Sheila W. Valencia is Professor Emerita of Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Washington, Seattle where she contributed to the teacher preparation, masters, and doctoral programs in literacy. She began her career as a teacher in New York City, then spent six years as Director of Reading in Adams Country School District, and finally 32 years as a faculty member at UW. Her research focuses on literacy assessment, policy, and teacher development, particularly how to create and use assessment to improve teaching and learning. Working on long-term collaborations with several states and school districts, she has conducted research and professional development projects on aligning both instruction and assessment with deeper, rigorous learning in literacy and social studies. Her work has appeared in numerous edited books and top-tier journals including Reading Research Quarterly, Educational Assessment, Journal of Teacher Education, Elementary School Journal, Journal of Literacy Research, and The Reading Teacher.

Valencia has served on national, state, and local assessment committees to improve assessment systems and policies including the Common Core Standards Advisory Panel on Literacy, National Assessment of Educational Progress subcommittees, and IRA/NCTE standards and assessment committees. She currently serves as a member of the Nationall Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Validity Studies Panel and the Technical Advisory Panel for Smarter Balanced Assessment. Dr. Valencia has been honored as a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the Dina Feitelson Research Award from the International Literacy Association (ILA), the P. David Pearson Scholarly Influence Award, and outstanding teacher education article from American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE).

 Hello, listeners. I'm Dr. Margaret Vaughn and welcome to the podcast, Getting Smarter, a podcast where I get to talk to some of the most transformational thinkers and leaders in the field of education, all in the hopes of getting smarter.

Dr. Sheila W. Valencia is Professor Emeritus of Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Washington, Seattle. Where she contributed to the teacher preparation masters and doctoral programs in literacy. She began her career as a teacher in New York City, and then spent six years as director of reading and Adams Country School District, and finally served 32 years as a faculty member at UW.

Her research focuses on literacy assessment Policy and teacher development, particularly how to create and use assessment to improve teaching and learning. Working on long term collaborations with several states and school districts, she's conducted research and professional development projects on aligning both instruction and assessment with deeper rigorous learning in literacy and social studies.

Dr. Valencia has served on national, state, and local assessment committees. to improve assessment systems and policies, including the Common Core Standards Advisory Panel on Literacy, the National Assessment of Education Progress Subcommittees, and the IRANCTE Standards Advisory Panel. and assessment committees.

She currently serves as a member of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the NAEP Validity Studies Panel. Dr. Valencia has been honored as a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, the Diana O. Fidelson Research Award from the International Literacy Association, the P. David Pearson Scholarly Influence Award, the Outstanding Teacher Education Article from American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, and is an inducted member.

Well, today's guest is the lovely Dr. Sheila W. Valencia, who is coming to visit us and talk to us about getting smarter. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's lovely to be here. Oh, Sheila, I'm such a huge fan of yours and I am just thrilled and delighted to have the opportunity to visit with you. I just, I love your work and I just love you as a human.

You're just a wonderful person. And so I can't wait to talk today. Oh, thank you. I remember when we first met back at UNC, right? Yeah. Yeah. With the great group of doctoral students you were working with when Jerry Duffy was there. Oh, yeah. So It was, it's great to revisit. Yeah, it's wonderful too to, to, and I remember seeing you in the airport on the way to LRA and, you know, and just saying hi, cause we were, you know, both going to the West Coast and so.

Yes. Yeah. It's just lovely to have this opportunity. So thank you for like, thank you so much for making the time. Thanks for asking. Yeah. All right. So, well, before we get started, why did you go into the field of education and, and, and teaching? Like what was your, what started it all? Well, I really came in through the back door.

I, I, I love mathematics and I started out as a math major in college and it was pretty early, you know, it was in the 60s and I was a math major and then I wanted to be an engineering major. And. There were two women in a class of 450 men and it was uncomfortable. And I wasn't really sure that I liked mathematics in the same way that I used to.

So I searched around and thought I'd give education a try in my sophomore year because it was an undergraduate major that you had to declare by your junior year. Laughter. Laughter. Laughter. And I found myself placed in a preschool with a teacher who was from France and was super, super, super liberal and full of joy in these, these four year olds and three year olds running around.

And I thought, wow, they are like, Open books, man, they were just delightful. And so there I ended up, it was an experiment, you know, to try some education classes. I tried some psychology classes, love them, but ultimately decided to stay in teaching. Wow. Backdoor. I didn't know that at all. So was, was preschool your, so preschool was your first part of kind of entryway.

