Computer.
And good morning, I'm Andy Johnson.
This is the Reading Instruction Show.
And today we have a very special guest in our studio,
which isn't a studio, it's just my office,
Stephanie Beer.
And Stephanie used to be a teacher,
but now she's a literacy advocate.
So Stephanie, introduce yourself.
Thank you, Andy, I'm glad to be here.
And this is my office, my bedroom where the door is closed
and my kids will hopefully not interrupt me.
I am a parent of three children.
I was a former teacher, but then after my last child was born,
figured that I couldn't do best practices
plus force mandates and then come home healthy.
So I became an education activist
and have now been working with a variety of things,
but also including my, helping my children
on their literary journey through school.
Their literacy journey, literary journey, both of them.
Interesting.
Now, what was it that caused you to leave the classroom?
A lot of force mandates, particularly around
the lot of testing, data collecting, screening of kids
and what to me seemed more like a deficit model.
And me having to put into place a lot of busy work
that really did not tell me much
about what the child was doing in the classroom.
I teaching is scholarly work.
You have to put a lot into it.
I've read like, I know you're a fan of Dr. Allenton,
read all of his work and used his work in the classroom
and it worked.
And so it was very effective,
but I couldn't do that plus what I consider poor practices.
It just didn't make sense.
So I, and to be with my children at home,
I needed to come home happy and I couldn't do that.
Yeah, educational malpractice.
Teachers are being forced to commit educational malpractice.
Yeah, and it's hard.
It is very hard.
It's very hard and it's driving good teachers,
master teachers from the classroom and that's a crime.
I loved being in the classroom
and the brilliance of each child in that classroom
was amazing.
It kept me going every day.
But unfortunately, classrooms have almost come more factory
like we're trying to get out of the factory model,
but it's like, okay, if they don't do well on this,
then this is where they go.
If they do well, then this is, you know,
they don't really have a lot of advocacy or agency
in the classroom anymore.
Yes.
The only remedy is they're going down a conveyor belt
is to send them back and run them through the conveyor belt
again.
Tell me more about the standardized test madness.
Do standardized tests actually tell you what to teach?
Well, they would like for you to do that.
I know I have to laugh because when I was,
my second child was born, I came back from maternity leave
and we had student conferences.
And I did parent or student driven conferences.
So they led the conference.
I did not realize we were supposed to show
the map test results.
And so instead I didn't do that.
And I found it afterwards we were supposed to,
but it's a number.
In fact, when I was driving with my daughter
and a couple of her friends,
my kids don't take the standardized tests.
They don't do any of the screenings.
I really believe that they're okay because of this
because I do feel that they would have been considered deficit
because they were late readers.
And we're all of a sudden saying that kids have to be reading
at four or five.
But anyways, we were in the car with a bunch of her friends
and they were all wondering what score
they had gotten on this map test.
And they thought that the highest score
made them the better reader.
And I just looked at my daughter and she's like,
oh yeah, now I get why you don't want me to be,
because that doesn't tell me anything.
And I always would like walk around
when kids are taking the map and read some of the questions
and I'm like, where are they going with this?
And here's the other funny thing,
when my son is a third grader,
he doesn't take, like I said, the test,
but they of course have to do all this test prep.
And this was at the beginning of the COVID
where we were at home.
And so on the Google sheet,
he had a document worth multiple choice questions.
And he was just struggling and he was feeling really down
because he couldn't get the answers right.
So I took the test.
I did worse than you did.
On these multiple choice reading,
if more parents actually looked at these test questions,
I think they would go, seriously,
you think we have a reading problem?
I think we have a testing problem.
We have a testing problem.
So you're able to ask that your children
not be part of the testing.
Minnesota, you can opt out of the test.
And I have chosen also,
because I think we consider the standardized test,
only the Minnesota test, the state test,
but I also consider maps.
I don't want my kids also to do like IXL,
any computerized programs for various reasons,
because I want my kids to be readers.
I don't want them to be good test takers.
And I feel like because of that, like I said,
they still have had some struggles with their reading journey
because of what I would consider mandates,
but yet they don't necessarily see themselves as losers
because they don't have this test
to determine who they are as a reader.
Well, let's talk about that literacy journey
or literary journey in just a minute,
but the very point of spending time to prepare for a test,
yes, it's a waste of time, but it invalidates the test.
