Spotlight: Education - What does a Reading Specialist Do?

This is not our interview subject - it's just a student at Christ's College Cambridge enjoying a book.

I'm going to keep this intro short because the interview itself is so rich and informative.  Read on to learn all about the responsibilities of a high school reading specialist - they're much broader than I had imagined.  And our subject also opens up about other high school related issues including pregnancy and peer pressure.  Enjoy!

ES: Why don’t you start out telling me a little bit about your title/position/where you work.

AS: Sure.  My title is Reading Specialist and I work at a public high school in the town where I live in New England.  So I work with individual students, I co-teach classes and I consult with other teachers in the school on literacy best practices.  I spend about half my time working directly with students and the rest of the time doing assessments, interpreting assessments. 

There’s a lot of state testing that we do that I coordinate and then interpret for teachers – things for No Child Left Behind, for state standards, and more and more education is moving towards these things called the Common Core State Standards, which are these common standards that theoretically, eventually, all 50 states will adopt so that there’s a common core of educational knowledge that all American public school students will ultimately have. 

Right now there are 43 states who have adopted the Common Core, and it includes a common basis of curriculum and also standardized testing.  So I’m sort of the building “go-to person” when it comes to that testing and interpreting that testing.

ES: When it comes to literacy?

AS: More and more, assessments are being given to all students.  It used to be that the only kids who would get tested were kids in special ed. or kids who had learning problems, but now pretty much the full student body is getting it, or sometimes it’s just one full grade level, so that you have a wider pool of data and you can compare from there.  

Because if you think about it logically, there are students who might be reading on grade level, but if they take an honors class, they might find the reading very challenging because the reading assigned in an honors class is likely to be above grade level.  So there are kids who are coming up as reading issues who are not below-grade-level readers, but their reading ability in the classes that they’ve chosen isn’t always a match.

ES: So do you do additional work with them to get them up to that level?  What’s your role?

AS: Well, for example, I’m in an honors American History class for sophomores to provide support because at our school, if a student has a B or better average in the regular level, they can move up to Honors the next year, and a lot of kids do but it’s not always easy or doable.  So, in that particular Honors class, out of 18 kids, 10 kids had moved up from the regular level and they’re finding the adjustment to Honors a big adjustment.  So I’m there in that class three days a week working with the teacher to figure out strategies to allow the whole class to have a positive experience.

ES: I understand teaching the mechanics of reading on an elementary level, but what additional skills can you give someone on a high school level to help them?  I always thought after you reach a certain level of reading ability, you can practice more to get faster at it, but how could someone actually teach someone to be a better reader?

AS: Well, some of it is the “faster or slower” stuff – the fancy term is “fluency” – so you want to develop fluency from a grade level standpoint, and for most high schoolers, that’s 250 words/minute.  Most college-educated adults read about 400 words/minute, and a speed reader would read about 800-900 words/minute.

For a lot of kids, especially kids who don’t do a lot of reading for pleasure, and also who don’t do sustained reading, meaning reading that’s more than three pages of text at a time, their reading pace is relatively slow.  They get very discouraged by long assignments and they often don’t complete them.  So helping them build up that fluency so they can read more is more effective.

For a good reader, like you probably, if you read something and don’t understand it, you’re likely to re-read it – to go back and try to figure out what the confusion was, or where your understanding started to fall apart.  Some people will do that kind of naturally, but for a lot of kids, especially kids who aren’t great readers, they need that explicit instruction of: when understanding starts to fall apart, what do I do?  What are the strategies that can help me understand what I read?

And also we have to say explicitly to kids, reading is supposed to have meaning.  It’s supposed to have sense.  It’s not just, can you figure out how these letters make words?  These words are supposed to make sense and make language, and if you don’t understand, then you have to stop, and what are some strategies you can use to help you make sense of it. 

And also we teach the more advanced readers, when do I skim?  When do I read for detail?  When do I go back and reread?  What are the strategies?  Because many times, as an experienced adult reader, we know: Oh, I don’t have to read every single word of this.  Or, this is something where I need to read every single word.  How do you use guide words in a text?  What does it mean when a word is bolded in a text?  Well, it usually means it’s a vocabulary term and I should pay particular attention to it.

For a lot of kids, they just need some explicit vocabulary instruction.  As they get up to high school level stuff, they can’t keep up vocabulary-wise.  When I was in school, we started a foreign language in third grade and it was mandatory all the way through.  For most kids in public school, they may or may not have exposure to a second language in elementary, and in high school it’s often optional, so they don’t have those root words and cognates to help them along with unfamiliar vocabulary that people who are either bilingual through their family, or have studied a foreign language, would have.

ES: Right, particularly a Germanic or Romance language, because my husband studied Japanese in high school and that doesn’t really do anything for him when it comes to English etymology or spelling.

AS: Right, not so helpful!  The other thing is, for a lot of kids, they reach a point in about fourth or fifth grade where they can read pretty much anything, and for a lot of them it takes sort of until high school to realize that that level of functional literacy is not going to be enough for academic success.  They can open a newspaper and read everything but they’re not going to understand it.

ES: Right, they’re not going to know what the words mean.  Like, if I were to read a foreign newspaper in French or German, which I actually studied but am not fluent in, I’d be able to pronounce all the words but I’d only have a rudimentary understanding of what the articles were saying.

AS: Even if you’d studied some – I had French from third through twelfth grade – I can make some sense out of a French newspaper…  Not entire sense, but some.

ES: I guess maybe it’s that when you are getting up to that fourth grade functional level, you’re used to gaining skills at this pace, and then when there are no more skills to gain and it’s just vocabulary, it’s like, well, now you’re redefining what it means to learn how to do this thing.  It’s just different.

AS: A lot of people say that in elementary school you learn how to read, and then after that you learn how to be a reader.  I think that’s sort of a good way to understand it because pretty much everyone at the high school level, with the exception of some severe special education needs, everyone reads.  But they’re not always equipped to be academically successful with the reading skills that they have.

ES: How did you decide to be a high school specialist vs. elementary school?

AS: I was an elementary reading specialist for a few years, but I became more interested in working with older kids because I sort of felt like, the kids who are going to present to a reading specialist in high school are going to be a more diverse and more interesting group in terms of their needs.  Most of the work as an elementary reading specialist is with kindergarten/first/second graders who are not picking up those beginning skills of reading, and for most of those kids, the reasons are sort of the same and the “cure” is sort of the same. 