It was the first course in education. You know, I guess they thought you couldn't do too much damage if you were in a preschool class. Little did they know. And so it, it was the introductory class and, and ultimately I never did teach preschool. I taught elementary and middle grades and ended up actually working it.

On some high school projects at the end of my time, but you really have spanned the whole gamut, you know, with the whole, yeah, yeah. Was that your, I mean, do you feel like middle school and secondary was kind of your, did you ever feel like one was really your pole? Like you were pulled a little bit more, you know, they, it just shifted over time.

It shifted over time. I mean, my certification was in elementary, so that that's was K8 in New York. Um, and the high school, I think those high school kids scared me, but until until I was about ready to retire, and then I got brave and did a did a high school intervention. And so then you did your Ph. D. at University of Colorado Boulder.

I did. Uh, and so, and so that kind of had that math component because you did the educational research and measurement. That was, was that, were you following that a lot? Yeah, I did, I did. I had a dual major. You know, one was in, I think they called it reading education and in measurement. Yeah. I just love the combination of the two.

But before that, I, I did my master's at the University of Buffalo, SUNY Buffalo, which is where I did my undergraduate also. And that's where I started my work in a reading clinic during my master's. Oh, nice. I was gonna ask you about that. And I loved it. I just knew that I found my home. That's wonderful because it, it really is what got me interested in assessment.

is the idea that you could figure out what was going on for a lot of kids. If, if, if you knew what to look for, you could often figure it out and then you could teach. So that clinical experience was magical. And when I did my master's, I took Every course they offered master's and doctoral, even though I was in the master's program in reading and language arts education.

So by the time I got to my PhD, I mostly had experience in, in literacy and teacher education. My, my dissertation was about preparing elementary teachers in reading in particular. So I was able to branch out a little bit more in my PhD. How lucky your students were. I know that you, that got to take classes with you.

I, I kind of envy them that they got to take some of your classes and at the, you know, when you were teaching. Um, so how about highlights from your career? Are there things that have stood out for you and, and why, and maybe what did you enjoy the most? Um, and maybe didn't anything surprise you, uh, along the journey?

Yeah. Well, it's interesting that I didn't come to academe until late. After I got my PhD, I went back and worked in a school district for six years and I was reading coordinator in a school district outside Denver of 30, 000 kids and I I was K 12 reading director. So I loved that work. You know, we were doing, then it was called chapter one interventions for kids and curriculum development and textbook adoptions and professional development and all that.

Um, So, I thoroughly enjoyed that, but I didn't go into higher ed immediately. So, what surprised me and scared me was whether or not I could get back into higher ed after six years out. So, I got my degree in seventy five. Eight and then I had the opportunity to do a postdoc at the Center for the Study of Reading.

Oh, and that's what gave me the gradual track back so that I started to publish because when you're in a school district, I think I published two things in six years, you know, but what surprised me is. What a wonderful community I found that kind of welcomed me, even though I was late to the party. And so I made these wonderful friends and colleagues, and it surprised me how interesting that was and how energizing to work with colleagues like that.

And then, of course, there are a number of surprises. subject matter wise, but that was a scary time for me. I, I, to know whether or not I could make it. Back into what was working with at the center. Like, I mean, so many wonderful guests have talked about that being at the center there and it just, it sounds, it sounds like such an exciting time.

It was wonderful. It was wonderful. You know, they had had maybe for 10 or 12 years, they had the grant from the government. To be one of the national centers for reading research. And it was during the time of becoming a nation of readers. It was during the time of comprehension research, um, Dick Anderson and David Pearson and Jean Osborne were directors and anybody who had anything to do with reading came through there at one time or another, and they created a community.

Um, researchers that was amazing. I mean, if I give you a list of all the people who who passed through there, you'd be amazed. But every Friday afternoon, there was a seminar and we would go to the basement of this, this little brick building and somebody would present. Their work and the room would just have a conversation around that work and so created an intellectually stimulating, respectful, challenging place to work.

So I, I really credit that postdoc with kind of the. The launch of, of my work, and it started with my work with David Pearson on new assessments. We worked collaboratively with the state of Illinois to develop an alternative model of reading assessment for the state, similar to what Karen Wixson and Charlie Peters did in Illinois.