If the test is based on a normal population
and a normal distribution of scores,
all of a sudden some groups are preparing
and some groups aren't.
So you are invalidating that test simply by preparing them
for the test.
That's one of the problems with it.
As well, where do these questions come from?
In Minnesota, these questions come from the literacy standards,
Minnesota academic English language arts standards,
and look at the standards.
They have nothing to do with reading in the real world,
but someone decided that these should be used.
All right, you still, all right, all right.
Steph, you're going to tell me,
and you're on mute right now, you're going to tell me about,
so your children's literacy journey,
the oldest one is in what grade, how old?
She will be a junior.
And then I have another one who will be a ninth grader
and the youngest will be a seventh grader.
All of them late readers, they came into kindergarten
not knowing all of their alphabet.
And I do remember once sitting at the,
after school waiting for them to come out,
and this one parent was so stressed
because their child wasn't reading at the age of five
and just she wanted to get a tutor and all of this.
And I just looked at her and said,
hey, I'm a teacher, my kid's not even,
doesn't even have the alphabet down.
And it was just like, this like seriously,
because there's so much pressure on parents
that their kids are considered defective
if they're not reading by that particular age.
And there's a really good,
I don't know if you're familiar with Defend the Early Years,
but there's an article out there,
Little to Gain and Much to Lose.
And it talks about how in kindergarten,
if you have a kid reading,
starting reading at six or seven,
and they are caught up by the age 11
for a kid who's reading at four or five.
The stress in kindergarten,
the kind of guy you should look like first grade.
That would have been really, really,
it doesn't.
You're breaking up on me a little bit, Stephanie.
She's breaking up on me.
As we wait for her to come back,
kindergarten shouldn't look like first grade
because kindergarten is kindergarten
and first grade is first grade.
It's not developmentally appropriate
to have a push down curriculum.
And I'm gonna stop the recording here.
Sure.
All right.
We had a little something was happening.
All right, your children left kindergarten,
deficit model, what's wrong with them
because they don't know their letters or whatever.
So tell me about how...
Well, fortunately,
they didn't leave with the deficit model
because they weren't screened.
I refuse all of the testing
that I was okay with testing
that gave teachers information,
but I wasn't okay with teachers information,
but I wasn't okay with it for labeling.
Was not gonna do that.
Anything that was standard or...
We live in a country that we're supposed to be individualized
and yet we really push our kids to all be on the same page.
I don't make, doesn't make sense to me,
but my middle child was very much in...
She did have some glitches,
what I would say in the reading,
but I was very fortunate
that she had the same kindergarten and first grade teacher.
And I remember her first grade teacher coming out to me,
she goes, Steph,
I just feel that she could use some help with reading,
but I knew what that would be.
It would be pulling out with an aid
and it would be phonics and just strictly phonics.
And I said, no, I said she's young.
She's a July birthday,
so she's actually very young for her age.
And the teacher said, yeah,
I mean, she wanted to put her in the higher reading group
because of her insight,
her meaning making,
but the physical pieces of writing,
a reading weren't working for her.
And I know like in fourth grade,
the teacher was going, yeah, she's great at comprehension,
but when she reads out loud, she just really gets...
And I'm like, well, I don't know that that's a skill
that you need in real life, reading out loud so much.
And by fifth grade, she was fine.
And now I've just shared with you
that she's got this cute little journal
that she puts her favorite quotes in.
She's also, you know, reading level, I don't go by that
because do you know what reading level you're at, Andy?
Do you know your reading level?
Right.
So I don't go by that,
but I go instead by what she like,
she came down the other day, two days ago,
kind of just like drained.
And I go, what were you doing?
I just finished a book.
She goes and I was crying.
And I go, isn't that amazing
that a writer can make you cry like that?
That to me, it tells me she's a literate person.
Why don't you show the journal you have?
Yeah, it's really cool.
So she does, she's got this little journal.
This isn't her only one, but she has, she'll draw
and she'll put various quotes in there.
So she has it pretty much filled out,
but she'll put different quotes that she likes
and she'll have drawings with it.
So I mean, to me, that's someone
who's on her literary journey.
She's interacting with books.
And she can, interacting with books.
And pulling out, you know, when I was in the classroom,
we had a wall that said, writing on the wall.
When students found passages that they thought were just like,
wow, this is amazing.
They'd put it up on the wall.
Fun.
