come up throughout today's podcast, but our whole story was really about how we as a school community responded to that pressure in a way that was thoughtful and deliberate and also supportive of teachers and families. And we tried to go slow to go fast. That was really our motto throughout the transition that we made as a district and a community was don't go too fast because you just you know, we have to be really thoughtful. We didn't wanna make any mistakes along the way that would be hard to walk back.
Right. Yeah. No. I mean, I can only imagine the pressure you were feeling at the time because as a teacher in the same school district, I remember one of the families I was working with had reached out to me privately and had sent me that whole, what was it, Soul of Story podcast.
It's like, what are your thoughts on this? Can you tell me? And I was like, woah. This felt like it came out of left field, but they were it was really intense.
I I they were they were kind to me and stuff, but I could really tell. They and they were big in the the school community and just wanting to make sure that we're kinda getting the Reader's Workshop pushed out.
So and that was just, you know, as a teacher. So as an admin, I can imagine that pressure that you were feeling. But, also, as a teacher, I can say that the response that you and the district had, I felt was so appropriate. Right? You said, like, we're we're gonna go slow to go fast. And Because anyone who's a teacher who knows that if you've ever had where you're all a sudden you're working with one curriculum and then you completely throw some that out and said, okay. Next day here, we're coming and doing that.
You are thrown for such a loop that you're like, woah, wait. What? And then you don't feel like you're giving the best instruction to your students. So working together with your admin, working together with your district, with your community, you really have to think about it. You really have to be cognizant of all the moving pieces and not just say, alright. Well, this didn't work, so we're gonna do this.
And we had that conversation a lot, especially early on because there was pressure to throw out all of the curriculum. There was sort of this like, well, while you're figuring it out, in the meantime, you shouldn't be doing this other thing. And I had to really go to bat for a lot of our teachers around that time to say, it is still in your child's best interest for their teacher to be using materials that they have been really trained in, that they feel comfortable and confident using. I think that's the other thing is the curriculum wasn't hurting anybody.
It just wasn't best practice. And there was at times having to have that conversation with people who wanted us to just burn it all down. And for me to say, if I don't have something for the teachers to use instead, and if they haven't been trained in how to do it, it could do the opposite. It could create more problems for kids if we have everyone trying to do their own thing while we figure out what comes next.
So that was also part of that go slow to go fast is just because we've decided that this is no longer as effective as it could be, it doesn't mean that there aren't some benefits that kids are still getting. They're still being read high quality texts. Texts. They're still being exposed to different genres of texts and they're reading and they're writing and they're maybe not getting the most effective practices or the most effective exposure, but it's still better than everyone kind of going off and doing their own thing.
And so that was a big guardrail that we had to keep up was, please don't throw out your materials. Please don't go rogue. Give us some time to thoughtfully develop the next chapter for our district.
Exactly. Exactly. And I I have to say now being in in this position and having worked with so many different school districts and talked to so many different admin and teachers, Orchard Park was certainly not alone in that. And there are still school districts who are really trying to figure that out.
And, yeah, and just throwing out one thing and moving on to the next never seems to be the answer. Just because, like you said, it causes so much chaos that as much as we might feel kind of that panic or that urgency to be like, well, we have to do something better. Okay. Take a deep breath, and let's look at it piece by piece and figure out in a calm, focused manner.
So yeah.
And that was really the work of our literacy steering committee was trying to take it one chapter at a time, just trying to figure out one foot in front of the other, where do we go from here? And I would often tell people, this is grieving for teachers.
I say that myself as a former special education teacher and reading specialist, I had to face this feeling of devastation that I had somehow been incorrectly teaching kids to read. And something that I've shared with other people around my experience as a teacher is I was a special education teacher, and so I knew that explicit instruction and direct instruction was the right thing for my kids. But I often was pulled in the direction of I want my students with disabilities or my students who have any type of a reading disability, I want them to have the same experience that their students and classmates have.
So I would put into place some of these balanced literacy routines because I was trying to give my students what I believed to be the gold standard. And that realization when I learned more through the last few years of my kids were getting the gold standard with the explicit instruction, they were getting what they needed from direct instruction. But having that moment of, I feel badly for making them do some of the things that I had them do that I thought were in their best interest. And I think many teachers felt that.
