The Catholic School Leaders Podcast

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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Catholic School Leaders Podcast, where we discuss leadership in Catholic education. I'm John Mahaly, your host of this podcast, as always, is dedicated to enhancing Catholic education and connecting Catholic school leaders worldwide. Well, literacy is a big topic in education today, and as we know, it's a cornerstone of a strong education.

As a Catholic school leader, we have the unique opportunity to integrate both our faith and academic growth in our students learning journeys. Well, today we're going to dive into the essentials of building a strong literacy program that not only develops confident readers and writers, But also fosters a love for learning and values driven education.

So, whether you're looking to revamp your school's current literacy program, implement new strategies to engage students and families, this episode is packed with actionable insights that you're not going to want to miss. So, stay tuned. Grab your cup of coffee, take a seat, and we're going to get started, as we do with [00:01:00] every episode, with a quick prayer.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this opportunity to come together today as your children to talk about literacy in our Catholic schools. Please bless my guest today, Linda Rhyne, in her work so that we may give your name honor, praise, and glory.

We pray our work will bring your light, love, and mission to our listeners and to the world. We ask this through your Son, Jesus Christ, Amen. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Well, joining me today is Linda Rhyne, the owner of Linda Rhyne Consulting, and founding president of the Reading League of North Carolina.

Linda. She's an award winning National Board Certified Educator, a Letters and Orton Gillingham Trained Educator with over 16 years of experience in education, including Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools, one of the nation's 20 largest urban school districts located in Charlotte, North Carolina. She served in multiple [00:02:00] positions.

Classroom Teacher, Literacy Facilitator, New Teacher Support Coordinator, and Southeast Learning Community Coordinator. With 10 years, with over 10 years, of experience as an instructional coach. In her free time, you can find her playing with her two boys, hanging out with her husband, reading, or just working out.

Welcome Linda, it's great to see you, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today.

Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here.

It's great to connect with you again. And I know we had a conversation a couple of months ago. It seems like it's been and just kind of getting to know each other. And we found out we're both North Carolinians in different parts of the state but both of us in North Carolina. And had a great conversation to learn a lot about what it is that you do and how you help schools.

So, I guess just to start, can you share a little bit about your background and really what sparked your interest in literacy?

Sure. So I went into college knowing that I wanted to be an elementary [00:03:00] school teacher and I was a dual major. in early childhood education and elementary education with a minor in special ed. And as I was getting ready to graduate, I was placed in a first grade classroom and a fourth grade classroom for my student teaching experience.

And I realized like where I wanted to be was teaching first grade. Right? Like, I love, that was a love for me was that age group of chil I love fourth graders too, don't get me wrong, I have one at home and I love all children, but first grade was just such a joy for me, and partly because it's that light bulb year for early readers, right?

It's a year that is, on average, the year that kids figure out reading. And I wanted to be a part of that. And so that was for me where, and I've always been an avid reader myself. And so I was like, I want to do this. And I was graduating and I was like, but I don't know how. I am not prepared. [00:04:00] I am not prepared to help first graders learn how to read.

So I stayed and I got my master's in reading and thought like, okay, I am prepared for this. Fast forward, you know, I was a first grade teacher. I was serving my students. And we did a pretty good job. We saw a lot of success with my students. And I taught fourth grade as well and

Ah, see you didn't make it back

I did. I did. I worked with my upper grades friends as well. And what's really interesting about this journey is I have learned, right, that what I learned and what I, the approaches I was using in teaching were not always following the science. and what the evidence base shows that children need.

Now that's not compl it wasn't like I needed to flip all of my instruction. There were a lot of elements that I was implementing in my classroom that really sparked joy for me. But this is where, this is what has led me to realize why we need to lean on this [00:05:00] movement, right? This current movement of the science of reading.

And so that is where I'm passionate about because in my own experience, in my own journey, as someone who wanted nothing else, But to help children learn to become readers, I was not necessarily equipped with all the knowledge that I needed as a classroom teacher to be able to see and realize that for all of my students.

and it's so great because I mean, I remember my student teaching so well and see for me, I think I was in third grade and then I was in eighth grade. So what a, quite a drastic change that was of sceneries. What's the biggest lesson that you remember from your student teaching? Like, what's the one aha moment that you had during your student teaching?