So how did she become this avid reader?
What was your secret or your, what happened?
Well, like I said, I was fortunate.
When I, like I told you that the teacher was saying
that she needed this help.
And I said, you know, but she's so young.
The teacher, I could just see her go, you're right Steph.
She is young and I am being pushed
by so many of these mandates that I can't sell,
but she goes, but you are absolutely right.
We will continue to do what we're doing.
And she was fine.
But we've read, I've got like a whole list of the books
that we read aloud.
I've read the whole sister's grim books,
the unicorn chronicles.
So a lot of reading out loud.
I would do a lot of reading with her.
I don't know if you're familiar with the Piggy and Elephant
books, but we would take those books.
Mo Williams and we would re, I wish she would be Piggy.
I'd be elephant.
We would do a lot of reading around.
We would, and guess what?
I use the queuing system when she read
and she said something that didn't make sense.
I'm like, hold it.
And I wouldn't always be right next to her.
I said, what you just read totally didn't make sense to me.
So she would go back, reread it and slow down.
We would work through words that she didn't know.
And yeah, we use phonics sometimes
to figure out those words,
but we did a lot of meaning making reading,
but it wasn't laborious.
We never sat down and drilled her.
Never. It was all about fun.
It was all about finding her interest area.
Monics can be learned in the context of good books.
And systems is just recognizing the brain uses
three interacting systems to recognize words.
Something as simple as-
We use it all the time.
Yeah. What makes sense in the sentence?
That is developing the semantic queuing system.
And if anything, I feel like we're not, you know, like,
and then so my son is a different story.
He's had more, he's the seventh grader
and he's had more of this, the mandates.
I would say even SOR, Science of Reading before this.
And right now I consider him a reluctant reader.
It's not something he enjoys.
He'll be okay.
He's going to be okay.
But he's the one that just,
it's really hard for me to get him to love literacy right now,
but he's okay.
And with that, go ahead.
What kinds of things does he like to read?
Well, and that I've been scouring the bookshelves
for everything that we can find.
Right now his big book is The Five Nights at Freddie Books.
I don't know if you're familiar with that, but yeah.
And he, so he's really big on that.
We've read the Bad Guy series.
And that also is a situation where he'll read a page maybe
and then I'll read a page.
We do a lot of modeling when we come across a word.
He's not sure if he doesn't have the queuing system as is.
He'll just read on, which I find with a lot of students
and he won't bother to stop and go,
oh, that doesn't make sense.
He'll just keep reading.
And I'm the one that stops him and say,
hey, you know, figure that out.
And I just wanted to give you a little quiz, Zandi.
Okay.
I'm going to read a passage from one of these Friday nights
at Freddie Books and you tell me if you can figure out
what this word is that I am going to read here.
Okay.
I could have you arrested for tr...
Press passing.
What are your kids doing here?
Oh, hold it.
Why?
How did you know that word?
Because I've been arrested a lot?
No, I haven't.
But even like when he,
when we would go through certain words,
like the word neighbor.
Now, if you look at the word neighbor in phonics,
how do you figure that word out?
How do you possibly figure that word out?
Yes.
You need the context around it to get that.
And so he, we would do, but we would still look like
trespassing, you can see a little like ASS being
at the end of it.
You know, is it treat passing or is it, you know?
So we would look at all of those things,
but it was really about him finding those strategies
that worked for him.
And like I said, that like his first grade,
his first grade teacher, first of all,
30 kids in the classroom, ridiculous.
Second of all, I think it's SRA.
It's the, you know, where you read a passage
and then if you pass that, you go on to the next.
So it really wasn't any engagement.
So it was really, you know, this SRR is bringing back
a lot of old practices that we know don't work.
And he did get, they got a phonics program in there.
And he's like, I don't know why, you know,
I don't understand what this is all about.
And so it's just, it's mind boggling to me,
but we're blaming so many things,
but we're not blaming like personalized learning
was this new districts policy.
They had a Bill Gates person come in and say,
oh, we're doing amazing things with this.
That has nothing to do with actual literacy.
Yes.
You know, what you are doing, asking your son
to look for word parts that they recognize,
that's large unit phonics.
And the national reading says synthetic phonics,
analytic phonics, large unit phonics,
one is not better than the other.
They should all be taught.
And analyzing words that they're reading,
that's analytic phonics.
