Even before our first Literacy Fight story, we knew we wanted to reach out to others to learn why they fight for literacy. Recently, Carleen O’Reilly, executive director of Coaching for Literacy, was able to virtually sit down with Kelly Butler of the Barksdale Reading Institute. Kelly is an expert in the science of reading and has helped Mississippi make great strides in literacy scores for students. Her organization is now collaborating with others across the country and has suggestions on how parents and the community can help students that may experience challenges with reading.
Use these links for the resources Kelly mentioned:
Barksdale Reading Institute - works to improve the overall quality of public education in Mississippi through strategic literacy initiatives and providing professional development to teachers and administrators.
BRI was founded in 2000 by Jim and Sally Barksdale, who, after researching the state of education in America, became convinced that reading is the most fundamental skill that every child must master in order to become successful.
Simple View of Reading - a scientific theory that a student's ability to understand written words depends on how well they sound out the words and understand the meaning of those words.
Ed Reports - an independent nonprofit designed to improve education by providing reviews of K-12 instructional materials.
Parents for Public Schools - involved in public school advocacy and reform through distinctive, important work to influence the factors that impact student success and improve schools. PPS believes that parents are owners of their public schools and provides programs that prepare parents for the responsibilities of ownership.
Campaign for Grade-Level Reading - a collaboration of foundations, nonprofits, states and communities focused on the No.1 predictor of school success: third grade reading.
Excel by 5 - an innovative early childhood community certification process focusing on a community’s young children. It emphasizes the important roles parents and early childhood educators play in the lives of children during their most formative years – birth to age 5.
Reading Universe - a creation of the Barksdale Reading Institute (BRI), a Mississippi-based philanthropic organization devoted to improving significantly our state’s pre-literacy and reading skills. For almost two decades, BRI has worked in K-3 classrooms with elementary teachers and principals to align early literacy instruction with up to date cognitive and educational science. The Reading Universe was introduced fifteen years ago as a way to illustrate to pre-service teachers how the various skills that are required for proficient reading fit within a larger picture.
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Carleen O’Reilly: Hello, I am Carleen O’Reilly, and welcome back to “A Conversation With…”. I am the executive director of Coaching for Literacy and I am so excited to have my guest with me here today. Coaching for Literacy is an organization in which we use the power of sport to raise awareness about illiteracy and funds for literacy programs around the country. As part of us raising awareness about illiteracy, we have been connecting with some amazing individuals around the country, and one of them is Ms. Kelly Butler and I'm so excited that she has agreed to join me. Kelly is the CEO of the Barksdale Reading Institute. And Kelly, I just want to say thank you.
Kelly Butler: Sure. Nice to see you, Carleen, and thanks Coaching for Literacy for getting the word out about how important this is.
Carleen: Thank you. Thank you. So just to give our viewers a little bit of a bio on you. Kelly is the Barksdale Reading Institute chief executive officer. She has a bachelor's degree in special education from the University of Alabama and a master's degree in administration planning and social policy from Harvard. Prior to the Barksdale Reading Institute, Kelly served as a teacher in Greenwich, Connecticut, public school and worked extensively on a variety of nonprofit organizations and social service, health care, education, in areas of program development, support and evaluation.
So when you're talking about someone who knows a lot about literacy and education, Kelly is definitely the woman to be speaking with. With sharing what I just did with your background in your bio. Could you tell me, Kelly, a little bit about what your focus is at the Barksdale Reading Institute?
Kelly: Sure. And I've learned a lot about reading myself in my tenure at the Barksdale Reading Institute, which is almost 20 years now.
Carleen: Wow.
Kelly: The focus of the institute has been first to improve considerably K-3 literacy in Mississippi. We were established by Jim Barksdale, who was the founder of Netscape, who is a native Mississippian. And he really wanted to commit to improving literacy in Mississippi. So, he made a $100 million gift to the University of Mississippi, which is his alma mater, to establish the Reading Institute. So while we are headquartered in Oxford, I'm talking to you today from Jackson, where we also have an office and where I live.