And so our first year of making these changes was also just letting teachers sit with how it felt and letting them digest it and get to the point where they didn't feel guilt or shame about what we had been doing, that they understood this is what everyone was doing because this is what we were told to do.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I remember even being in college and talking about balanced literacy and the the versus you you have the direct instruction. They weren't really calling it science of reading at the time when I was in college, but kind of them basically saying, like, we're gonna teach you both.
And the idea is to kinda meet somewhere in the middle.
And so you learn the theories a lot in school. And then yeah. And then when I know when I entered teaching, which is around the same time that you're kinda talking about there, it it was a very balanced literacy approach that readers workshop was kind of the go to.
And then we all of a sudden went, boom, to Science of Reading. And it's almost like the two can't touch. You can't have either or. And we've even talked about it on our podcast that you can have both.
You can do both. It's just when and where do you use them. Right? And I think that's what we were talking a lot about at Orchard Park.
And so you had mentioned this Literacy Steering Committee, and I I know what you're talking about because I had the joy of being on that committee. But can you talk about what the Literacy Steering Committee was, how it came to be, and what kind of why it came to be?
So it became what I consider to be a shared decision making group of people, but it also was this focus group where I wanted to make sure that the people who were impacted the most by this change would have a seat at the table to talk about what comes next. And I learned very early in my administration career that if you don't give people a place to say how they're feeling, they will say it somewhere else.
And so you might as well say it right to my face and say it to the people who need to hear it. I joke about that, but it's true.
If you don't give people a place for their voice to be heard, for them to talk about what their experience is, they will find another way to share it, and I wanted it to be shared in a productive way. So bringing together pre K through twelve, we had reading specialists, we had AIS providers, but we had our academic intervention teachers on the committee. We had classroom teachers, we had administrators.
Wanted we had school librarians, people who have a really strong opinion about what it means to build a culture of reading and what it means to develop strong readers and writers.
And the purpose of that committee was really for us year one to develop a vision. And I think that's something that I really wanted to make sure is that we're not just going to adopt a new curriculum. We also have to define what it looks like for students to be strong readers and writers in Orchard Park and not have us just jump from one program to the next.
I believe that often we start associating the program with our vision or mission, and those are two different things.
So going back to your point about balanced literacy and science of reading, this idea that they can't coexist, and I think that's where that structured literacy term has emerged in the field. But the fact that they can't coexist, I think, is a disservice to kids because we do have to really evaluate what were the best practices from both sides that had developed. And what can we take from I remember one of the really one of the anchors for us on the committee that we were not willing to part with was this idea that we would foster a love of reading among kids. That was the biggest fear. I will tell you now, three years later, that's still prevalent. That's still an issue and a concern is, do kids still have access to books that they can read independently that they feel confident and comfortable reading?
We're still trying to find ways to fit that in. One of our biggest struggles is the number of minutes in a day is never enough to give students every experience that they deserve.
So we talk a lot about how can we prioritize what is the most important thing for us to do with kids during the day and hope that some of the other things also happen and that kids become readers and writers outside of school. But I would say that was the big focus, was developing that vision year one and having it be a shared vision so it wasn't just Sarah's view of what it should be or Sarah's decision. I wanted it to be a shared decision among the district.
And that group evolved into what became year two, which was our pilot group. So the teachers that were responsible for piloting new curriculum and developing some decisions about what comes next.
We were also very deliberate about making sure that any teacher who wanted to pilot could pilot.
Right.
I didn't want to get to the point where in a district of our size, we have over five thousand kids and hundreds of teachers. I didn't want anyone to say, well, it was Sarah's decision and her five favorite people.
Or Right. Right.
It was you know, if I would have been able to have a say in this, so I said, anyone who wants to pilot is welcome too. And quite honestly, that helped with our first year of implementation because when it came to adopting a new program and using new resources, we already had so many teachers who had piloted that they were in year two at that point. So they were able to partner with teachers who had no experience, and they were able to say, hey, let me help you with lessons I learned last year as a pilot teacher. So it just helped in exponential ways.
