A Conversation with Dana Robertson

Dr. Dana Robertson talks to us about connections between conversation and music, the power of motivation and engagement, and opportunities for creating meaningful contexts for learning in schools. Dana is known for his work focused on classroom discussion and teachers’ talk, reading and writing challenges, and literacy professional learning through coaching and whole school literacy improvement. Through each of these projects, he has sought ways to provide equitable and inclusive literacy opportunities to teachers and school-age children in ways that are humanizing, agentive, and sustainable. He has received numerous awards for his research and teaching. Dr. Dana A. Robertson is an Associate Professor of Reading and Literacy in the School of Education at Virginia Tech.

To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2023, Apr. 25). A conversation with Dana Robertson (Season 3, No. 23) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/BF18-C3BC-F7F2-4DB0-A875-L

Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Transcript

Lindsay Persohn: 0:10

Education research has a problem. The work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom caffeine is here to help. In each episode I talk with a top education researcher or an expert educator about what they have learned from years of research and experiences. In this episode, Dr. Dana Robertson talks to us about connections between conversation and music, the power of motivation and engagement and opportunities for creating meaningful context for learning in schools. Dana is known for his work focused on classroom discourse and teachers talk, reading and writing challenges and literacy, professional learning through coaching and whole school literacy improvement. through each of these projects, he has sought ways to provide equitable and inclusive literacy opportunities to teachers and school aged children in ways that are humanizing agentive and sustainable. He has received numerous awards for his research and teaching. Dr. Dana a. Robertson is an associate professor of reading and literacy in the School of Education at Virginia Tech. For more information about our guest, stay tuned to the end of this episode. So pour a cup of your favorite drink. And join me your host, Lindsay Persohn. For classroom caffeine research to energize your teaching practice. Dana, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.

Dana Robertson: 1:44

Lindsay, thank you so much. It's really a pleasure to be here.

Lindsay Persohn: 1:47

Thank you. So from your own experiences in education, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?

Dana Robertson: 1:55

Sure, I think my first experience is probably not going to be one that you expected. Because my first experience actually relates to music. I was immersed in music early on, I think it was about four years old or so is as early as I can remember. There was always vinyl, LPs playing in the house, a lot of big band jazz and others that had featured drummers. And as you might expect, now, I am a drummer and used to be a professional drummer, you know, but back then I used to set up pots and pans and wooden spoons, and I was learning to listen to the language of the musicians from very early on. And then, over the decades from that point, of course, my parents realized that this was not just a passing fade. And you know, they purchased me a drum set, and then further drum sets and further drum sets. But all throughout this time, just listening to music, and learning from the musicians what they're doing, how they were playing with each other. And then of course, once I started playing with other people doing the same thing, and what I've come to realize, reflecting back on it is that I was learning to communicate and listen. So that I was saying what I said musically in response to what others contributed. So when musicians are playing together, you're always trying to hopefully invite space for everyone to be part of the conversation. And it's that understanding of how our interaction collectively as musicians, shapes the music that we're creating. And I never thought about this at first when I was, you know, when I first became a researcher, in a literacy scholar, but upon reflecting upon it, I realized that a lot of the work that I do now has that roots in this idea of how we're creating space, and listening and communicating to each other, so that we can have a collective voice in terms of what we're trying to say. So I would say that that was probably the first experience. It wasn't a single experience, but you know, his experience over many, many decades. And then I became tired of being a touring musician. And I moved into education, but not to teach music to teach elementary school. And I was a fifth grade teacher in Massachusetts. And this is where the second experience that I think has been a transformational experience for me. Of course, I was in my first year and you know, one of the lessons didn't go well. It happens to all of us. I don't even remember what the topic of the lesson was. But a lesson didn't go well. And I'm here, you know, my first year teaching. I go over to my mentor teacher, Miss Lafave. I still call her by her last name because she was actually one of my teachers when I was a student and I was working with her then as co-teachers, so I went over to her and we were sitting down because this is what we did after school each day, you know, we sat and we talked and we reflected, and we shared ideas. And I was just talking about how the lesson didn't go well. And you know, the students were doing this, and students were doing this and the students, you know, they didn't get this part. And she stopped me. She said, Wait, she said, What were you doing? And that right there, stuck with me? Because I had to think about, well, what was I doing at this point when the students weren't doing what I wanted them to do? And it stopped me. And I realized from that point that I started paying closer attention to how students responded to what I did in the classroom, and to what I said, and I started to realize that how I spoke, when I'm delivering the instruction really mattered. My language choices helped set the tone for the classroom, not only in terms of shaping management, but it also seemed to be that my language choices were very consequential for student learning. So this aspect of teacher talk teacher language, stuck with me as I moved into my doctoral study and into the work that I do now. And that importance of reflection and language