But the institute has been it is 20 years old this year. And through those two decades, we've done a variety of things, but all have focused on primarily early literacy. But we are beginning to look all across the pipeline of education in terms of how literacy presents itself, depending on where you are in school and in life. So, at the very beginning, we established some literacy coaches. We have brought reading experts from around the country into Mississippi to train our coaches.
And at any one point in time, we had about 30 coaches who were working in about 180 schools. That was the very early days and we were establishing sort of a model for how you improve literacy instruction at the building level.
From there, we have also done a good bit of work in teacher preparation, recognizing that we can retrain teachers after they get out of school or we can do it right in the first place. And so one of the very early things we did was to support reading, teacher preparation and reading at the eight public universities in Mississippi. We've also done some studies of the teacher preparation work. We have 15 programs in Mississippi and we've begun to look at how effectively all of them are doing in terms of preparing teachers to teach reading.
So we've done a variety of things. The original intent was to be a partner with the State Department and that has waxed and waned over the decades. Right now we're enjoying a really good and strong relationship with the state superintendent, who has been very focused on early literacy and has been a terrific partner in our work. They have bandwidth and some authority and we have some resources and nimbleness. And so we make a good partner in terms of helping folks get to do a better job of teaching reading.
Carleen: Yeah, that's awesome. Could you remind or just let some of our viewers know why…you said the word building before, and I think it's familiar when you and I talk about it…but when you're focused on K through three, talk about why those four years are so incredibly important.
Kelly: Great question. They are important because they lay the foundation for all of reading that affects us all the way through school and through life. And so while we are also doing some work in pre-K as well, and as we know that even before you get from zero to five is really critical year. We've done some programming in that area as well because that's when language begins to get mapped in the brain. And if you don't have enough language, it's really hard to teach you how to read.
So we've also focused on the early years pre-K, but from kindergarten to third grade in a typical school curriculum, that's when the what we call are the “learning to read years” and everything after that is the “reading to learn years”. And so we need to lay a good foundation in those early years so that kids can move on and not struggle with reading, but apply what they know about reading to learning every other thing they need to know.
Carleen: Yeah, and it's absolutely fascinating. And I love that. One of our last conversations, we talked about mapping of the brain, and I know that's a lot to get into and not enough time on today's episode, but that's not something you think about. You think someone learns to read and they just go through the words and they were just building a vocabulary. But it really has to do with their brains and how they're looking at a word and how it sounds.
I have been learning a tremendous amount and a lot of it is from you…
Kelly: One of the things we know about reading and language is that and this has been one of the reasons I think we've struggled to do a good job teaching reading, is that for a long time there was this philosophy that. A real belief and many teachers, I think, who are not well prepared still believe this. The brain is wired for language.
We are born to create communication through language. But we are not going to read the writing system’s only about 5000 years old. And so this manmade invention called “writing”, which was in order so we could record things and remember them, is totally invented. And so the brain was not wired to do that. So we have to teach it how to do that and we have to do it explicitly and pretty early.
Carleen: And intentionally.
Kelly: Yes.
Carleen: One of the ways that we score, we look at NAEP scores and there is some successes that we've seen. Can you explain to our viewers what NAEP scores are in a few words?
Kelly: Well, NAEP stands for National Assessment of Educational Progress. It's also known as our “Nation's Report Card”. It's given every two years to a random sampling across the country. It's a national study and it's given in 4th, 8th and 12th grade. And we focus primarily on math and reading. But there are also some science and writing and social studies assessments that are given also. But it's given every two years.
It began in 1969 and it's the nation's report card because it's really a snapshot of how kids are doing across the country relative to those really fundamental skills that we expect for them to master in K-12. And that's math and reading. And Mississippi has shown some terrific growth in the last couple of years. On our NAEP, we have always been at the very bottom. It's one of those lists that we're at the bottom of. But in the last round, which was 2019, moved reading scores to the national average.