Absolutely. And and again, I was so lucky to be part of that year one where we did meet.
And I do remember, I think it was the first meeting you had. You're like, this is not my decision. This the whole point of this is that we talk as a group together, that this is a a combined decision. We're looking at all the pros and cons.
And one, that set the tone so well just because I kind of felt like that relief, and I think everyone in the room did. And then it was the first time in my experience where we were together k through twelve.
Yeah.
And we got to work. And you said it wasn't even just admin and teachers. There was librarians. All the decision makers, all the people, like you said, who who felt like they had an interest or something really, they were involved in this decision making. And we got to talk throughout the entire year. And then because of the piloting program, that's actually where I got introduced to Ascend, you know, through our other teacher and was learning that I loved it. And it was really working with my students, especially at a secondary you know, being in the middle school.
And that's where we kind of secondary were able to kind of look and work together and be like, hey, I'm noticing this is working for me as you're trying to pilot something. Like you said, let me help you. Right? So, and I know the same was happening down the elementary level, and that you could just really tell that there was a cohesiveness there that we really wanted to have, and we could still meet all of our goals of giving the instruction that we needed to our students.
But like you said, fostering that love of reading because that was big. From the moment I started at Orchard Park Kutzu till I left, fostering that love of reading and getting books into kids' hands that they wanna read that are appropriate for them, it's so big. And that has always been something that I was so happy to be a part of and that, like, the school that I worked at was so passionate about. So I'm so glad to hear, you know, like, that's still that's still the concern.
You know? That's still people being like, we want kids to read, and we want them to enjoy reading.
That's the goal. And we've talked a lot lately about the challenges with the distractions from screens and technology and how, even for adults, I would consider myself a lifelong reader. I absolutely love to read. It's one of my hobbies and one of my great joys.
Every night when I go to bed, I have the decision to read my book or scroll on Instagram, right? We're all faced with this distraction that's with us at all times that can pull us and in many ways be like this little bit of joy, that dopamine hit that you get from technology. So I think it's really important that we also understand we have kids who are facing that same dilemma, and their brains aren't as developed as ours. They don't have the wisdom and the life experience to know this is the healthier choice for my brain.
This is the thing that I will really find great joy in and maybe learn something new in. And so I talk a lot with teachers about that struggle of trying to foster a love of reading in a world where we have such a distraction now from some of these, you know, not just from reading, but anything that really sustains our attention for a long period of time.
We don't, you know, I have small children, and I don't want to get on too much of a tangent, but even my kids struggle to watch a full movie because they'd rather watch fourteen minute episodes of something on Disney Plus. Adults can't watch longer than like a two minute video because they want to just see a thirty second reel.
So that's also this societal pressure that we have that's really hard to feel like sometimes we're swimming upstream with trying to build the culture of reading. So we have to keep at it. But we also have to recognize some of the parts of it that are beyond our control and with beyond what we can take on within a school day.
Yeah. No. One hundred percent. And for our listeners, just remember that, as Sarah said in the beginning, not only she got that reading background, but she's got a technology background.
So, like, great. So, like, this is great to hear. No. It is one hundred percent true, and I'm, you know, I'm the same way.
I'm a huge reader, but there are times I choose that phone over my over my book just because it seems like it's an easier thing just to scroll through. So and when the kids could have kind of that time to sit and read or work with a book, I know so many of my kids said, I get so much more of my reading done in school because outside of school, I'm on my phone and it's they I even had a student tell me once, it was so it's so hard to put your phone down.
And I'm like and it's designed to be.
I think that's the other thing that some of the recent lawsuits and the government's been really facing a lot of challenges with that, of regulating some of that with big tech, because it is designed to make you want to use it all the time. It's an accident or one person's fault that you can't put your phone down. It's designed to do that. And so for kids, I think we have to really try to protect them as much as we can from that so that they can continue to love reading and all of those other activities that we know are so good for their brains.
Yeah.
So, Sarah, my next question for you is so we've kind of talked about when you you took on this role.
What has really kind of changed for you or maybe like the field in the years since then?
