Rita M. Bean, PhD, is Professor Emerita in the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining the university, she taught at the elementary school level and served as a reading supervisor for grades K–12. Dr. Bean has published numerous articles, book chapters, and books on topics including professional learning and the role of reading specialists and literacy coaches. She is a member of the Reading Hall of Fame and a former board member of the International Literacy Association. Dr. Bean is a recipient of the University of Pittsburgh’s Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award and Distinguished Service Award, among other honors.

 Hello listeners, I'm Dr. Margaret Vaughan 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.

Rita M. Thien is Professor Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education. For over 25 years, she taught students preparing to be reading specialists and also served as Director of the Reading Center. Prior to joining the university, she taught at the elementary level and served as reading coordinator, K 12, the role which stimulated her interest in coaching as a means of supporting teacher professional learning.

Dr. Bean has focused her research on the role and impact of reading specialists and literacy coaches in schools. She served as co director of a large scale evaluation study of a literacy initiative in Pennsylvania. That included coaching as a major approach for professional learning. She has also participated in several national studies that have resulted in position statements about the role of reading specialists and literacy coaches.

Results of her research have been published in many journals and books. Recent books include The Literacy Specialist, Leadership and Coaching for Classroom, School, and Community, a co edited volume, Best Practices of Literacy Leaders, Key to School Improvement, Power of Instructional Coaching in Context, a System's View for Aligning Content and Coaching, and Cultivating Coaching Mindsets, an Action Guide for Instructional Leaders.

In addition to her writing, Dr. Bean facilitates workshops. For reading specialists and for instructional coaches, these interactive sessions emphasize the importance of the coaching and leadership role of these professionals. Dr. Bean served as a member of the Board of Directors International Reading Now Literacy Association.

I'm fine.

Thank you. And I'm delighted to be here. And thanks for the invitation.

Oh, I'm just so thrilled to talk with you. You are, you know, I, whenever I think about doing any work in schools with teachers alongside of teachers, I, I look at your work because it's so inspirational. And so before we get started, I always like to ask our wonderful guests, why did you go into the field of education and teaching?

Like what was that story? What's your story about that? I

laugh when I saw that question because you sent it to me and I thought, I'm like most of those little girls who always wanted to be a teacher. You know, I was always teaching somebody else, including my brothers, and forced them to be the pupils, in other words, so, so that was always an interest and actually I can remember when I was I was just about ready to graduate from high school.

And one of my uncle said to me, Oh, you don't want to be a teacher. And I said, yes, I do. So what happened is I didn't go directly into education. I became a secretary, but I became a secretary at the University of Pittsburgh, and that just confirmed for me that I wanted to teach because I was working, you won't believe this, Margaret, but in literacy, in reading education, a faculty member who had been president of ILA, or was IRA at that time, and I was so interested in that whole reading process.

I went to the conferences that he was holding. I looked at the data that he was analyzing, and I began, became really interested in how do you work with struggling readers. And when I went off to Edinburgh to do my undergraduate work, I actually was working in the reading clinic the entire three and a half years that I was there.

So my life is reading education. And I guess I could think more broadly as literacy, but really it's the whole notion of helping young readers learn. To do to be effective in their work and what they're learning. Yeah,

that's so fascinating that it originated. Did you share that with that faculty member that that was like, did, did they know that you Oh yeah, they know.

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. He was really proud of me because he saw me progress and, and become, you know, And I became a member of the ILA board of directors and I was involved in all kinds of literacy work. So it was Don Cleland, and you might not know that it's many years ago, but it's just an interesting story that in a sense, he was a mentor and and, and, and, and it's become my passion to be honest with you.

So, so that's how I got into it. I don't tell that story to many people. It's just the way your question came, it made me think of it.

Oh, I love it. So what was that experience like in Edinburgh? What was that?

Well, You're asking a lot of questions that force me to reveal some things that I don't talk about too much.

I actually worked my way through Edinburgh by being a secretary to the president of the university, of the college. And so, working in the reading clinic, working for the president, being involved in reading education, I was just really fortunate. And again, it was another mentor, this Robert Wilson that just pushed me to move ahead.

So I became a member of IRA while I was a student at Edinburgh. And so I always tell the people at IRA that I probably have the lowest number of anyone who's alive. The lowest membership number. So anyway, it's been my life. It's passion.