So it's a tremendous growth. If you look at our NAEP trajectory between 2013 and 2019, it's just straight up. It's really an exciting thing to see.
Carleen: That's amazing. And how wonderful to be a part of that, to be able to show and say here's the progress that we are making and the teaching of the teachers is working because the scores are reflecting all of that work, which is absolutely amazing. So when you are working with these teachers to ensure that they are providing quality education for students, I know you keep talking about Mississippi. You work with organizations in other parts of the country as well, or is it really just focused on the state of Mississippi?
Kelly: Well, we have been primarily focused on Mississippi until the last couple of years where we've gotten a lot of national attention for the work we've been doing and teacher preparation. And so in the last really in the last year, we have begun to branch out and do some other work across the country. So one example of that is we were contacted by Teach for America, the National Organization of Teach for America, which is the teacher corps that attracts...I don't know if your viewers are familiar with Teach for America… attracts young college graduates to go into teaching, trains them. They don't all stay in teaching, but it's a way to serve critical need areas of which Mississippi has a number of districts that are in critical need. They contacted us about preparing their new corps members, 2800 of them, they get about that many in a year across the country, across five time zones, to teach them the science of reading, so we gave them kind of a crash course this summer virtually, they had moved all of their institute work, which is usually done at the regional level to a national platform. And we were invited to participate, actually to coordinate that effort. And so I drew on some of my partner organizations across the country from California to North Carolina to work with this with us on that.
So we served an organizing function as well as a program design function for that. And we're now in conversation with them about continuing some work through the academic year. So that's an example. Another example is we've gotten calls from about 22 states who were interested in the work we were doing in teacher preparation. And it occurred to me about a year ago that there was real interest around this. But I didn't have nor was my organization really geared to organize all of these different states.
So I'm partnered with the Belk Foundation in North Carolina, Hunt Institute in North Carolina and North Carolina, in part because they were one of the first states to call me. They really wanted us to help them with a study of teacher prep. And through those conversations in that partnership, we are now in the process of interviewing state teams to pull together a coalition of state teams to begin to look at policy around teacher preparation and licensure. So that's another example of kind of a multi-state.
Carleen: That's wonderful. And I mean, kudos to you all for getting the accolades that people are calling you and saying, let's see the expertise, but then also you all sharing it and saying yes, this is something that can help children all over the country.
Kelly: You know what they say about Mississippi…If we can do it here, y’all can do it anywhere.Let's give it a shot.
Carleen: Yeah, I love it. So you've talked a lot about the teachers and you know that I'm a parent. And one of the first questions that you asked me was, do I know what reading programs my then third grader was using and what was his teacher using it? And you caught me off guard and I didn't know what it was. I went and followed up and got the got the resources that they're using and really track it down. But what kind of questions should we as parents be asking of our administration and our teachers?
Kelly: Great question. Well, first of all, I think that if I could teach parents and every teacher in the country one thing about reading it would be the Simple View of Reading, which I have taught you now. I hope you remember and I'm not going to quiz you. It’s based on a lot of research and has been replicated and confirmed over 40 years of research. It is a simple idea, but the Simple View of Reading essentially says that there are two domains that are really important to reading.
Now we know that there are five components of reading and those components are Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension. But within those five domains, they're really two domains that the Simple View says you have to have if you're going to be a comprehending reader. And that is word recognition, which is decoding, and language comprehension, which is essentially that the vocabulary and background knowledge. And what the Simple View taught us is that you can't have one without the other.
You can't be a really Whiz-Bang decoder and not know what any of the words mean. You're not going to be able to decode. Or you could be have a lot of language because you're talk to a lot. But if you can't break the code, then you can't begin to decode those words you want to put meaning to that are in print. So I think a Simple View of Reading is something parents need to know. It's a simple concept and there's a lot more to it when we get into the teaching of reading.