Lindsay Persohn: 6:19

two wonderfully rich examples. I think, the reason I asked that question is because I feel everyone has these moments, or these sort of inspirational experiences that lead us to the work that we do. And I love that idea of thinking of music as a conversation, and how that can in fact, inform the way that we think about how we talk with students, how we sort of run the band, so to speak, right in our own classrooms, because it is so important, the choices we make in our language, they do impact the climate, the the learning, the understanding the content, and just that sense of community. So thank you so much for those really wonderful, rich examples, Dana.

Dana Robertson: 7:01

Yeah, sure. And like I said, I didn't even realize it. At first, I wasn't consciously making that, that link to music. It wasn't until I was trying to actually reflect on all of the work that I had been doing as a researcher for the last several years. That that first, you know, came to my mind, I was like, Oh, wait, this is exactly like I was doing when I was playing music, and how I play music with other people.

Lindsay Persohn: 7:27

Yeah, and I the other reason I think I love that example so much is because it is a typical of how we think about the way classrooms work. Right. And that sense of community, you know, in my experience, it just, it is so very important. And thinking about how music and the arts can help us to expand our thinking about our classroom spaces beyond those four walls. It reminds me you know, that everything is connected, which I think also sometimes can be easy to forget when we get into the day to day of teaching. So yeah, just really wonderful examples. Thank you.

Dana Robertson: 8:02

Yeah. And the conversation is not established ahead of time. You know, it's not scripted out. It's, it's improvised, but you're bringing to that improvisation, you know, all of the beliefs and dispositions and everything that you hold. But you're still improvising that conversation as you're moving forward to hopefully reach the goals that you have set.

Lindsay Persohn: 8:24

That's right. And that that actually reminds me of a conversation I had with Kevin Leander about some of the work that he's doing with improvisation and teacher training. So there's a connection for listeners as well. Yeah, that's really great stuff. So Dana, what do you want listeners to know about your work?