And we kind of became the four musketeers because we were All working on the same things and you know, our goal was to flip assessment on its head for a long time. It had been assessment driven instruction. So you'd look, you know, people would look at what was tested and then decide. What to teach. And we all thought that that was not quite right.

That it needed to be the opposite. That we needed to decide what was worth teaching and then create assessments that measured what was important to, to teach. So just think about what was coming out then. And what we were learning about comprehension, what we were learning about also explicit and we called it explicit instruction or adaptive instruction and and what authentic reading look like, what authentic reading instruction look like, and what authentic reading assessment would need to look like in order to get all those pieces to go together.

That sounds amazing. I mean, there's so many questions. So talking about also your experiences working in schools and the school district, how did that inform that? I mean, I feel like you must have had also this additional capital having to navigate those kinds of relationships in schools. I mean, that seems to me an amazing, um, capital that you had when you were working on the assessment because you had seen it on the ground in a different lens.

Yeah, yeah, those six years in the school district were were exceptional and it was an exceptional school district to they were on the cutting edge of many inner innovations. And because of my position I spent a lot of time in classrooms, and a lot of time in professional development. Nice. I mean that was really.

My my primary responsibility, but I also got in on the assessments because they were not aligned with what we were teaching. So that capital of working with teachers, professional development really paid off when I got my first tenure line job and started to teach in teacher education, you know, and. In my case, we started to do our teacher education classes when I came to the University of Washington in 80.

seven, we started to teach a couple of years later in schools. So I know you're familiar with that because Jerry Duffy did some of the same work, but originally teacher education was, you know, on campus and student teaching was in the field and the two barely talked to one another. So you're right. It was, extraordinary experience to have both on the ground practical experience and then to have this gift of research, the research community.

Wow, what an exciting time. I feel like it's so exciting. So how about some other highlights? I mean, you've done so much. Sheila, really, there's, you know, from your grant work to, you know, amazing publications and are there other, other parts that have really stuck with you or any projects that you think, wow, maybe they've surprised you or they've just have been ones that made you think differently, or just maybe they were extensive.

Well, I'm just wondering about those. Gosh, well, you know, as I. Thought about this interview. I realized that it's been a pretty steady path of concepts that have driven me. So it's kind of hard to pull one out for, for sure that that first experience of developing a statewide assessment that was more aligned with best teaching practices was a big one, but.

After that, I started to work on what people started to call more authentic assessment. And I had a great project with Kathy Au to look at portfolios. And we looked at portfolio, classroom portfolio assessment across the context of Hawaii and Washington state, which wasn't bad for a visit, right? Yes. And we worked with teachers who shared a common set of loosely written standards for teaching reading and collecting evidence in classrooms.

And so again, I tried to bring together practice in classrooms with the wise use of assessments to make Instructional decisions. So I never got into assessment purely for the assessment. Um, perspective, the measurement, but how do you learn to enhance instruction? How do you make an instruction better?

But that was really groundbreaking in terms of finding that we could have teachers collect work from students. And if he documented it. Correctly, you could gather some reliable, valid evidence, even across. You know, 3, 000 miles as long as you had a common understanding of what your goals for instruction or so that that was a big one.

Probably

probably after that, I would say that I just really enjoyed the below the bar study where we took what's common sense. And looked at kids who did not do well on state assessments, and they were all the policymakers were putting them all into remedial reading programs that, of course, they assumed required decoding instruction and right, right.

Our study showed, of course, that only 11 percent of them had decoding problems and comprehension problems, but the rest were all over the place. And so that idea of differentiating instruction came up again in a fluency study that I did where, again, people were trying to make judgments about kids based on scores of words correct per minute, you know, big numbers.

And then you tried to say, everybody who scored below this, This level or that required X instruction. And of course, again, we showed that that wasn't the case. That in fact, there are many contributions to words correct per minute. There's fluency, there's expression, there's accuracy, there's comprehension.

And so when you pull those apart, You know, it's cliche, but one size doesn't fit all for intervention. Right. So, you know, that that is kind of a recurring exciting thing to me to try to disrupt the simple answers. Um, to complex problems that in assessment and in instruction. I love that. How did, how do you, how did the work with, with Nate?