Wow, I love that. I love that. So, so tell me a little bit more about your teaching.

I know that you've taught, tell me a little bit more about that background.

I did I taught third grade, well I taught first grade, and then I taught third grade, and what happened was the assistant superintendent came into my classroom. At that time you could do that, and He said, how would you like to be a reading specialist?

Because I'd gone for my reading specialist certificate. And I said, what would I be doing? And he said, whatever you want to do. That was the best advice I ever got because I wrote my own job description. Oh, that's great. So I became a reading specialist, really supervisor or coach to be honest, in that district because we had a lot of young teachers at that time.

There were a lot of people coming into education and they were novices. So I spent most of my time working with the teachers. Rather than with students. I still, I assess students. I did some tutoring. I gave advice to teachers, but most of my time was spent helping these young teachers who just came in and really didn't know much about how to teach reading and how to do adaptive teaching.

And that's when, actually, I said, that's what we need is professional learning that really is embedded. and a way to help teachers do a better job that's not evaluative. And I wrote a tiny little book that I already published, 86 pages, called Effective Change in the School Reading Program, The Resource Role.

And that was the first book, to be honest with you, on coaching. Wow. Could you believe it? Wow. It was all on leadership. It was all on how do you listen to teachers? How do you work with them? How do you work with small groups? How do you develop trust? And and it just all started from there. So when I left the university, actually, I was asked by the university, when I left the school district I was asked by the university to come in and help to run a program in which reading specialists went out into the schools To work with multiple schools in a, an urban district.

And that's the beginning of my university career.

I bet. Was that just a dream job? I mean, to me, that sounds like the ideal job in the world to be able to work across schools. And

it was a dream job. I had a team of people. Can you believe, I mean, we were doing coaching, external coaching many, many years ago and probably about eight schools.

There were a team of four of us. And we didn't really know what coaching was. Nobody really used the term. I was just going to ask you

that. Was that a concept that you developed or was it something that kind of evolved from that work? I wondered.

Yes, I developed it, but I never used the word coaching.

I mean, I just saw myself as a reading specialist who spent her time working with teachers to help them do a better job with students. And and I can remember the superintendent saying to me, And this is How little we knew about how coaches should work, to be honest with you, because I went to him and I said, you know, we have these schools, we have so many teachers, we have so many students, I'm not sure exactly where to stop, start.

And he said, well, It's like being at a, in a horse race, you want to bet on the horses who are on the track and not those who are in the barn. And what he meant was start with those who are willing and then you'll go on from there. And I thought that was pretty good advice, actually. So that's what we did.

We worked with those who wanted to work with us and then we kept building the program. And at that time, to be honest, Margaret, I had no idea about thinking about this as research. I saw it as a way to teach, and that's always that was always my focus. I wanted to teach. I wanted to work with teachers. I wanted to work with students.

And yet, as I got into the university, I realized the importance. of studying and learning more about what it is that we were doing. Because we were, I don't want to say flying by the seat of our pants, but we were basically learning as we were building the plane. And so that's what my career really is. I think about my focus.

It's always been, how do you help schools do a better job? to do the best for the most kids.

I love that. Did you, okay, this might be dumb, but I wonder at the time, did you know what you were doing was really groundbreaking? I mean, did you, I mean, I guess you maybe in terms of you were kind of building as you go, you maybe might've had that mindset, but did you know that it would have the impact or the.

Well, now that I'm at this stage in my career, I can say honestly, no, I had no clue. I just knew that. Teachers appreciated it. I enjoyed what I was doing. There seemed to be an impact. But as I moved through my career, I realized the importance of Being more systematic and intentional in what I was doing.

And I realized that I did have a focus and, and, you know, as a professor, I always talk to you. If you want to make progress, you've got to have a focus. You've got to have an agenda. And so as you move along, you start saying, well, I do have an agenda. I have a love. I have something I want to pursue. But to say that.

I began with that. No,

I'm just, I love that. And, you know, as a former first grade teacher, I mean, I just, I love, I love that small link to, you know, your greatness and the, and, and connection with the work that you do. And I just, I love the way that you're You know, your work is rooted in schools. It's connected to schools. It's what's happening.

And was that ever a challenge? I mean, I, I love working with teachers and also as we kind of were talking before the show started, they're under such constraints right now. And it, does it feel different? Has it felt different in the past couple of years in terms of the work that you've done versus when you first started?