Is there anything that stands out?

So I actually there was a lesson for me on kind of how I didn't want to be in the classroom. I was it was in my fourth grade teaching experience and. What I, what happened was students were [00:06:00] struggling with some of their classroom behavior and they lost their chair. Like they, the chair was taken away from them and they had to participate in the lesson standing.

And as the student teacher, right, obviously like it, I wasn't owning that. But I also realized like, I did not want to find myself using that type of approach in my classroom. And so I really, what that taught me to do was to really strive to understand the behaviors that were happening in my classroom.

and I think so many times you could go to things, you go to conferences, student teaching whatever and sometimes, you know, people are always looking for that, this is what I need to do, and sometimes you learn what you don't need to do, and it leads you to be more successful through finding strategies that you don't want to use rather than the ones that might be being shown to you.

yeah, well, I think when that happens for us it helps us get clear on why doesn't that [00:07:00] resonate with us? And it's probably because of something in our core values as a human being, right? That we can't ignore in education because we are human beings showing up in a very human profession, working with other human beings, right?

So our core values are going to be an important driver to how we show up. in our work.

Yeah, especially with the cute little first graders. You know what I mean? You can't beat them. So, so, literacy is your jam. I know how passionate you are about this. What do you think are the things that are key components to a school having a strong literacy program? And kind of how do you see those things playing out in the school?

It's maybe, Going, wow, we've got to do something different right now. What are those things that you see and where would you tell a school to start if it's something they're looking to build?

Okay. It's a big, it's a big question.

that's a big question.

is. So, something that we are learning from the evidence base [00:08:00] is the importance of explicit and systematic instruction. So for a school who might be reflecting on What they currently have, some things that you want to look for with in terms of like a phonics or foundational skill curriculum or program, right?

Is there a clear scope and sequence that moves from simple to complex components of foundational skills, right? With the goal of developing strong and fluent decoders. Kids who can read and access the text on the page. Going from simple words, like two, two sound words, right?

Like at, all the way up through multi syllabic words. And you want to see that there is a systematic approach to building up the complexity there. So that's an easy thing to look for, especially if you are a school that has a curriculum.

[00:09:00] so can you identify that there is a clear scope and sequence to the skills that you're putting in front of students, whether that is in house created or part of a curricular resource?

that you are using, right? And so the other, there's some other facets that are going to be really important to literacy instruction that you're going to want to ask yourself, are we doing this right? So systematic explicit some schools are avoiding being really clear and direct with their instruction around literacy because it feels good.

We like the idea that immersing kids in books, exposing them to reading, like that's all it's going to take to get them to love reading and be able to read books. And what we're finding is that doesn't work for all kids. It works for the kids for whom reading is coming easily to them.

Like they can easily make [00:10:00] connections between words they hear, words they see on the page, it's like, got it, right? And then their access. To the decoding threshold means they can go on and kind of do the self taught stuff. There are many students, the majority of our students, need very clear, explicit, direct instruction from a teacher that helps make those connections for them, and then offers the to then build into their independent practice and get them also to that point where they can continue their reading and application to increase the self taught piece of that. The other question to maybe ask yourself from the evidence base is, In the 80s there was a reading theory that's been kind of established and reestablished, right, for a long time now, called the simple view of reading. And it's great because it's simple, right? And It names, simply for us, a very complex process, which is what reading is, right?[00:11:00]

But in the simple view of reading, you have two main components that develop us into being able to have strong reading comprehension, and that is word recognition multiplied by language comprehension. And so the word recognition part is the foundational part, skills part that I was talking about previously, like, are we building strong decoders?

Are we helping kids be able to read the words on the page? The language, and we multiply that by the language comprehension part, which is really getting to Do students understand our language orally and based on what they're reading on the page, right? And we establish that orally first. Can they understand parts of speech?