I think one of the challenges that we still face today this year is really the emphasis on tier one and understanding the value of tier one instruction. I wish that I had the magic wand to be able to fix all of the systems that need some tweaking to make our MTSS process or any type of response to intervention process.
But we still struggle a little bit, not just here, but in everywhere, to understand the value of tier one instruction. And that really is where we can make, where we can, I think, do the greatest good for the most? And tier two and tier three, while they remain a critical component of our district, they can't fix it all. You can't really now very famous expression of you can't intervene your way out of a tier one problem.
I think that continues to be a challenge for us is teachers have so many priorities that they juggle during the day that it's hard to cover all of the tier one material that really I think is required for students to be able to develop all of the skills that they need to develop. So time is still a challenge for us. Right. I think writing is something that now that we've in many ways, I don't want to say tackled because we have a lot of room to grow in reading as well.
We're only in year two of our implementation, but writing is a big struggle for us. And we've been talking a lot about some of the frameworks from the writing revolution and some of these different methods where you're looking at really structured approaches to writing to get students to understand how to form a sentence, how to form a paragraph, how to form a written response. And that's an issue that goes pre K through twelve, where we've got high school seniors who really struggle with being able to write at the quality at that level that they should be in the courses that they're taking at the high school.
And then developing an understanding of the relationship between reading and writing, especially in the early years. Again, not to keep talking about technology, but as we've moved so much farther away from written words and whether it be typing or anything like that, where that has been in place, a lot of students need that relationship between reading and writing to click.
And so some of our work around professional learning is about having teachers and educators develop an understanding of that relationship.
So I think those are two things that we're still struggling with a little bit is that emphasis on tier one, but also writing.
Yeah. And all I can say is you're definitely not alone. Again, you know, I've been able to work with many different school districts across the country, even even worldwide. I'm thinking like of our Australian friends. So I have this kind of mentioned this as well.
But it is. That's a big issue right now. And I even just had a conversation this past week with a school administrator here in Colorado talking about how can we even implement some of this in a tier one setting in the secondary schools, just so that we're getting some kind of reading, writing, comprehension practice then because you have such a limited time for tier two, tier three, especially if you are doing have to, like, do a pullout model. Because like you said, time time is our biggest enemy, really.
And tier one teachers, we don't wanna there's so much that they have to do in a day. How much can they do that's reasonable before tier two or tier three has to step in. And it's a huge juggling act. And I just don't think that anyone truly has the answer right now.
I think everyone's working really hard to find the answer. And honestly, I think it's probably going to look different from year to year.
And I think one of the challenges where leaders can help, and this is something that we've been focusing on, is the master schedule can be a huge barrier when you're talking about tier one instruction.
For us, our master schedule is a challenge because of the size of our schools.
I've used several different iterations of our master schedule and worked with our principals to try to make changes to it so that we can have more uninterrupted instructional time for teachers so that they have a ninety minute ELA block, so that they have a sixty minute block time where they can do thirty minutes of intervention in ELA and thirty minutes in math. Like, we've looked at all of these different iterations.
And what the struggle ends up being is in a school with eight hundred kids, and you have to get all of those kids to the lunch room and you have to get some of those kids to unless you're serving lunch at nine thirty in the morning, there are some limitations. I just that's the struggle is there are some things I think that leaders can do to improve it. You just have to be creative and try to think outside the box and also foster a culture of trying something and being okay if it doesn't go well and then changing again. Not having to have it all figured out at once, but just saying, is there one tweak we can make next year that gives us an extra fifteen minutes of time here? Or is there a shift we can make that reduces some of the travel time that kids have going across the building for services? You know, how can we try to get as many instructional minutes into the day as possible?
Yeah. No. And I I hear you there. On one hand, you have to have that master schedule. Right? You have to have the the times figured out.
On the other hand, when we're talking about education and school, we are talking about kids, people. Right? Which it never goes this way.
No. Never. Never.
So to have that flexibility and to have that kind of understanding of, like, we're gonna try this. It may not work, but we're gonna try it until we find out what does work and having the patience to kind of get there is so big. And I think the thing that people often forget when we're thinking about you know, especially district wide. I mean, I even know when I was taking some graduate courses in curriculum design, one of the first articles that my professor assigned to us was focusing on, like, how do you design the right kind of curriculum, the best kind of curriculum?
