How the SuperDville x Storyshares Partnership Aims to Prove It Matters.
A conversation between Megan Turner, SuperDville’s Education Program Manager and Shira Engel Storyshare’s Director of Education (bios at the end) discussing the intersection of literacy and social-emotional learning in context to the exciting partnership between both companies.
Megan: I’d love to know a little bit more about you and your background.
Shira: I started with Storyshares about a year and a half ago. I’m a former middle school humanities teacher, and when I first started teaching, I had a bunch of students in my class who struggled to sound out single-syllable words. My master’s is in Secondary English Education, but at the time, I didn’t know how to support my students emotionally and socially. I also did not know how to teach them to read from scratch. So, I got trained in a whole host of reading intervention programs. I found one that I went deep into and became a dyslexia specialist through that program.
I love reading interventions, and I think that they’re really powerful. I find that they’re often created with younger students in mind and lack resources for connected text practice that supports older students’ identities (3rd grade and above). They often lack culturally responsive texts or texts that feature older protagonists. All of those things play a huge role in reading engagement and also in the social-emotional state of a student who, for example, is in the sixth grade and is learning to read for the first time.
So, I wrote an article for Chalkbeat expressing my deep frustration that we’re only having conversations about how the science of reading applies to early education and grades K to 1. I was very fearful that we were leaving older students out of the conversation. Louise, the founder and CEO of Storyshares, reached out to me after I wrote that article, and she wanted to connect. She told me that Storyshares was focused on adolescent literacy, and I came on board with Storyshares as a dyslexia specialist to work on our first decodable chapter book series, making sure it adhered to a scope and sequence.
My role expanded, and we decided to make two more decodable series. We have since made many more than that, but the upper elementary decodable series is the one that’s available via SuperDville. I came on board to lead those projects, to create our teacher-facing resources, to hear from educators who were using our material, and to create and provide a professional learning program.
Megan: As you’re talking, I was thinking – we are so similar. I was a high school social studies teacher and found that I was not prepared for my students who were struggling with reading and some who were struggling to decode text, so I went and became a reading specialist as well! And I believe I was the only person in the training who was not an elementary school teacher. And so I found similarly that a lot of the supports and resources were not geared towards the older, struggling readers.
Can you share a little bit more about the work you guys are doing and the heart behind Storyshares?
Shira: Storyshares started initially as a writing contest many years ago, intended to solve a challenge that the founder, Louise Baigelman, found in her classroom. She taught newcomers and multilingual learners, and she had a lot of students who didn’t necessarily need decodables, but they needed books that were more accessible and also reflected their identities as older students. Older students in general are really good at knowing when something was not made with them in mind. The goal was to engage authors from all over the world with a writing contest and “share stories”.
Thousands of submissions came in, and the judges decided winners based on a rubric. The best high-low books were put through an editing process. Now, each year, we have this contest, and every year, we get more books. We now have about 500 books in the Storyshares library.
Also, the authors who write very high-interest but foundational-level books have gone on to be trained in phonics to write decodable books. So that is how our decodable series has come to be.
We also want to give SuperDville teachers the resources to use the books and to engage students in foundational reading skills. We know that a lot of them come in with experiences like the experience I had where they knew how to teach their content area but not reading. I knew how to teach a really great literary analysis essay, but I did not know how to teach phonics. Because we know that struggle, our professional learning really focuses on that. We call it a primer in structured literacy practices and support.
Megan: That’s wonderful. It sounds like it is not solely beneficial for the student but beneficial for the teacher as well. It makes the classroom environment holistically beneficial, not just giving a teacher a resource to put in front of their students.
One thing I’ve noticed is that all the covers have photographs of real kids. Can you talk a little bit about the intention behind those covers?
Shira: It’s one of the things that is very similar to SuperDville’s intention behind having real kids in the videos. We want books to be mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, even at the most developing skill level. We also want students to be able to see another child or teenager on the cover of a book and for that child to be reflective of their age range as well. So many decodable books are created with younger readers in mind, so we wanted to be really clear that these books are for you. It can help to remove the stigma from learning to read.
Megan: As you mentioned, there are some similarities between SuperDville and Storyshares with the mission and vision, as well as the practice. I’d love to know what drew you to SuperDville? What led you to have a desire to collaborate and build the relationship?
Shira: Storyshares had a virtual booth at the Dyslexia Alliance for Black Children Conference last year. SuperDville also had one, and Peggy Stern reached out to me during the conference. She said that it seemed like we were doing something similar here and asked if we could connect. A couple of days later we jumped on the phone and had a very long conversation because our work is truly so aligned. And SuperDville is such a robust SEL curriculum.