Dana Robertson: 8:40

Well, I think, as I just talked about there, from those experiences, in terms of having that conversation, and then thinking about when I became a teacher, and and the importance of language, the role of language has always been central to the work that I'm doing, and have been doing over the last decade or so. But languages been central in different ways, depending on on what the work is. And I've always tried to take a very pragmatic stance to the research that I'm doing, not designing studies that are, you know, in a, quote unquote, laboratory context and things like that, but, but working with teachers within their socially situated contexts, around ideas that have been not only identified by me, but co identified by me and the teachers together to be legitimate areas of focus of inquiry for the work that we're engaged in. And I'm not I don't say that I don't do laboratory type research or things like that. Because I don't think that that work is important. It's absolutely essential, but we also need work that's working with teachers as they're trying to grapple with particular problems or issues that arise As in their classrooms as well, and how they might work to translate particular research findings into practice within their classroom to help their students learn more. So, language has always been a focus, whether it was my dissertation where I was a coach, and there was teachers that were reflecting on their talk that they were using with their students through listening to audio recordings of themselves after they provided their instruction, or actually transcribing their talk to be very reflective to say, how was I providing explanations of how to engage in this comprehension strategy work, which happened to be the focus of the dissertation? So again, it was this idea of what role was my language choices as a teacher having in influencing the the learning that was going on, and then that shifted over time to think about characteristics of effective instruction around, you know, what are the kinds of big idea characteristics that I felt and my colleagues that I was working with felt, were important to have as part of our work, especially when working with students who find reading and writing challenging, and after reviewing research, we landed on ideas of motivation and engagement, as one of the first and foremost things, not to say that motivation always precedes literacy achievement, because we know that students become more more motivated, when they're successful at engaging in work. But we didn't want to hold off on motivation and engagement until students were successful readers, we wanted to start with that right from the beginning. But then also thinking about instructional intensity and teaching strategies, so that students could apply those strategies to actually achieve knowledge based goals. So we hear a lot right now about, you know, knowledge building curriculum and things like that. And, and I love it, because I've been writing about that, since like, 2013, about having these knowledge goals that we're trying to work on. And I'm not saying that I came up with the idea of knowledge based, you know, reading and writing either, but it was drawing from that literature. So I'm glad to see it's really, you know, moving to the forefront now. But that work again, we focused that work around thinking about teachers, language choices, as levers for thinking about motivation, and engagement, and for teaching strategies, to students that find reading and writing challenging, and us as coaches or other coaches that we were working with, we're engaging in that work, to use video as a basis of reflection. So again, the ideas of language and reflection are coming in using videos as a basis of reflection to think about how our talk was helping to create instructional intensity and to create an engaging environment to the things like that. And then that work from the dissertation. And the idea of characteristics of effective instruction, and video based reflection, has merged into what I've been exploring now around coaching discourse, because all of the work that came prior was related to coaching, because coaches were part of those conversations. But what I'm starting to explore is how coaches or other PD providers or professional learning providers, talk with teachers, you know, because we hear about the importance of, you know, a coach, having a trusting relationship and things like that, but what does that really mean, you know, you know, how do we talk with teachers in a way that helps build that relational understanding between the two, so that teachers are not just talked to, but actually talked with, as SPD providers. So all of this work around language, when I was reflecting upon it, it linked back to those ideas that I talked about with music earlier about how we're all part of the collective conversation when we're playing music, because the piece of music comes out is the result of all of us being there. So why aren't our coaching conversations and our PD conversations the same? And why isn't our work with teachers and students the same where all of our voices are collectively valued and and seen as important to the conversation? So that's really where I've been trying to explore the coaching work is to say what is the coaching discourse that's happening around instances where teachers are acting in an agent active way where they're where they're exercising their agency because They know what they need for their students in their context. But maybe me as a coach on providing a little bit of support or brainstorming together with them, not giving them the right answers, but brainstorming and problem solving with them to think about, well, what are we doing? And how could we tweak it a little bit, to help make it a little bit more effective or successful as we're working with students. So I think it really just comes back to that relational understanding of talk and reflection, language choices, and we're all in it together.

Lindsay Persohn: 15:40

It really does paint a very, I would even say motivating picture of what school environments could be like, what teaching could look like, if we do in fact, have the sort of Symphony of voices that comes together in order to create those positive and productive learning environments, and not just for students? Right, they should be positive and productive learning environments for for teachers as well, we are all we're always growing and learning, we're always trying to hone our craft. And so I love that idea of what those conversations could look like in order to support teachers, as they work in agentive ways. And as they are expressing what they need for their students and for themselves.

Dana Robertson: 16:17

And we talked about that, you know, we talked about, you know, differentiating instruction for students all the time. And we know that we should be differentiating instruction and providing responsive instruction. But that's important for the adults to know, because if I'm providing PD on vocabulary instruction, not all of those teachers are going to come with the same funds of knowledge about vocabulary. So why can't we all collectively understand vocabulary? While we're all exploring the little areas of vocabulary that we need to work on with our students that are in front of us at this time?