And the very first thing we're basically given is, it's impossible. This is articles from nineteen eighty, but it was the reason he's like, I'm giving this to you is because it's still relevant. And the reason that it's impossible to really get the perfect thing is because of all the different factors that come in. And even with the best of intentions, just, sometimes it's financing, sometimes it's time.
Time is a huge one. Sometimes you just don't have the time to do that.
And it's also the buy in from people. The ability for everyone to agree and work together is a huge component of it as well.
And when we were piloting programs, that was something that we regularly had to remind people is you will hate something about every program we look at. Yep. And you will love something about every program that we look at, and that's okay. Yep.
And we should be critical of them because we should be looking at this saying, this isn't going to meet our needs one hundred percent. I feel we'd be foolish if we fell in love so hard with a program that we felt that it was the answer to our prayers. And that's also that reminder to teachers of you are the magic maker in the classroom. This is a tool.
This is a resource, but it's your instructional strategies. It's your delivery of the program that really brings it to life. Yeah. And that's been a recurring theme for us.
This year, our professional learning, now that teachers have been trained in the new programs themselves, our professional learning has all been all about explicit instruction and strategies and how do you give multiple opportunities for kids to respond? How can you make sure that engagement is high and that you are giving feedback? And just some of those best practices that, quite honestly, some teachers have said, I always knew that a KWL chart was helpful.
I always knew prior knowledge was important.
And they're excited about that because they see, hey, this did work and for whatever reason I got away from it in two thousand and five. And now I'm glad to see that it's back. So we've been really focusing now on strategies that are universal, that you can apply across math and ELA so that we're not so tied up in what a manual says or what a program says, but we're understanding what science says that students respond to.
Exactly. And we've honestly, whenever we work with a school or we talk to any of our members, that's the thing that we really try to reiterate with our members as well is that even with DSI, this is a program that we talk about. It works beside what you already have. Please don't throw out what you have.
Try to use it to implement, to bring it together, because it really is you as a teacher using the strategies you know that work, using the tools that you know that work, and implementing it in the way that you know works for kids. Like you said, you are the magic maker. And so that is a big conversation that we have. And we always say, this is a way, not the way to teach And just whenever we we have talked to other educators or other educators have done any training with us, there is that sense of they can breathe.
Oh, I don't have one more person coming in telling me that everything I've been doing is wrong and that I need to do it this way. It's like, no, there are, again, like you said, there's gonna be pieces you love. There's gonna be pieces you don't love. The pieces you don't love or don't work for you, put them off to the side, Right?
You don't need them.
And that so much of that is understanding that every teacher has strengths. Every teacher has a different way that their delivery lands for kids and getting people to understand that and feeling comfortable saying, this strategy just doesn't feel great to me, but this one over here really seems to connect with my kids. And letting them be critical of things and letting them form their own opinions about what's working and what's not, but continuing to show sort of this menu of here are practices that we know that there's evidence to support them.
From this menu of practices that you've learned about, do the ones that work best for the students that you serve.
Exactly. Exact and we talk about that a lot. We talk about meeting the science and the creativity. And so the science is the menu, but then you pick and choose what works for you.
And that's the creativity piece that teachers need in their classroom because we're not robots. We all teach differently. We all have different strategies in our classroom. You know what?
The kids, they like it. They respond. They have one teacher one year, and they have another teacher one year. As long as you're confident in your teaching and you know you're using what works, your kids will respond to you.
You're not gonna go from one teacher to the next and know it's gonna be exactly the same, but they're still gonna get that great instruction because they have a teacher who cares, and they have a teacher who is informed, and they have a teacher with experience. So that's what it's it's gonna come down to a lot. And be able to give teachers that room to be creative within the science of the breeding is where I really have found the beauty happens, right, and stuff. Yeah.
Oh my goodness. I just I love talking with you.
So you kinda you've mentioned a little bit of the challenges that you you guys are still kinda facing. Is and you've talked a lot about, like, what's working currently, but is there anything that you really wanna emphasize right now that you feel really good about that's happening in Orchard Park that district wide literacy that you would maybe even recommend or want just want to share with people?