The way that Storyshares approaches SEL is through removing that stigma from learning to read and learning those foundational skills. We have a backpack test that our books have to pass where if a student pulls a book out of their backpack, it needs to look at least from the outside like a book that they’re reading on grade level. And SuperDville really does that work of removing the stigma around language-based learning differences and learning foundational reading skills. There was just such synergy there.
Also, at Storyshares, we really believe in providing something that’s very holistic for teachers and students. But we also know that teachers have so much that they are responsible for. And so the thought of being able to provide them with another resource that supported the social-emotional piece so explicitly was really appealing to me. I was so happy when Peggy reached out! It’s been about a year since we had that initial conversation, and I think having that year allowed us to be really thoughtful about how we wanted to approach this.
Megan: Why do you see SEL as being a good companion to the work that you are doing and what is the relationship that you see between SEL and supporting struggling readers?
Shira: I think that older students who are still working on foundational skills have had time to form their reader identities. The identities they form as readers are often impacted by the experiences that they’ve had of feeling unsuccessful. Those experiences and that identity can make them shut down and avoid getting the support that they need to read. It’s a vicious cycle. I think that social-emotional learning supports are the precursor to instruction because if they don’t feel supported emotionally, it is impossible to engage a student who has already formed a negative identity as a reader.
If they see their peers reading proficiently and they have experiences, whether it’s being called on to read aloud in class and feeling unsuccessful doing that, or if they see a book and they feel that the books aren’t for them. Those are all very fixed mindsets that young people have and that are easy to form based on their experiences. As a dyslexia specialist, I saw students shut down to instruction. In two of the schools I worked at, we did book studies of Zaretta Hammond’s culturally responsive teaching in the brain, and she writes a lot about a trauma response. Older students who are struggling readers will often shut down to learning and retaining information.
I think that social-emotional learning has to be the foundation of all literacy work. The older the students get, the more it has to be the foundation because the more of a disconnect they have from identifying as readers.
Megan: That’s really powerful. I’m thinking about the last piece that you said about how SEL really needs to be the foundation. What have you seen in terms of when students are feeling that support? How are they responding in the instructional space if they’ve been given emotional support ahead of time?
Shira: I think that when students are given support, and they feel a sense of emotional safety around learning to read and practicing reading skills, they are more open to practice. I think it decreases the number of behavioral interventions that are needed within reading interventions, which is a huge piece of the puzzle as well. It also saves time and allows teachers to move through a curriculum a lot faster if students are coming in emotionally well-resourced and socially well-resourced to that process. It allows them a kind of openness and flexibility to learn new things and to admit when or be okay with not knowing and with needing to do that additional practice.
Megan: What is the most effective way of supporting students so they can be present for their learning experience?
Shira: Well, I love that way of phrasing it, being present for the learning experience. I think that’s huge.
Megan: It’s really a powerful thing to think about and to encourage people to think about it on many levels. I think, as you’ve spoken to, both resources are important when we’re looking at the whole student, the whole teacher, and the classroom environment, and for students to be able to see themselves reflected in both of these different spaces.
Is there anything else that you’d like to share? Just about this collaboration or about your heart and your passion in the space that you find yourself working in every day?
Shira: We talk about educating the whole child and that kind of holistic education can’t just be for students who are reading on grade level. It has to be for students who are working on foundational skills, almost even more so. I’m really excited about this partnership because I think it is a huge step in that direction to pair engaging instructional content and resources with a powerful social-emotional learning curriculum.
Because SuperDville operates with a video-based curriculum, it also increases the modes with which a student can engage with these texts and with this whole process of developing foundational skills. Now they have books, they have video content, they have audio content, they have discussion questions, and they have hands-on activities. This is a true multisensory education which I believe is effective. I am so excited about that.
And then I’m also excited to see what it’s like for students when they apply the social-emotional skills that they learn in the videos and in the lessons and then enter a connected text for practice to help them build that self-efficacy and other social and emotional skills. The student can use these skills in the process of learning to read and in the process of developing foundational skills.
Megan: Yes! To see a student experience that cycle…to watch a video and do our curriculum and read a thematically connected decodable book and say, “I could ask my teacher to repeat those instructions again because I missed them and I’m confused, and that’s okay.” And for them to be able to apply that and then see how it benefited them through this integrated experience- it’s really exciting! Thank you so much for the time that you’ve taken to share with us. We’re all really excited about this partnership!
