The MCIULearns Podcast
The MCIU Learns podcast is where education leaders, innovators, and experts share insights and best practices to elevate learning and empower schools. Each episode features thought-provoking conversations with thought leaders, presenters, and program directors from Montgomery County Intermediate Unit (MCIU) and beyond. Whether we’re discussing cutting-edge programs, professional development strategies, or the latest trends in education, our goal is to inspire and build capacity in educators, administrators, and all those passionate about improving student outcomes.
The MCIULearns Podcast
Breaking Down Walls: How Every Teacher Can Support Student Literacy with Dr. Dickey
Dr. Donyall Dickey delivers a powerful message about America's literacy crisis while offering clear, practical solutions educators can implement immediately. Donyall D. Dickey, Ed.D. is a nationally recognized authority on curriculum, instruction, organizational development, and the administration of schools As founder and CEO of Educational Epiphany, Dr. Dickey brings credibility and real-world experience to this urgent conversation.
The four practices Dr. Dickey outlines include creating learning targets that push students toward higher-order thinking, teaching vocabulary through word part analysis, using gradual release of responsibility to build independence, and explicitly teaching writing skills across content areas. What makes his approach particularly effective is the implementation strategy, introducing one practice at a time, ensuring mastery before moving on, and focusing on sustainable change rather than quick fixes.
Educators across Montgomery County will have the opportunity to learn directly from Dr. Dickey at the MCIU's Shared Learning session on October 1st. Don't miss this chance to transform your instructional practice and make a real difference in student literacy outcomes.
Visit learn.mciu.org/sharedlearning to learn more about this upcoming professional development opportunity with MCIU's Office of Organizational and Professional Learning.
No matter the content, no matter the grade. Don't bring the text down to students. Bring students up to the text.
Cassie Brusch:Welcome back to the MCI ULearns podcast brought to you by the Montgomery County Intermediate Unit. This is where we connect with educators, leaders and innovators who are working to improve the outcomes for all learners. I'm your host today Cassie Bruch, a project consultant in the Office of Organizational and Professional Learning. I'm looking forward to today's conversation. Before we get started, I'll ask everyone to introduce themselves.
Mike Webb:Thanks, Cassie. My name is Mike Webb. I am the assistant director in the Office of Organizational and Professional Learning here at MCIU.
Stephanie Schwab:Hi everyone. Stephanie Schwab, program administrator, here in the office with Mike and Cassie.
Julie Ortlieb:I'm Julie Ortley, project consultant in the office with Mike and Cassie. I'm Julie Ortley, Project Consultant in the office with these fine people.
Stephanie Schwab:We're really excited today to have a special guest joining us. Dr Danielle Dickey is here with us from Educational Epiphany and we're going to have a very casual and intriguing conversation today.
Dr. Dickey:Oh, both Two parts, casual and intriguing, I guess that's my cue.
Mike Webb:The challenge has been laid.
Dr. Dickey:Hello everyone, Thank you for having me be a part of your amazing podcast. I'm excited to delve into this conversation with you all. For those who are listening today, I am Donnell Dickey, founder and chief executive officer of Educational Epiphany, one of America's fastest growing publishing and professional development companies, and I support school districts in 40 states here in the US and a few countries abroad.
Julie Ortlieb:Amazing. Thank you, dr Dickey, for being with us today. So we know that you travel extensively across the country and we're wondering what are some common strengths and challenges that you see that connect us all.
Dr. Dickey:Good question. I'll start with the strengths and I'll go to the challenges. So, julie Company strengths is I don't think people head to work each day with the intention to underserve other people's children. Like no one's driving to work thinking I can't wait to get there to underserve other people's children. Like no one's driving to work thinking I can't wait to get there to underserve other people's children.
Dr. Dickey:So I find educators, whether they be central office leaders, the most senior school-based personnel, they have a desire to produce a schooling experience for children that is fully worthy of consumption. And that is half of the battle, like half of the battle is already won, because I don't meet educators who, typically, who do not hold best interests for the children and communities they serve, which makes them teachable right, which makes them able to be supported in ways that are both strategic and sustainable Challenges that I face. That, I see, is children. Far too many children in our nation are illiterate, but they don't have to be, and I think it. You know, 70 percent of our children in this nation have yet to reach the developmentally appropriate reading expectations. So for me that is not a child issue as much as it is an opportunity for adults to calibrate. Hopefully I answered that question.