Lindsay Persohn: 16:52

Right, right. I think that's I think that's such a great question. And I've reflected on that also, in my own teaching practice, you know, whenever all the teachers come together, all at one time to talk about the exact same ideas without the acknowledgement that we're all in different places in our professional learning, and and our content knowledge even you know, it is a, I think it's a an important question. And I hope it's one that is being asked in many spaces in this world in order to support teachers. So Dana, you mentioned the idea that or that your work shifted to consider characteristics of effective instruction, and specifically motivation and engagement and then on through discourse around teaching language choices for teachers, and discourse and coaching. I feel as though motivation engagement gives us something really concrete to think about when we consider what are the most effective practices in our classrooms? Did you have any other tips you might be able to offer to listeners around those characteristics you identified particularly effective instruction?

Dana Robertson: 17:52

Yeah, so the the first one was this idea of of creating a motivated and engaging environment. And from this work, we drew a lot on John Guthrie and colleagues work on concept oriented reading instruction, around the types of teaching actions that seem to be correlated with increased reading achievement overall, and strategy use and things like that. So what they have found in their research, and what we had then taken up and brought into our clinical context, when we were working with students that found reading and writing challenging was that there were really four key teaching practices. The first one was to have that knowledge focus, to have knowledge driven goals. And this is just that long standing idea of having that relevant purpose for teaching particular skills and strategies. You know, we're not teaching students to identify cause and effect or to write a summary, they have to be able to summarize, in order to understand this bigger idea that's related to the real world. So that was one of those teaching actions is always making sure that, you know, we're not just teaching the skills and strategies, but we're teaching those in service of a larger outcome, which is knowledge based, you know, world world knowledge based type of thing. And then from there, it's the idea of using interesting texts. I mean, there's just a correlation with huge effect sizes of over 1.0 When the texts are interesting to students, and that doesn't mean that you give them only the text that they want to read it all the times. But if it's a curricular topic, we're really doing our due diligence to make sure that we have texts that are appealing to look at and are written in a way that have enough grist and content to grapple with and things like that. But then of course, there's also time for them to to read texts have their own interest as well. Because the other teaching action is there's some opportunity for choice. And when I talk about choice with teachers, I often hear teachers say, Well, I can't just let students do whatever they want. And that's not what choice actually is, there's ways to give what I refer to as many choices. You know, we're all reading about the Holocaust. But here's a bin of books on the Holocaust. And you can choose which one you want to read. or We're all reading this book about the Holocaust, but you can choose to read it with a partner or on your own. And then there's opportunities where they're choosing books, on their own for their own topics, you know, some self selected reading that they want to do as well. So the idea of choice is another action that increases motivation and engagement. And then opportunities for collaboration. You know, when when kids are working together, they're more motivated. So give them more opportunities, to collaborate, to talk together to discuss, and it's going to be more motivating, but also they're going to understand more. And they're going to be able to create more in the in their writing when they're discussing and talking together. So the other broad category is thinking about instructional intensity, because we want to think about how we're using our time. And these are ideas of teaching students strategic actions, not in the same way of like for the next couple of weeks, we're going to, I'm going to teach you how to make predictions. And now I'm going to teach you how to make connections. And now we're going to do this. But the idea of teaching students how to you have this book in front of you? What do you do now to successfully navigate your way through the book? What kinds of things do you do before you start reading? What kinds of things should you be doing while you're reading? And what kinds of things might you do when you're done reading, either done reading with the book or done reading for the day? So those kinds of integrated strategic actions, which incorporate all of those strategies of predicting and making connections, and summarizing and all of that, but they're really thought about as more open ended questions, kind of merges strategies with the kind of work that Margaret McCowan and others did around questioning the author, where, you know, you're asking the author, you know, what was the author trying to say, here, you know, as a monitoring strategy, you know, things like that. So, having those strategic actions that are open ended and can get across books and contexts and content areas, increases intensity, because you're using it more often. Now. It's not just an isolated thing. And then of course, thinking about pacing, and the match of of books to readers, is going to help to create the instructional intensity. And then the last big idea that we talked about is working with students that find reading and writing challenging, is actually cognitive challenge for them. Because we've known for decades that the students who aren't reading as well aren't writing as well typically read less words during the day, they engage in less discussion. They're doing more, you know, question answering about short little books that they're reading and things like that, in the text that they're reading don't have a lot of grist in them. So this idea of how we can create cognitively challenging tasks for them, but mediate it in a way so that students can access that content. And from the motivation research, the engagement research, such as that Guthrie and others did tasks that are slightly challenging, yet students feel that they could still be successful at it with the right help, is actually more engaging than engaging in easier work. So it actually hooks them in and gets them to, to want to do that work, because they know that you're there to help them to be successful to go through there. So we see some overlap then, with the other big areas of motivation and engagement, if they're engaging in discussion and collaboration that's related to creating a more cognitively challenging environment for them, because they're not just answering questions. They're actually engaging in talk with others and grappling with these ideas with other people. So when we worked with readers who found reading difficult, some of them, you know, a sixth grader reading at a third grade level, we would be using books that would target particular skills that they needed around decoding or building fluency and things like that. But we were also doing work at that age appropriate a grade appropriate level as well. And we would create text sets around this to say, well, you know, this is the grade or age appropriate book related to this topic or this idea, and then we have some other books that are more quote unquote, leveled for the student, and maybe even some decodable text in there if, if that's an area that they're working on. And then, of course, multimodal texts with, you know, websites and, and things like that, so that this whole text set was there, and the student wouldn't just hear the grade level book being read to them. But we'd be mediating for the student how they were actually reading part of that text on their own, even if it was just sections of it. So that they had to grapple with that more complex syntax and vocabulary. And not just hear it for listening vocabulary, but actually be reading through it and thinking about it, but the tutor was always there to support them.