But I think if parents knew when kids began to struggle to read. If they could determine and ask their teacher, do you think my kid has a decoding problem or do you think he has a language problem or does he have both? Because until you can answer those questions, you don't know what you're dealing with in terms of reading instruction. And there's curriculum that parents should be asking about is how are those two domains addressed in the curriculum?
Is there a point in time in the curriculum where a child is really taught to break the code? Is there enough text in the curriculum where kids are learning new vocabulary and building their background knowledge? So that's a really basic thing. And I think it would go a long way to connecting parents with teachers. And don't be surprised if your teachers never heard of this because it's not in many of the preparation programs. It's a fundamental issue.And if everybody knew, it would be a lot farther along.
There's also a new resource that's online now called Ed Reports. And you can go online and when you find the name of your curriculum, plug it in to Ed Report and it will give you an evaluation of whether or not that curriculum is sound and based on science. And they are beginning to add much more of the foundational curriculum, the early years K-2, that really deal with the decoding part of the simple view.
And you can get you can get a better sense of if this does it have a good scope and sequence? Are they teaching the skills in a right in the right order? Those are some key questions that parents should be asking.
Carleen: Yeah, I absolutely love it, because when I went back and looked, what I received from my third grade teacher. It wasn't just one type of it wasn't just one book. It was, well, we use this and then we supplement with this. So when you're talking about looking, checking this resource to try to see, how materials may score on and based on the scientific research, then it's some of these teachers in these programs.
They know that they're missing some gaps. So they're trying to cobble these pieces together to try to figure out what's the best tool, because it might not just be one, but that's what I mean you are trying to do with giving these teacher prep work is..how can we get our teachers to recognize how they can teach a child holistically? And it’s not just one book.
Kelly: There's a real push for high quality materials now. And there's a lot better stuff coming online than we used to have. So the good news is we've gotten much better at developing reading curriculum than we used to. Another thing a parent ought to know is, is pay attention to how much their kids are reading nonfiction versus fiction. And the Common Core standards call for a little bit of a heavy emphasis, heavier emphasis, like 60/40 in the early grades around literature versus nonfiction.
But it shifts as you get up into secondary. So by the end, you're at 40/60, just the opposite. But I think particularly if kids don't have a lot of background knowledge, a good dose of nonfiction is an important way to build their background knowledge.
Carleen: Interesting. I have a question that I'm going to ask you following now. I know you and I could just go on and on. I do have a question for you relating about…as parents and members of the community, what can we do? It's something that we're really focused on with Coaching for Literacy…but what can we do to try to help increase literacy rates for those who have less access and less resources?
We obviously know that we have no idea when the pandemic is going to end and kids are learning in all the different methods right now. But as far as parents, as community members, what can we be doing to try to help kids that are down the street, that are in Mississippi, that are in Iowa, North Carolina, everywhere? Like what steps should we be taking?
Kelly: Well, it's community-based organizations and groups of parents. The advocacy role can't be underestimated because school boards and schools respond to advocacy of pressure that is applied so that it knows the schools need to know the community is paying attention. So for organizations, they should be aware of, where are the low-performing schools or where are the low-performing classes? That's all public knowledge. You should go on your website, whatever state you're in, and look to see how kids are scoring on the state tests, which is a bit of a barometer, doesn't tell you everything, but it's how essentially schools are being measured these days.
So pay attention to where the gaps are, what schools aren't being serviced well. And I think that if there are organizations that are forming for just this very reason to help parents get connected and do a better job with advocating for their kids and other kids. So here are a couple of them. One is Parents for Public Schools, which was founded in Mississippi. It's now a national organization. It's a chapter based organization.
If you go online to Parents for Public Schools, you can learn more about them and even perhaps start a chapter in your community. There's an organization called the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, and it is a community based organization that is growing across the country. And its purpose is third grade reading, reading by third grade, reading on level about third grade. And it has a three-pronged approach, getting kids ready. So school readiness, school attendance, getting them there and keeping them there and summer reading loss.