How sentences are formed? The meaning of words? Can they understand the multiple meanings of words and all of the multi faceted parts that make up our language, which is how we convey. [00:12:00] The reading that's on the page, right? And when we pair those things together, that is how we walk away with reading comprehension. So the cool thing about that is we can see how that plays out in our curricular resources, or even just in our instruction, right? So as a, if I'm a school leader, I want to ask myself. When I go and visit classrooms or I'm talking to teachers about their instruction, can we name parts of instruction that address word recognition, and can we name instruction that's happening to develop language comprehension? In the early grades, right, you're going to see that there is a, we, there's that old saying of like, Learning to read and reading to learn. Right? And so oftentimes we think that in K 2, our only focus is foundational skills because we're learning to read and that's true, but if [00:13:00] we don't also work on our language comprehension at the same time, we will find that our older students continue to struggle.

And so what we can do in our early grades is, You have to immerse students in complex texts that are read aloud to them and engage them in exploration and analysis of those texts that they wouldn't be able to access on their own because they haven't developed those reading skills yet. But rather because we're doing it orally, right?

Or through discussion. We can start to engage them in hearing that strong vocabulary and start making sense of what does it mean when we come across a text structure that looks like this in a text.

I, and I think that's super right there. And because we all know the value of, you know, getting these kids to read at a young age because that just builds upon things. And I think we're seeing more and more, even in the math you're getting more and more story problems. You're getting more and more, well, explain to me [00:14:00] how this happened.

And, you know, the science is getting more complex as we're getting into the STEM classes and everything like that. So you're really taking this across all areas which makes it even more important because If you're not comprehending what that story problem is asking, you might know how to do the math piece of it, but you might not even have the right problem in play to get it done.

So I think this is so critical across all stages. When you talk about because I think it's really interesting because you said, you know, when principals go into a classroom or in your role, you know, going into a classroom, you know, I think sometimes the tendency is I'm going to go observe a teacher, I'm going to visit a classroom, and let me watch what the teacher's doing.

And one of the things I used to always say is, well, I know what the teacher's doing, I want to watch what the kids are doing. Because then that's going to tell me how effective of a lesson this is. The teacher might be putting the greatest show on the world on up in front of the classroom, and You know, but if the kids are snoozing [00:15:00] it's, you know, it's really having a minimal effect.

What are some things that you as if you were a principal walking into a classroom that is teaching literacy, teaching reading, teaching basic skills in the younger age, what are some things you would expect to see from the kids that, wow, this is a class that's really getting it done right?

Well, that's a great question. So it can look different, right, depending on either the component of literacy that you're working on. Right, like if it were, if I knew that my focus were working on that, some of those language comprehension skills, I would picture students sitting with a teacher, either with the same text that the teacher has that they can look at, or if it's a read aloud, right?

Maybe the teacher has it under a document camera so students can explore things alongside the teacher. But students are engaged in discussion, all students, right? So the teacher has. A process for ensuring that all [00:16:00] students are engaged in a conversation, whether that is a partner turn and talk or a dish, you know, like time for group discussion before then we bring it back and not just do the one on one calling on students.

How are we getting all students involved in thinking through that discussion in a classroom that is focused on foundational skills? I would want to see that students have some sort of tangible manipulative that's helping them make sense of the work that they're doing, right? If I'm a teacher working on phonemic awareness, you can use chips or even the Unifix cubes that come in math kits, right?

You need students manipulating something so they can make that one on one sound to letter connection, phoneme to grapheme connection. And then you also want to start seeing. That teachers are beginning to make connections to letters for students, right? That can be easily done on a whiteboard and have having students [00:17:00] work on their letter formation, even if it's a handwriting page, like all of that is a part of that foundational skill work that a teacher would be doing.

So you, you need to have something that every student is working with, because as a teacher, you need to be formatively assessing how many of your students are getting this in the moment. So that you are prepared to either pull a small group at a later time or be prepared to respond to that student in the moment and do an immediate correction so that they're not practicing the incorrect practice.

Yes. And I think that's so important right there, and that's what I used to always tell people. Teachers with math, for example, and I know we're talking about literacy, but I think it really carries across the board. When I would get teachers that would assign 30, 40, 50 math problems a night, and I would say, pause there, because If they don't know how to do two, they can't, they don't know how to do 50, and if you learn two wrong, you're going to learn 50 wrong, and now you've [00:18:00] got to undo that, and we all know that the amount of time it takes to unlearn something is seven, eight times as long as it takes to learn something, and so I think that's so important to really create those opportunities to make sure that people are getting it early.

because then you just hit the nail on the head. You can pull a small group, or you see this group is, wow, these guys are way ahead. Let's take this up a little bit. This group maybe didn't get as much. Let's bring this down a little bit. I think, I always liked it when I went into classrooms and centers were taking place.