Lindsay Persohn: 25:46

Seeing as you're, as you're explaining these concepts, for us, the word that keeps coming back to my mind is authenticity. You mentioned authentic purpose, you mentioned sort of the the way that we can use these strategic actions in order to navigate texts, rather than just approaching them as these little isolated skills that we sort of sprinkle in throughout the day. And even I think that cognitive challenge, you know, whenever we give students texts that have some sort of authentic meaning to them, or given that authentic purpose that you mentioned, yes, of course, it increases motivation and engagement, right, because we see that it's relevant to our lives, you know, learning for the sake of doing school is never as meaningful as learning for the sake of, you know, what I want to learn or what I want to get out of my life, we're building to my own goals, my own aspirations. And so as you were talking, I just kept thinking about how authentic really everything you're telling us is, right, we're talking about authentic conversations with each other as, as teachers, as coaches, you know, as peer teachers, but also, of course, with children and giving them those real, genuinely authentic experiences.

Dana Robertson: 26:54

Yeah, and it connects right to the cognitive psychology literature around interest based work. And one of the ways that teachers can create those interest based contexts without just giving it over to the kids to say you can do whatever you want, because it's your interests. But I have this curriculum topic that I need to teach, because it's part of my curriculum. And this is what we're going to do, I can still build that situational interest as the psychologist referred to it. By contextualizing that topic for them in a relevant way for their lives, I can build relevance and spark curiosity in this topic that may be more abstract, because it's, you know, history or something related to science. But I can now make it relevant for them by contextualizing it. And that might spark some situational interest to hook them in. And then my job is to create that engaging environment, give them the conditions to be successful in doing the work, so that that interest is maintained. And maybe it even turns into a new individual interest that they pursue, we don't know. But, you know, interest based teaching is not about just turning it over to the kids and say, you get to do whatever you want. It's it's some of that to explore that. But it's also our job as teachers to create authentic opportunities for them to possibly learn some new interests and to try out some new ideas in ways to see who they want to be, or multiple ways of who they want to be when they're older.

