Interview with a Reading Specialist

Headshot of Jamie Chowning.
Courtesy of Jamie Chowning. 

Guest contributor Jamie Chowning is a librarian with Denver Public Library working primarily in early literacy programming and reader’s advisory for children. Marilyn Thompson, the interviewee and the author’s mother, retired in 2016 as the National Board certified reading specialist at a suburban Title I school. 

Public children’s librarians and reading specialists who work in public schools may share similar goals of helping children become confident readers, but our work rarely brings us together and so we function in parallel. By a fortunate coincidence, however, I was raised by a reading specialist--my mother, Marilyn Thompson, worked as a reading specialist for the last twenty-four years of her career. As a librarian, I was excited to sit down with her and learn more about the overlap between our fields. This transcript of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What are some reading trends that came and went during your career? 
When I first started, it was all about whole language and we taught very little phonics. It was all taught through writing and through what kids needed to learn and we taught about developmental spelling and word study. 

The current reading method across the country is guided reading, which was brought to the US by Fountas and Pinnell many years ago, and it is actually based on an intervention. It’s based on Reading Recovery. 

I will tell you, the method doesn’t really matter that much. Because 80% of kids learn to read regardless of how they’re taught; it’s the other 20% and the interventions that you use that make more difference. 

Mrs. Thompson reads Dick and Jane with her visiting grandson Gus. Courtesy of Jamie Chowning.

What are some common challenges teachers face in teaching kids to read? 
Lack of vocabulary. If you haven’t been read to at home, you’re missing a lot of vocabulary, but you’re also missing that sense of story--you don’t know that stories have happy endings, you don’t understand what a story is. And of course in some cultures stories aren’t told from beginning to end; they’re told in roundabout ways. We can teach them the alphabet, we can teach them to read, we can teach them all the sounds and things, but if they come in with limited vocabulary, limited sense of story, those are big challenges. 

What kind of books did you use with your students? Did you notice a change over the course of your career? 
There was a huge difference. When I first started as a reading specialist, we used predictable books, like Drummer Hoff Fired It Off or Brown Bear Brown Bear. And none of those books were leveled. We knew about instructional level, of course, but it typically wasn’t measured in kindergartners and first graders. But with the advent of guided reading and leveled books, instructional level became a huge concept. Which is fine, but some of those predictable books were really good, the kids really liked them, and they were a lot less boring than some of the guided reading. 

What advice do you have for librarians on helping customers whose children are “not reading on grade level”? 
Encourage the parents to give the kid lots and lots and easy reading practice. Find easy books that the kids like. And I know some people worry they’re not going to get smarter if they read easy books, but that is absolutely not true. I had this paper that I used to give out that was FAQs for parents of beginning readers and that was one of the questions, will my kid get smarter if they read harder books? Well, no. They just get more frustrated.The more they read, the better they get, the more efficient their processes are.