I will say sometimes I have these pinch me moments here where I have to remind myself, like, we're only in year two of a new program. And if I were to predict that we would have such little, I don't want to say such little pushback, but it's working really well. People are really content. And it's not without challenge. Our teachers are, they are spread really, really thin right now. And that is something that is true and no one can deny it. But they also desperately want what's best for kids and they are working so hard to make that happen.
And I think that they feel like their voices have been heard over the last few years and that that truly was a shared decision for us to move in the direction that we moved in. And so I think when I think about like, what's something that has worked really well, it's listening to teachers. It's recognizing that there are a lot of voices right now who are saying, you should do this and you can do that and you can buy this and you can be that. But the people who are closest to the problem are usually the ones with the solution.
And so the teachers are the ones in in the room working with kids and saying, this is an ongoing issue. Like I was talking about writing, our upcoming focus on writing is the result of teachers saying, this has to be where we look next. You know, it's not because I heard on a podcast or something that said, Oh, focus on writing next. No, that's what's come out of teachers being engaged with the work and having their voices heard.
We have tried a new model that also I think deserves a shout out when talking about and reflecting on our success in the last two years.
So we have four elementary schools, and I have recently learned that it's a buffalo thing to say elementary. I did too.
So so we we have had in our elementary, if I can say it the more appropriate way.
I just became aware of this last night. I'm not gonna lie. I was like Oh, really? I didn't know we were saying it wrong.
We had a we had a professional development presenter who came from I think she's from Missouri, and she could not get over how we said elementary. She's like, Elementary.
So our elementary buildings, we have four schools in the district that are elementary schools, and that means that we have teams of teachers at every grade level that are not geographically connected. And so for year one this year, we had a lead teacher in every grade level at every building. So for the four schools, we've got one lead teacher from each school from every grade level. Those four teachers at each grade level will meet with our instructional coaches before every unit that they are about to teach for the first time.
And they get together, we give them a half day to work and collaborate and unpack the unit and look at the text complexity of the upcoming texts in the units. And that has been such a tremendous model for us for year one because the teachers are previewing what their colleagues are going to need to teach. Okay. They're able to unpack it.
They're able to say, oh, this is gonna be a little bit hard. Maybe we should find you know, maybe we should develop an anchor chart that can accompany this lesson. Maybe we should make sure that we have incorporated some additional background knowledge because this is a unit that kids likely won't have very much background knowledge on. So they are usually a few weeks or months ahead of their colleagues, not in teaching, but just in previewing the units.
And the really beautiful thing that has emerged from that is that now we have all of this vertical alignment. So we no longer have this school is on this unit and skipped over seven lessons because they ran out of time, and this school over here has decided that they might not even do that unit because they feel like they need to do it in this order, or this school cut out this assessment or added this assessment. We're really trying to keep the organizational coherence alive and try to make sure that all students, regardless of what school you go to in our district, are having a similar educational experience.
And so that lead teacher model, which was the brainchild of our instructional coaches, that has been such a tremendous success. That has really so much so that teachers are saying like, can we do this for math too? Can we have these vertical meetings throughout the year where I get to go talk to second grade teachers from other buildings and have a chance to make sure that we're all on the same page?
I love that. That is amazing. Again, the more that we can just talk with one another and we can work together, like you said, that vertical alignment is so important.
And part of it is they get together and they reflect on the past unit. So they'll make notes of this was hard, this was not, this was a success, this was a challenge next year, let's do this differently. And then they also spend time actually working. So it's work time for them. So they collaborate, they do that kind of PLC like meeting where they're talking about the data that came out of that last unit and highs and lows of the skills. And then they're spending time creating resources and supplemental materials, or they're previewing the texts and identifying things that their colleagues likely need to have on their radar before they teach it.
I love that so much. Oh my gosh. That is great.
So my my next question for you is what's next? Maybe if you guys are probably you're probably thinking the next school year, right? Or, like, at least have it in the back of your mind. So what do you guys think is next for you?
Definitely, our next focus area in terms of literacy is around tier two and tier three.