Yes, very honestly, I think teachers under are under a great deal of more pressure than they were. There was a lot more freedom. I mean, I think back to my initial days where teachers were given. a lot of autonomy, and in fact, the whole notion of empowerment in the school district in which I work, we had all kinds of teacher committees, and we did develop the curriculum, choose the curriculum, and so on, but we also had the freedom to adjust.

Now, I think not only the problem with the scripted programs, but also the difficulty with the pressure that comes from media, from politicians, from communities, teachers find themselves not knowing exactly what to do. I mean, it's really problematic. And my heart goes out to them because. Well, for example, I have a grandson who wants to teach and I know people have said to him, don't go into teaching.

It's too hard, but he's, he's determined and, and I keep telling him there's such a benefit to it. And I, I'm an optimist. So I'm going to hope that things change, you know, I've watched this pendulum switch in my lifetime so many times. And so I have to be hopeful that we're going to make some, we're going to be able to convince people to be thinkers.

And I'm talking about teachers now, not just kids. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's, it's a tough time. And, and when COVID was going on J. C. Ippolito, who's a colleague of mine, and we've done a lot of writing together now in the last, I'd say about 15, 20 years. I happened to see him at a conference and we connected because we had the same views about coaching and so on.

So we've been doing some writing together. But anyway, during COVID, we actually did telephone interviews, focus group meetings with coaches from four different states. And we tried to, what we wanted to learn was, How did their positions change? What, what were the factors that were affecting the way they work?

And what we learned was, was interesting that for some people it was, it was difficult because they actually weren't coaching anymore. They were put back into, let's say, some sort of intervention program or, or in other cases they were put into administrative programs. But in many cases, They were given a focus that really helped them to do their job even better, but they had to use technology, so they had to learn technology, and they also had to teach teachers to use technology, but they could see into the classroom.

They were either working with teachers and watching them teach or working with them as they taught, and not just classrooms, they were into homes. So they got to learn a lot about what was happening in the homes with children. And so the other part of that was that the curriculum had to be refined so that it was much more narrow in the sense of, okay, these are the priority goals and objectives we need to achieve.

That's all we can do. We can't be all over the place. And so for some coaches, it was I don't want to say the best of times, the worst of times, but it really helped them to do a better job as far as, yeah, they had, they had a focus. What kind of

focus, like was it fluency or was it something as specific like a targeted?

dimension, or was it like, I wonder if they've mentioned anything specific? Well,

they didn't mention anything specifically, but let's take, for example, any of the core programs that you see. Any lesson has a multitude of things in it, right? Yeah. And they had to say, okay, let's just deal with one or two important skills, important strategies that we really want to get across.

We can't do it all. Okay. Wow, because they only had a certain amount of time. So that was an interesting finding. That is interesting.

Mm

hmm.

Yeah. Mm hmm. That just, that sounds fascinating that it sounds like they were adaptive in their approach to

They were and resilient. And resilient. Yeah. I think that's the other thing was that anytime I've worked with these specialized literacy professionals, I really think that you see the resilience in them and it's, it's really hard to keep them from.

Not wanting to do the best for kids. Maybe it's a special group of folks in the way that they've chosen again, to choose a career that says, I really want to do something that is one of the most important skills that kids can learn, you know, to be literate.

Yeah. I'd love that. I just, I'd love that. So how about some highlights from your career, you, your career?

I mean, it's, I, I, I want to learn. We want to learn. Like, so What are the things that you enjoyed the most? Maybe there were some surprises along the way?

Well, lots of surprises because, lots of surprises. Well, let me just share a couple of the projects I worked on. How about that? I would love that.

Yeah.

And, and regardless of which one I choose. All of them have involved being involved with teachers and coaches and being in schools. My friend, Isabel Beck, actually at the University of Pittsburgh always said to me, she said, I like to look at the tiny, tiny little things, like, you know, how does the kid learn?

She said, you like to look at the big things like the entire school and how it's functioning. And that's true. I really am interested in how a system works and and how it all works together and understanding the factors that can make it successful or not successful. So I'm going to just choose a couple things.

