Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
Special Edition: Building Expertise in Literacy
Feeling stuck in your teaching practice? Wondering how to better support struggling students? You're not alone. Many educators reach a point where they need deeper knowledge and skills to advance their impact. Dr. Elizabeth Burke Hadley's journey from literature lover to high school English teacher to literacy researcher demonstrates how advanced study can transform both career trajectory and professional effectiveness.
Graduate education provides more than just additional teaching techniques. It offers theoretical frameworks that help explain why certain approaches work, research-based evidence to guide instructional decisions, and a community of fellow educators who bring diverse perspectives and experiences. As Dr. Hadley explains, "Graduate studies really deepened my understanding of everything in the classroom." This deeper understanding translates directly to improved student outcomes.
Feeling inspired? USF’s fully online MA in Reading Education offers flexible pacing, innovative curriculum, embedded media literacy, Florida K-12 endorsement eligibility, and guidance from expert faculty connected to local and global literacy communities. Learn more here: https://hubs.li/Q03J88bv0
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In recent years, we've seen a strong and steady increase in graduate education for teachers and school leaders. Nationally, more than about 40% of practicing educators now hold a graduate degree, and those who do often report expanded career opportunities, higher salaries and deeper professional enjoyment. Even as some other graduate disciplines have declined in enrollment, colleges of education continue to see educators invest in advanced study to strengthen their practice and broaden their impact. Welcome to this special series of Classroom Caffeine, where we're talking with friends, old and new, about their journey to and through graduate school. I'm your host, Lindsay Persohn. This special series, produced in collaboration with the University of South Florida's Literacy Studies Program in the College of Education and USF's Innovative Education, explores the question what is the value of graduate education for educators? In each episode, we hear from faculty and teacher leaders who share how advanced study and education shape their thinking, their work and their professional lives. Whether you're considering graduate school or guiding others on that path, this series will help give you insight, encouragement and real stories from the field.
Lindsay Persohn:Dr Elizabeth Burke Hadley is an Associate Professor of Literacy Studies at the University of South Florida. Dr Hadley studies young children's language and literacy development in pre-k classrooms. Her research focuses on how teachers can help foster young children's oral language growth through conversations, shared book reading and play. She's also interested in identifying pre-K literacy instructional methods that support later reading comprehension. Dr Hadley, thanks so much for taking a few minutes to talk with me today about the value of a graduate education for educators,
Elizabeth Hadley:Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Lindsay Persohn:So can you tell us a bit about your path through higher education? Where did you study? What led you to pursue graduate work in education, those kinds of things.
Elizabeth Hadley:Sure I'd be happy to share. I would say that I have what I consider like a fairly non-traditional path to where I am today, which is a tenured associate professor in a college of education. I started kind of like, I guess, my higher education journey, you know, I graduated from high school, went to college, I went to the University of Notre Dame, and at that time I was sort of unsure about my career path. I would say, you know, like many 18 year olds, I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life, but I loved to read, I loved literature. If I didn't know anything else, I knew how much I love to read and talk about books, right. And so Notre Dame has kind of a unique major called the Program of Liberal Studies. It's a great books program. And so it's kind of like you take these like Socratic style seminars where you read like the major works of Western and Eastern civilization, and it appealed to me because it was like very small classes, really close community. It was kind of a combination of philosophy and literature and theology and all kinds of different things. You know, we were reading Plato and Virginia Woolf and all kinds of like classic works really, and being in conversation about them with our classmates.
Elizabeth Hadley:But the thing with any liberal arts major is it's not necessarily like pointing you in one career path or another. People at Notre Dame would joke that PLS stood for probably law school, and I did. Many of my classmates ended up going to law school. I myself took the LSAT senior year, but I also, when I was at Notre Dame, had a lot of experiences like doing some tutoring of local students from elementary schools, and then I also spent a summer running a summer program for kids in Boston and working with those children, and specifically I worked with a pre-K age group and really enjoyed those little people.