There was a lot of pressure in this shift and transition to science of reading that we focus on tier two and tier three. But I tried to slow that down a little bit and just let's get one whole tier in a good place before we bring in other layers of support. So I think next year, a big focus for us will be tier two and tier three instruction.
What interventions are we using?
What does it look like to qualify for services? How can we be creative with some of the barriers that we talked about earlier with time and structures and the schedule and all of those things that can sometimes slow down our ability to intervene and support a student in need. So looking at how our structured tier two and tier three support looks, and then also really trying to be more focused on the data that informs our instruction. So trying to empower teachers to be able to take progress monitoring data and recognize this data is telling me that this is the very specific skill that this child is struggling with, And how can I be responsive in my teaching to that? I think that our culture of assessment in the country is one of more focused on grades and performance of kids, and we often don't recognize the purpose and value of assessment is to know what we need to do next with kids, not to know what they should have done last.
And so trying to build a culture of understanding how assessments can help us help kids better and more effectively, that's one of our goal areas is understanding that assessments are our friend and that they are not to be used as an indictment of any kind of teaching or any kind of student's failure or lack of progress. It's really to say, Oh, okay, we're still not making progress on set and rhyme. We're going to go back and we're going to hammer on set and rhyme, we're going to make sure that we can give students as many opportunities to master this skill before we move on to the next one.
That is wonderful. Yeah. No. You know, working even just like on a personal level, I have a last night, gave a final assessment for one of my students.
And looking at the scores, they were looking at seventy five percent. And this is a student who's very like, I need to be an A student and being like, you know what? This does not indicate who you are as a person. This indicates but I want you to see where you were when we started and look at that growth.
You've made so much growth. And you're going to continue to make growth because you're doing all the things that you need to.
And so just having that conversation with our students, with our teachers, with our communities. Like you said, data is our friend. Assessments are our friend because they tell us what's working, what's not working. Do we need to try something different?
Or, hey, actually, no, things are going great. So looking at it more from that point of view versus, again, and it's more of a societal issue where you're right, we do put so much emphasis on a specific number or a specific grade to kind of say, oh, you're an A student versus a B student. Right? It's not about that.
It's about growth.
And I think that comes down to community, too, is it's really hard to tell parents when their child is not making progress. So we have sometimes this culture of nice where we are afraid to tell a student or their family that they didn't do well. We do a lot of things to try to boost their grade to a point that is palatable to the family. And what we're doing is a disservice to the child or the family by not saying it can be both and. You can be really strong in some areas and still need support in others. So I think that's not really a specific issue for us as much as it is, I think, a national issue around grades.
I go to a lot of different educational conferences, and I belong to a lot of networks of educators. And the ideas behind standards based grading and some of these other ways that we can look at how a student is showing progress, I think are really important to start looking into and trying to develop a more effective way to communicate progress with families.
Absolutely. And I know that can be the hardest part, like you said, and it does have to be that conversation that we change as a society. So, I mean, my last question for you was like, what was one piece of advice you would give others right now? Honestly, I think you've given us so much to create advice.
Thank you. I don't know that I have it all figured out, but I do, I have to say I'm really proud of the community that I work in and I'm really proud of the teachers that I work with because they truly are the ones who deserve all of the success that we've had over the last several years because they're the ones every single day showing up and doing everything that they can for kids. So I am privileged to work among them and excited about the next thing that we tackle together.
Absolutely. And I just have to second that. As I mentioned to you, Sarah, before we started recording, I love Orchard Park. It was my home for a long time and it was hard to leave.
I was just ready for kind of that next step in my career and everything. But but as someone who was a teacher at Orchard Park, thank you for all of the honestly, just the the time, the space for us to learn, to talk, to work, because this is a community that cares very much about their kids, who cares about their community at large, working with parents, working with teachers. So thank you for that. And I can't wait to hear how OP continues to do.
Thank you, Lindsey. Was so nice talking to you.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Smarter Literacy Podcast. Make sure to subscribe for more strategies and insights to make delivering effective literacy instruction easy or at least easier. And if you found this episode helpful, share it with a friend or leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcast. It really does help others find the show, and we are beyond grateful for your support. Thanks for listening. Until next time. Happy teaching.