So let me start with. The Reading First Project in Pennsylvania. I was fortunate enough to work with a colleague of mine, a special educator, Dr. Naomi Zygman, and that was special too, because here we go, collaborating. To me, one of the things that we need to do a better job with is collaboration. But anyway she and I worked together.

had the grant to evaluate reading first in the state of Pennsylvania. But what we did, in addition to the evaluation, was actually provide professional development for the coaches. So we were very much involved in helping coaches learn how to do their job. We had them keep logs. We, we looked at those logs to see what was going on.

And the exciting part of that project for me was working with about 15 graduate students at the university who were all funded through Reading First. We were able to develop the various tools and assessment tools that we needed to find out was Reading First working or not. And we learned something when we did a sustainability study afterwards, which is probably even more exciting than what went on during Reading First.

And so we did a survey and we did some interviews and we found out that There were a couple things that made Breeding First continue. One was that the schools would continue the work of coaches. The other was that there was a stable staff, so that you had a stable principal. And, and that's been a big learning for me, the importance of the principal, both in promoting the work of coaching, promoting the work of literacy in a school.

How important that particular individual is so the stability of the staff, the stability of the principal, and the belief in the program, the belief that this was an important initiative that would make a difference for kids. So, it was a pretty exciting enterprise and I guess we spent five years, I think almost five years working on that particular project.

When you really take it from the beginning to the end so my, my entire life at that time was spent with working and visiting schools and working with coaches and so on. So it's pretty exciting.

What a significant impact that had and continues. I mean, the work that you, that, that paved its way for that.

When you were working on that, was there anything that really surprised you? I mean, were you. Were you thinking, like, at the time, did you not envision the stability as being as an important component as it was? Did that, was that, like, a little bit of a Wow, like this is a huge factor that must, that we, you know, if we want this change to withstand, we need to have that stability.

Did that surprise you a bit? Or were you,

I'm not sure so much, I would say it was a surprise, but that it confirmed for me that the importance of that, because we know that, I mean, as you look at the research about schools that are having difficulty It's those schools where there's a lot of movement of kids, kids change, teachers change, they don't stay, principals change.

To have it validated in a sense and verified in research, I think is important because then you can make that point and say, look, it's really important. It makes a difference in, in what's going to happen in that school. So not so much a surprise, but

yeah, that's a really significant finding. Yeah, that's interesting.

So that's so fascinating. So you said there were some other ones that also. Yeah.

What was, what was working in these schools that made, that made it, made it effective? And of course, now we talk about MTSS, but at that time it was RTI. And these five schools were located across the state of Pennsylvania. And, I got the contract to, to lead the effort and visited every one of those schools, held focus groups with teachers, individual interviews, and, and visited in classrooms.

And again, I'm not going to say it was a surprise, but and this was written up in Reading Teacher. What we found, I think, led me to where J. C. Ippolito and I are now in terms of the importance of, of, of understanding how. a system works and how important that is for educators. But anyway, what we found out was that the specialized literacy professionals were great at working as a team.

And so too often when we prepare teachers, when we prepare reading specialists, literacy professionals, we teach them how to work with individuals or we teach them how to teach in a classroom. We almost promote that isolationist viewpoint. And It's only for working as a team and we know that from John Hattie's work on collective efficacy, right?

How important it is that we build that school as a place of learning, and we believe in that we can do something. And that's what was happening in these schools is that the coach. was not working, she was the coach, the reading specialist with the reading specialist work with students and that they identified those tasks and kept them separate.

Rather, the coach said the reading specialist also can help work with teachers because she has some special expertise. And maybe comprehension. So let's get her to work with a special teacher. So there was the collaboration between those two and the psychologist. And I remember interviewing one of the psychologists who said, I learned so much from the literacy people.

He said, I didn't know all those things. And it makes them realize that they don't have all the answers. Yeah.

Yeah.

And the, Educators. So when you really think about it, It's, it's that whole notion of teamwork and and the system. And so I just felt that that particular study again, was another sense of validation that we're not thinking enough about these things.

So JC Ippolito and I now in the last couple of books that we've been writing, we're very excited. We now have a framework for how we think about coaching. And we see it as having three important dimensions. One, you have to be aware of each one of these dimensions if you're going to be successful. So one is the core, or the content.

You have to understand the content, and you have to have a goal in terms of where you want to go. So you can't go in and say, I'm going to work with X with teacher one, and I'm going to work with Y with teacher, another teacher. Rather, let's focus on, let's say, Vocabulary. And we're all going to be focusing and we have similar strategies because we want coherence in what we're doing across the school.