This just seemed like it would be something sort of more interesting.  Also, the nice thing about being in a high school is that I have a lot of exposure to the subject areas, so I’m in science classrooms, I’m in history classrooms, I’m in English classrooms, and that makes it a lot more interesting than just being in the reading resource room with a whole bunch of phonics material.

Also, I have two little kids at home, so I think it would be hard to work with elementary school kids and then come home to elementary school kids.  The high school kids are fun, they’re interesting.  I love working at a high school.  There’s always something going on.  It’s different every day.

ES: It’s hard for me to imagine because I always think that I hate teenagers, but I guess if you’re doing something that they really get something out of and they relate to you well, or have a good relationship with you, then it’s really rewarding.

AS: It is really rewarding.  I really like working with adolescents.  Even when I was in high school, I think I thought I might like to work with high schoolers.  It’s a really interesting time in people’s lives and it’s also a time where everything feels really, really, really important.  Everything is fraught with emotion and fraught with meaning, and then when you look back on it as an adult…  I’m still friends with some people from high school, but the romantic relationships I had in high school seemed like it was everything at the time… 

It’s so nice to be a voice in someone’s life, to say, “these things that seem so deeply important to you now – yes, they’re shaping your life, but three years from now, five years from now, ten years from now, it’s going to be very different.”

I had a good high school experience I think, but I certainly wasn’t the prom queen – not that my private high school had that.  But I think, to be able to talk to kids and tell them [it’s okay to say to yourself], “these are not the best years of my life.”  And people will say, “Oh, I just loved high school.  It was the best time of my life.”  But for kids for whom it’s not, I want them to know that it’s a period of your life, and maybe you’ll look back on it fondly, but it’s also okay to say, “I can’t wait to be out of here.” 

You are going to grow up and you’re going to move on and this is a time in your life to get skills, but it may or may not be the best time of your life.

ES: It’s weird, because they’re on the cusp of “adulthood” at 17 years old, but they’re really still kids.

AS: It’s also hard because they’re physically so different – there are kids who could pass for 25, and there are kids who look 12, and they’re all in tenth grade.

ES: Shifting gears – I know this is out of the blue…  I don’t know if this is more in college, but do you come across digital textbooks more now?

AS: Yes!  Right now, we have a bunch of school-owned ipads, and mostly we use them for special ed. students, kids on IEPs [Individualized Educational Plans].  We basically bought them because we have three kids in our district who are visually impaired, and for a while, we were buying them large print textbooks, which was costing us thousands of dollars a year because none of them were taking the same courses.  So every year we were buying full sets of large print textbooks for thousands and thousands of dollars for these three kids. 

And we realized, if we bought ipads and got the digital textbooks, the kids can increase the font size to anything that they want.  And it worked so well for them that we bought about 100 of them all together which belong to the special ed. department. 

The ultimate goal is that the incoming freshmen next year will each get an ipad for them to use while they’re at school, and when they’re seniors and graduating, they can buy it at a discount and take it to college with them or just give it back.  And they would get their textbooks on there.  We’d get some hard copy textbooks too for kids who wanted them, but for a lot of kids we’d move to digital textbooks.  So much of what we read in the English department is old enough to be in the public domain – Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein – all that stuff is free.

ES: Right, so you don’t have to buy the paper book – you just get the free digital copy…

AS: And we’ve found that the kids are often kind of disrespectful of their textbooks, but they’re extremely protective and careful of their ipads.

ES: What would happen if they were to damage their ipad?

AS: They’re on the hook.  With the textbooks, it’s the same thing – if they damage or lose their textbooks…  These belong to the district, and each one is numbered, and we write  down in the Fall who has which number, and if they don’t come back or come back damaged, the kids owe money. 

Now, it’s sort of an empty threat, because it’s a public school, so what are we going to do – expel them?  Theoretically we won’t let them graduate, or hold their diploma, but the fact of the matter is, what do you say to a low-income family where the kid owes a hundred bucks for textbooks but has done everything else to graduate – you’re not really going to hold that kid’s diploma.  All that kid needs to do is write a letter to the local paper saying “my parents are out of work, I finished high school but I lost my textbook in ninth grade and now they won’t let me graduate.” 

Of course we’re going to let them graduate, but we say [we won’t]…  But with the ipads, they are on the hook, they sign a contract saying they’re responsible for them, and they don’t get another.  Whereas with a paper textbook, we have enough extras that they do get another.

ES: So can they take the ipad home with them?

AS: Yes, they can take it home.  We’re basically saying, if you can manage to keep this through when you’re a senior, you can have it for $50.

ES: So your school weighed the economics of buying enough textbooks for all the kids over four years vs. giving them the textbooks on the ipad, and the ipad actually costs less?

AS: Yeah, it seems like it’s going to be cheaper.  The other thing that is nice – well, for example, the ninth grade English department bought all these ninth grade textbooks – they ended up being like $120 per book for 100 students. 

The next year, the Common Core State Standards came in, and the textbooks are not aligned with the Common Core State Standards.  So now we have thousands of dollars’ worth of textbooks that not aligned with the standards that the state says all textbooks have to be aligned with.  Whereas, if we had digital copies and had paid $10 or $15 or whatever for the license, it’s annoying, but it’s not such a big deal.

ES: It seems counterintuitive – it sounds indulgent to just give each kid an ipad, but I guess it sounds like it makes sense.

AS: I really think that by the time my second grader is in college, I think that’s what it’s going to be.  It’s a different skill.  How do I read on a digital device vs. in a book?

ES: I was going to get to that – how about the mechanics of reading, taking notes, underlining, highlighting – can you still do all that with digital?

AS: I think that technology’s really coming along.  Next year they’re going to buy this digital chemistry textbook that has a highlighting feature built into it.  You can use a finger gesture on the ipad to highlight, and a two-tap will bring up a post-it note that you can type on, and if you go back to that page, it’s there.  But some of them don’t have those features built into them yet, and it’s harder.

In some ways it motivates kids to read more because of the novelty of doing it there.  Being able to change the text size – even good readers will sometimes want to change the text size because it’s easier to read that way.  That’s been a positive. 