Julie Ortlieb:You answered it beautifully and I'm wondering like how do we steer the ship towards enriching our literacy experiences for students? How do we write that ship?
Dr. Dickey:Yeah, if John Dewey were alive, I would ask for his autograph, because he said more than 100 years ago that it is an imperative for us to bring the walls down between and among the content areas in order to promote literacy. And so who has a role to play in literacy development? A high school science teacher, a second, a sixth grade social studies teacher, and certainly a pre-k to two in early elementary? A teacher does, but in what ways do we behave as educators?
Dr. Dickey:because we know the vast majority of the children we're educating have have yet to reach the reading proficiency threshold, or, if they have, some of our highest performing kids are highly able to give their kids their flatlining and they could do better academically if we do what dewey said to us more than 100 years ago bring down the walls between and among the content areas, not to make everyone a reading teacher, but in hopes that everyone can help children become more literate in their content areas.
Mike Webb:I love that bring down the walls that you just referenced. That kind of leads into, I think, our next question, because it's really about great instruction, whatever content area you might be working in. So what do you think it really takes to deliver great instruction?
Dr. Dickey:Well, a small number of practices, and that's what I help schools and districts with around the world. Dr Webb, can I talk about those four practices, or you want me to stay very high? Level Please please do Okay, all right. So I think we all behave out of what we believe.
Dr. Dickey:I mean, let's just take ourselves out of the education world for a moment In our natural everyday lives. What we believe in we act out of. And so if it's true in the natural world, I believe it's true in the educational ecosystem, and so we help school districts to conceptualize four major behaviors. Number one present children with a learning target and this may sound trite, but it doesn't happen enough in America. Present children with a learning target that has two parts, that is one part content, that is one part. High order thinking why? Because we live in a world of increasing impact by AI and children can ask chat GPT to think for them. Right, but a learning target is supposed to position children to think up the pyramid of cognitive demand. And far too far, all too often, I see learning targets on boards that require children to stay down at the bottom of Bloom's taxonomy.
Dr. Dickey:Just remember not necessarily understand, not necessarily apply your understanding of concepts to a complex text or problem-solving situation. I don't always see analyze, which of course is pull apart. I don't always see evaluate, which is just the effectiveness of the author's use of a particular element. Whether it be in a text or in a math classroom, the author's the mathematical problem-solving situation that has to be pulled apart in order to be solved. And then, beyond it, evaluate is create. That's the highest level of thinking. So we want, I help schools and districts to put in front of children opportunities to create, to evaluate, to analyze, to apply their knowledge and skills to problem-solving situations so they can do more than just understand and remember.
Dr. Dickey:And then, secondly, we help schools and districts, dr Webb and team, to never allow kids to skip over words. They don't know whether that be an economics class at the high school level or that be a second grade class where they're reading a text about the life cycle of a frog. Right, because that is literacy, because vocabulary development, I think, is largely misunderstood in the US. That it is about you know kids using a word in a sentence and then magically they have an understanding of it. But I think it is whenever they see a word, someone in the room has to say hey, kids, I just want to make sure you understand it before I ask you to do something relative to that language.
Dr. Dickey:How we make that actionable in schools is we help folks to understand this, no matter the content, no matter the grade. Don't bring the text down to students. Bring students up to the text, build an access bridge to the text. And if you believe that there are things you would do, naturally right Like give kids a highlighter and ask them to tell you if they see words they don't know, Deal with those words and then read the text to determine its main idea. Deal with those words and then plot the points on a coordinate plane, deal with those words and then analyze the relationship between the elements on periodic table.