How did that, you know, how did that inform kind of the lens on the work that you looked at and looked at their work and the validity studies? Like how did that. Oh, the validity studies. Yes. So, um, for the last. I don't know, maybe eight years, I, I've been a panel member on the NAEP Validity Studies panel, and that, it's a group made up primarily of measurement people, but there are some content people that sit around the table.

I'm one of the content people for reading. And when you take a close look. At the nature of assessment on NAEP, and you ask yourself how well it aligns with best teaching practices, the validity question comes up. Are we measuring what we're teaching? Right? Yeah. And so there were a series of studies that we did looking at common core standards as they align with NAEP, we looked at other state assessments that aligned or not with NAEP, And then, as part of that, there were a series of studies that Karen Wixen and I did to look at what makes text comprehension difficult, and we use NAEP, um, data, as well as other data to ask that question.

So, again, trying to dig deeper under a simple number. Yeah. The question on NAEP was. If these reading passages have similar readabilities. Why do we get different performance if they have different readabilities? Why do we get similar performance? And so the question is not how to evaluate text by itself, but how to evaluate how difficult comprehension is when you look at the interaction of the text.

Tasks as well as reader. So we call them text task scenarios, which means In any given text, you can ask easy questions, you can ask hard questions, you can ask questions that require the processing of an entire passage to answer, or just the single sentence. You can ask kids to select the right answer. Or to explain an answer, you can find very small details that are essential, like in a mystery to understanding, or superficial details.

So, by looking at the relationship of a text to the task, what you're asking the reader to do, We found you get a better measure of what makes the text difficult for students. And NAEP gave us some opportunities to look at that with huge datasets. And in turn, I think we help them think about how to create assessments that paid attention, not just to picking out the right passages, but the right tasks.

Thanks. And how those work, work together. Was that an amazing, was that so empowering to be able to It was totally empowering. I mean, I've used the, like the, these studies took us years and years and years. And you know, anybody who's taught comprehension, Those, those things, like, wait, I can't ask you to talk about a character's development unless you've read the whole thing and talked about it.

Anybody who's taught kids who can't get the right pronoun, what, what's that referring to? Or second language learners, who in another study I did, we found they were under identified in words correct per minute. Because they could read accurately, but they didn't have deep understanding. And that was mostly due to new vocabulary, which happens with second language learners, you know, who are new to the language.

So these measures that simplify, either because the measurement is easier to do, or because you think you can intervene more simply, often miss the sweet spot, or the sweet spots. So, yeah, it was. It was very fun to do those studies. And, you know, David Pearson and I started to, started me on that process when we started that Illinois assessment, you know, because we have to think about those things.

So over time, it's, it's gotten better. More and more interesting. And I love that. It's, it's like the continual thread. Yeah. Seems to be in my life. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's kind of wonderful. I mean, and, I mean, and also like I, you know, just in kind of preparing for today, just the various layers from, you know, the Gates and the George and Lucas foundation and some of those kind of like different with any of those projects.

Like I was fascinated to read about those projects. What were those? And yeah, what did they, you know, of course, I'm supposed to ask you, what did you enjoy most, but I'm very curious about those two. Well, you know, it's interesting because the George Lucas project was the last. When I worked on before I retired and it was a long term project.

And they started, that project started without me. They were interested in what does deeper learning look like? And by deeper learning, they were looking at helping kids learn by concepts that were more complex. And that we called adaptive expertise. So they were able to apply what they learned, not regurgitated, have deep understanding and apply, which, you know, is similar to what's going on in reading now, or also knowledge building in reading.

So they, they started that project, and they were at it for a couple of years, and it wasn't doing very well, and somebody invited me in to go in and observe in classrooms, watch them implementing it, and what we found is that the kids weren't reading the text. They, the teachers were assigning text, even though it was project based learning, they still were assigning reading.

The kids weren't doing the reading. So the only learning that was happening was what the teachers were telling them. Uh huh. So Why weren't they reading? Unmotivated, not motivated, not, not interesting. Yeah. High school kids. Yeah, yeah. And, and, you know, sometimes the reading didn't have a whole lot to do with the project.

Okay. Right? They were saying, well, here, we have to cover this topic. We have to cover this topic. We have to cover this. And then there was the project. So they were almost like too Different things. So we, we discovered that there was no real purpose setting in the reading. The reading wasn't aligned with what they were held accountable for.