Some of the books have some really interesting features that they wouldn’t be able to have otherwise, and for a lot of my students who don’t have a rich background knowledge base, to have those things in the textbook is great.  There’ll be a vocabulary term that they don’t know, and if they click on it, it’ll show a little picture of what that thing is. 

Or, with a tenth grade book we may or may not buy, it had a whole thing where if you clicked on the author, it gave you a whole biography and for some of them, even little clips of interviews with the author.  So for a lot of kids, having that enrichment stuff there, especially kids who don’t have that coming from home, is nice to have. 

What we’re going to need to figure out is that we didn’t buy the 3G ones.  The books are on there, but you have to be able to connect to the internet to pick up on some of the features.  So for kids who go home and don’t have Wi-Fi at home, then they’re missing out on it.

ES: But you’d think that in school you probably have Wi-Fi.

AS: Right, in school we do and for a lot of kids, we’ve moved to like, how much homework is an appropriate amount of homework and how much homework is just for the sake of saying, “Oh my goodness, I was up until midnight doing all my homework!”  We’re trying to say we’re not going to give busywork as homework – we’re only going to give something that will prepare them for the next day of class or enhance the next day of class.  So for students who are efficient, and most students have at least one study hall a day, they should be able to manage a lot of that stuff that might need the internet while they’re still at school.

ES: But I know for me, I’m the ultimate procrastinator, so having a Wi-Fi enabled ipad in study hall would have meant I’d never get anything done.

AS: Our school network is very limited – the kids can’t get Facebook, we can’t get Amazon – it’s very tightly blocked.  Of course, everyone has a 3G phone, so having the things blocked is of minimal use, but…

ES: Well, at least they’re not going to be sitting there watching movies.  This makes me realize what a different time it is now.

AS: I think that’s the other thing that I like about working with teenagers – I can be prepared.

ES: I think that would take away some of the fear for me too.

AS: I think a lot of teenagers put on a defensive shell around them.  They want to seem tough, or cool, but really they’re just big kids.  They aren’t that much more mature than the eight- and ten-year-olds I know, but they’re trying. 

The place I live and work is a pretty small town.  It’s not that diverse, but it’s socio-economically diverse.  It’s interesting to see what a public school is like, and see the range of kids who are there, and see who is interacting with one another, and see how much different socio-economic groups will interact and won’t interact, and how that shapes the decisions that kids make.  Because that was very different than my high school experience, which was essentially wealthy kids and some kids who were there on scholarships who mostly stayed with each other.

ES: There was a recent article about that in the New York Times.

AS: Yes!  They’re doing some really interesting articles about high school education.  In my town, pretty much everyone looks the same.  It’s mostly white kids.  But the kids have these signifiers of social class and they know who is like them and who is not like them, and you see a social divide there.  And you see an academic divide, which is certainly a concern, because we do see more kids from a lower socio-economic background in the remedial classes.

ES: Why do you think that is?

AS: Part of it is that wealthier families, if they see their kid struggling with reading in elementary school, they jump on it.  Because they recognize that it’s an important component of academic success, so it’s addressed sooner.

I have some students who are dealing with things at home and academics can’t be a priority.  Like if they don’t have enough food, or they’re worried they’re not going to be able to pay their rent, obviously those things are more of a concern than homework.  So they’re not fully available for learning because they’re thinking about other stuff.

Some of my students are pregnant, which is clearly taking up a lot of their attention. 

ES: Is that divided socio-economically as well – who’s pregnant, who’s not?

AS: Yes.  Definitely.  It’s interesting, it was my birthday at the beginning of the month and a lot of the kids were like, “oh, how old are you?”  “36.”  “You’re 36?!  You’re older than my mom.”  And yes, it is certainly possible that I could have a high school age child, but I don’t.  And for a lot of these girls who do become pregnant at 16 or 17, often their moms were pregnant at 16 or 17, and so it’s not necessarily that mom is happy about it, but it’s sort of not a shocker.

ES: The cycle repeats itself.

AS: There are definitely a lot of extended families here who are going to step up to take care of a baby.  I don’t know any girl who’s had a baby and who has chosen adoption.  Every single girl I know who’s had a baby has parented it.  There are some good supports in our area but it definitely is a detriment to focusing on schoolwork.

ES: Does your student body seem politically involved at all?  I know they can’t vote yet…

AS: They are.  Part of it is being in New England where it’s a big thing, but they are.  Barack Obama was in Portsmouth, NH at the beginning of the month and all the tenth graders study American History, so all the tenth graders went down just to see the political process in action.  I think they are interested in the election.  Last year there was a little bit of interest; this year with the election coming up, there’s a lot of interest.

ES: Because I was going to ask if it was clear that some of them were pro-life, with the pregnancy issue…

AS: I don’t think that they would necessarily say that they were pro-life in the sense that I think most of them would say, “people should be allowed to have abortions.  But I’m not going to have an abortion.” 

And I think a lot of them think, if I was born when my mom was 17, and I have an abortion, then it means my mom should have aborted me.  And to say they’re not going to go through with the pregnancy is to say, “I reject what you did mom, and what you did was have me.” 

ES: It’s really complicated.

AS: It’s really complicated.  But there’s a lot of support in the area.  And let me just say, watching these girls have babies, they are the biological age to have babies.  They look amazing, they barely gain any weight, they are full of energy and happy and bopping, none of their babies have any problems, they deliver their babies with no problems. 

They only get three weeks of maternity leave and they’re back at school three weeks later thinner than they ever were.  And they have these beautiful accessories, who are their babies.  And they probably got pregnant from one mistake.

ES: They don’t bring their babies to school, do they?

AS: They’re not supposed to bring their babies to school.  They’re not allowed to have their babies in class.  But there’s a daycare center that’s right near our school where pretty much all of them enroll their babies unless a mom or a grandma is around.  They’re not supposed to bring their babies to school but every now and then, there’s a baby and of course it’s cute and it gets attention. 

It’s hard because I want to be supportive of them, but I don’t want to be fawning over their baby because there’s a balance between, you know, you’re working really hard and it’s amazing that you’re even managing to come to school, and that you are managing to do whatever you need to do with your newborn because that’s really hard.  I had more than three weeks of maternity leave and came back like a zombie, not exactly ready to do my work.

It’s also interesting because the wealthier girls who would never have a baby still are all like, “Oh, she’s so cute, can we have a shower for her?”  But we never do – it’s against school policy.  No baby showers in school.