Dr. Dickey:Thirdly, we help schools and districts to understand the gradual release of responsibility in the 5Es. We call those instructional plan and delivery models, because in the back of my head when I'm planning a lesson, I'm thinking am I going to model for them? Am I going to see if my model impacted them? Am I going to put them in groups when they qualify? Am I going to follow up with opportunities for them to work independently once they've proven they're ready, or do I do the heavy lifting for them? And then, when they get to the assessment, they're unaccustomed to doing the heavy lifting and then they don't perform well. And then people blame the zip code. But it wasn't the zip code, it was the quality of the instruction inside of the zip code. And then finally, fourth and finally, we help schools and districts to teach kids how to write, because children write like they text.
Mike Webb:True, too true.
Dr. Dickey:Yeah, sorry I went around the mulberry bush with my response, but therefore practices that once we put them in place, kids do better academically without fail.
Julie Ortlieb:We talked about how we need kids to access increasingly complex text, and we need to do that across content areas, and we need to do that with asking areas, and we need to do that with asking good questions. And you referenced bloom's taxonomy and I wonder what does that look like specifically? Is it we're going to read that entire complex text? We're going to pull out some vocabulary words we don't know, and I'm going to ask you all of those questions at the end of the text? So my question is what does it look like to ask good questions? When and how do we ask good questions?
Dr. Dickey:Yeah, sure, I was recently teaching a group because our professional development is not, you know, death by PowerPoint. So you will see a PowerPoint, but we don't stay there, okay. I think it's also important for folks to see demonstration lessons consistent, julie, with what we espouse. So I found myself teaching a demonstration lesson to a group of high school kids in Arizona on, like sublimation, the water cycle, evaporation, things of that nature, and we were going to during the explain phase of the lesson, because I gave them an engagement opportunity, which is I asked them a question and then I backed up and let them discuss it so I could see what they were thinking about the concept. Then I asked, then I showed them a visual of the water cycle so that they could engage in like three questions inside of their heads with the and with the partner, like is anything being refuted, confirmed, or what are you wondering about the water cycle? So then I got to the explain phase of the lesson and instead of me lecturing to them about the scientific concepts, we read a piece of text on the scientific concept so they could explain it to themselves, to each other and ultimately to me. So I pull up this piece of text from the National Geographic and it was filled with multi-syllabic words that I know they didn't know Because the vast majority of the class they were English language learners. Know because the vast majority of the class they were english language learners, 70 of them. So I said to them hey guys, go to paragraph number one, okay, and highlight any word. You either have difficulty pronouncing or highlight any word. You have difficulty with its meaning and I need you to tell me the truth, because if you tell me the truth, I'm going to help you access this text in a way that does not require you to depend upon lecture from me for new knowledge.
Dr. Dickey:So what do they do? They highlighted all the words. They highlighted the word um, evaporation. So I said to them I said, guys, do you know what? Do you see a prefix in that word? They were looking stunned and afraid to ask. So I said the letter E. It means out, like exit, e-x, e or E-X, for what it means out. I said do you see a word inside of evaporation? They said yeah, vapor. I said can you touch vapor? Kind of right, but it's fleeting, right, it's gas, okay, now T, now t-i-o-m. You see it? And they say yeah. I said what does it mean? They say I know, we don't know, we've never been told. It means process. So then what's evaporation? It's the process of water going to what vapor. It's coming out of the water phase, that's the liquid phase, and it's going into the gas phase. It came out that letter E and then we went through the text and we did very similar things with that paragraph then reread the paragraph.
Julie Ortlieb:That's how you help children. You didn't just tell them what the word meant, you had them unlock the knowledge Right.
Dr. Dickey:I put in front of them the most commonly occurring word parts, because I know the condition that our nation's children are in and they found the word part on the chart. I put the work on them and that is my responsibility as a science teacher, as a math teacher. Right Isolate the variable S-O-L along A-T-E. Become isolate, get it by itself. Thank you, julie. Dr Webb, did you have a follow-up?