I always thought, and it used to drive me crazy when you would have a teacher, a teaching aid, a reading specialist in the room, and they would say, And maybe if you were blessed enough to have a resource teacher in the room, and there's four teachers in the room, and we're doing direct instruction as opposed to small groups, I'm going, you have three or four adults in this room.

Why are we not breaking this down to make your adult to student ratios so much smaller for yourself? I mean, that's just gonna be beneficial for everybody.

I'm so glad that you mentioned that. That is something that's coming, hashtag [00:19:00] trending in the current science of

it's, is it trending on X right now? I don't know. What is

I don't know. I don't know. But that is a topic, a very hot topic right now in our science of reading movement, especially when we're thinking about foundational skills because we have access to assessments that tell us exactly what's, where students are kind of in that scope and sequence I was mentioning earlier, right?

And so foundation, you can be providing differentiated small group instruction as your tier one core instruction for your phonics skills. So that students are getting the appropriate instruction designed for them, right? So there's a model called the walk to read model and Stephanie Stoller calls it flooding the grade level, right?

So if you think about what you were just describing, you have four adults in the classroom, right, then you can really be strategically figuring out [00:20:00] who are those adults working with and on what skills that are appropriately matched to where students are instructionally with their foundational skills, rather than addressing foundational skills as a whole group because of the current like grade level sequence.

Thank you. And what we're finding is that tends to move students at a faster pace because they are not they're being placed in instruction that is appropriately matched for what is next for them in that simple to complex scope and sequence. So that is certainly another consideration for leaders and teachers to be thinking about is, Are they specifically with, in the early grades, with their foundational skill instruction, are they appropriately matching instruction to student needs?

based on data?

And I'm going to say this to our principals out there, to our teachers out there that are listening to this. Okay. I'm going to challenge you if this is not, cause we all know that everybody [00:21:00] has their comfort level of doing things. And if your comfort level is not having kids working in small groups or working in you know, centers or whatever, however you want to phrase it.

Okay. I'm going to challenge you when your next, opportunity comes for an observation. If that's not something you're comfortable with, ask your principal to come and observe you during you doing one of those. Because I think sometimes what happens in schools is we want to put on a great lesson, and we want to get good marks on our observation, but when we're talking about growth I want you to see something that maybe I'm not as comfortable with, So that you can tell me how to improve it.

So if you are somebody who is out there, or maybe you're a principal listening to this and your teachers, you want to see your teachers moving in that direction, create that safe environment where you can come into their classroom, or maybe you have an instructional coach or whatever the case might be at your school to come in and just give you some direct feedback on how that went.

When it's outside of your [00:22:00] comfort zone. Cause you're telling me right now, the results you're going to see from it. are going to be leaps and bounds ahead of what's happening right now.

Yeah, because you're, you have to think about it, right? Like if you have that data, then it's very clearly telling you what to be working on with this student so that they can begin to make those instructional moves. And when you can really match it at that kind of level, right?

At an individual and then small group. level, then students are going to make moves because they're not confused trying to stay, you know, caught up to what the grade level instruction is while they're also maybe getting support in a small group later, right? Something else that is interesting in this current, within this current topic is around centers.

And so thinking about how are we giving students, if they're working at an, if they are working individually at a center, if you have four teachers in the room, chances are you can have an adult [00:23:00] working with every child in the room. And then you know that all of the instruction is strategic and targeted, right?

And going to be at the right pace.

intentional. Yep.

which I highly recommend. Like if you have the human resources to be able to do that, Or to share kids across the grade level to be able to do that, do it. Because then you know that students are engaged in appropriate instruction. you are in a position to be having students working independently in a center, is the center work appropriately matched to something they can practice correctly independently?

It goes back to what we were talking about, right? Like, you don't want to send students off to do 50 math problems without ensuring that they have the proper, instruction first. And so you want to be mindful about the work that you're asking students to do independently is have they demonstrated mastery with that skill before they're off and practicing it?