Lindsay Persohn: 28:39

I hope this sounds like opportunity for listeners, particularly listeners who may be working in spaces where they feel boxed in by mandates, or, you know, curricular choices that were made sort of above their pay grade, so to speak, I hope this does sound a lot like opportunity for bringing that authenticity back to the classroom space. You mentioned, like whenever you can find that situational interest whenever you can open up those possibilities, you know, find the good and exploit it right? And how do you how do you make that interesting and relevant? First yourself, I think, as a teacher, but then also to your students.

Dana Robertson: 29:15

Right? And you know, maybe I have a particular novel that I have to teach, because that's what my curriculum says I'm supposed to teach. But I can still contextualize that for the learners that are in front of me, and make it relevant, hopefully, in some way for them to try to hook them in.

Lindsay Persohn: 29:30

Right. Absolutely. And we and we do have many tools at our disposal. I think in this day and age when I think most teachers are probably pretty tech savvy by this point, especially if they've survived through COVID. You know, we found lots of ways to use technology to bring voices and images and you know, those multimodal components into our classroom in order to help create interest. So those are really, really great tips. Dana,

Dana Robertson: 29:53

and I think another part to it is is not only establishing the relevance on the part of teachers, you know, we want to contextualize the work for them. But we also have to be willing to maybe be vulnerable a little bit, because we have to be willing to cede control a little bit, as well, you know, if, if we're really going to approach your teaching as a way where we're all part of this collective conversation, students and teacher together, or coach and teachers, together, the people who are in the conversation with you, as the teacher, or as the coach, may bring up ideas that weren't part of your plan, and are we going to dismiss it? Or are we going to value it and see how it fits into the conversation. And maybe in the long run, it doesn't really fit in, because it was a misunderstanding in some way. But maybe it does fit in. And it's just something that we had never thought about before. So it's about creating that contextualization of that authenticity. But it's also about this willingness to seek control a little bit. And to be a little bit vulnerable, as the teacher or the leader of whatever context, it happens to be to say that others are bringing some something to this conversation, I need to not just respond with the ideas that I already wanted to respond with, but actually have to listen to them and think about it. And then be willing to explore those ideas further, to see whether it's something that actually has some traction, or whether it actually wasn't misunderstanding that we need to then right in some way.

Lindsay Persohn: 31:37

What a valuable way to think about that. And I think that that does lead us right back to where we started right? With those authentic conversations, and how, you know, you can't have a conversation without listening, right? And those conversational turns are all based on what someone else says and our response to it. So you're absolutely right, we have to be willing to reconsider what we think we know. And to potentially, you know, fall down a rabbit hole and see see what's there and consider and reconsider. Yes. So Dana, given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?

Dana Robertson: 32:11

Well, I think part of that message is has been what we've been talking about this whole time is that it is possible for us to create really meaningful and purposeful contexts for for learning to happen. Even if it is curriculum that's been provided to us, you know, I can have my packaged curriculum, and still use that in adaptive ways to make it relevant for my students. And the only one that can make it relevant for the students is the teacher, the curriculum can't make it relevant for them, because the curriculum doesn't know the students, the teacher knows the students. And this is where that art part of the teaching comes in. You know, we have our science that's telling us, you know, here are the practices that are generally most effective, generally most effective, but it's the teacher that then artfully brings those in and knows the students and knows how to make it relevant and knows how to make it engaging, that merges those two together. So I think that's part of it is that we have that opportunity to do that to create those purposeful contexts for students, and for administrators, coaches, literacy leaders, professional development providers, to make it relevant and purposeful for the teachers, and to honor their voices in the learning that the teachers are engaged in, in the school as well. I mean, if we're just going to keep creating PD opportunities, and having someone outside of the classroom, just deciding what those topics are going to be and hiring someone to come in to do it. I think we're just going to see the same trajectory that we've been on of, okay, here's a new idea, here's a new idea, but the teachers aren't connecting it into their context to see how it's actually useful to them and things go on. So how do we involve teachers in the decision making process so that we're actually valuing them, and the decisions that they can help us make around what they need to actually teach their students the best and the teachers know the students the best than the teachers are the most poised to understand what they might need to help their students learn. So we need their voices in terms of how we're going to engage them in ongoing learning opportunities as well. And you know, I think it's not until we actually embody those dispositions and practices that empower people and uphold that they actually matter whether it's the adult or the students in their lives, that we will see sustainable social change where we're all much more than we're told that we are