And we started to develop better text. Task scenarios. It goes back to that, yeah. It goes right back to it, so it was so exciting, you know, to work with the teachers and we figured out a way to motivate kids before they started the project, like, gave them a challenge and then there was performance of the project but also all the reading assignments had it.

a purpose. Tonight you're going to read, not chapter 15, but pages blank for blank. The reason you're reading it is because of this. Tomorrow, when you come into class, we're going to be using that. So we tried to match the text to the task, to the classroom, to the classroom activities, and man, we got payoff.

We really did. And it was exciting. It was exciting. And we did it in many school districts across three states over seven years. And so we had what we call, we call, we had looping where ideas went through multiple units engagement first, you are George Washington and you're going to have to convince Benjamin Franklin.

That your idea is the right one. So now gather some evidence. Right. Yeah. Kind of making like, Oh, right. So I ended up in high school in the end, but again, I think. For me, it was this idea of matching texts with tasks. And then we had to create an assessment. I was going to ask, how did that work to measure?

So we created scenarios. So if the kids had studied the constitution, the assessment we gave them was a newspaper article about an event that happened, for example, search and seizure in a high school, the principal collected all the backpacks. Right. Put them there. Did this. And we said, so what principles of the constitution are at play here?

And then we had a challenge and we said, A court came out and ruled that it wasn't legal because of these things. How does that change your opinion? So that application over time. So I was able to work with some great colleagues to both put into practice learning, we call it learning from text. We called ourselves the lift team.

I love it. And learning from text. And then to create an assessment where we made sure the reading level was accessible to all the kids and where we were going for application of skills and strategies that they had learned through, through the course. So fascinating. And you know, one of my office, I, you have, there's so many, so many papers I love, but the one I, one I always.

I tend to always cite is the curriculum materials for elementary reading shackles and scaffolds for I love that paper. You do. What is it that you like about it? I, well, you know, I love that it's, it's tracking teachers, but it's just this idea of adaptability, which, you know, that's kind of my, one of my passion areas that Jerry kind of started with us in our work, but it, it's so timely.

And that's what I, I love it, but. Yeah, I have to really credit my colleague, Pam Grossman, who was here at University of Washington for a while. Then she became dean. She went to Stanford and then she became dean at Pennsylvania. And she is a supreme teacher educator and researcher in teacher education.

And we, we, since we were both working in teacher ed, I've taught methods classes. Every year I was here, and two out of three quarters I was in there, and she was doing the same in secondary. And so working together, I learned a lot about teacher education, and we were able to do several studies together to look at what we needed to do better in teacher education to prepare teachers to deal with the challenges of implementing Good instruction when they get into the field and what a timeless question, right?

That's just whatever we you know, that's exactly what we always struggle with right with our teaching We do we do and we talked about both conceptual tools That is concepts that you teach in teacher education like scaffolding or maybe like constructivist understanding From a comprehension perspective, and then what we called practical tools, that is how do you actually put those into into practice and when when teacher education brought those two things together, it was most successful, because without.

Giving teachers practical tools, like what does it mean to actually scaffold and reading, then they were unprepared for making adaptations. During teaching. Yeah. Or, or to deal with mandated curriculum. How do you deal with mandated curriculum that doesn't meet your standards for good instruction? Yeah, it's a, it's a, you know, it's just a continual question and I love that article.

I, I read it every couple months. It's just, whenever I, I do, I mean, I, you could find something better to do than that, I'm sure. No, no, no, since, since my, since I was introduced to it in my doctoral program, it's one of those I, I always, I love it. I mean, there's so many aspects. I love the design. I just love the, I just love it.

It's, you know, there's, yeah. You know, what's, what was really great about it and, and also challenging were many of the studies we did were longitudinal. We followed the same teachers for up to three years, right? For the faint of heart. I mean, that's long, that's a lot of work. Oh man, it was a ton of work and talk about a ton of data.

To analyze, right? But you know, some things that were sleeping in the first couple of years of teaching resurfaced in the third year of teaching. So you, you know, from your work that the first years of teaching get overwhelmed with management and other things. Um, but some things actually come back. So we shortchange our work in teacher education.

If we only look at first year Teachers, right? You know, we need, we need to look that longitude look right. We need to look over time at that. Yeah, I love that. So how about some suggestions and insights for listeners? I mean, you know, right now we're, we're back still in the science of reading. So it feels like it's.