ES: I guess you don’t want to glamorize it too much.

AS: Right.  And it’s already glamorized because everyone watches “16 and Pregnant” and all those shows on TV.

ES: So how big is your school?

AS: We have about 160 kids in a grade.  750 kids or so.

ES: That’s a nice, small size.  Did you always want to do this?  How did you get into this career field?

AS: Well, after college, or even in college, I knew that I wanted to work with adolescents and in education, but not really anything in particular.  I wasn’t really sure.

After college, I got a job working at A Better Chance, which is an organization that helps minority students get into private school and then provides support for them.  So I worked there for a couple

years and then decided to go to graduate school. 

One of my friends had just finished the Language and Literacy program at Harvard Ed. School and had had a fabulous experience, and it’s also a one year Masters, so I thought, that sounds doable.  I’ve always been interested in Literacy. 

So I did that and then got a job as an elementary literacy specialist, which I liked, but definitely thought long-term that I wanted to work with adolescents.

Then we moved up to New England and I got a job at a non-profit one on one organization for kids with learning disabilities, one on one instruction for some kids in private tutoring and some school district contracts for districts with like two kids who needed reading support – they weren’t going to hire a reading specialist. 

So I worked there for six years, and I was consulting with the high school I work at now for a couple of those years.  Then the principal said, “I think we need you here full-time.”  And I said, “I would love to work here full-time.”

ES: That must have been nice to hear. 

[Conversation ensues about college, meandering into the subject of peer pressure.  We both agreed that although difficult in the moment, if you take a stand because you don’t want to participate in a certain risky behavior everyone else seems to be encouraging, that ultimately gains you respect even though you might get labeled negatively at the time.]

AS: It’s interesting because the 9^th graders are very socially conformist – they’re just trying to figure out what high school is about.  But by 10^th grade, you sort of start to see kids who are like, I do or don’t wear this, or do this, or act in this way.  And people are fine with it.  And by the time people are seniors, people are doing all their own stuff.

For example, we don’t have any openly gay 9^th graders, but we have eight openly gay seniors.  And it’s not just that that class has eight gay people and the freshman class has none.  So it takes time for them – by the time they’re seniors, they’ll feel more comfortable.

ES: I’m sure over time, you’ll see that every year, your senior class has a few gay people.

AS: Right – they can see, by the time I’m a senior, I’ll be able to come out.  I teach at a pretty nice school, so I’m lucky.

ES: Yeah, it sounds like it.  Sometimes I think it would be nice to be involved with something on a college campus because you’re around that youthful energy, and I guess it’s the same thing with high school – you are around that energy and you stay on top of trends.  You’re aware of what’s going on.

AS: You see what they’re thinking.

ES: And that they actually are thinking.

AS: It also makes me feel like I not only live in this town, but I’m a part of the community.

ES: Does your town feel like a true small town with a town center?

AS: It’s not a teeny tiny little town, but if I go to the grocery store, I will see someone I know.  It might be a neighbor, another teacher, a kid I teach.  If I go on an errand, I will see somebody.

ES: I guess especially because you float around to lots of different classes, you meet a lot more kids than you would otherwise.

AS: Right, and in a school with only 750ish kids, I recognize every face.  I may not know the name, but if I see a teenager walking around, I can immediately know whether that kid goes to my high school.

ES: How is it determined what you do day to day?

AS: There are three classes that I co-teach regularly: two sections of remedial ninth graders, who are ninth graders who come in reading below grade level but aren’t getting additional special ed. support. 

So I have two sections of those, and that’s in addition to their full ninth grade curriculum, so instead of getting a study hall, they get this remedial class with me, which some people are happy about and some people would rather have a study hall.  So two periods a day, I teach that class. 

Then I also co-teach a low-level tenth grade English class but they’re all kids who did not pass or barely passed ninth grade English.  Some passed it by like one point.  A 70 is passing.  All my kids got between 67-71 in ninth grade English.  They end up in my structured 10^th grade English class.

ES: What do you find is the issue with a lot of these kids?  Does it really vary or do you see patterns?

AS: Most of the kids who are in that class read at like a 5^th or 6^th grade level.  If you hand them a ninth grade level book, they might turn the pages but they’re not going to comprehend very much of it.  Then if you give them a reading quiz or tell them to write an essay, they can’t really do it because they don’t really have an understanding of what they read. 

We do a mix of lower level books and then a lot of structured support with them for things that are on a higher level, and we also buy differentiated books, which are books that are rewritten to be at a lower reading level. 

So right now we’re about to start Huck Finn in a differentiated book that is rewritten at a sixth grade level.  So, lower level vocabulary, shorter chapters, but it still has the story line and some of the original language because all tenth graders read Huck Finn, so they’ll be able to communicate with classmates and have that structural knowledge of, you know, what is Huck Finn?

That’s three out of seven periods in a day, and then I’m usually out in other classes for the other periods based on teacher or principal requests.  We have this person – her official title is “Director of Curriculum and Instruction”, but she’ll send me an email saying, “there are 14 kids in this history class and 8 of them have F’s – can you go in and see if you can figure out what’s going on?”

ES: So how do you diagnose that?

AS: Well, part of it, because we do a lot of standardized testing, I have reading levels and a lot of data on every single student in the school.  So I can go into the class and see what the reading level of all the kids is and then see what the reading level of the assigned materials are, and kind of follow along with the teacher’s lecture and see what’s going on and what’s happening. 

For example, we have a history teacher who’s a genius but he just stands there and talks – he doesn’t give any handouts, he doesn’t write on the board, he just stands there and talks.

For kids who are struggling with literacy and just have to sit there and take notes from listening to him, it’s really really hard, especially because if they take notes and they have spelling errors in their notes which they will, because reading and writing and spelling are all one and the same… 

I had a student who was taking notes and she wrote down a whole bunch of stuff based on what she heard, and when she went back to the textbook and tried to look in the index to find those things so she could go back and figure out what her notes meant, everything was spelled wrong and she couldn’t find anything in the index. 

So, talking to him and saying, “This is a lower level class than you usually teach and they’re going to need visual clues – maybe a typed outline of your lecture, so they have those keywords they can anchor onto, or write an outline on the board, or pause to write some of these names and terms so they have some sort of something to grasp onto – but these particular kids are not learning through this kind of lecture.

ES: That seems so obvious, but I guess it’s not.