So that's the core. That's the inner circle. These are all circles. And then the middle circle is the one of coaching. And I'm talking here now about coaching. So you have to know your coaching processes. You have to know the various processes. activities that you might want to do with teachers. For example you have a menu of services.

So would you model? Would you co teach? Would you co plan? Would you observe and go through a coaching cycle of observation? So you have that as something you need to know. But the ultimate circle is the context. And that con, that's the con, that's the part where we have been missing the point. And I think back now to the early days, I saw the same thing.

We forgot about the fact that you have to be on the same page with the superintendent with the district. As well as the school the principal has to be on the same page with you as the teacher, as you with the reading specialist, whatever. So, now talking about that system and how you get it to work together.

And very honestly, that's what JC and I, we've been working, we worked in Delaware during the COVID, and then we worked and I'm talking remotely, and we worked in Massachusetts just recently. And what you see is the big, some of the largest problems come at that system level.

Yeah. I was going to ask you about that.

How do you navigate that in the context of doing the work? I mean, I'm really, how do you, how do you navigate that? I mean, how do you. How do you, like, that's just an enigma for me. Like, I often wonder about how do you get, how do you make those circles work? You know, it's like the stars aligning, you know, how does

Exactly, you've hit it.

You have to go, how do you help them align? Okay, so I guess the first thing I'd say, it's not easy. Yeah. And it's not It's not a quick solution. It's a journey. But the first thing for me, if we just focus on the system, we can go to the other things, but if you focus on the system, the first thing is understanding the system, knowing what the system is like.

And then after that, I guess for me, the next step would be, how do you work with your principal?

Because if you can get the principle to appreciate what you're doing, and you can get the principle to validate and be a messenger for you, then you make the step that way. And then so, so we have some ideas for how you can develop that relationship with the principle.

No, I'd love that. But, but, you know, as I start to think, just kind of how, how did, how does it work where, you know, just in that micro level of working and, and getting contracts across states, like, how does that, is it, is it through the work, your amazing work?

I mean, how does, how does one. Put themselves out there. Like I'm always so interested in how do you, how does that evolve it as part of your career work? Or has it always been a function given the work that you did with the reading first initiative? How,

how does that evolve? That's funny. That's a great question.

I mean, I actually don't know quite how to answer that Margaret. I suppose, and it wasn't from reading first because I had I'll go back and say I must have been really, really optimistic and maybe naive because I received a Right to Read grant in one of my first years as a faculty member at the University of Missouri.

We're reading that. Right to Read was given to only about five or six states. I mean, that was a program long. I put my foot in the water. So maybe that's the advice I should be giving people is put your foot in the water. I don't know that I knew again, like, I just said, Hey, this is a great project. I can go to schools and I could put specialists in them.

And we're going to work with kids that struggle. And I got it. Yeah, that was my first venture. All right. But. I continued really, I've been, I was involved with a lot of state projects and I think you build the credibility that you're committed to something and then probably, gosh, you know, you're making me think of things I didn't even think about.

At one time, I don't know if you know the name, Bob Kelphy? You know, Robert Kelphy from Stanford. Okay. He he's no longer living, but anyway, I was really excited by his work. He was doing work called the inquiring school. And it was again, a notion that. And it was literacy, but a notion about the kind of thing you love, adaptive teaching and the fact that teachers should be decision makers, reflective in their practice and so on, but he had kind of an idea of how this should run.

And I thought it was such an exciting idea that I decided I'd go and take a sabbatical with him. So I went off to California. And spent six months at Stanford and we worked together and I, I got to learn more about the inquiring school. Then I brought it back to Pittsburgh.

Wow.

So, we worked with our laboratory school.

We start with the laboratory school and Dr. Kalfi came and some of his grad students, and then we, We put it out to, we got funding from local foundations and put it out to districts to get involved. So for a long time, we ran this inquiring school concept in the Pittsburgh area. And I would run into people in the grocery store five years later, and they would say, we're still doing the things that they did in the inquiring school.

So, yeah, so when you asked me that question. How do you do it? I don't know. You get excited about it. You put yourself out there. You believe in it. You, you do it. You don't, you follow through. You follow through and you're there. And you're as involved as the people who are, you know, the teachers. So

I love that.