Lindsay Persohn: 34:59

I as you were describing that, Dana, I got this sort of visual image of, you know, we have this sort of cycle and a lot of spaces right now, where I think, you know, it can be a very discouraging conversation when teachers are not treated as experts, even as humans in some instances, and neither are students. But what I think you're giving us here are some real tangible ways that we can work together to sort of interrupt that cycle, if it is happening in our own spaces and say, No, actually, you know, we do know a few things, right? We know about who our students are, we know our content, we know how to engage our students in the learning. So I'm going to take this one back, right, rather, rather than just sort of playing the game or reading the script, but instead, how do we then you used a term, you said, we can use that package curriculum in adaptive ways. And I think that that is, you know, it gives me a lot of hope for what teaching can look like. And I think it does give teachers of of any level any grade level an opportunity to maybe make some positive changes starting today, right, starting tomorrow? How do you work to contextualize the work that we're doing with kids in order to make it relevant to them, and therefore make it more interesting, more positive, more productive, and disrupt any sort of negative cycles that we may be experiencing in our school spaces. So that message gives me a lot of hope,

Dana Robertson: 36:23

and contextualize it for the kids. But you could also contextualize it for the adults as well. Right? Absolutely. How do you make it relevant for them, as well?

Lindsay Persohn: 36:31

Absolutely. Well, Dana, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for sharing your ideas. And thank you for your contributions to the field of education.

Dana Robertson: 36:39

Thank you so much, Lindsay. It's been my pleasure to be here.

Lindsay Persohn: 36:43

Dr. Dana Robertson is known for his work focused on classroom discussion and teachers talk reading and writing challenges and literacy, professional learning through coaching and whole school literacy improvement. through each of these projects. He has sought ways to provide equitable and inclusive literacy opportunities to teachers and school aged children in ways that are humanizing agentive and sustainable. In 2013, Dr. Robertson was named an Emerging Scholar with the reading Hall of Fame. He's also been awarded the elbogen Meritus classroom teaching award, the Marvin Millgate engaged faculty award and the Mary garland early career fellowship all from the University of Wyoming. He is a frequent presenter at national and international conferences, and he was a collaborating author on the International Literacy associations standards for the preparation of literacy professionals, published in 2017, which serve as credentialing standards for the preparation of literacy professionals at institutions of higher education throughout the United States. He serves as a board member at large for the International Literacy Association and was a past board member for the literacy Research Association. He has co authored two books, co edited a third book focused on equitable and sustainable literacy professional learning, and has published numerous book chapters and articles and literacy education journals, including journal of literacy research theory into practice, professional development and education, the reading teacher reading psychology, language arts, voices from the middle and journal of adolescent and adult literacy. He is a former elementary classroom teacher, literacy specialist and literacy coach. He also formerly served as the executive director for the literacy Research Center and clinic and associate professor in the School of Teacher Education at the University of Wyoming, where he held the Everett D and Elizabeth Lance distinguished professor in education appointment from 2019 to 2021. Dr. Dana a. Robertson is currently an associate professor of reading and literacy in the School of Education at Virginia Tech. For the good of all students, classroom caffeine aims to energize education research and practice. If this show provides you with things to think about, don't keep it a secret. Subscribe, like and review this podcast through your preferred podcast provider. I also invite you to connect with the show through our website at WWW dot classroom caffeine.com where you can learn more about each guest. Find transcripts for many episodes, explore episode topics using our tagging feature, support podcast, research, through our survey, request an episode topic or a potential guest or share your own questions that we might respond to through the show. We would love to hear from you. As always, I raise my mug to you teachers. Thanks for joining me