AS: Right, but for most high school teachers, they’re content area experts.  But they’re not necessarily experts in how kids learn.  Or how can they help kids who are not good readers?  They’re experts in American History, or Economics, or Chemistry, or Math or whatever it is.  They’re more content area specialists than learning specialists. 

And I think what’s been really nice for me is that most teachers have been very welcoming and like, yeah, I don’t know anything about that.  I know how to teach people what the Civil War was and why it started and what Reconstruction was– I don’t know how to teach them how to learn it.  So it’s nice to have that collaborative relationship.  Because I know that stuff, but I don’t know it enough to teach it – I know the learning strategies.

ES: It must be really fun to get to sit in on those classes and have those refresher courses.  Sometimes I think about how overloaded kids are, not in the sense that we usually talk about it these days with all the afterschool activities, but just going to school.  They’re learning all day. 

If I go to one lecture, I talk about it for a month.  They’re going to class after class, every day, where they’re being taught new information and skills.  It’s a lot for their brains to process.

AS: It’s a lot.  And also, my school day starts at 7:40am.  Let’s say these kids wake up at 6/6:30, they get to school at 7:15, and they’re in class until 2:40.  Then many of them go to sports practice, or a game, or Yearbook, or their job, so they don’t get home until 6. 

They’re on the go for eleven hours, and that is part of the reason we wanted to be really purposeful about homework, because they do need some downtime to take what they’ve learned and internalize it.

ES: They’re learning new things for years and years, and then suddenly you graduate and it’s over.

AS: Right.  And for most of these kids, truly new things.  High school economics – most of them have no background in economics.  It’s all new.  It’s not like me sitting there being like, “Oh, I never thought about it that way but I actually have thought about these concepts before.”  It’s all new.

ES: Right, like, “Supply and Demand” – they probably haven’t heard of that before.

AS: And for a lot of kids, not only have they not heard of Supply and Demand, for my low literacy kids, they don’t even necessarily know what “Supply” means.  Every little thing is a step up for those kids.  Their vocabularies are low.  They don’t have that background knowledge, they haven’t read other novels. 

They just don’t have the connections, and when you can make a connection to something, it’s so much easier to learn it.

ES: I wonder what a reading specialist thirty years ago would have said were the main issues kids were having vs. now.  Now we talk about how our culture is going down the tubes, and kids are so used to instant gratification, and soundbites, and their attention spans are so short because they’re constantly switching from one thing to another.  Any media that they consume is so brief and empty.

AS: I think the reading specialists of the past were definitely more special education based, and that has been the real shift – saying, yes, there are kids who are in special education and need help reading, but literacy impacts every subject area, it’s in every domain of life and every student across the curriculum needs to be a better reader, and it’s not just your English class you need to be a better reader for.  There’s reading in math, there’s reading in science.

Even for those students who are saying, “I’m not taking those college prep classes.  I don’t want to go to college.  I’m going to go to some kind of vocational program or I’m going to take over the family business.  I’m taking over the farm or my dad’s construction business,” there’s reading in that too. 

That recognition that everything is reading, and that being a good reader is going to be conducive to success in a lot of areas is definitely a big shift in the field of education.

ES: And it sounds like an understanding of not just learning disabilities, but that if you have low literacy, you can isolate that and improve it vs. saying “you’re just a remedial student and we’re going to put you in this different track.”

AS:  I think that what’s also interesting is that there are so many things they can improve on.  In the remedial classes, we track their fluency and vocabulary development and comprehension and every single week, they’re getting feedback on their progress and it’s very motivating for them to see, oh, like these are actual concrete skills that I can work on. 

It’s not exactly like math, where you can say, “this week we’re going to learn addition” and then they learn it, and they can see they’ve learned something.  But they can see things progressing across these certain measures. 

Even for kids who are below, we do their testing and to say, “Look, we did your testing and you came out as a seventh grade fourth month reader” – it’s validating for them to hear.  Like, I genuinely am behind.

ES: It’s like getting diagnosed with an illness: at least I know there’s genuinely something wrong with me and now I can figure out what to do about it.  I’m not just imagining it.  It’s not just that I’m not trying hard enough or something like that.

AS: Right.  Like, yes, things are hard, and this is why.  That’s another reason I really like working with adolescents because they really can understand that and sort of buy into that, “if I do this and take part of this, I can improve, and then see that improvement and feel good about it.”

I had a student last year, a ninth grader, who started the year at a fifth grade level and worked super-hard and came up two grade levels of reading in one year of school.  So he ended the year still behind, seventh grade level, but he was so proud that he had worked for one year and gained two years’ worth of skills, which is huge.

And having that data, and saying not just, “look, you’re doing better,” but “look, here are your actual numbers of how you’re doing better and you have made two years of progress in one year.”

ES: So what are they testing?  Reading comprehension or vocabulary or what measures do you use on a week to week basis and year over year?

AS: The state tests are comprehension – well, they say they’re comprehension, but they’re obviously vocabulary too because if you don’t know the vocabulary words that are in the story, then you’re not going to comprehend it.  So, primarily comprehension because it’s the easiest to assess – you give us something to read, you ask us questions.  If they answer something right, they comprehended it. 

We also do fluency, so how fast they can read.  It’s a big thing people are pushing, first to make kids more efficient as readers.  Because if they’re real slow, they just don’t get things done; they give up.  “There’s no way I’ll ever be able to finish it, so why even start?”

But also, for a lot of kids who are real slow, it becomes a memory issue.  By the time they’re done reading something, it’s been so long since they started it they have no idea what happened at the beginning.  So we want to help them with their fluency.

ES: Also, with that, if you’re focusing so much on the effort of just reading the words mechanically, sometimes you don’t internalize any of it.  If I’m reading out loud, I don’t focus on the meaning of the words. 

I remember in middle school or high school, if I had to read something out loud and the teacher would ask a question about what I had just read, I would have to read it back really quickly silently to myself in order to know what I just read out loud.  If I’m reading words out loud, I’m focusing on pronouncing them and putting the accent in the right place, not on what the words are.

AS: I know I didn’t take pretty much any science once I didn’t have to take it anymore, but the one science class I took in college, I remember that textbook being impossible, like it was in a foreign language.  Just because I was so unfamiliar with that kind of text, there wasn’t any vocabulary that I knew, there wasn’t any plot or chronological order to carry me along, so it was really challenging. 