And to teach a strategy, look for parts that you know,
that's analogy, that is a word recognition strategy.
So they came in Bill Gates and again,
because someone is-
They had one of his consultants.
Yeah, because someone is an expert in business,
we call on them to help us understand education.
And teachers never exploited third world countries
for labor or polluted rivers.
Why in heaven's name would we ask someone
from business who's an expert in business things,
not having children's learning things about learning?
Yeah, it's about money.
She's putting her fingers together.
And I wanna-
Go ahead.
So, you know, we say that I did like a reading
and writing workshop in my classroom.
I wanna also make sure that we understand
the power of writing.
I was part of the National Writing Project,
which was an intensive summer program.
And so as a teacher, I really, really worked hard
on understanding product or process.
Process.
She wasn't getting that anymore.
It's very much chunked up.
Fluency, fluency is huge.
And it would be, and my point is,
I never saw balanced reading literacy
in my children's classroom.
They got ploniphonics, they got word recall.
They got a lot of, like I said, fluency.
And I'm like, you know, my oldest daughter,
they wanted to have her go after school for fluency,
just practice fluency.
And I said, nah, not gonna do it.
You know, she's, here's, I'll tell you what,
her thing now is that all of her friends
went to Barnes & Noble, bought a book.
They bought a different colored pen
and they're now writing comments in that.
And then they're sharing them with each other
so they can have conversations about these books.
What a cool idea is that.
That's a literate daughter.
That's not someone who is focused on just fluency.
I mean, I just don't understand some of the things
that we're doing and it's not balanced literacy.
You know, Steph, I interviewed a teacher last night
and she said the same,
she was involved in the writing project as well.
Oh yeah.
What a coincidence.
And she said, well, it's been shown
that there is a strong reading and writing connection.
One enhances it.
Absolutely.
And writing is mistaught and undertaught.
Yes.
And my son in particular has not had writing.
And then they've gone back to doing just the grammar,
making it all about.
And like I loved Katie Wood Ray's book, Study Driven,
where we'd had a unit on punctuation,
or on grammar, punctuation.
I would take out all of the period,
or punctuation out of a particular story.
We tried to read it and we're like, okay.
So we discovered.
And it was really, I mean,
we had some strong writers in that class
and we would constantly be revising and editing
Ralph Fletcher.
And my son is not, he can't,
writing is not his strength.
And I get it because he's never had the practice to do it.
What a neat idea.
Boy, I wish you were in a classroom someplace.
I would love to be in the classroom.
And that's what really pains me,
is good teachers like you are being driven out.
You can't learn, teachers of writing need to write.
You need to take piano lessons
from someone who didn't play the piano.
Absolutely.
We need to teach the process.
Absolutely.
Instead of just to start.
And more importantly,
we have to give ownership back to the students.
I really feel in this mandated world,
I feel like they're going through the system
versus it giving them the tools and skills they need,
but them to be active.
I don't feel like there's active learning going on right now.
Learning is something being done to them.
Yes.
And it's, well, and I don't even know if it's learning
to be honest with you, but it's painful.
I fear for our little children,
we talk about the high schools
and kids having a lot of mental health issues.
And when we're pushing them at such a young age
to do something, why aren't we having kids
all walk at that nine months?
Yes.
Maybe if they're all walking at nine months,
we should start screening them at six months.
And if they're not doing certain things that,
I mean, can you imagine how painful that is?
A child wants to go into the classroom
and they want to love it.
And then we take that away when the first day
we're screening them and then we say they're deficient.
Interesting.
Who wants to, who wants to, who's motivated by that?
Right, deficiency model.
So what advice would you give parents?
What advice?
What do you want to say to parents?
To trust the process and to not take those tests
because they don't tell you much.
If it, well, and I want to be great
if we could opt in to this testing.
The first, the daughter, my middle child, when she did,
you know, they were talking about struggles.
I did actually find a teacher who I know
who's very respected and expert in the field
but was not in the classroom.
And I had her sit down with my daughter
and have her do some reading,
authentic reading kinds of assessments.
And she said, Steph, she's fine.
She's going to be fine.
She's going to be fine. So let's go back
to real authentic assessments that help.
Let's maybe opt.
If you feel like you need to have this,
but I would refuse the test.
Let your child go in with joy.
Let them the first day, you know,
the first day they usually go back like a 30 minute
and they do these, all of these tests for your kid.