I just, I love that. Are there, I mean, so this kind of I know you've, you've done so many research projects. Are there others that you feel like have really also stuck with you that are just, I mean, there's so many. I mean, even the ILA, the standards that, you know, I was just, I cite those all the time.

And, you know, I wondered if there are other things that have really stuck out for you and. You know, that you really,

right. Well, there's no doubt that the standards work, you mentioned the standards work really has been important for the field. Yeah. I've been fortunate. I'll have to tell you, I don't remember if I've been involved in two iterations or three, I think three iterations of the standard.

So, We've just the learning that goes on to develop those standards and to get them together. Then the development of that national recognition program so that universities could apply to become involved and to get, I guess, a kind of a letter of distinction or certificate of distinction, they call it.

And to visit those universities that actually applied, I had the chance to visit a couple of them is pretty exciting to see how the standards really make a difference in the preparation of, of teachers. So, Yeah, that, that was, that was a probably a very time consuming, but, but very important part of my career.

Yeah, I just I love that. I I just think it's fascinating. I just so many of the different aspects of your career. I find so fascinating the work in schools, your research, the amazing grant work that you're able, you know, speaking of kind of your the model of human resources. And, you know, I don't know, I just think about you and your own work.

And, you know, you have a goal, you have a vision, And it's just, it's almost beautiful. It is beautiful the way you were able to kind of implement it across so many different platforms and different avenues, different venues. I mean, from standards to research to on the ground with teachers and, and, and professionals, literacy specialists.

It's just, it's beautiful. It's really inspiring. I, I, I, I'm sure you know that. So that's probably not a new idea, but it's, it's really powerful. And I've, I've wondered, has there been things in your work that have surprised you or in your career that you have thought, wow, like that was a surprise. It doesn't meant not even necessarily about the research, but just.

It could be maybe even the work in schools, or just something that you were thinking, wow, that, that's an interesting component. I didn't quite realize that.

What surprised me trying to think that

I suppose the biggest surprise for me

was

Realizing that I did have an impact. Oh,

I love that.

I'm really, I'm serious. I love that.

How did you realize that? When did, what moment were you, could you, could you pinpoint it to a moment or?

Well, it's, you do it because you love it. You do it because you see yourself. Graduate students really responding and coming back and telling you that, you know, they're appreciating what they're learning and all of that.

You see people even now who continue to. Come back and talk to you. But to the biggest surprise is that all of this has somehow coalesced into yeah, I made a difference. I guess I made a difference. I love that. And that's probably the, that's the biggest surprise in terms of me. I think you were reaching for maybe what's the biggest surprise in terms of some of the findings maybe as I've worked with people or as I've done all this work.

I suppose that whole systems bit is the biggest. The biggest surprise, because I think when I went into it, and that's how your work evolves, actually. So maybe that's, that, that is true. I focus, I too focused on preparing the individual, preparing the, the specialists so that they could be the best possible with an individual teacher.

How do you work with individuals? You know, how do you talk to them? How do you listen? How do you build those skills? And then as I went through and kept working both in my own personal career and watching how systems can kill you to the work with teachers now and with coaches now, it's. How do you work as a team?

And that's true of businesses, by the way. My, my son is a CEO and he has the same leadership books I do. He, he too is trying to help his colleagues, his, his peers learn to work as a team. It's the same stuff.

Has he using your model

with

the

circles? He needs to. I haven't shared it. Maybe I should. Maybe I should.

He's actually shared more books with me because I love reading the books from business. Because it just makes me chuckle to see how they're using the same things that we use. And when you actually go back even to Jim Collins book, From Good to Great. And I think that's one of the first because he was talking more broadly.

And and so I, I just, you just, I think that's why when we prepare people, we shouldn't be looking only at education. Mm-Hmm. , we should be looking at the broader field and what we can learn from other fields, from psychology, from sociology and so on, in helping them to, to be better. And I think for all teachers, not just coaches we've, we've maybe just been too narrow in how we, how we educate them and, and.

I think this is especially true as we think about our kids who still. Whether from urban, minority the poor, that there are so many factors, it's the same thing. There's so many factors affecting their lives, their housing, their health, and we don't think that way. We think classroom.

Yeah, it's the context like you were saying, yeah.

But who wants to take that on? It's like my friend Isabel Beck said, she wants to look at how do you learn a phoneme, and I want to learn how do you deal with the big problems of society.

