Talk To Teachers: Amanda Bryant

As part of our commitment to celebrating, uplifting, and highlighting teachers and their incredible work, we’re introducing a regular series called Talk to Teachers, where we interview teachers about their experience teaching reading and learning about teaching reading. 

For this installment, I spoke with Amanda Bryant, a reading interventionist in Texas about her experience supporting struggling readers and writers, including her son. The following conversation was edited for clarity and concision. 

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How did you become a teacher? 

I always wanted to be a teacher.  When I was a young girl, I would rush home from school each day and teach my grandpa everything I had learned that day.  Because of these fond experiences, I always knew I would end up in the classroom. I got my teaching credentials through an alternative certification program that my district offered. I furthered my education through a graduate program in curriculum and instruction.  

What did you learn about teaching through the certification program?

We learned about discipline, relationships, how to set up your classroom, how to talk to parents, and other tangible tips on how to stay organized as a new teacher. This training set me up to feel confident about providing a safe, secure, and organized learning environment for my students, but it didn’t provide training on the curriculum and instruction side of things.  We were assigned a mentor for daily teaching support. 

How did you learn how to teach reading?

I had an amazing mentor, who happened to be trained in phonics. She was Orton-Gillingham trained, and she shared all of her knowledge with me. I still teach the way she taught me to teach. Even when my school adopted balanced literacy, I kept incorporating the things she had taught me into my instruction. New teachers coming into education after me usually only received training in balanced literacy.  I feel blessed that I had a good teaching foundation built around phonics before the transition to balanced literacy occurred but felt bad for colleagues who didn’t. 

Tell me about your school’s shift to balanced literacy. 

It was about two years after I started teaching, and it was so intense. It was all anyone could talk about. I remember going to the library and having this big meeting about Fountas and Pinell and stations. We were given a book called “Guided Reading, Good First Teaching for All Children” and started a book study based upon it.  They told us we needed to set up all of these stations in our classrooms, as well as limit the use of worksheets (pencil/paper) activities in the future.  My head was spinning because I was wondering how I was going to set up my classroom to incorporate all of the things that were required. I had just learned how to be a teacher, and I thought it was going well, and all of sudden, it was time to change everything.  It was a whirlwind.  

How did you respond to this?

I don’t do anything halfway. I told myself, “we’re doing this. I’m going to be good at this. I’m going to figure out the parts I don’t understand.” It’s funny I had so many questions about how this new system would work in the back of my mind. So I got my workstations ready and did what they wanted me to do. I did continue to use my phonics curriculum because I knew it worked. I kept using decodable readers, and I always sent them home with kids on Fridays to practice the skills we were working on in class. I know that I would have been so lost if I didn’t have the strong phonics training that I had received those first couple of years.  Balanced literacy instruction left me feeling like something was missing, which was the explicit and systematic phonics instruction.

How did your job change? 

It was so much extra work for me. There was so much planning for the workstations. I would spend hours designing something, and then the kids would go to the station for 20 minutes, and I never knew if they were getting good things out of it. I physically couldn’t be present with students at each station while working with small groups, so I usually gauged success on behavior of students as they completed their workstations.  I remembered wondering if it was really working?  I still felt something was missing, so I worked harder during my whole and small group instruction to teach skills.  Administrators wanted to see stations in action. They wanted to see kids engaged. They wanted leveled reading. So, I stuck with it.  Still, I never neglected phonics, and I still incorporated independent work to assure students understood what I was teaching.

What happened next?

So, after 6 years in the classroom, my son was born with some medical problems, and I had to take some time off from teaching. While I was at home, I kept learning about how the brain learns to read, and this is when I decided to get my Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction. When I returned to teaching, I started hearing a different kind of conversation about reading instruction. Everyone is talking about the science of reading, how we need to change our instructional approach, and how all of the teachers need to have more training. I found myself in the middle of another shift. 

How have teachers at your school responded to this second shift?

We’ve all had to do professional development through the Texas Reading Academy, which I’ve loved. A lot of teachers weren’t as excited as I was about it because we had to complete it on top of a demanding schedule.  It was very detailed, time-consuming, and intense.  Many related it to taking college level courses.  While we were training, there wasn’t very much opportunity to apply the knowledge we were receiving. Many want to make instructional shifts, but it is always challenging to change. One of things I'm trying to do is to offer hands-on phonics training for teachers at my school so I can directly support what’s happening in classrooms. I love to share resources and go into classrooms to model effective teaching strategies aligned with the science of reading. I am passionate about shifting the way we are teaching reading because it is necessary.  

Tell me about your current job.

I’m now a reading interventionist for students in kindergarten through fourth grade. I have a jam-packed schedule. Before I start working with a student, I do a lot of detective work to pinpoint exactly what the student needs. Once I understand that, I try to work with students as efficiently as possible to get them the foundational skills they need in order to be successful in the classroom.  

I love the videos you’ve shared on Twitter. Tell me about your process there. 

I learn new stuff each day by keeping a growth mindset and staying involved in professional learning communities.  Because I have benefitted from awesome ideas of other educators, I decided to share instructional techniques and activities as well online.  Some of the things I have shared on Twitter and Tik Tok have been viewed by almost a million educators around the world.  I feel so honored to have the great feedback surrounding techniques related to the science of reading.   

Tell me about your son’s experience in school. 

So my son learned how to read, but on paper, he looked illiterate because he had zero phonological training. I remember going into his third grade class, and he had made an acrostic poem about Texas. For “E,” he meant to write “excellent,” but he wrote “EXLET.” For A he meant to write “Alamo,” but instead he wrote “ALMO.” For “State,” he wrote “STK.” This set off a huge alarm bell for me. I realized he couldn’t hear the sounds in words. No one ever taught him. I talked to his school about my concerns, but they just told me nothing was wrong and that this is really common among all students. They also said, “We don’t have time for writing.” I knew this wasn’t right. At this time, I didn’t have all of the knowledge that I have now regarding the way a child learns to read, but I knew that reading and writing are interconnected. They’re reciprocal. This has made me so passionate about teaching reading, writing, and spelling. We can’t neglect a single component.   

How’s your son doing now?

He’s doing better. We worked hard to get him caught up. He is still severely deficient in spelling and writing.  Because of this, he doesn’t like school and he really doesn’t like writing. He never had the chance to develop an interest in either. I know there are many children out there who have the same issues, and this isn’t fair.  We have to do better and provide students with a strong foundation that sets them up for success.

What advice do you have for teachers just starting out today?

Stay on top of the research and get a great mentor.  Have a growth mindset and always learn new things.  If you learn how to do something better, change what you are doing and incorporate that technique.  Know better, do better.  Too much is at stake to neglect the science of reading.  Everyone deserves the right to read, and the time is now.