You know, there's still some conversations about what that is and the most, you know, the, this, the most effective way to teach reading. What's your suggestions, maybe, and some insights for, for faculty, maybe teachers, and even policymakers? It doesn't have to be about the science of reading, but just, I wonder, you know, what do you, what, you know?

Well, you know, I think there are lots of things in the science of reading that we've known forever. Right. Yeah. And somehow there's a new label on it, but, but for sure, I, I, I think,

I think you have to attend to all aspects of reading and developmentally there are changes in, in what, you know, what kids are grappling with. Over time. Yeah. So I would, I would be a thoughtful, thoughtfully adaptive teacher. Thank you, Jerry Duffy. Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Margaret. Thank you, Seth. Right. I think you can't afford to follow anything without thinking about it, and to supplement.

your insights from any One measure so I don't know that that's particularly insightful, but no, but yeah I think especially like the like assessment. I was I was wondering about that like You know that, you know, also the thoughtful connection to assessment, you know, you're with your work I mean, how do how do we how do we think differently about?

Assessment maybe of how we're using assessment right now. And that just is a question I wondered about do you have any thoughts about you know insights about how we can be thoughtful around assessment You know, I wonder about that for, particularly for, for school districts, maybe kind of harking back to your earlier work with school districts.

You need indicators of comprehension, of self monitoring, of vocabulary, of decoding. I mean, all of those come together. And anything that simplifies that is likely to miss. Miss something, you know, I think the saddest for me as, as I mentioned earlier were, were the miss the miss labels of second language learners using words correct per minute, the kids they missed and and shouldn't have missed and the kids they targeted and shouldn't have targeted, you know, so I think multiple measures are, are the only way to go and, and I think any, any Any school district would be wise to gather more than a single indicator.

I'd love that. Yeah. Now I know I've asked you this, but I'm wondering so more broadly, like, has there anything that surprised you in general about your career or your work or even working in schools or any, is there, has been anything that surprised you along, I feel like those surprises sometimes are the places that I wondered about that.

I. I, you know, I, I taught school, you know, I started as school teacher and, and I spent a lot of time in classrooms, but it continually surprises me at how challenging teaching is. I mean, I, I just, sometimes I leave there, I'm so exhausted, I think, and, you know. We're, we're suggesting teachers do so much and how, how difficult it is, uh, let's just talk about teaching reading, right?

And the wide range of abilities and motivations and backgrounds and prior experience and culture and language that, you know, that make classroom interesting. And challenging. So it always surprises me that even the most experienced teachers have a huge job. And so I think as researchers, you know, our job is to understand better or more, more about the complexities of.

reading itself, but also instruction, you know, the complexities of instruction and to try to partner with teachers to, to help, help them do that really hard job. I love that. So let's see, how about when, what do you view maybe are important questions that your work has led to? I think the best question is how, how can we understand what kids understand about reading and what do they understand what can they what.

What can they do? How do they marshal resources to, to do the job? To do the job? And to do not just the job in that moment, but to carry that ability to read across context, across time. Look, I think that. The question is always, how do, how do they do what they do and how can we help them do it better? I love that.

So how about given your career striving to transform thinking, what is your current view or advice to the field, to the, to the literacy field or more broadly education? What's your, what's your advice or view?

Well, I think it's important to continue to do research in real classrooms with real kids, real teachers. It's certainly, there's a place for experimental studies and I call them greenhouse studies, you know, where you, you, you try stuff out, right? But, but it's, we need, we need to understand more about how things work.

In, in real life, in real life. I'd love that. Oh, Sheila, I, I literally could talk to you for the whole day. So, I mean, are there other things you'd like to, or any other suggestions or anything you'd like to talk more about? No, I just want to continue to appreciate my colleagues who, and you've talked to a lot of them.

I feel really fortunate to have part of that. And I, I hope that the next generation also creates community. And I think the center for the study of reading really helped create that community, even when it no longer existed or the, uh, the MSU center where, where Jerry Duffy was before. They created communities, both local and national.

That was just. Very productive and smart, really smart. So I hope people continue to find those communities and find them in schools too. I, I, I feel like teaching is, should be a community activity more than an individual classroom. I love that. Oh, well, Sheila, thank you so much for, for talking with me and helping us to get smarter and.

You're just a hero of mine, and it's just, it's wonderful to have this opportunity, so thank you so much. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me and helping me think back. That was fun. Oh, I love it. Thank you.