Elizabeth Hadley:But when I graduated from college, I kind of thought you know, if I do want to end up eventually being a lawyer, I feel like I want to be the kind of lawyer that like makes a positive difference in the world, and so I actually got a job at the Justice Department in DC as a paralegal. I was working in the civil rights division, and so I worked there for two years and it was a good experience, but I was definitely like I don't think I do want to be a lawyer, I don't think that's for me. But I was kind of thinking about my next steps and continuing to do some tutoring work and I actually lucked into a teaching position. I had a couple of friends who worked at a local school and I had some connections in terms of having gone to a Catholic undergrad institution, having gone to a Catholic high school, pretty much attended Catholic schools my whole life. There was like a Catholic school job fair that I attended and I knew I happened to like have some connections with some friends who worked at this Catholic school. I met the principal and the assistant principal and they ended up hiring me for the upcoming year as a high school English teacher.
Elizabeth Hadley:So that summer and then into the school year I started taking some graduate credits towards education but I wasn't enrolled in like a formal degree program but those credits were, I would say, like half of my life raft as a new teacher. So I had so much to learn, coming in kind of cold only having done some tutoring and, you know, having a really strong foundation in like the content, I would say, as a high school English teacher, but very little preparation in the pedagogy of how to communicate and teach and help these high schoolers learn Right. So I was lucky enough to have a mentor teacher at my school who basically, like, walked step-by-step with me through every lesson plan my first year and who would co-teach with me. We planned every single lesson together. She would come into my classroom, I would observe her and then I was continuing to take these graduate credits at this local college.
Elizabeth Hadley:So I ended up teaching for four years and then I started to feel the call towards more education and for me I wasn't sure I wanted to be a classroom teacher forever, but I was getting really interested and thinking about how I could have impact on a higher level in the education space. I wasn't exactly sure what that would be. I knew that I was a strong reader and a strong writer and I wanted to be able to, like make a difference beyond the four walls of my classroom and I was always kind of interested in research. So I started having conversations with some different people who worked in the field. I was sort of interested in education policy initially. I was interested in reading, comprehension and how I could better support my students who seemed to really have a hard time making meaning from some of the texts we were reading.
Elizabeth Hadley:And so eventually I applied for graduate school at a few different places and the two places I was really considering was University of Virginia, which is more of like an education policy focus, and then Vanderbilt, which had more of a teaching and learning focus, where I could really like investigate reading comprehension and vocabulary and some of the topics I was really interested in. And so after visiting both places, I decided to go to Vanderbilt, and with the idea that I would first of all get some more background in teaching theory and literacy studies that I hadn't really gotten previously, but also that I would learn how to do research with the goal of eventually either working for a research organization or becoming a professor, and I was really lucky at Vanderbilt to get some like really comprehensive training in both of those areas and I fell in love with research and was lucky enough to get a job doing research and teaching here at USF.
Lindsay Persohn:One thing that has been really exciting for me about these conversations is that I have learned so much about my colleagues. These stories about your background, you know they don't always show up in other spaces.
Lindsay Persohn:And so yeah, it's been really cool to hear about you know the path that led you to where you are. I think that's for me that's one of the most exciting things about life is you know how the path unfolds for each of us a little bit differently, sometimes in really unexpected ways. So it's really cool. So let me ask you this next question In what ways has graduate studies shaped how you think about teaching, learning and leadership?
Elizabeth Hadley:Great question. I think for me, graduate school really deepened my understanding of everything in the classroom. You know I wish I would have had the benefit of having like a more robust education focused undergrad experience. I actually wrote my like senior thesis on an education related topic and a lot of the readings I was doing were focused on education. But in terms of like contemporary research on education, I really only became deeply exposed to it in graduate school. So I think for me, having both that theoretical background and that empirical background to kind of guide teachers' choices was very helpful for me to like fully understand some of the decisions I was making. As a teacher, I felt confident in some areas and then less confident in others. I had some students who were really struggling with reading right.
Elizabeth Hadley:I think I did a great job of creating a supportive classroom community. I think I did a great job of sparking students' love of reading. We had a really fun book club. I was always turning my students on to new books that they would get excited about. I think I did some great work in that area and like helping them become excited about things like Shakespeare and whatever.