Mike Webb:Yes, absolutely, and it's on the theme of not just giving the students the answer. Earlier, when you were talking about the four behaviors that you focus on, you brought up AI, and while we're not completely focused on AI in this episode, no podcast would be complete without talking about AI at least a little bit, right? Yeah, be complete without talking about AI at least a little bit, right? Yeah, I think everybody is overly familiar with the cautions that we must approach AI with, especially when it comes to the classroom. Like you said, students can just ask a question and get the answer from AI in a way that has never been possible before. My question to you is the opposite Do you see opportunities for more higher order? Thinking back to Bloom's taxonomy, that could be possible for teachers, if teachers themselves know really good instructional practices. With a new tool like generative AI, do I believe that it has a role to play? Yes, and maybe what role do you think that could be AI? What?
Dr. Dickey:role could AI play?
Cassie Brusch:Yes.
Dr. Dickey:Well, we have to be careful with AI, because if you ask AI a question, you don't know if that is telling you the truth, right, right. And so I have a colleague who likes to use AI to generate like copy, and when I read the copy, it's often filled with erroneous information. So I mean, you can get an answer, but can we trust the validity of the answer? So that is one of my abiding concerns about the AI, this generation we're about to step into. But, you know, I think it's important to put the technology away for a moment and teach children. Technology is supposed to be an accelerant of learning. It's not supposed to replace the teacher. It's not supposed to replace the teacher. It can't replace the teacher Because, not to say that, teachers are the only folks who hold knowledge. But we do our best as educators to make sure what we give to children is free of bias, that it is quality in nature, and I don't know if a machine can do that for us, right?
Mike Webb:It's a great answer.
Stephanie Schwab:I want to build on that with you, Dr Dickey, because a statement you said earlier resonated with me is that we act out of what we believe, and so you shared your beliefs there with how AI should be the enhancement right as all other technology should be. Our roles that we work towards is helping to shift people's instructional practices, but I believe that shifting those practices really means shifting their beliefs, and so how do you support districts, teachers, administrators in shifting their beliefs around effective instruction?
Dr. Dickey:Oh, that's such a good question. Well, it is an iterative process. Okay, because I think there's two kinds of like change in leadership. One and these are not my ideas, I borrowed them from Heifetz and Linsky 2008, when they wrote the book Leadership on the Line there is technical change in leadership and there's adaptive change in leadership. Technical change is pretty easy to do. If the electricity power bill is too high, you turn the lights off when you leave and the power bill goes down. That's technical, easy to do, right.
Dr. Dickey:But adaptive change and leadership is a kind of change in leadership that requires people to suspend disbelief, to encourage the suspension of belief, when people have seen so many initiatives come and go right, and so, hey, everybody, I went to a conference and now we want everyone to do this and stop doing that, and without any guarantee that what you're being asked to do is going to make a difference, and so that's called a doom loop. We've tried this. We don't have any proof that it worked. I'm sorry it didn't work, and so now we're going to do something brand new. So I think folks are traumatized by all of the different types of initiatives that are put in front of them, and so how we help folks is we say to them okay, those four practices I talked to Dr Webb about, we're going to do one at a time and they are not a program because public education is already over-programmatized.
Dr. Dickey:We've got a program for the program, for the program, and the people who are selling these programs are getting rich and children can't read.
Dr. Dickey:So it's not a program, it's a practice. It is something we do for the first month of the school year because we believe that children have a capacity for complexity. That's from Thomas Jefferson, so that we will do this thing for children, we will unfold our arms, we will wipe disbelief off of our faces and we're going to try this all together because we're members of the same team. And once everyone feels good about that practice, then we'll start learning about the second practice and then we'll make sure that everyone feels good about it. Nobody's being dinged if they're not perfect in the implementation of that practice. And then, once people feel good about instructional practice one and two, then we go, then we start learning instructional practice number three, and then the cycle continues and then you look back and you're in January and things are better for kids and it's able to be sustained because it's not a packaged program you must buy, because what's going to make schools better is not a pile of stuff, it's a body of knowledge.