So that the practice, [00:24:00] so that you know that the practice is happening correctly.

and I think they're, we're talking about all this and we have schools out there that have, you know, a teacher and a teaching assistant and you know, reading specialist and maybe a resource teacher or two within their building and et cetera. But there's the other side in Catholic education, so, so if this is you, we see you cause you're out there going, John, Linda, this is great, but I'm in the room by myself, and I have 28 kids in this building, in this classroom, whatever the case might be.

That's great that there are four teachers in certain classrooms but that's not me, okay? So, we also have teachers out there, or we have schools out there, that's resources may be a little more limited in our, in Catholic education. They're working within constraints. They say, listen, we're, our teachers are overworked, we're, our budget's, you know, pushing.

What advice would you give for them, maybe of some cost effective [00:25:00] strategies that they can implement to make sure that they're having these same kind of successes in your room? Because it's great that you can have four people in your room, but it's not a requirement to have success that you have to have four people in the room.

So what are some strategies that you might use? Or what would you say to that person that's listening to this going, Yeah, that's me. What would you say to that person?

Well, there are some there are some open source curricula. And I, you know, I will say I empathize with the teachers who are on this journey on their own because it's very hard work and it does take a lot of intention and teachers don't have time or money to invest in all of this, right?

So I recognize that there are some open source resources that are curricular, resources that are available and are aligned to what we're seeing in the evidence base that teachers could pull to support lesson planning, for example, so that they maybe weren't feeling [00:26:00] overwhelmed with designing the lesson while also implementing the lesson.

And so if you were able to pull one of those curricular resources where you could spend your time is thinking through, what does this look like? during an implement, an implemented lesson. Two that come to mind are bookworms and EL education. They have open source lessons. So whether you're implementing the full curriculum or not, they do have lessons that you could access to support you.

The other thing is that a lot of this does not require, like, purchased manipulatives, right? As a teacher, you can print out, you can make a table and print out something that has L cone in boxes, for example, for you to practice that phonemic awareness or that letter sound connection. And that is easy for you to print out.

There's a lot out there with sources that can support what that instruction looks like for you as a teacher. Some places if you're [00:27:00] new to this journey, this science of reading journey, like I was a few years ago I highly recommend checking out the Reading League resources. I will, I am the president of the Reading League North Carolina, so I am

interest in this.

I do. I do. But there's a reason because their resources are incredible. And so they have a national, I, while I'm the state leader, we have a national organization, and they've, within the past year, published a resource called The Compass and it's a great resource that has specific pages for who you are, right?

So if you are a person a school leader or administrator, there is a page specifically designed for you with resources to guide you through how you might do this. And it's all free. And likewise, if you're an educator, there is guidance to kind of walk you through how do we do this? How do we make this come to life?

The other thing I will share is for the professional development side of [00:28:00] things. Many of the state chapters, there's 33 of us across the U. S., many of the state chapters are offering free professional development, or have recorded videos on their state chapter websites that can walk you through how might I implement an explicit vocabulary routine with my students?

What does that look like? And so there's a lot out there for teachers to be able to do this. If you don't have the human resources, right, figure out what you can outsource, right? If it's the lesson planning, then you focus on what you do with the lesson plan, right? If you are struggling because of your, because of the number of students that you have, Start with a small group of kids and practice doing this, right?

Or ask for help. Maybe your school leader can help you figure out getting some support so that you can try this. You know, I don't think it's wrong to ask for collaborators in an effort that's going to improve things for [00:29:00] students. And maybe it takes some creativity in working with multiple people in your school building.

To support that work but I do think it's possible.

I've even seen schools use parent volunteers to come in and run a group. And it's great because you have a second set of hands in there. But also, boy, think about the street cred, the PR you're going to get when that parent goes out and tells everybody the amazing things you're doing in your classroom right there.

That, that is the best marketing tool you can have for what's happening in your room is for somebody to see it firsthand. So, I think there's a lot of opportunities out there. I think one of the other things that, that I have seen schools do we did it within our diocese a few years back. was we gave a day, and this required some collaboration and some really big coordination, but it was like, okay, there's seven, eight, nine schools within our area.