Elizabeth Hadley:But I did not feel like I was equipped to really help move the needle for my students who needed more support and help, and so that was like a frustration for me and I really regret not being able to help them more. Right, and that's something I actually hear from my students a lot now too, like my master's in reading students. You do your undergrad and it's just like drinking from a fire hose. There's so much to learn, not just about reading and literacy, but about everything to do with running a classroom and about supporting your students in all kinds of ways that, like you really can't absorb everything you need to know. And especially if students come into a school where, like, maybe the curriculum isn't that great, they don't really have an understanding of the why behind it, maybe the district is changing the curriculum every five minutes so they can't even learn how to do it properly, they feel like they don't know the interventions they're using aren't really working. So I feel like a lot of our students come to the master's program being like I'm frustrated, I feel like I don't know what I'm doing really, and I can identify with that feeling, because I felt like I couldn't really help support my students with their reading comprehension struggles in very meaningful ways. Right, I mean that's part of the reason why I actually ended up doing research with kids earlier on, because it's easier to intervene for students when they're younger, and so that's part of the reason why I work with younger students.
Elizabeth Hadley:But I think also, graduate studies are a great time to just dive deeper and develop some real expertise in the areas you're interested in and be able to like acquire some additional tools to make a difference, whether that's in your classroom or maybe you want to learn how to support other teachers better.
Elizabeth Hadley:There's an art to coaching teachers, just as there's an art to teaching the students in your classroom. So I think graduate studies can just give you that additional expertise that I personally was looking for and felt that I lacked. As I said, I was sort of unprepared in many ways for my teaching experience, but I think, even having done undergrad, sometimes we just need a little bit more. Teaching is such a demanding profession and there's always more to learn and there's always some additional tools we can put into our toolbox in terms of supporting our students, even more so with all the digital innovations that are happening and technological innovations, so many of us are looking for guidance as to how to employ those thoughtfully with our students and in our classrooms, and I think graduate studies can be a great place to get that information as well.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, I totally agree and I think a few things you said really resonated with me this idea that when you are in a profession and you think you're doing a few things pretty well, but you still have all these questions because of course an undergraduate degree can't prepare you for everything right, we can't just open it up, pour it all in, you know and you're ready to go, I just. But I also think that it takes some of that experience to know what you don't know.
Lindsay Persohn:And then I think it makes that graduate path that much more rewarding, because you're kind of going in with a focus or with an eye for something or you're trying to find answers to the big questions that still remain in your mind. And I think in some ways graduate programs are also really humbling because you realize how much there is to know and how much you don't know. And maybe you come out feeling also simultaneously, or contradictorily, a little bit more confident in what you know as well, but also still knowing that there's still a lot to learn.
Elizabeth Hadley:So you can't do it all in the undergrad level because you don't have like the practical experience to integrate it with and, like you said, you teach for a year or two and then you come back to a graduate program and you're able to really understand and contextualize the learning a little bit more and be more self-directed about like this is what I want to know more about.
Elizabeth Hadley:The other thing I'll say is that the students in our master's in reading program, like, learn a lot from each other. Just sharing their experiences across districts or sharing ideas of tools that they use or their thoughts and reflections on different topics, I think are really helpful to each other because most of them have at least a year or two of experience under their belt. Some of them have 20 years of experience under their belts and being able to come together in a community where there's not the pressure of it's your school community you're talking to your supervisor, you're talking to your like teacher across the hall that's great too, but being in a different environment where you're learning from, most of the time, other Floridians, other Florida teachers, where you can take the best of their experience and wisdom and bring it back to their own classroom, in addition to all the wonderful readings you're reading and instruction you're getting from your professor. I think is a really great combination.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, I think that network is so important. I think you know, networks for teachers are critical for that day-to-day, not just surviving in the classroom but really thriving, and I think that whenever you enter a graduate program it does give you access to a whole different network of people with different ideas and different opportunities that, like you said, you may not necessarily be able to get in your school building or even within your own home district or you know circuit of schools, right? So what advice would you give to future graduate students if an educator was considering when or if to take up a graduate program. What advice would you give?
Elizabeth Hadley:I think I would advise them to look for a program that's flexible. First of all, I think it's really important, if you're planning on teaching and getting your master's degree at the same time, that you choose a program that's sort of designed for somebody like you where the other students will also be full-time teachers who are taking classes in the evening. I mean that's kind of like, I guess, logistical, but it is important in order for you to be successful. It's really helpful to have those structures in place where, like, the program expects you to be a teacher for the most part, or maybe somebody who's considering becoming a teacher, but somebody who's working full time and is doing this sort of in the evenings and weekends and making it work for themselves. Other things I would consider are just being clear on your motivation and your why behind getting a graduate degree. I think for me, I really felt motivated to learn more and, if I wasn't going to be a classroom teacher, at least thinking about my sort of life and career goals around being in education and finding out more and researching more and contributing to, like our body of knowledge about how to improve outcomes for kids. So having that personal why for yourself could be something like this is something I've always wanted for myself. This is a personal goal for me to get my master's degree. Or maybe it's like I want to be a literacy coach. I'm ready to help share my knowledge with teachers and I want to learn more about how to support teachers right? Maybe it's that I feel like I need to know more to support the struggling readers in my classroom. But having that kind of clear motivation or rationale behind your program will kind of carry you through those moments where you're like, oh my goodness, I have all these readings to do, I have to get my grades in and my kids have three soccer games on Saturday or whatever. So I think having that motivation laid out for yourself clearly is really helpful.
