#EdLeaderChat with Dr. Stephanie Reid: From Teaching Middle School, Pandemic Learning Loss, and the Future of the Teaching Profession

Every day I am inspired by education leaders. From K-12 teachers who work tirelessly to ensure the success of their students, to district administrators who make critical decisions to keep staff and students moving forward, to bus drivers, librarians, counselors, and more.

To celebrate these leaders, I am starting a series called #EdLeaderChat, where I talk with educators from around the world to learn about the important work they’re doing to shape the future of our industry. My hope is that with this series, we can all learn from each other, so we can continue to serve our students, families, schools, and districts, and give them the best education experience possible.

In honor of Women’s History Month, I wanted to start this series by interviewing my friend and colleague, Dr. Stephanie Reid. Stephanie is currently an Assistant Professor of Literacy Education in the Phyllis J. Washington College of Education at the University of Montana, where she instructs current and future teachers. Beyond that, she is also passionate about her research on multimodality, visual literacy, and how students make and interpret multimodal texts, with her scholarship being published in several journals, including Journal of Language and Literacy Education, Literacy Today, Journal of Children’s Literature, and more.???

I first met Stephanie when we both taught middle school in River Falls, Wisconsin. She had just moved to the U.S. from England, where she taught students in grades 6-12 English Language Arts (ELA). My first impression of her was that she was innovative, quick-witted, and joyful - so much so that she quickly became every student’s favorite teacher (and I’m not just saying that - she was my favorite too!).

After more than 10 years since I last saw her, it was wonderful to catch up and hear about the imperative work she is doing today. Throughout our conversation, we talked about her career growth in education, the importance of learning your students, a different take on pandemic learning loss, and the future of the teaching profession.

Below are just a few snippets of our #EdLeaderChat:

Me: I think the first item I want to discuss with you, and probably one of the most important, is why did you choose to work in the education industry?

Dr. Reid: It’s an interesting question when I think back. I’ve been an educator since 2000, so I am well over two decades in which seems unbelievable to think about! I fell into the teaching profession almost by accident. I was an English Literature undergraduate in college at Cambridge, and for the initial part of my degree, I really thought that I would pursue English Literature as my career. But as I went through my undergraduate degree, I started to understand that although it was fun for me (reading and writing), it didn’t feel like I was doing anything meaningful with this knowledge.

Then I enrolled in law school. But after going to several interviews with law firms, it didn’t feel right to me. After I graduated, I decided to take a year off, where I went to America and met my husband. During that year, I applied on a whim to the Teacher Education Program at Oxford University. At the time, Oxford University had a one-of-a-kind immersive teaching program where for one year I spent most of my time in a school classroom, getting hands-on experience teaching students. From the second I started the program, I loved it, and I realized that what I was doing was purposeful, meaningful, and I found joy in the human aspect of being with students and colleagues in the learning environment. And I haven’t looked back since - I believe teaching is amongst some of the most important work we can do.

Me: I’m curious about your migration from working in middle school for 15 years, and then moving into teaching at a university. What was that change like?

Dr. Reid: An important piece of my identity is that I am a first-generation student. No one in my family has attended college. Every new step through academia was entirely new to me because I didn’t have anyone whose footsteps I was following in.

Throughout my career, I have been very fortunate to have people who have given me important guidance at key moments. One of those people was a professor I had at Hamline University while I was earning my master’s in education. She recommended that I look at PhD programs with R1 Research Institutions, which emphasize research and publication. She believed that I had the capabilities to do that kind of work and to be a leader in education. Because of her guidance, I applied to and was accepted into Arizona State University’s PhD program, which I would have never considered prior to that conversation. I am also so thankful for my academic family at Arizona State University, who helped me navigate the transition to higher education, and my former middle school colleagues and administrators who always uplifted and supported me across my educational pursuits.

While undertaking my PhD was an incredible learning experience, it was really difficult to navigate the transition from being a middle school teacher to a college professor. At that time, I already had an identity as a K-12 educator, and that was my whole world for so long. I experienced an identity crisis during the first year of my PhD. It was difficult and emotional to no longer be part of a school and district community. And even now, six years later, I still miss being with middle-schoolers. For a while, it felt like I had to put my K-12 educator identity aside in order to learn how to work towards becoming a college professor. I am now at a point where I can draw on both identities and sets of experiences. My research often takes place in upper elementary and middle-school contexts. In my teacher education classroom, I pair theory and scholarship with supporting stories from my past experiences in the classroom.