Let's have our first grade teachers all go to this school and spend a day. And we're not going to give [00:30:00] them an agenda, we're not going to say this is what you got to talk about, but if you put a group of 10, 12, 15 first grade teachers in a room together and just say, you have the day to collaborate, go.

You know it'll take about three seconds before the conversation will go. And I think what that did for them was, number one, it gave them an opportunity just to exchange ideas, But number two, it also, and we know you go to a conference and there's a lot of people there, maybe don't connect with everybody, but you connect with a couple people where you really, hey, that person did things very similar.

I want to keep in touch with them. Now you've got, even though you might be the only first grade teacher in your school, you now have somebody else who you can partner with. Remotely, because look at you and I, we're in different cities right now, we're three, four hours away from each other, but recording this podcast.

And so there's an opportunity these days, I think to collaborate. So I would say that's a great way, but I think for our principals out there too I always said the gift [00:31:00] that our teachers want more than anything else. is the gift of time. Because you've said it before they're running all over the place trying to get things done and trying to, that gift of time just to collaborate with others or to, you know, you mentioned those online courses they could take.

That gift of time to allow them that opportunity to do that. Maybe bring in a substitute teacher for a day and three different teachers can, you know, share the sub and, you know, this person is going to take this for a couple hours, Just being creative and intentional with that time really I think goes a long way with your faculty.

And I think that's the biggest thing, is just giving them the opportunity and the time to do it. Because it's great to say, you know, well hey go look for these classes. Okay, well when am I supposed to do that? My kid's got basketball, my kid's got soccer, this one's going here, I can take this one. But as a principal, you have the opportunity to bless them with that gift of time.

And don't overlook the significance of that I think in a big way.

Yeah.

So let me ask [00:32:00] this question because I know with technology is such a big thing. And it just seems like more and more of the technology is coming to classrooms. I think we really saw that with COVID, where the only way that schools could keep on keep it on was to almost have one to one in everything.

And now it's, One of those things, it was hard to get rid of it. Everybody's used to it now, okay? So in this digital age we all know that technology can both support, but it can hinder development, okay? What do you see the role of technology in literacy instruction, and maybe some ways that you can best use technology Maybe you have limited resources at your school, maybe you have a whole bunch of things, but what are some ways that you see low hanging fruit where technology can be used?

Oh, that's a great question. So, there are lots of great ways that you can use technology in your classroom to support this work. Number one, right, is giving students access [00:33:00] to additional texts, right? Sometimes there's only so many books that we can have access to build a classroom library or to give students access to building a classroom library.

So having technology a lot of times will give students access to e books. whether it's through a local library or some other, you know, resource, if the school has the means to do purchase, you know, access to eBooks and audio books as well for students who need access to that. So that's one way to, to leverage CHECK.

There are other resources that are being put out to, to support some of that instruction that I mentioned too. UFLY is a curriculum that you can purchase the teacher guide, but all of their other resources are free. And so they have a lot of like online manipulative stuff or even PowerPoints to support their lessons that are out there in open source.

And which I think is another really cool way to help students see, oh yes, I might want the phoneme chip, right? But I can also like [00:34:00] move something digitally on that. I think it gives access to a lot of videos about books, videos where you connect to, you can connect to authors about their books too which is another thing.

I am seeing some teachers are leveraging AI technology to help them develop decodable texts that are specific to the sounds and parts of their scope and sequence that they've introduced, right? So you can tell chat GPT, Hey, We've worked on this many sounds, or you can even upload, you know, that section of your scope and sequence and say, help me develop a decodable text using these sounds, right?

I'm seeing teachers do that in different languages. Right? I need to give students access to a Spanish decodable text. Can you help me do that? So I do think there are some ways that we can leverage the technology to help and support the instruction that we're providing students. There's some interesting work [00:35:00] happening around that.

Marianne Wolfe has published a book called Reader Come Home. And it explores what does it mean to be reading digital texts? Thanks versus physical text, and how do we process that differently? And therefore what's the impact? And there was a study about that published recently, too, um, because she kind of put out the question, and then we've since then had some research come about and what's interesting is we read differently digitally than when we do physically which is interesting to think about and to consider, right, when we are Leaning on only purchasing, for example, e books for our kids or access to e books.

How are we also investing in resources that are going to be essential to developing readers?

