But what do teachers think? Centering teacher stories in a program evaluation of a district-mandated reading initiative through longitudinal focus groups

School district instructional leadership seeks to improve students’ reading abilities and growth trajectories. As a result, districts across the US are engaging in the debate about “best practices” for teaching reading and adopting approaches described as “evidence-based” to improve student outcomes (Castles et al., 2018). This revision reflects a shift from a Balanced Literacy approach (Heydon et al., 2004) to instruction guided by what is called the Science of Reading (SOR; Shanahan, 2020). Woulfin and Gabriel (2022) argued that “with this new wave of SOR advocacy and policy, policymakers, reformers, advocates, and educational leaders place pressure on teachers and other educators to rapidly change the content and pedagogy of their reading instruction” (p. 326). Using an ecological and mixed methods approach, we examined one district’s multi-year effort to transform K-12 reading from balanced literacy to a science of reading approach. In this presentation, we will focus on how six longitudinal focus groups with more than forty K-12 ELA/R teachers enabled us to collect their stories about how the new reading initiative interacted with their instructional ecosystem, or the different layers of support (e.g., intellectual, practical, and material) that they needed to be able to transition to SOR-aligned reading instruction. We relied on Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (1976) to develop a focus group trajectory that enabled us to study these teachers’ interactions (e.g., with students, colleagues, and parents) and relationships (e.g., with instructional coaches, campus administration, and district leadership) related to the SOR-aligned initiative as well as their immediate environments (e.g., grade-level or subject teaching teams, school campus, curriculum materials) (Cross & Hong, 2012). We will discuss the practical elements of planning, recruiting for, and implementing longitudinal focus groups as well as outcomes of the data collection effort for both participants in the focus groups and school district leadership. Attendees will walk away with concrete strategies for implementing large-scale qualitative data collection efforts in collaboration with program partners that invite often unheard participants into the conversation.