Reading Realities

Erin Hanrahan, a middle school English and journalism teacher based in Woodstock, Vermont, joins host Rose Else-Mitchell to explore what fluency can mean for older readers. Erin shares how hearing her students read aloud woke her up to the issues of striving older readers. She understood patterns she hadn't previously recognized: students guessing at multisyllabic words, reading slowly, choppily, and struggling with phrasing even w...

* New episodes air every other week on Wednesdays *

What does it take to change how you teach reading?

Reading Realities is a podcast for teachers who are somewhere in the middle of that shift, trying new strategies, reading the evidence, rethinking old habits, and figuring out what actually works in your classroom. 

Each episode, host Rose Else-Mitchell, Executive Director of the Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz, talk...

Faith Howard, a grades 6–12 literacy specialist and former secondary English teacher based in Pinedale, Wyoming, joins host Rose Else-Mitchell to discuss her journey from teaching Shakespeare to teaching older students how to read.

Faith shares the moment she realized that creating multiple versions of texts and heavily differentiated materials was not helping her students in the long run. While teaching Othello, she found her...

Anjanette McNeely, a kindergarten teacher and former literacy coach in Kaysville, Utah, joins host Rose Else-Mitchell to discuss her professional journey from a whole-language teacher preparation program to becoming an advocate for evidence-based literacy instruction.

Anjanette shares how an unexpected pamphlet summarizing the National Reading Panel Report sparked a decades-long pursuit of learning more about effective readi...

Danielle Honsberger, a grade one teacher and former literacy coach based in Prince Edward Island, Canada, (our first international guest) joins host Rose Else-Mitchell to discuss her journey from classroom teacher to literacy coach and back to the classroom again. 

Danielle shares a pivotal moment when she reexamined familiar assessment data and realized that a single score wasn't telling the whole story of how students were le...

Sara Quinn, a middle school reading interventionist in Atlanta, Georgia, joins host Rose Else-Mitchell to talk about her journey from teaching kindergarten to supporting adolescent readers. Along the way, Sara questioned familiar practices, went deep with Orton-Gillingham instruction, and continued searching for evidence about ways to connect reading instruction with meaningful text experiences.

Rose and Sara discuss what i...

What do you do when the way you’ve been teaching reading for years just isn’t working?

In this episode of Reading Realities, host Rose Else-Mitchell speaks with Holly Price, a veteran first grade teacher with more than 25 years in the classroom, about how she rethought her long-held beliefs about what teaching reading looked like.

Holly shares her journey from enthusiastic trips to New York to learn about the workshop mod...

What happens when educators realize the way they were taught to teach reading may not have served their students well?

In this episode of Reading Realities, Cherie Kent, a literacy coach and consultant based in Auburn, Massachusetts, discusses her realization about the instructional and emotional shifts involved in adopting evidence-based instructional practices.

She reflects on her own ah-ha moments from whole language instruction, ...

What happens when students are expected to “read to learn” — but haven’t yet fully learned to read?

Kyair Butts, a middle school literacy teacher and instructional leader in Baltimore, Maryland, joins host Rose Else-Mitchell, to explore what it means to teach reading to middle school students — and why this work is so urgent.

Kyair's journey into teaching via coaching debate shaped his approach to litera...

In this first episode of Reading Realities, host Rose Else-Mitchell talks with Caitlin Lucas, a kindergarten teacher and literacy specialist in Pittsburgh, PA, to unpack her journey from familiar routines to research-aligned reading instruction.

Through the disruption of the pandemic, Caitlin began rethinking everything—what mattered, what didn’t, and how to better support young learners. She shares how shifting toward e...