And I think you have people out there that are, I want to have all these books on my Kindle or my iPad or whatever their device is. And then others, as you see behind me, it's like, I want the you and I, people can't see this because it's an audio recording, but both Linda [00:36:00] and I have the bookshelves behind us that are full and we laugh because the first time we talked, we found that we had some similar books on the shelves behind us, I was like, wait, that's that book, and so, I think people, there's one of two things, it's like, I even want to have everything in one place, Or I want to have the physical copy.

I want to touch the pages. I want to be able to give it to somebody. I want to loan it to somebody. So I think there's all those different mindsets, but I do agree that it's a different type of learning when you're reading it digitally versus in person or, you know, in a paper format. I know that you offer some amazing resources for schools.

And so we're having this great conversation today about literacy. And maybe you want to learn a little bit more about what Linda does and how she helps schools. Cause I know you do an amazing job with this. So I want to give you a chance just to kind of plug what you do. I know I'm kind of just throwing this at you, but I really, I think what you're doing is so great.

And so I want to, Give you the opportunity to talk to Catholic school leaders out there about what it is that you do And I know you've got some great resources on there. You've got your checklist your quiz and things or the Survey or whatever. [00:37:00] My wording is probably wrong here on this one but tell Catholic school leaders about what it is that you do As well as how they could learn more about you and what it is that you have to offer.

Sure. So I, my, the two pillars of my work are focused on literacy and instructional coaching which often pair well together right? Because I really believe in the power of coaching as we're working through things, right? And we are finding ourselves working through things right now with literacy.

So I have a free resource it's a literacy system assessment and it's free to download for leaders. And it, what it does is it thinks through the systems in our schools or districts in four categories, right? So I find that we tend to forget the people. in our system. So that's a category of indicators that I have in there to help people think through.

But I have indicators for us to take a look at and then use a [00:38:00] rubric on a Likert scale to kind of assess where are we right now? Right? Like it with this indicator. And what I find is when you can move through these indicators, they're in a people category, a process category, a product category, and a culture category.

Right? So those are the four lenses that I kind of think of. When it comes to systems

And it's a very thorough assessment. I mean,

I try to be,

but it is a really great tool. I've downloaded it. I checked it out. And so I really, it's very well done. So I really encourage people to check it out for sure.

Yeah. So what it's meant to do is to help you assess where you are currently and then use that to kind of guide what kind of plan do we want to put in place, right? To address some of these indicators as well as identify what are we doing really well, right? Given what this assessment is telling us.

So you have to kind of know where you are to know where you want to go. As far as the services that I offer around literacy I love working with schools [00:39:00] to help conduct a curriculum audit, and we can do that, I can use the assessment, and we can conduct it that way but if you have curricular resources, it's sometimes really helpful to ask ourselves, how aligned are they to what the evidence base is telling us right now?

So in the same manner that we use the assessment to kind of establish where we are, The curriculum audit can be really helpful to kind of say, what do we have that's working and where might we have some gaps that we need to fill or to think through? And then I love working with schools, either short term or long term, right?

It can be really helpful for us to be thinking through, how can I offer literacy support or a thought partnership? to some of your teachers who are doing this work. Especially in Catholic schools where you might not have a person who's serving as an instructional coach or a thought leader around literacy leadership that is something that could be really helpful to have someone kind of pushing the, pushing that thinking but also being a support during that literacy instructional planning.

So mostly [00:40:00] I, you know, I love to serve as a thought partner and someone who can help be that focus, right? Liter leaders are often very busy with so many things that it's hard for them to focus on the one thing, right? Even though they know literacy might need to happen it's an opportunity to bring somebody in who can serve as that focus for you.

And a great way to use your Title II funds out there, so, for professional development. Your website, I want to make sure that you're able to put that out there to everybody. And I know you have a newsletter as well, which is outstanding. And so, I want to let you plug those as well, because if you want to check out and get some good resources, definitely the place.

It's easy. It's lyndarineconsulting. com and everything is linked there and I welcome, you know, people connecting with me or reaching out through that avenue as well.

Yes, most certainly. Well, Linda, I can't thank you enough for your time today. It's been such a great conversation, and look forward to continuing our collaboration and partnering in the future.

Thanks for having me.

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