And that’s the sort of thing I talk to teachers about, saying, you know, someone may be a fabulous reader in English, they might be able to read any novel you give them, but that does not mean they’re going to be successful reading the chemistry textbook.  Or for someone who loves science, even if they don’t do well in Language Arts classes, and his English teacher says “man, is he a slow reader,” he might do very well with that textbook because he has content knowledge and interest that would carry him along.

ES: It’s great that they have you to help with all of this.  It’s even more like that when you get to college – well, then you’re just kind of on your own – but the professors are not great at teaching necessarily, they’re great researchers in their area.

AS: Right, because they’re content area experts.

That’s the nice thing about my job – I have three structured classes a day, and then the other periods are free to meet with students, meet with teachers, meet with parents…  I have colleagues who are at different schools teaching classes five out of seven classes a day and have minimal time for consultation.  I like the teaching, but I feel like the consultation stuff is almost more valuable.  I’m glad I have time to do both.

ES: Sounds like it’s a great balance.  Thanks so much for teaching us so much about reading.  And for anyone still reading at this point, congratulations on your superior fluency and literacy skills!

Spotlight: Entertainment Reporting

I had the pleasure of speaking with Breanne Heldman, Senior Editor at NextMovie.com and Film.com, about her role there and the real facts of what it's like working in entertainment reporting.  Read on to learn about the glamorous and not-so-glamorous ins and outs of her work, the benefits of employment with a large corporation, and how she turned a college extracurricular activity and absurd love of The CW into a dream job.

ES: Hi Breanne!  Why don’t you start out telling me your position and company and a little bit about what you do.

BH: Sure – my title is Senior Editor at NextMovie.com and Film.com, and we are part of MTV Networks.  It is very confusing – I fully understand that – because obviously there is MTV.com, and it covers a wide range of pop culture including movies.  They have specific movie blogs on MTV.com.  We do work with those guys.  It is meant to be a complementary relationship.  We try really hard not to tread on their feet.  And right now we’re in a really happy place working with them, so it’s all hunky dory.

ES: Was NextMovie its own thing before MTV bought it?  Did it predate MTV?  Or is it something they created as another site?

BH: Great question.  It’s actually something they created.  They were kind of looking at the movie space.  There’s certainly lots of advertising to be done within movies.  I think there’s research that in all of pop culture, movie studios spend the most on advertising.  So they were looking for more openings for that.  I’m sure that was part of it.  Paramount put out a movie called “Next” a couple years ago.  It starred Jessica Biel and Nicholas Cage.  So, for that movie, Viacom owned the URL “NextMovie.com.”

ES: Oh, okay.

BH: So, I think that it was a combination of, “we have this URL, it’s just sitting there, it has some girth to it, so let’s make something of it.”

ES: Right, that makes sense.

BH: So, my former boss, Scott Robson, was kind of hired to turn it from nothing to something.  Then about 4-6 months ago, we acquired Film.com, which was part of Real Networks– it was kind of lingering and there was not a whole lot being updated on it.  So we’re in the process of simultaneously revitalizing Film.com.

ES: So you guys have different content on Film.com vs. NextMovie vs. MTV, but you might be promoting the same movie in different ways across the different properties…

BH: Exactly.  So the way we kind of think of it is that NextMovie is kind of the MTV audience – it’s a little younger, teens and twenties.  A little more “popcorn movies”, more Twilight/Hunger Games stuff.  You’re going to find a lot more of that on NextMovie, whereas Film.com is geared a little older, more towards your film snobs for lack of a better term.  But I think most film snobs consider themselves film snobs.

ES: Right, it’s not a derogatory term.

BH: So you’re going to find a little more looking back on a wider array of movies, and a lot more coverage of indie movies there.

ES: So, NextMovie gets more of the blockbuster younger stars, and they get maybe the more mature stars.  Do they interview current celebrities when they’re promoting their movies and do all the same things you do, just with a different selection of films?

BH: Exactly.  For example, for the movie “Won’t Back Down”, which we won’t talk about whether that was any good or not, we had interviews with Maggie Gyllenhall and Viola Davis.  Maggie Gyllenhall went on NextMovie – she’s younger, she’s hipper – and Viola Davis – older, Oscar winner – went on Film.

The beauty of doing both sites is that it’s a wider range of ideas and possibility.

ES: Does your job involve – I know you get to do some of the fun interviews – does it also involve working with publicists to determine what interview will run where, developing that whole side of it?

BH: Well, it’s determining that within our team of three editors and then going to publicists and saying, “we would like to do this for this site and this for that site.  Is that all right?”  And most of the time it is.  The other beauty of running two sites is the ease of cross-promoting is really nice.  And on the larger scale, being part of the MTV network certainly opens big doors for cross-promotion.

ES: This is embarrassing to admit to you, but I have not watched MTV for so long because I’m so far out of the demographic that they’re targeting.  So how do they promote films?  Is it mainly online or do they have actual shows people would go on live?  When we were younger, you’d go on TRL to do live promotion.  What do they have now?

BH: There is a little but there’s not a whole lot, so really a lot of it lives online.

ES: So, talk a little bit about your career path, because I remember when you were a reporter in New York doing some fun feature stories but I don’t know the full story and what’s happened since then.

BH: Well, I actually started in PR and was lucky enough to kind of do a little networking through working with reporters on the other side, and also writing press releases that got put into stories and run with other people’s bylines, which was always a little interesting, because the line between a press release and an article is not clear, and it’s really ridiculous that someone else is getting to put their name on your work.  

So I was lucky enough to turn some of that into a job at the NY Daily News and stayed there on staff for three years and then freelancing for three years.  And that turned into a job as senior writer for E!online.  And I was there for about a year and half when I got a call from Scott Robson, who was looking to staff up NextMovie.com and the rest is history.

ES: So, what is the glamorous side of working with celebrity clients and what is the not-so-glamorous side?

BH: Well, certainly the glamorous side is meeting celebrities, and I’ve always said I’ll only do this so long as it excites me and I’ve met far too many people who do this job or something similar who don’t get excited about celebrities anymore, who are completely jaded and have lost the sense of excitement about it.  I still get nervous for every interview.  