I know, as you're talking, I'm thinking about teacher preparation, you know, in our, yeah, I'm the program coordinator for our program, and I think how, wow, what is, what a smart idea to bring in leadership and part of our conversations instead of just having our reading methods class, right?

What would that look like in that? Inviting, you know, just, it's making me think a lot more about the context and the systems that you were just sharing as well. Well, it's

especially true for beginning teachers because it's the systems they go into that break them. Because you teach them all the wonderful things they need to know about being an effective teacher and then they go in and the system says, here's the book.

Right. Yeah. Or the teacher next door says you're not going to do that. We don't want you to do that. Or, I mean, there's so many incidences that just They get discouraged and so maybe recognizing that there's more to it would be helpful. I mean, you can't do that. You can't do it all. You have so much to do in teacher preparation.

I'm well aware of that and in a short amount of time to do it. But getting them started in thinking that way, it would be helpful, I think.

Yeah. I would have

appreciated it.

Oh, yeah. So, so what do you, what do you view as maybe important questions that your work has led to? What, what is your thinking around that?

So, what's the important question that my work has led to? Well, I think the biggest question for me is what and how can we produce students who are critical thinkers who know how to use what's out there. I mean, I'm not sure this is directly related to my work, but it's sure directly related to what I think is important right now in our country, and that is how can we Use social media in a, in an effective way.

How can we help students understand that they need to check the credibility of, of what they're reading and what they're learning. I think these are some of the questions that are, are important in our life today. Because

it seems to me that we know a lot about teaching reading. We do. That's not the issue. It's the bigger issue of how we deal with the critical issues in our society right now. I'm concerned.

Right, right. Do you have suggestions or maybe for policy makers or faculty or teachers right now at this moment, kind of also given your work?

You know what I would say to policy makers? Start listening to teachers. Start listening. I don't like to say the same thing that, that I've heard before, you know, go to the experts, you wouldn't go to somebody to take out your appendix who wasn't a doctor and so on and so forth, but at the same time, we're, we're getting bombarded with advice from those who know very little.

So, I don't know how you do that. I, I, Margaret, I'm going to leave that to you because you're in the middle right now. Come on, that's why I

started this podcast to get smarter. So yeah. But

I I know I'm trying to do my part, but just by what I do in my community and talking to people and trying to share and, and question and be brave enough to say things.

Yeah. That you think or to stop people if there's misinformation, and I think we all have to do that. And I know we're way away from my specific little career, but but I think that's, that's our, our, one of the major concerns for me right now.

Yeah. Yeah, I think I think that makes sense. So, so kind of thinking more given your career and striving to transform thinking.

Do you have any advice for us and like for all of us and collectively and literacy? teachers and, you know, your, you know, your work is so critical and so powerful and, and I can't wait to kind of, get your newest book. And so I just, I wonder, do you have any advice? I know you've shared kind of more broadly in terms of us being critical, but how about like the role of coaching and, and, and maybe right now with just the science of reading debate and kind of how could we kind of.

understand what your, your research has shown us about how we can work collaboratively rather than isolating each other?

That's, that's a fair question. Let me start with saying that I think that coaches are going to be really important because they can be the mediator between the administration and the teachers.

So that's one bit of advice and coaches need to be prepared to be able to do that kind of job. And I, as you look at Sarah Wolfen's work or others, they, they talk about that, the key role of mediation. So that often if something's coming down that doesn't permit for differentiation that that coach has that important role of saying, wait, wait a minute, we can't, there's no, One size fits all and we understand some strategies that can we're not leaving the program, but we can make some slight modifications that will make it better for students.

So I think that's, that's an important point for everybody to know coaches, administrators and teachers. So, so I, I, I think that the coaching and, and, and is going to be I see an increase now in coaching. Okay. I don't know whether you do, but I see it in this area of teachers or schools are now, whether it's federal funds or whatever, but they're starting to hire them again.

Now, you know, money goes away, coaching goes away. So now that's the other bit of advice I should mention. We've got to work more. on looking at the impact of coaching. We're not going to be able to keep it unless we have some systematic way of saying it makes a difference. And we don't do that. And we, we, we reach for the ultimate student learning.