Julie Ortlieb:I just like I can't wait to unpack these instructional strategies more with you, because I think that we've just gone through this ebb and flow and this shift of instruction, with all the enhancement of technology with COVID and having switched to remote and the hybrid, and now we're back in person. And how do we mold together all those things that we did before we went virtual and after virtual and making sure that we integrate all of the technology around us and also make sure that we're discussing and collaborating and having human interaction and it all? I feel like it's so overwhelming. What do you prioritize? And I think we're at this place right now, where it's. We just have to get back to good instruction. What is good instruction? What is good, effective instruction that I can deliver, whether I'm standing in front of you, whether we're virtual or hybrid. What is good, effective instruction? I just am very excited to dig into that with you, to see how it transfers across landscape and content and delivery method that we're using.
Dr. Dickey:Yeah, what makes good instruction good? Instruction has to be quantifiable and finite, otherwise people stay in a constant state of being overwhelmed. Right, because we're over-strategized. If we're over-programmatized and we're over-stratum, it's not a word, we're over-stratum-agized.
Julie Ortlieb:It's a word now, Okay it's a word now.
Dr. Dickey:Maybe I should write a book about it. Stratum-agized okay.
Dr. Dickey:So, I think we have too many strategies to make things better for kids and people are drowning in those strategies. And and these are good intention people because it's easier ways to make a living than being an educator, and so it's already difficult. And so we, we compound that difficulty by sending people in 10 different directions. We help people go in one direction expeditiously and the test scores go up. But I am not about test scores Because, okay, fine, we live in the era of this accountability, fine, okay. But I think if you give children access to quality instruction, the assessment will take care of itself. I don't know how a brown cow eats green grass and makes white milk, but I do know, if you give children what they need, they will produce. Steph Dr Swab, you're laughing at me. Can you tell the people why you're laughing at me?
Stephanie Schwab:Because you have a way of saying things that really resonate and are accessible, without it sounding like a bunch of jargon or pedagogy being thrown at you. So I'm really excited for our instructional council, leadership council and STEM council representatives to see you when you come in October for our shared learning and experience you in person. I am fortunate enough to have experienced your session when I met you in California, and so I'm looking forward to others to be able to see that with you, because to me, you come across as real and you understand the problem and you're giving people tangible, minimal strategies that work and they can latch on to.
Dr. Dickey:Yeah, and I mean I led and led in places, taught and led in places where children needed help. So all I know how to do is help.
Cassie Brusch:Steph, so you started to tease a little bit about what we have upcoming this fall. Mike, can you give us a little bit more about how we can continue to learn from Dr Dickey, because I know this was a great teaser about what we have coming up in the fall.
Mike Webb:Absolutely.
Mike Webb:Thanks, cassie, and if you are an avid listener to this podcast, you will likely know that we bring together our different councils and networks in what we call shared learning throughout the year and we'll have several dates this upcoming year and our first date will be on October upcoming year and our first date will be on October 1st, and our special guest for that session will be Dr Dickey.
Mike Webb:So we can't wait to hear more. I already have more questions, dr Dickey, that I really want to propose, but I'm going to save those all for October 1st and the theme that we have is really focusing on answering a couple of questions throughout the year, the first being how can we support shifts in the way teachers approach learning in their classrooms to impact growth for all students? And then, secondly, related to the first question, how do educators support their sorry, how do instructional leaders support teachers in their content area as a leader themselves, how can they be of best support to the people that they serve? So we'll be exploring those questions with a variety of some guest speakers and with each other in our Montgomery County IU councils throughout the year.
Cassie Brusch:Thanks.
Mike Webb:Mike Thanks.
Cassie Brusch:Mike and for those of you listening to learn more about this shared learning, this podcast will be there, as well as some information about Dr Dickey and our upcoming sessions at learnmciuorg slash shared learning. A big thank you, dr Dickey and everybody here today for sharing our insights. I know I've learned a lot and I'm really excited to dive in deeper. I know Mike has some burning questions. I have some burning questions that hopefully will get answered this fall. If you've enjoyed our conversation today, be sure to follow us on social media at MCIU Learns and visit us at learnmciuorg to explore more of our work at MCIU and specifically, our Office of Organizational and Professional Learning. We are focused on supporting educator growth through purposeful learning, authentic partnerships and innovative practices. We're so glad to be learning and growing with you, thank you.