I’ve found that I can meet my favorite celebrities and professional and whatever it is I need to be, and then when I walk away, when I turn into the hallway, I am just as giddy and excited as anyone else would be.  And not dissimilarly, if I see “celeb in the wild”, meaning just on the street or out at a restaurant, I’m just as excited as the person next to me.

ES: How do you find that they react?  Do they play it cool, or do they get excited that someone is excited to meet them?  What’s your experience?

BH: I think it’s an interesting mix.  I find that the celebrities that I end up getting most giddy and excited about and I actually show it to them end up being the least A-list of the celebrities that I’m talking to.  For example, yesterday I interviewed Britt Robertson.  She’s in this tiny little movie called “The First Time” which I really loved, but she’s best known for being on the CW’s “The Secret Circle”. 

So, I watched her in “The Secret Circle” and I watched her on “Life Unexpected” which was her series before that, but I really liked her in this movie and I think she’s a rising star and one to watch, which was the point of my interview. 

It was definitely one of those where I was really excited going in and I was kind of gushing about how much I enjoyed this movie and how excited I was to talk to her.  And when it’s stars like that, they’re just excited that you have any semblance of knowing who they are.

ES: Right, they’re not getting recognized all the time and like, hounded and followed around or anything.

BH: I’ve had the experience at fashion week where I’ve gone up to talk to a star who none of the other reporters who were there watched the show, and so they didn’t know who this guy was, and sometimes they get so excited that you know who they are.

ES: I can really imagine being in their position and just being on the cusp of getting recognized and how that would be really exciting, although I can see how, down the road, it could just get overwhelming and annoying.  But in the beginning, I’m sure it’s really exciting.

It’s the benefit of watching The CW and ABC Family.

BH: I’m still like a 16 year old at heart, and even that’s a push.

ES: I am when it comes to ABC Family shows, like Make It or Break It.

BH: Oh, I love the ABC Family shows, and that’s another one where sometimes I’m the only one who recognizes the celebrities.

ES: Have you done anyone from Make It or Break It? Or Bunheads?

BH: When I was at E!, I was covering more TV stuff, so I did talk to Candice Cameron and I talked to the woman who played Payson’s mom.  They were awesome, and they definitely told me stuff they weren’t supposed to tell me, which was awesome!  But yeah, I love the TV stars.  It’s really fun to talk to them.

ES: Right, I guess now you wouldn’t be talking to TV stars so I shouldn’t have even asked.

BH: No, I loved the heck out of that show.  There are so many  similarities between figure skating, which I used to do, and gymnastics, so I really loved it.

ES: That’s right – you used to teach figure skating too when I still lived in New York, but I guess you don’t do that anymore.

BH: No, I don’t have time.  When you’re pulling days where it’s after 9 and you’re still at the office…

ES: So is it typical for you to be there so late?

BH: No, it’s not, and also the beauty of working in a big company like Viacom is that there are really nice benefits like twice a week boot camp and twice a week Zumba, so I did Zumba from 7-8 and came back to my desk to finish something.

ES: Is it funny working out with people you work with?

BH: It’s weirder working out in a conference room.  For the Zumba class, there’s this whole window wall and it’s right near an elevator bank, so as people are leaving, they’re watching you and that’s weird.  The beauty is that it’s on a Nickelodeon floor and I work with those guys so rarely that it’s really just my close colleagues who are all doing it together, but beyond that I don’t know anyone else.

ES: So, what do you do when you’re interviewing a celebrity and they’re kind of dry, or they’re exhausted and they’re answering the same questions for the billionth time?

BH: If it is over the phone, I want to bang my head against the desk.  But sometimes there’s just nothing you can do.  And by the way, often, those people are the much more established stars who are doing it, and they know better.  So it’s annoying.  But you know, what can you do?  You’re going to have a shorter piece.  The beauty of working on the web is that we’ll give our writers a word count, but eh, they don’t have to follow it.

ES: When you say, “we’ll give our writers a word count”, is that because you’re doing the interviews but not writing the final piece, or what?

BH: No, we are three people who are running two websites and we’re turning out 10-15 posts a day on each site, as well as maintaining a lot of elements you kind of don’t think about when you’re looking at a website.

ES: Right, I know it’s a ton of work.

BH: So when you look at something like a “coming soon” page that lists what movies are coming out over the next two months, someone has to maintain that.  So, a lot of our stories are written by freelancers – they’re pitched, or a news story is just assigned on the spot. 

A lot of what my day to day is isn’t doing the interviews.  I really only do them when I want to, because it’s not worth it.  It’s after 9 and I’m still at the office to finish up a story, but I’m here because I wanted to do this story.  Anyone else, I’m happy to give it to our freelancers.  It’s not worth my quality of life.  So I pick and choose, and I often choose people that, like, no one else knows who they are.

ES: Just your personal favorites.

BH: Yeah, so a lot of my day to day is conceptualizing stories, assigning them, getting them back, and editing them and then building the story itself.

ES: What have been some of your favorite stories that you’ve done recently?

BH: Well, I’ve got to tell you, this article is really adorable.  She’s really funny, and it was probably one of my favorites of recent time.  One of the things that’s fun is to see someone turn your idea into a good story.  Back in April, Titanic came out in 3D and I went out with a camera crew to the Staten Island Ferry and tried to get people to talk to me about Titanic, and ultimately it resulted in a lot of people singing for me, which was really funny.  Getting strangers to sing for you is really awesome.

ES: So did you put together a video piece from that?

BH: That is a video piece.  One of my favorite things about this job, as opposed to my previous jobs, is that I get to do some on-camera work, and I’ve never done that before and I’m not going to say I’m an expert by any means.  But I’m enjoying it; I feel like I learn something  from every time, and hopefully improve.

ES: It’s amazing that you’re developing a professional reel from it too because I’m sure you have the technical expertise of Viacom with excellent production behind you.  Good Cameras, microphones, etc. vs. what you might have if you worked at some random other website.

BH: Exactly, and MTV.com produces a lot of video.  They have a huge video initiative.  So a lot of times, I’ll go on one of the videos they’re doing and be an “expert opinion” talking.

ES: That’s so great.  I love that part of your job.

BH: It is fun.  It’s interesting when my parents try to explain my job because it sounds so silly but they know that you have to pay your dues, and they know that I love what I’m doing.  So they’ll tell people, “watch my daughter in this video where she’s talking about ‘Twilight’ and knows far too much about it.”