And so there are programs that districts are interested in doing and parents and community members can help work with the district to be a Campaign for Grade-Level community. Those are two that come to mind. Excel by 5 is maybe an organization your audience knows about. You become an Excel by 5 community, which means that there are lots of services, not just schools, but health services, early childhood daycare issues, that Excel by 5 communities become. You actually can become a certified Excel by 5 community. We have a presence here in Mississippi and I'm sure they're virtually in every state.
Carleen: Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you for sharing those. I'm going to put those links on our website when this post in case anyone wants to check them out. And I encourage everyone to do so. So, Kelly, I’ve said this every single time, I could talk to you all day long, but is there and I don't want to take up too much of your time, is there anything else that you would like to share with our viewers?
Kelly: Well, one of the things that we are working on at Barksdale is something called that we call the Reading Universe and we actually have right now a very rudimentary website. If you go to readinguniverse.org, you can pull up the Reading Universe. And it's essentially a…we used to call it the placemat that was before that was when it was just visual and we were sitting at the teacher table because it fits on one single page. And the purpose of the Reading Universe, the website is much more than that.
But the purpose of the Reading Universe is really to be a taxonomy for teachers of the skills they need to know how to teach. Now, every child may not need to know how to teach every skill on the Reading Universe, but every teacher needs to know how to teach every skill because they're never going to know what child's going to need what. But the beauty of the Reading Universe, it has been really well received by teachers is that it helps them appreciate all of the things that comprise the reading process and at any point in time, if you're dealing with phonemic awareness on a particular day or you're teaching fluency on a particular day, or you're working on vocabulary at any point in time, you need to know where you're standing in the Reading Universe and how it relates to that end goal, which is reading comprehension.
And we are right now partnering with two really big national organizations to help us take this Reading Universe website and really build it up. So it's going to be we're in the developmental stages right now, but it's going to be a very interactive resource for teachers in the moment, wherever they are. And it will be free.
It will help build their knowledge and also have what they need in the moment. It will give them resources. There will be lots of demonstrations of teaching reading by real teachers with kids that look just like yours. So we're hoping it's going to be a really robust site. So that's one thing I wanted to share.
And the other thing I meant to say a minute ago, when we're talking about helping parents and teachers and knowing what to do is make sure your kids are writing.
Kids need to be writing about what they're reading because the more they write, the better they comprehend. And we see that writing is kind of taken the back burner in many of the curriculum that there's so much focused on on reading that. What we need to remember is that reading and writing make all of literacy. So if we're talking about literacy, you've got to have both. And writing is a good way to reinforce comprehension.
Carleen: Thank you for reminding us of that. But I can see that, too. I'm still a paper and pen person because I wired into my brain that way. Going back to what you were talking about earlier, is that your brain was not intended...we have to teach our brains how to learn and teach our brains how to read. And we have to teach our brains how to retain that information. And writing is such an enormous part.
Kelly: And even at the early stages, when you're just learning to decode, it's important to encode, which is writing those letters that you are decoding. It's a two way process. Someone once described it as the inhale and exhale of literacy. The inhale is when you're taking a print and putting it into language and the exhale is where you're taking language, you're putting it into print. So when they're working hand in hand.
Carleen: Oh, my gosh. Kelly, this has been absolutely amazing. Again, you gave me a couple of nuggets that I jotted down, and I'm going to take all the links. I'm going to put them down below. Also, if you want to learn more about the Barksdale Reading Institute or get in touch with Kelly, please visit msreads.org.
Kelly, thank you. Thank you for everything that you were doing for the state of Mississippi and apparently all of these states around the country as well. And our future teachers, because we know what an impact they are making on our children and for years to come. Right, because it's not just to teach a child in just one moment. You're going to teach them and they're going to learn skills for the lifetime. So thank you.
Kelly: Thank you, Carleen. And I always like talking to you because I appreciate your energy and your curiosity. So keep stirring the pot out there.
Carleen: I will. Thank you so much. I will see you soon.
Kelly: Thank you.