Just let them go on and meet the teacher,
get to know the classroom, you know, things like that.
That to me is what I would say,
don't worry about if your child isn't reading
by the age of five,
isn't reading by the age of six, let them discover,
let them explore.
And what can parents do at home?
Do a lot of reading with them, find joy.
We would read books over and over and over again,
particularly the ones they love,
like I said, with the elephant and piggy books.
Yeah, we would play, act play.
We would do things like that.
We would talk, we would, I would say,
okay, what is this about?
Or what, you know, we would have conversations
about the book, but we also, like I said,
like you were talking about in regards to words,
they didn't know.
We would do a variety of different things to say,
okay, this is how you learn these words, you know.
But just find joy in literacy.
They see me, my oldest daughter gave me this book.
She made this for me, it's a reading journal.
She knows me as a reader and she has little tabs in it.
She has my book list, she has my favorite books,
reading thoughts, you know?
So I myself, so this is what she created for me.
And so yeah, so and give them experiences,
let them play.
We know that the power of play is so important
and yet we're taking it away from them.
Yep, they're not just Sarah Bellum sitting in a row,
as they're emotional, social, intellectual,
creative beings.
So what advice would you have for classroom teachers
that are out there struggling with these mandarin?
To get involved with Thandi Johnson and the ILOC,
International Literacy Educators Coalition.
I think that it's powerful because it gives us a voice,
a collective voice.
I think, you know, like I've had teachers reach out to me
because I'm no longer in the classroom, they say,
I can't say this, but can you say this for me?
And so then I go out and I will, I'll publicize,
my face are various places, I'll say, you know,
this is what's happening.
I'm hoping that we can, the outside,
unfortunately teachers are scared and I get it.
I mean, good grief, they've got so many things coming.
You go into a convenience store these days and it says,
please be nice to the people we're doing our best.
Teachers have like that times a million.
And so I would say reach out to people
who maybe aren't in the classroom,
tell us what's going on and we'll advocate for you
if you can't.
But if you can try to, yeah, I don't know, Andy,
I don't know what to tell you on that because I got,
I can't say much because I got out of the classroom.
I admire teachers who are still in it.
People don't realize how hard teachers work.
How stressful it can be.
And they're wasting $100 million on the science
of reading Boondoggle when it could have been used
to have smaller class sizes.
Absolutely.
And educate, you know, we know that there are places
that have really, I taught in Sioux Falls, South Dakota
and we were constantly going into each other's classrooms
and looking at what people were doing.
We were constantly reading, journal, you know,
professional articles.
We were active research is what we were doing.
You know, put your investment in that
because that's where it's gonna go.
It's not a program.
Yes, there's no program in the world.
Action research is teacher directed research
where they do research in their classroom
and often they connect to the research literature.
I guess the one thing I would say for teachers
is not to look at maps, you know,
if you feel like you have to look at it,
but don't look at what you're doing in the classroom,
look at what your children are doing in the classroom,
your students and that is the best indicator
of where they're going to be and what they're doing.
A doctor is assessed by patient outcome
or by patient, by his practice, what he does.
Some, they have different outcomes.
Teacher should be assessed and valued
by what they do in the classroom,
by the strategies and processes they have.
All right, one of the things-
And look at the strengths of the students.
Look at the strengths of the students,
what they're doing well.
Get to know them.
All right, one last question for you, Steph.
I'm working with pre-service teachers.
What advice do you have for them?
I'm gonna show them this, by the way.
Oh, take a deep breath.
Take a hi.
Take a deep breath.
Find the joy in each child that you're working with.
Get to know them and listen to the research
and listen to Andy and what he's giving you.
Read Richard Allenton,
read all of these professional people
who know what they're doing.
And Andy, just for your sake,
my daughter just told me that she wants to be a teacher.
So we have six years to fix this.
She's working with students this summer
and she's just loving it.
She loves what she sees in each child
and what their brilliance.
And so if she's gonna go into it,
I need to make sure that she knows what she's getting into.
What really keeps me going and brings me joy
is interacting and finding teachers.
In my graduate classes, I see them
and their eyes light up when they talk about their kids
and what they're doing in the classrooms.
That really is what keeps me going in this.
All right.
Steph, fear, I wish you well.
Thank you.
Literacy, advocacy,
and this has been the Reading Instruction Show.