ES: Do you get screeners of the movies, or how do you get to see the movies before they come out?

BH: For the most part, there are press screenings, so it’s just a matter of going to an advance screening, and often they are in a bunch of small screening rooms throughout the city, and then sometimes it’s these big all-media screenings at the big theaters.  Very rarely is it a matter of them sending me a screener. 

The bigger the movie, the harder to get a screening unless it’s a movie that the studio really feels they’ve got a hit on their hands, but they know they need as much buzz as possible because it’s a hard sell.  So, like, for “Looper”, they did so many press screenings for that movie and I think it’s because they were worried that people really had no concept of what this movie was or if it was going to be any good, so they needed to have a lot of reporters going to see it and talking about how good it was.

ES: I feel like when I was younger, there were so many movies I wanted to see, but now the marketplace is so crowded and they just don’t make many movies for adults anymore.  There’s hardly ever anything I feel is made for me, not teenagers or kids.  Do you know what I mean?

BH: Absolutely.  I think, interestingly, movies targeted at teenagers are also targeted at adults.  But maybe that’s just me, a 33 year old adult who still likes the teenager movies.  I don’t disagree with you, there is a void there.  There aren’t a lot of movies for adults that aren’t totally over-the-top Oscar bait.

ES: Right.  I don’t know if it’s just that my perspective has changed, or it’s just my stage of life.  They probably realize that families with young kids just don’t go to the movies, so from the studios’ point of view, not worth it.

BH: No, when they’re going, they’re going to see “Hotel Transylvania”.

ES: Which actually looked really good, I thought.

BH: Go see “Frankenweenie” instead.

ES: I don’t know if I’ll be seeing either of them, but I guess that’s my point.  Why bother making something for people like me?  Actually, I love when they release things On Demand now.  I saw “Arbitrage” – did you see that one?

BH: Yes – I watched it On Demand, actually.  That’s a really nice technological change.

ES: Do you find that more and more movies are doing that?  I actually don’t know how common that is.

BH: Yes – I think more and more movies are doing it, especially smaller movies like that.  “Arbitrage” hit On Demand right around when the movie came out in theaters, and part of the beauty of that too is that, when you’ve got a movie like “Arbitrage” and it’s only being released in a handful of theaters, in a handful of cities, On Demand is throughout the whole country.  So if it’s not out in Abilene, TX, they might be able to watch it On Demand.

ES: And maybe it’s the kind of movie that people aren’t likely to buy later on DVD, so they can at least capture people’s interest while the promotional marketing is fresh rather than doing a later wave of marketing later for the DVD release.

BH: Right, and hopefully it’ll stay there as Richard Gere garners more and more critical praise and we move towards awards season.

ES: Is there anything else you want to share before we wrap things up?

BH: I think one of the things, when I look at my career, that I think is really cool, is that when I graduated college, in college I was the editor in chief of our entertainment magazine.  I got to fly to L.A. and to New York for press junkets because they did college junkets back then, and I graduated and thought, I’m never going to get to do these things again because there are so many people who want these jobs and I’m not that great, and whatever.  

I got a degree in Public Relations, I got the job in Public Relations, not because that was easier necessarily but there were a lot more of those jobs.  And I couldn’t be happier that I proved myself wrong.

ES: So who paid for those junkets to L.A. and New  York for that college magazine?

BH: Studios.

ES: So they don’t do that anymore?

BH: I have no idea – I think because the internet and blogs are such a bigger deal and so much different than when I was in college, they’re spending the money more on bloggers than on college students.  There are just so many more outlets than there were. 

ES: Right – and just to follow up on that, how do you feel like you break through the clutter?  The internet is so cluttered in any field, let alone entertainment, which is huge…  How do you get to your audience and get them interested?  I guess the affiliation with MTV is important, and getting referrals from their site.

BH: Absolutely, and I think we pride ourselves on having a good sense of humor, and that really inspires us and moves us forward.  We do feel that the work that is on NextMovie is very different than what’s on other sites.  And if you’re a big movie fan, or you’re only a mild movie fan, but you’re interested in a movie, you’re going to find something on NextMovie.com that’s going to tickle your funny bone.  Or there’s going to be really sexy pictures, because who doesn’t like sexy pictures?

ES: Right, one or the other – funny or sexy.

BH: To give you an example, in honor of the movie “The First Time” that comes out this week, or “The Sessions” , we are doing the twelve most awkward sex scenes in movies.  Most other places wouldn’t really go there.  So we’re always doing fun lists, trying to take it to that next ridiculous level.  

We asked fifty celebrities what their porn names were and turned that into a feature.  And we’re talking major A-listers – Katie Holmes – telling us what their porn names are.  We’re using “first pet” and “street you grew up on.”

ES: I’ll have to check that one out.  This has been wonderful.

BH: Well, if you have any more questions, don’t hesitate to call.

ES: I’m sure you have those moments sometimes as a reporter, that you wish you could call back to ask something you forgot or thought of later.

BH: That’s the worst.  Most of the time, you have to just suck it up.  More often than not, there’s the reverse.   The, “I have to ask this question or I’m not doing my job, but I know you’re not going to answer it.”

I interviewed Leighton Meester for her movie, “The Oranges”, like three days after Blake Lively got married.  And often the publicist will tell you, “Don’t ask her this question,” because they know you’re going to, but oddly they didn’t and then had three publicists still sitting in the room, which was annoying.  Because everyone’s asking [about the wedding.] 

So, I’m sitting there – you save the hard questions for the end – and I say, “I’m not doing my job if I don’t ask you – what are you sending Blake as a wedding gift?”  And immediately the publicists are all, “Aah, don’t ask her that question!”  All right, no problem, but it makes for an awkward moment that could be avoided.  I find asking the question you know you shouldn’t ask but you kind of have to much more troubling than going to write it and going, “oh, shoot, I didn’t ask that question.”

ES: Well, thank you so much Breanne.  Get home soon – don’t work too late!

BH: Thanks!

Lessons Learned

An explanation for a pulled post some of you may be noticing: I'm not going to go into specifics, but I'll just say from now on I'm going to plan on keeping my subjects anonymous unless they request otherwise.  My goal here is to exalt the work women are doing every day in all kinds of industries and at varying levels.  This is a positive arena, not a place for exposes or mudslinging.  So please keep your eyes peeled for my next interview, coming soon!