Me: Can you talk to me a little bit about the importance of personalized learning and how you discuss it with your college students?

Dr. Reid: I really do believe in the ability of teachers to learn and get to know their students. At Browning High School in Montana, a spoken word poet worked with students on sharing their voices and perspectives through poetry. Their spoken word poetry is featured in an online documentary. One poem, written by a student called Weslee Pree, focused on how, “to know me, you have to learn me.”

I have played this documentary and pointed out this line to all my college students in my pre-service teacher classes because I think that is the number one thing you have to do as a teacher. While your subject and the standards should factor in, you need to get to know your students first and foremost. As a middle school teacher, I invested so much time in understanding students and what they wanted to get out of class, and that is something that has translated to my university classes.

Even though I taught four classes a day as a middle school teacher, none of my classes were the same because I needed to respond to the unique combination of students in each class. I had to get comfortable with that. Teaching is not about planned perfection. If you hold yourself to attaining perfection, you’re not going to be a teacher who can personalize and be responsive because it’s all about getting to know students and reflecting on what works and what doesn’t work, as well as understanding that some lessons and approaches may work for some students, and for others they may not.

Me: Knowing that you are a professor of literacy education, what are your thoughts on the learning loss that many K-12 students are facing due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic? And if you were back in your middle school classroom, what would you try and encourage educators to embrace with the changes that have happened?

Dr. Reid: My take on learning loss is different. One of the ideas I would challenge about the notion of learning loss is that often learning loss is talked about in terms of standardized assessments and forms of measurement. Those tests assume that every student needs to know a certain set of knowledge, at a certain point in time, at the same time as all other students.

The pandemic has really highlighted that students don’t learn the same way and at the same pace. I also look at learning loss differently because I think the pandemic gave students the opportunity to learn different things outside of their school curricula. For example, in one of my research studies that I worked on with a colleague during the pandemic, several students remarked that while they didn’t spend as much time on traditional schoolwork, it gave them space to understand politics, learn about racism and social justice issues, and build activist identities. One student remarked that she felt like a different person because of the learning experiences she essentially designed for herself. This study will be shared next month and is entitled, Authoring Pandemic Personal Narratives: Middle-Grade Students’ Representations of Life During the 2020-21 School Year.

Even though the pandemic disrupted school in many ways, it also gave us as educators the time to reimagine what school space and curriculum can look like, and how much ownership of that space students can take. In a byline by two scholars and Teacher Education Program Assistant Professors, Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia, they challenge learning loss and what the future of education can look like. Ideas they shared included co-designing learning experiences and curriculum with students and linking curriculum very directly to what is going on in the world.

Me: As someone who is teaching college students and training them to enter the teaching profession, what are you telling teachers in your college classes right now?

Dr. Reid: I started as an Assistant Professor at the University of Montana just after everything shut down from the pandemic, so my first experience as a professor was remote. While my experiences teaching in K-12 were still relevant to my college classes at the time, I was operating on a basis that we were in new and unknown territory. Even now, as the mask mandates lift and more students go back into the classroom, it is not school as we knew it to be.

Teachers and students have been through so much over the last couple of years, and I think it’s important that we don’t settle back into business as normal. And when possible, we should use this moment to think about what else school can and should be and how school can be a place where all students feel nurtured and flourish.

Regarding online learning, one of the important realizations is that online learning does not replicate in-person learning. They are two different modalities, and one does not constitute the other. We really need to think about the affordances of the technology and tools we have access to, and what they can do for us without feeling like it has to replicate what can be done in-person.

During the pandemic, teachers had a sense of grief because this wasn’t the teaching experience they were expecting. But there is also excitement and possibility with being part of a wave of educators that could shift education and do school differently. Right now, new teachers are feeling a mix of emotions - grief, loss, excitement, joy of being with students, and anticipation of the unknown and what school will look like moving forward.

As I mentioned, this was just a small portion of the conversation we had, and I left feeling more inspired than ever. I am looking forward to seeing Stephanie’s research study that comes out next month, and to watch as she continues to help shape the future of the teaching profession.