And yet, coaching is so far distant from student learning. I mean, we've got to look at student teacher attitude, teacher behavior, teacher instruction before we ever get to student learning. Well defined evaluation program that a school can use. and develop actually before the coaching even starts. And, and we don't think that way.

Again, schools are so busy doing that they don't, they don't really, they don't really get into the the heart of how, how am I going to prove to the school board that it's going to give the money or, or use the money that this, this is going to make a difference. I, I think, I think that's a critical question.

The other one for me, and this is all related to, may not be organized in my mind, but I'm thinking about it I've, I think data are important in schools. I think the use of assessment tools are really meaningful, but not necessarily standardized assessment tools, but rather the formative ones that teachers can use for instructional decision making.

So that's another important role of a coach and, and to be able to help schools build a co coherent, a well aligned assessment system that can be used then because that kind of assessment system also helps coaches decide what they need to do. It helps. Work with teachers to say, well, we should be working on fluency or we should be working on comprehension or oral language or whatever it is.

And it's also a source of growth for the teachers. Look at my student work samples and let's look across classrooms to see if there are differences in how we both approach the task, how we assess the task and what we do next. So I think for coaches, this is a great way to get into the classrooms to help teachers understand that they can make a difference.

So, so I really appreciate the use of data. It's an important tool.

I love that. Well, once again, my cheeks are hurting from smiling so much And I just it's just a delight

you should be Thinking of what you disagree with. What do you disagree with anything? Oh my goodness. I asked well,

okay So I love that you're optimistic like I love that I love that, that, like for me, that really connects because I love working in schools and it's so challenging, it's so challenging and personally I find it, I, I want to do this work and I build those relationships and then either new administration comes in or there's, and then it's back at square one.

And so I, I. I love the position that of being optimistic and I think right now for being in my work, I, I want to do more impact. I want to, I just want to work. I want to make schools better. And I'm at this point where how do I do it more across systems. And so, I don't think I disagree. I think how I want to learn how to do that.

do the work more around the context. I want to get smarter, you know, listening to you and kind of learning. I think me personally, I have also just been focused perhaps too tightly on the individual or the individual school. And so that's kind of how do I think broader in terms of that context and, you know, research is our platform and so many, it's our commodity as professors, but I'm I don't think I disagree.

I think I'm trying to learn. How do I, How do I, how do I learn more about how to do that is my next kind of thing that I'm, a big thing I'm walking away with.

So what's the takeaway?

For me? Yeah. Oh, oh, from, oh, from your work be optimistic. And also, you know, you're, you're smiling and you're so joyful.

And I think there's something that is so empowering about that. And I love that. I think that. That's a model of what, you know, I think it's part of why we go into this work. And I think a big takeaway for me is, you know, I want to be like this. I want to be smiling, you know, in the work as I, as I, in years to come.

And so a big takeaway is just how joyful you are in this work. And then that doesn't undermine the amount of work. I know that the intensity and the The relational capital and all of the work and, but it's so inspiring. I mean, I think you're a very, you're just so inspiring. I don't know if that's the right, I didn't expect to be asked questions.

I did not prepare. Gotcha. You did. But that's a big takeaway. It's just, it's wonderful to see how happy and how how you've made such an empowering difference and a huge impact in the, in the field and for so many kids and for so many. Schools and other scholars and teachers and researchers. It's, it's, it's inspiring policy.

I mean, you've made as policy and that's, that's amazing. So you're amazing. That's my big takeaway.

Thank you for that. But I I, I didn't ask it to, to do a gotcha question. Interested because As I said, you asked me questions that I hadn't thought about for a long time, even though you sent me questions ahead of time your approach is much more open. And so I found myself telling you things that I, I hadn't thought about for a long time.

And so that's what happens when you get some folks who had many, many, many, many years of, of working in the field. And you're right. I've loved it. I've been very fortunate and and my takeaway as I listen is I've had a lot of great mentors, a lot of great colleagues and so probably advice to faculty members would be, find yourself a really good colleague or two or three that that you can just bounce ideas off.

Learn from and work with, because that's the greatest thing. I mean, I've been fortunate all my life. You know, I started with one and I'm still working with one that we learned from each other. I love that.

Oh, Rita. It's just been a delight to visit with you. Thank you so much for your time. And, and just to visit today, it's, it's been wonderful.

Thank you so much.

You're welcome. It's been, it's been delightful for me to have a great day.