Elizabeth Hadley:I always tell my students to pace themselves right. I have flexible due dates in all of my classes because our students are working professionals. I have due dates, of course, but there's no penalty for late work. It's okay if they turn things in a little late, but I tell them not to wait until the last minute and to be like very intentional and planful about how they schedule themselves. We do have eight-week master's courses, and so it kind of goes like that. It's great because you can get your degree in a shorter amount of time, but it also means that you have to be focused or the half semester will be over before you know it. So yeah, just a few kind of thoughts about doing a graduate program while also teaching or doing other work full time.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, and on that note of time, the time it takes and due dates and being so busy, I think the other thing I always think about is that the time commitment isn't forever, but the degree is you know, and so I think that's. There's that trade-off as well, that it might, you know, maybe it takes you two years to get a master's degree, but you'll have that for the rest of your life, for the rest of your career, and so the knowledge stays, even, you know, once our schedules adjust a bit.
Elizabeth Hadley:So yeah, the pain is temporary, but it's also it's not just pain. It's so exciting. You'll find yourself like your brain will just be so busy because you're thinking about everything that you've learned and integrating it. And you know, we've been talking master's degree but, like a lot of teachers also go back and get their EdD, which is more of an applied doctorate. A lot of students get their master's degree and then continue on to their PhD right. So there are several options in terms of graduate degrees and you can kind of choose what is the best fit for you in particular, and you know, if you're interested in administration. Eventually it is helpful to have an advanced degree, as you're thinking about potentially taking on roles outside the classroom and kind of either moving up in the district or moving up at the state level. So having advanced degrees can be a real asset just in terms of having a resume that looks strong.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, yeah, it can definitely open a lot of doors. Like you said, even if you want to be the best teacher, you can be within the four walls of your classroom. Or if you want to try something different, you know, or advance your career in another way, so, yeah, that's great, great advice. One last question for you what do you wish you had known before starting grad school?
Elizabeth Hadley:I think I thought that everybody else knew exactly what they were doing, and that's not the case. People certainly came in with some more robust background experiences than I did, in terms of having gotten their master's degree or whatever, but in terms of like, if you're getting your PhD and you're about to start doing research, most people don't really know what they're doing either. So I think for me it was. I was very overwhelmed my first year of graduate school and I like partially brought it on myself because I was kind of going in cold, but partially, I think I could have been a little more patient with myself in terms of not expecting myself to have figured out my dissertation topic on week one of graduate school.
Elizabeth Hadley:So I think it's important, like, not to compare yourself to others. We're all on our own journeys and I think we all have something to contribute, right, and I think the piece that you have to contribute will become apparent as you continue on your career path. If you don't know it already, it will become apparent and you do have something to bring to the table. So, just being open to learning and being patient with yourself, knowing that there is a lot to learn but that life is long and we all have lots of time and experience that'll help build our expertise, and I think graduate school is an important piece of that for a lot of us.
Lindsay Persohn:Great advice. So thank you again so much for spending a few minutes talking with me about your graduate school journey, Dr Hadley, and yeah, greatly appreciate your time and ideas.
Elizabeth Hadley:Thank you so much. This has been fun.
Lindsay Persohn:Thanks for joining us for this special episode in the special series of Classroom Caffeine, in collaboration with Literacy Studies Program at the University of South Florida's College of Education and USF's Innovative Education. If today's conversation sparked your curiosity about graduate education programs, you can learn more about USF's Reading, masters and Literacy Studies programs by visiting www. usfedu/ education/ areas- of- study/ literacy studies/programs. So again that's If you haven't already, subscribe to the Classroom Caffeine podcast for more energizing conversations with inspiring educators and education researchers. Until next time, stay curious and keep learning.