In the fall of 2025, I stepped away from my role as an instructional coach to write full time. The name came easily: The Middle School Literacy Project.
Teaching middle school did not happen to me on purpose. I joined Teach For America in 2008 with a journalism degree, a strong work ethic, and a boundless sense of possibility. I was placed in a sixth-grade reading classroom in New Orleans, a region still living with the academic and human aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
I later learned that sixth-grade English, especially in a low-barrier state like Louisiana, was something of a repository for corps members who didn’t have a lot of other credentials or expertise. But it did not take long to see that this supposedly generic role required a deep well of knowledge and expertise. Many students were leaving elementary school without the background knowledge, fluency, vocabulary, and habits they needed to make meaning from complex texts. At the same time, the texts themselves were becoming more demanding: richer in meaning, denser in prose, and less forgiving of shallow instruction.
For the adults around me, it was easy to find explanations for why students could not succeed. But after enough conversations with students and families, I saw something else: sparks of curiosity, humor, brilliance, frustration, pride, and possibility. The problem was not that students were incapable of serious reading. The problem was that the work of helping them become serious readers had been badly underestimated.
Solving that puzzle has been my “project” ever since.
I write about the nooks and crannies of middle grade literacy: the delicate bridge between learning to read and entering the depths of humanity’s biggest ideas, often laid out in dense prose. I write about complex text, close reading, classroom culture, reading data, curriculum implementation, and the conditions that help students grow as readers.
